Tartarus
The abyss beneath the world, where everything order can't hold ends up.
Hesiod says that in the beginning there was Chaos. Right after came Gaia, the Earth, Tartarus hidden in her depths, and Eros.
So Tartarus is among the very first, more a place than a god, with no face to carve.
To measure how far down it is, Hesiod uses a bronze anvil. Dropped from the sky, it falls for nine days and nine nights before it hits the earth. Dropped from the earth, it takes another nine to reach Tartarus.
A bronze wall closes it in, and Night wraps around its neck three times. Poseidon set the gates on top.
That is where the defeated end up. After ten years of war Zeus locked the Titans inside and put the Hundred-Handers, the giants with a hundred arms, on guard.
With Gaia he fathered Typhon, the biggest monster the Greeks ever imagined, Zeus's last enemy.
Over time the poets filled it with the damned: Tantalus with the water that pulls away whenever he tries to drink, Sisyphus with his boulder.
Today Tartarus would be the basement of a club with no sign outside, the one you reach down a narrow staircase and leave when the sun is already high. Or the part of us we keep locked away, which sooner or later knocks.
If he were a zodiac sign? Scorpio, who goes all the way down and doesn't come back up until he understands.
This story is for those who aren't afraid of the dark.
For those who went down there and came back up with something in their hands.
