HADES: Everyone comes to him in the end by IOAKIM IOAKIM

Hades was the first child swallowed and the last released. He drew the underworld in the lot between brothers and built the most permanent kingdom in existence — not a place of punishment, not darkness, not absence. The place everything moves toward. Told entirely in his own voice, Hades follows the sovereign of the dead through the full weight of his reign. Heracles arrives — the hero who once came down living, took what wasn't his, and left without asking. Now he's dead, truly dead, and the reckoning is quiet and long. Orpheus comes twice: once with music that stops Tantalus mid-reach, once with empty hands. The dead of Troy arrive in thousands — heroes the poets named and fletchers no one did. And Persephone returns, every year, the same moment, undiminished. This is the record of every soul that ever lived. Read aloud, for the first time, by the one who kept it.