AVERNUS
INTRODUCTION
The underworld of the Greek pantheon is a dark place filled with wailing souls and marked by the eternal sounds of rivers lapping up on muddy shores. The shades of the dead here are wispy things, their extremities fading out of sight and their bodies seeming to be tatterdemalion bits of smoke and gauzy nothingness. The normal dead wail endlessly and piteously, though not loudly. They are barely existent, so they make little sound.
Hades is not kind to normal, average souls. Only those who lived existences of great heroism, creativity and excellence have any kind of solid existence here. Mediocrity is rewarded with more of the same, and the souls of the pathetic dead are themselves hardly worth considering.
THE OUTER SHORES
The River Styx separates Avernus from the World, flowing in a circle around the lands of the dead. Across the Styx, however, flows the Phlegethon, a river of dark-colored flame that burns with no fuel. In truth, it is easy to mistake them for being a single river, for no bank separates the Styx and the Phlegethon, which runs parallel to the Styx’s dark waters as they surround Hades. Practically speaking, this results in there seeming to be two barriers between the land of men and Hades: a river of water, then a river of fire.
The ferryman Phlegyas poles his barge across the Styx, picking up any soul that wanders the mortal side of that black river, whether they are living or dead. His duty is not to keep any soul in or out of Hades, but merely to provide means by which they might cross.
This circle of water and fi re is broken by another two rivers: the Cocytus and the Acheron. Phlegyas travels up the Cocytus, dropping his charges off on the barren lands between the Cocytus, which means “the river of wailing,” and the Acheron, which means “the river of woe.” This stretch of swampy land is haunted by the souls of the dead, waiting for Charon in his barge. According to burial customs, the dead were buried with either a coin over each eye, or a coin under the tongue, that they might pay Charon for passage into Hades proper. Those who have no funereal coin are forced to wander the swampy lands that lie between the Cocytus and Acheron for 100 years, wailing their misery for all to hear.
All the rivers in Hades are vast, and the land itself is quite dark. It is impossible to see very far, even through the use of supernatural means. The ferrymen of Hades find their way through the gloom more by knowledge of where they are than by actual sight. Mortals and many Scions become lost quite easily here, and sometimes, lost souls can be found who have gone astray, floating listlessly in the river or wandering nearly blind along a marshy shore.
