River Styx: the river of hatred beneath Greece

The River Styx was the principal river of the Underworld, the water every Greek soul had to cross once its life was spent. It was known as the river of hatred, and for anything still living its touch meant death. Charon worked its banks as ferryman in the service of Hades and Persephone, carrying the dead over in a vessel the size of a warship. Kratos met the Styx more often than any other mortal in Greece. He was refused passage on it, thrown from its docks into Tartarus, fought his way back to kill its ferryman, crossed it on a road of bone, watched Icarus drown in it, and eventually swam its length and came out with his weapons destroyed.

The river of hatred#

The Styx was the water that separated the living world from the dead one, and its reputation among the Greeks was not of peace but of loathing. It carried the name river of hatred, and it was not a thing any mortal was meant to see twice.

Its appearance varied along its course. Through the ruined flats of Asphodel and the burning depths beneath Greece it ran as a river of blood, and for the living it spelled instant death, so that the only way across was to be carried. In the calmer reaches nearer Hades' Palace, further from the place where the newly dead arrived, it ran instead as murky black water thick with souls who swam and thrashed in it without ever drowning. Those souls were not passive. Anything that entered the water was seized, drained and pulled under.

Asphodel itself, the neutral ground of the Underworld lying between Elysium and the pit of Tartarus, was where Kratos first came upon the river. He fell into that region after loosing the Fire Steeds and made his way through its barren ruins until the ground opened onto the water and the docks beyond.

Charon and his docks#

The Docks of Charon stood on the bloody bank at the edge of Asphodel, marked by a giant statue of the ferryman himself and hung with Charon's Bell, which any arrival could ring to summon him. The ferry that answered was enormous, more than fifty feet from bow to stern, driven by banks of long oars and carrying no sail at all. Set into its deck was a structure of three columns like a hearth, from which the ferryman could send a wave of green flame the length of the vessel and kill everything standing on it.

Charon was a son of Nyx, making him brother to Thanatos and to the Sisters of Fate, and he served Hades and Persephone as the god of the afterlife. He was gaunt and pale, robed in dark cloth strung with severed heads, his skull like face covered by a golden mask, and he carried a great scythe that doubled as a walking staff. He made no secret of despising the work he had been given.

When Kratos rang the bell, Charon refused him. The Spartan was still living and the ferryman would not take him across. They fought for control of the ship, and the ferryman won, knocking Kratos unconscious and throwing him down into the Jails of Tartarus. That defeat put Charon in a very short company of beings who ever bested Kratos in a straight fight.

Kratos climbed out of Tartarus with the Gauntlet of Zeus and came back to the docks. This time he destroyed the three pillars the ferryman used to draw back his strength, wore him down, and drove Charon's own scythe through him. Even that did not finish it. Kratos took hold of him and beat his face until he died, then stripped the golden mask from the corpse. With the ferry his own, he crossed the Styx and sailed on to the Temple of Persephone. A carving of the ferryman survived him, cut into the gate of Persephone's shrine.

The Path of Hades#

Not every crossing was made by boat. Deep in the Underworld a road called the Path of Hades ran out over the Styx, built of platforms and narrow bridges of bone slick with blood, threaded with spinning columns of spikes and burning along its whole length.

Kratos took that road to get out of the Underworld after he was cast down during the siege of Athens. The path was defended the entire way by the servants of the dead, legionnaires and archers of Hades, harpies, minotaurs and satyrs, and while he fought across it the freshly dead could be seen dropping past into the river below, some of them still burning. At the far end he found a long rope and climbed it, coming up out of his own grave at the gates of the Temple of the Oracle. He walked back into Athens from there and killed Ares.

Falls into the Styx#

The river took at least one famous soul while Kratos watched. Pursuing a way up out of Greece, he grappled with Icarus in the air above the Great Chasm and the two of them fell together toward the Underworld. Below them the world sat on the shoulders of Atlas, and beneath the Titan lay the Styx. Kratos tore the wings from Icarus' back and used them to land safely on the Titan. Icarus, stripped of the only thing that had ever lifted him, fell the rest of the way into the river with no means of ever climbing out again. Making his own way back to the surface afterward, Kratos took care not to follow him in.

Swimming the Styx#

The last and worst of his crossings came after Gaia betrayed him on the flank of Mount Olympus. Having killed Poseidon, Kratos was thrown from the Titan's back and fell the full height of the mountain into the Underworld and into the Styx.

This time he could swim in it, but not without cost. The cursed souls in the water swarmed him, dragging at his body, draining his life and his magic away, and eating the Blades of Athena until the weapons were destroyed outright. The Golden Fleece on his arm came through the water intact, though most of its power was stripped from it. He walked out of the river weaker than he had entered any fight in his life.

The river stopped being a danger to him only after he killed Hades. Having torn out and absorbed the lord of the dead's soul with the stolen Claws of Hades, Kratos carried a god's soul inside him, and from that point the Styx let him pass through its waters without harm.

The mirage of Midas#

The Styx was fearsome enough that its mere image could destroy a man. When King Midas was shown a vision in his madness, what he took for the river of the dead was in truth a channel of molten lava. Convinced that he had already died and that the water before him was the Styx itself, the king put his left hand into it. The lava burned the hand off and sent him running in agony, and the severed hand turned the whole stream to gold where it fell, opening a crossing for Kratos over a river that had never been the Styx at all.