Fruits of Insanity

closing up shop

Hades was quiet. Too quiet, Pluto thought from his throne in the center of the realm. Kore had left a week ago for her half year with her mother, and Pluto had too much time to think. While she was there, he could lose himself in her presence but without her, the underworld echoed with emptiness.

That was the problem with being an immortal god whose people no longer believed. The Elysian Fields where the righteous dead waiting for their opportunity to be reborn were nearly empty as the souls who had made it their home gradually chose to leave for their next life. They drank of Lethe, and when their deaths came around again, they had some new underworld to call their home.

What was the point of being the lord of the dead when the dead weren't there?

Charon didn't bother to take out his boat anymore. No spirits waited with coins for the ferryman to cross the Styx. Even Cerberus with his three heads was getting lazy and fat, because there was nothing to guard anymore. The condemned in Tartarus were the only ones left. But Pluto had known Tantalus and Sisyphus and the rest of them for thousands of years, and he'd lost his will to torment them.

He sighed. “What's the point of teasing people for eternity.” The words echoed around his throne room, filled with all the wealth of the earth, and still empty. What was the point? If a soul was going to learn its lesson, it was cruel to continue the torment—no matter the gravity of the original act against the gods.

Pluto had been stuck here, in the underworld, spending half the year without his wife for way too long. He wasn't going to do it anymore. He wanted a demotion—he deserved that demotion, and he was going to take it, no matter what.

“I'm done.” With a snap of his fingers, a drop of water finally reached lips that had been seeking it for thousands of years, and the stone rolled on its own to the top of the hill. The sounds of rejoicing erupted from the souls of the condemned but they knew better than to wait for their punishments to be reinstated. In a mass, they swarmed Lethe and drank the waters of forgetfulness and reentered the world. Soon, the underworld was empty of souls.

All who were left were inhabitants, and they could do what they wanted. He sent out a memo to everyone, thanking them for their service over the years, and bidding them a happy retirement. He was locking up shop.

With a wave of his hand, Pluto was gone, leaving Cerberus to whine in his sleep on his gigantic doggie bed beside the now empty throne.

He appeared in Kore's bedroom on Olympus.

She looked up from her book. “Honey!” They flew to each other's arms, kissing with the intensity that had built up over the week. “What are you doing here?” She rolled her eyes. “Mama isn't going to be happy that you're taking some of her time.”

“I've decided to retire,” Pluto said, and there was an excitement in his voice that she remembered from when they'd first gotten married before the pomegranate thing and her mother threw that hissy fit.

“Retire?”

“What's the point of being the lord of Hades when all the souls end up in Hell or Gehenna or Nirvana or a thousand other underworlds while mine empties out.” He looked away for a moment, and Kore knew here was a point he wasn't certain about. “So I let all the rest of the souls out of Tartarus, and now, we can spend the rest of our eternal lives together.”

“You let them out?”

“I've known them so long I was starting to feel like a bully. What's the point of punishment if there's not a hope of redemption.”

“Have you been reading Dante again?”

He shook his head. “I've been thinking about this for a while. Maybe it made sense when we actually got new souls entering sometimes, but it's been ages.” He pulled her close. “I want to spend all my days and nights with you. Time to brush out the dust from my cornucopia and be the fertility god your mother wanted you to marry.”

She frowned into his chest. “She isn't going to like this.”

“She can deal. She can't keep me out of your bed.”

Kore was right. Ceres did not like her son-in-law's presence in her house at all. But when appealed to, Jupiter reminded her that the agreement said nothing about Pluto.

“As long as Kore remains with you, working and lending her power to the spring, there's nothing that says that Pluto can't be with her.” He turned to his brother and winced. “Are you certain that the underworld doesn't need your presence?”

“Hades is empty. We have no underworld,” Pluto said, and he was laughing as he said it, his once sepulchral tones now filled with the joy of this new existence. “I'll live with Kore during her mother's time, and then, when winter comes, we'll do the retirement thing and travel the world.”

Kore held her husband's hand as tightly as she could and was warmer and happier than she'd been on Olympus for thousands of years.

That spring and summer, the world was blessed with more abundance than had been before in recorded history. The humans called it scientific principles applied to agricultural management but the gods knew it was the happiness of Kore and her husband, who knew how to find the life and treasures of the earth.

As autumn fell, and they made their first forays into their new life together, Cerberus found them in an abundance of licking. “Good puppy,” said Kore as she created an appropriate doggie room in the infinite space they had stuffed into their RV. It looked like an ordinary camper, but held all the room they needed, and as the former owner of all the riches under the earth, got better mileage than any human could believe.

They started in Italy and then the rest of Europe and Asia. The twisted the possibilities to visit Australia so that they could be warm during their off months. They made a point of hitting every national park and attraction they could think of, spending six months in their traveling retirement before shooting back to Olympus.

One December day, twenty years later, they met Charon, running an Uber in New York City. “Demotion rocks. Best thing you could have done,” he said, and then pulled his cap over his eyes for a nap.

Pluto pulled Kore to his side and kissed the top of her head. “Best things indeed.”

Word count: 1136
Prompt 12: National Pluto Demoted Day (8/24)