Part I : Rise of Hades
The leather of the armchair sighed as Ron shifted his weight. Dust motes, illuminated by a single, fading sunbeam, danced in the still air of the silent room. Across from him, the medals on the wall gleamed dully, their brass and tin no longer able to reflect the light they once represented. At sixty-eight, the retired general was still a formidable fighter, but the war had long since left him. He was a story waiting to be forgotten, its final chapter ending with no one left to read it. He sat alone, weary, and awaited the final silence.
As Ron drew his final breath, the world did not fade so much as unravel. Light and sound dissolved into a static hum, which then bled into an absolute, crushing nothing. He was not in a place. He was a thought without a thinker, a memory without a mind, a single point of conscious awareness adrift in a sea of starless black. There was no ground, no sky, no cold, and no heat. Here, silence was not an absence of sound; it was a physical law.
Time became meaningless. He floated, swallowed by the endless emptiness for what felt like aeons, a ghost in the machine of a dead universe.
A sound—not a vibration, but a concept given voice—echoed through the void. It was deep, resonant, and utterly alien.
"Why were you here?"
Ron stirred, his formless essence recoiling from the change.
"Who are you?" his own voice echoed back, a whisper against infinity.
A response followed, calm yet immense in its presence. "I am Kaos. The universe itself."
Awareness focused upon him. Ron felt strange, as if something were reading him. Every battle, every scar, every moment of fear, struggle, emotion, and courage from his long life unfolded and was examined simultaneously, from his first orphaned cry to the echo of his last sigh.
"Hm… you were not from this chaos. A soul from another Kaos, a reality that ceased the moment you died. But a fragment of its dying energy adhered to you. It drew you through a crack in the dimensions into my being. Truly… a statistical anomaly."
Ron now stood—if standing was possible in a realm without direction—in the presence of something beyond comprehension.
In the vast silence that followed, Ron's voice trembled with awe and dread. "Then… what happened to me now? Was I to be reborn, or something else?"
Kaos responded with a calm, immeasurable weight. "You had two choices. The first was integration. Your consciousness would be dissolved into my essence, becoming one with the cosmic background. A final, true end."
The concept of nonexistence hung in the void, a profound and terrifying peace.
"Or," Kaos continued, "you could choose rebirth."
Hope—a sensation Ron had long forgotten—flickered within him.
"But choice demanded sacrifice," Kaos intoned. "The foreign energy you carried was a cancer, unstable and dangerous to the balance of this reality. To be reborn, it had to be purified and remade. And there was a greater price. Your identity was an artifact of a dead world. It could not pass through."
The presence focused, and Ron felt a specific, agonizing extraction. The face of his mother, long forgotten, vanished. The names of his comrades, the sound of their laughter, the pride in their eyes—it all dissolved into mist. The intricate knowledge of firearms, explosives, and the terrible promise of nuclear fire was scoured away, deemed too volatile for a nascent god. What remained was the core: the skills of command, the instincts of a strategist, the relentless endurance forged in a thousand battles, and the cold, hard will of a survivor.
"In recognition of the trials etched into your soul, your new form shall be that of a ruler," Kaos declared. "Choose your vessel, and your essence will shape the rest."
In the endless dark, Ron was given the power to decide his fate.
For a subjective eternity, Ron remained silent, wrestling with the phantom pain of a stolen life.
Finally, he asked, his voice cautious, "What was I to be reborn as?"
"Three vessels awaited a soul," Kaos responded, its voice a cosmic tide. "The first was a Titan, a being of pure might, destined for endless war. The second, a nymph, a child of nature and fleeting magic. The third… was a new god species, unknown to this universe, but destined to be named Hades."
The name struck a chord, a lone, familiar note in the symphony of the unknown. Hades—the god of the underworld. A king of a final domain. It resonated with the command and responsibility he had once known, yet promised a power and permanence he had never dared to imagine. It felt like purpose.
"I chose Hades," Ron stated, his voice firm with newfound resolve.
"The choice was made," Kaos rumbled. "Now, the unstable becomes stable. The chaotic is given form."
A profound transformation began. Ron felt the wild, cancerous fragments of cosmic power—the last dying embers of his old universe—drawn out and refined. They were not destroyed but hammered and tempered in a forge of primordial will, woven into the very fabric of his new divine soul.
A weight beyond that of any world settled upon his nonexistent shoulders. Then came not a tear, but an unfolding—a fundamental aspect of his soul realizing a new, terrible geometry. From the core of his being, power bled out, crystallizing into a form both feather and blade, shield and shadow. He felt the birth of vast, impossible pinions, their edges sharp enough to sever fate, their spans broad enough to eclipse stars. The Black Wings of Judgment were forged, a manifestation of his unyielding will to defend and conquer, now a part of him as intrinsic as the breath he no longer needed.
Kaos's voice was final and vast. "It was done. You were reborn. You were Hades. Your past had faded, but your essence and your will remained."
And with that, the void shattered—not with a sound, but with a light that was ancient and divine, a searing radiance that was the very antithesis of the nothingness he had endured. It was filled with the birth scream of a god.
Ron's journey was over.
It had only just begun.