Hades the Unseen

"I have already forsaken my home. I will suffer for yours."

Hades, the Unseen one, the Iconoclast, Defiler of the Old Gods, Emissary of the Deepest Void and the Shadow of Two Worlds was a sorcerer and father of the Old Ways in Aquila. Born in the forsaken world of Hydra, destroyed in the Titanomachy, he escaped the fate of his people with the aid of the Void Priests and defied the Titans by stealing their power and sharing it with the mortals of Aquila in hopes of saving it from a similar fate.

History
The universe was built upon a lie. While the Ancient Fear has long been perceived as the personification of evil across the numerous worlds of the Eminence, its persistent malice stemmed not from a desire to conquer and subjugate the outer worlds, but one to right an ancient wrong which resulted from the greed of the Titans - the first sons and daughters of Moros, who stole his heart and began a seemingly endless loop of war, betrayal, and resentment. Of the mighty new realms forged by the Titans in the wake of the tearing apart of the Aether, few were richer and more powerful than the many-splendored world of Hydra, ruled by the First Son himself, Gamma; and of the many worlds destroyed by the wrathful Ancient Fear in the Second Titanomachy, none suffered more than that selfsame world.

For tens of thousands of years, Hydra stood unparalleled as the most advanced, most developed, and strongest world in Eminence. Dozens of the Old Gods looked with envy upon the mighty Titan King Gamma, whose veins coursed with the indefatigable blood of the Daemon-Sultan stronger than any of his siblings. While other worlds such as Aquila and Orion were rife with disease and tribal warfare at the hands of apathetic Gods, Hydra charted the cosmos, studying the quintessence which bound the universe together and using their knowledge to peak into parallel worlds as well as power their own for hundreds of generations. All this under the watchful and benevolent eye of Gamma - the Emperor of Things and Heir to the Allfather - who used his natural connection to the void to sap copious amounts of dark energy not only from the forsaken countryside, but from sister worlds, thereby draining the very life out of the unfortunate peoples of his world and seven worlds over in order to perpetuate the eternal paradise that was his perfect empire, Libellus vere Aureus.

The Infinite Heir’s rule was not so infallible as his honorific suggested, of course. His siblings grew inexorably jealous - as was their propensity - and outright furious that their eldest brother had betrayed their trust; immediately after the defeat of Coda in the First Titanomachy, Gamma promised his brethren that he would watch over his Father’s heart with all due diligence and only use his considerable power as a means of insurance against a potential resurgence of the Allfather - or the emergence of some other cosmic force, such as the mysterious precursors who built Emanation. The Titans were content to live with the obvious lie, eager as they were to utterly rip apart the Aether and begin building their own kingdoms to spite their banished Father. Now, as Gamma held all the power of the Eminence over their heads, the siblings were ready for a civil war over the heavens.'

The Aureus was utterly ruined in an onslaught of celestial fire. All of its fabulously wealthy denizens were brutally slain but for one lowly administrator by the name of Elliot Sinnwalker - a bureaucrat favored by the Emperor for his ability to keep the down beaten peoples of the drained countryside from rebelling through incessant religious propaganda glorifying the powerful and generous Emperor of Things. In the wake of Aureus’ sacking, Sinnwalker broke himself free from the lies which Gamma had been feeding him, only realizing the horrors he’d helped the tyrant perpetrate over the peasants of both Hydra and many other worlds once it was too late. He wandered the ruined halls of the broken paradise for many months, contemplating his failures in an empty world. The Titan Civil War was short-lasting; not a year after Aureus’ destruction, the Ancient Fear returned with a bloodlust, sparking the Second Titanomachy; Coda’s children were woefully unprepared for his return, only saving all of Eminence from being assimilated back into the Aether with a mortal sacrifice on Gamma’s part. Before Moros could be driven back into the abyss beyond the void, however, his wrath consumed a multitude of worlds, including the doomed Hydra. Before resigning to the fate of assimilation, however, Elliot decided to use the experimental dimension-warping technologies of his ruined utopia in hopes of reaching a parallel world in which to start anew.

His leap of faith did not immediately land him in another world, rather transporting him to the region of spacetime just at the edge of existence known as Emanation, where he was greeted by the Soth Hafh’drn, known in standard Aquilan as the Void Priests. The mysterious, tall, and skinny Curators of the marble fortress shared with Elliot next to nothing about who they truly were, who they served, or the extent of their involvement with the Titanomachy - only that they were the stewards of the Zodiac with the eternal duty of eliminating any threats to its unflinching slumber; in this case, the Curators explained, the Titans represented the greatest threat to peace. Sinnwalker, enraged by the deception of the Emperor and now privy to the knowledge that the Ancient Fear was in truth created by the Old Gods, agreed to ally with the Void Priests, who gave him the task of acting as their Emissary. He was given the chance to save all of Eminence from a similar fate to his own world, with the task of uncovering the ancient power necessary to destroy the Titans. The Curators bestowed upon him the name Hades, or in the dialect of the void, “redeemer.”

Armed with the Cloak of Eternity, which gave him the ability to evade the gaze of the remaining Titans, Hades scoured Eminence for signs of the hidden Heart of Coda, the source of the Old God’s power. His journey yielded him little materially for centuries, but in his travels, which took him to the worlds of Eridanus and Pisces, he shared what knowledge he could of the betrayal of the Titans, and shared with those he trusted the reality-bending magicks of the void - even unbeknownst to the Soth Hafh’drn, who entrusted a modicum of their power to him for his quest only. Still, his ability to actually wield magick was next to none without the secrets of the Heart, and those worlds would not develop their own cohesive interpretations of the Old Ways for countless generations.

Eventually, his journeys brought him to the world of Aquila, ruled by the mighty Avus. He took a particular liking to the peoples of Aquila, even garnering a party of followers devoted to his cause which he dubbed the Scions of Aquila. With the Scions, Hades uncovered the whereabouts of the Heart of Coda, secreted away in the Nether beneath Aquila; the adventurers infiltrated the abandoned fortress forsaken by time and finally discovered the Heart, only to be greeted with one final challenge given by its black skeletal keeper: Any who gazed upon the relic’s secrets would be given the curse of immortality, doomed to forever live with their failures and never truly know love or peace. Hades was the one among them who undertook the challenge, entering the Hall of Sacrifice and emerging with the knowledge of the Old Gods. Though the knowledge he had gleaned from his quest had given him the power to wield the secrets of the void almost to the extent of his nemeses, it came with the unspeakable burden of having to live with a sliver of Moros’ own unspeakable rage within his still mortal heart, which would only weigh heavier on his newly immortal soul as he continued to live for thousands of generations - penance for his desire for revenge.

Upon returning to Aquila with the Scions, Hades was visited by the Void Priests from beyond the stars, who admonished him for sharing his knowledge with other mortals and sentenced him to death for his betrayal; upon discovering his newfound immortality, the Priests vanished from the mortal plain, vowing that they would one day have retribution. Without the blessing of the Curators, Hades was no longer able to travel among the Zodiac at will, forever binding him to the world of Aquila. Nevertheless, he devoted all his efforts to conspiring against the Old Gods, wasting no time in plotting the deicide of this realms’ ruler, Avus. Under the shadow of the Cloak of Eternity, the Scions of Hydra grew in power, preparing to wrestle the realm from the Titan and thus, in Hades’ eyes, prevent it from arriving at the same fate as his home.

Their efforts did not continue unabated indefinitely, however. Avus soon discovered the Scions’ actions and became enraged, utterly offended that any would dare harness the power of the Gods except he alone - in his own domain, no less. Unable to single-handedly strike the Defiler down due to the protection of the Cloak, Avus resolved to indiscriminately obliterate the base of his cult, Merth Docto, and send him along with all his followers to the void. The epic blow that ensued ripped a massive hole in the very fabric of the realm, opening a fissure in Merth Docto that extended to the abyss itself - the realm of the Daemon-Sultan. Though the Scions that were with him at the hour of their grim fate were given the gift of a swift demise, Hades himself was thenceforth doomed to float through the unknowable and infinite expanse of the void for all time, watching the universe begin and end on a continuous loop for all of eternity. His sacrifice was not in vain, however, as his remaining cultists dispersed throughout the world and carried on his teachings to all who would listen, largely free from the oppression of Avus, who was irrevocably crippled by the sheer exertion of the strike.

The grim fate of Hades the Unseen sparked uncountable generations of adherents of the ancient religion of the Old Ways, all stemming from a mere moment of immersion within the Heart. Numerous attempts at communing with his formless spirit have been made throughout history, all of them yielding poor results. The site of his sacrifice, Merth Docto, has remained a place of darkness even after the massive continental shift of the Great Desynchronization; the hole to the void has allowed unspeakable creatures from beyond eternity to slowly seep into the landscape surrounding it, which today is simply called the Rift. Whether Hades will one day emerge from the void or is doomed to forever wander its terrifying expanse cannot be said for certain; all that is known is that his presence continues to be felt tens of thousands of years after his disappearance, and thus the legacy of Hydra still lives on in one form or another.