THANATOPHOBIA [vs Hades]

Life is precious.

There are those who waste life, slumped in gutters with veins full of poison, or living life behind a screen with nothing to call their triumphs. These people have forgotten what it means to be alive, and so their days are endlessly numb. But being alive is about feeling.

And feeling is important because to feel is to really exist. When I was a young man, I was told that “boys don’t cry”, that showing my emotion was a bad thing, but in reality this is a fallacy spread by those stuck in old ways. Feeling emotion is the key to living a life to the full.

Some people get so caught up in those feelings that they become obsessed with the brevity of life and instead of living, their lives become a constant attempt to evade or repel death. Death cannot be evaded. Death is inexorable. But these people live in constant fear of death.

Thanatophobia.

That is the name for the fear of death. How must it feel, Hades, that the fear of your former domain is named not after you, but after your whipping boy? That despite your former glory, it is Thanatos who adorns the annals of history.

On reflection it makes sense. Thanatos, as the personification of death, was without mercy, and indiscriminate in his work. He hated, and in turn was hated by, mortals and gods alike. To him, death was a means to an end.

There are those who have tricked Thanatos, such is his tunnel vision for the proliferation of death, but those who tricked him did not stop him, merely bought a temporary solace from the clutches of death. And the people who feared death slept easy for a short while, only to have their wildest nightmares realised when he came back to power.

Thanatos does not scare me, and nor does death, for I have walked through the doors to Elysium and greeted death like a friend. In fact, your servant means little to me because his powers are null and void. He controls the Doors of Death, the passage he uses to bring his victims to the Underworld. He takes his prey and throws them through the doors and into oblivion. But me? He can try and throw me through the doors if he wants to, but I won’t end up where he wants. No. I will end up in my rightful resting place in Elysium, far away from him and far away from you.

Hades, I was cleansed of my acts under the power of Lee Crowley, when I was not truly myself, and accepted as a hero for my acts when in sound mind by the Olympians. But you? Since I snapped your neck you have been a nothing. No longer king of the Underworld you have festered in hatred. So I must step back through the doors of Elysium once more, as I RISE to the challenge in front of me. I have killed you and stripped you of your powers once, Hades, and I will not hesitate to do it again.