Hades Moon

The living think of the underworld as a place apart from the world they see each day. Christian minds think of Heaven above and Hell below, while other faiths have seen our souls' destinations as separate realms entirely. The Greeks, though, and the Romans after them, believed everyone descended into the earth to meet what paradise or punishment they deserved.  

In the myth, the god of the underworld rose up from the ground and snatched his bride-to-be, disappearing without a trace. The world suffered for her absence, and in her time she became a queen, thereafter symbolized by seeds as red as blood. 

In my experience, the Greeks, the Christians, the Taoists and the Egyptians and all the rest got it wrong: the underworld in which the dead dwell is neither above nor below, rather it is beside, overlapping with the land of the living, but generally only visible at night. 

We walk right next to them, and most of them never know when death passes by, though some few can sense our closeness.  And we drain the living of the life we lack, drinking in their breath and blood, sometimes devouring their very flesh. Only the most depraved of my kind rely on muscle and sinew to survive, though other monsters enjoy it as a delicacy. Most of us drain life through the blood. The rarified taste of breath grows difficult to distill after a time. 

One thing the Greeks got right was the way they thought about their gods: unlike the Christians, who ascribe an otherworldly purity to their heavenly Father, the Greeks wrote about the deeply human characteristics their gods possessed. Love, hatred, jealousy, hunger; the gods felt them all and the humans who worshipped them generally suffered in response. We walking dead still feel those human feelings too, especially hunger. Always hunger. Our appetites are ceaseless and eternal, driving us each night to draw close to living vessels and drain them of the vitæ that keeps us animate.  

We return to the grave with the rising of the sun, and under the light of our beloved, Hadean moon, we return again, and again. I cannot speak for others of my kind, but I can say with all sincerity that I only thought in passing about the moon when I was alive. Now, when I gaze upon it, I can't help but realize that it is the closest I will ever be to seeing the sun's rays again. 

I ramble. I'm telling you all of this now because it will help things make sense in the future. In some ways, you likely already feel that the ground has opened up and the god has dragged you into the darkness.  

I assure you, that is not yet the case. Not really. 

Not yet.