Hades (2026) –  Dwayne Johnson & Charlize Theron

I have ruled the Underworld in silence.

No hymns were sung for my reign. No temples raised in my honor by trembling hands. While the other gods demanded worship, I demanded order. The dead arrived endlessly—kings and beggars, warriors and children—and I received them all without judgment, without favor. My throne was not built on fear, but on necessity.

Someone had to keep the balance.

For ages uncounted, I kept the gates sealed, the rivers flowing, the realms aligned. The living slept soundly because the dead stayed where they belonged. That was my covenant with existence itself.

But now the gates strain.

It began as whispers in the dark—souls restless beyond reason, shadows lingering where they should have faded. The River Styx surged against its banks. Cerberus growled not at intruders, but at the walls themselves, as if sensing a weakness even I could not yet see.

The realms trembled.

And when the world trembles, the gods look for someone to blame.

They spoke my name like a curse.

“Hades,” they said, from golden halls far above my domain. “Hades, whose realm decays. Hades, who hides behind duty and calls it balance.”

I watched them from afar, these gods of thunder and wisdom, of war and harvest. I had watched them before—watched wars begin with pride and end with graves. I had seen heroes raised by prophecy and discarded by ambition. I had gathered the dead they left behind and learned what happens when power goes unchecked.

Yet now, they dared to accuse me.

Worse than their words were the signs. Cracks forming in places untouched since creation. Ancient seals weakening. Doors between realms responding to forces that were not meant to exist. This was not neglect.

This was pressure—from above.

At the center of it all stood Persephone.

Queen of the Underworld. Bridge between life and death. And now—unwitting catalyst.

She walked among the dead with compassion too vast for a realm built on finality. Where I enforced boundaries, she questioned them. Where I held the line, she wondered what lay beyond it.

“She doesn’t see the truth,” I told myself as I watched her speak with wandering spirits. “She sees suffering—and believes mercy alone can heal it.”

But mercy without structure is collapse.

The gods whispered to her. Athena’s logic. Zeus’s authority. Demeter’s grief. They fed her doubts, shaped her concern into resolve. If the Underworld was cracking, then its king must be the flaw.

They wanted her to strike my throne.

If she did, she would not punish a villain.

She would cut the last chain holding the Underworld back.

I was not the rot beneath reality.

I was the wall.

As pressure mounted, shadows began to move without command. Spirits clawed at the gates not to escape—but to flee something deeper. Something ancient, buried beneath even my dominion.

The truth settled heavily upon me.

This was not rebellion.

It was awakening.

Something older than gods, older than judgment, was stirring—drawn by imbalance, by the gods’ careless interference with forces they pretended to control.

And if Persephone came for my crown—

If she tested me in my kingdom—

Then the trial would not decide my fate alone.

It would decide whether the world above would drown in the dead it had forgotten how to respect.

So I rose from my throne of obsidian, staff in hand, eyes fixed upon the cracking dark.

Let her come.

Let her test me.

Because if the wall falls—

Everything follows.

Persephone did not come to the Underworld as a conqueror.

She came as a queen who could no longer ignore the cracks beneath her feet.

The dead had begun to linger. Souls that should have crossed the rivers instead wandered the asphodel fields, confused, frightened, clinging to memories that should have faded. Persephone walked among them, listening, kneeling beside warriors who no longer remembered their wars and mothers who still whispered the names of children long turned to dust.

Something was wrong.

When she asked Hecate, the goddess of crossroads only shook her head. When she questioned the Fates, their threads tangled without answers. And when she reached out to Olympus, the response came swiftly and sharply.

“Hades has lost control,” Zeus declared, thunder rolling through the heavens.
“The balance has failed,” Athena added, her voice cool and precise.
“If the Underworld collapses,” Demeter whispered, grief trembling beneath her words, “then life itself will follow.”

Persephone returned to the realm below with doubt weighing heavily on her heart.

Hades felt it the moment she crossed the threshold.

The Underworld responded to her presence—flowers blooming briefly in dead soil, spirits lifting their heads as if sensing hope. She was life walking among endings, and the realm strained to reconcile the contradiction.

“You walk carefully,” Hades said as she approached his throne. “As if the ground might betray you.”

“It already is,” Persephone replied. “The dead are afraid.”

“They always are.”

“No,” she said firmly. “This is different.”

She accused him gently at first. Asked questions. Demanded explanations. Why were the gates weakening? Why were souls resisting judgment? Why did shadows move beyond his command?

Hades listened in silence, his expression carved from stone.

“You think I have grown careless,” he finally said. “That I hide behind duty while decay spreads.”

The words stung more than she expected.

“I think,” Persephone answered slowly, “that you are holding something back. And it’s tearing the realm apart.”

Above them, unseen by either, Olympus watched.

The gods fed the tension. Dreams haunted Persephone—visions of the Underworld flooding the surface, of Hades seated upon a throne of ruin, of herself crowned in darkness, forced to choose between realms.

And in the deepest layers of the Underworld, something listened.

That night, the gates screamed.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. The ancient barriers groaned like wounded beasts as a surge of power rippled through the realm. Souls fled in panic. Cerberus howled, his three heads snapping toward a fissure forming beneath the River Phlegethon.

Persephone ran.

Hades arrived moments later, staff blazing with cold fire as he sealed the breach with brute will alone. The crack closed—but not before something vast shifted on the other side.

Persephone stared at him, breathless.

“That wasn’t neglect,” she said quietly. “That was pressure.”

“Yes,” Hades replied. “From something the gods refuse to acknowledge.”

She turned toward him fully then, doubt colliding with loyalty.

“Tell me the truth,” she demanded. “All of it.”

But before he could answer, Olympus made its move.

A decree thundered through every realm:

Hades would be judged.

And Persephone—queen of two worlds—was named the one to deliver the verdict.

The trial was never meant to be fair.

Olympus called it judgment. Hades called it desperation.

The gods descended into the Underworld in radiant defiance of its gloom, their presence tearing at the fabric of the realm. Zeus stood at the forefront, lightning barely contained. Athena observed every crack, every tremor, already forming conclusions. Ares smiled at the tension, eager for conflict.

And Persephone stood between them all.

“Hades,” Zeus proclaimed, “the Underworld fractures under your rule. Relinquish your throne, and we will restore balance.”

Hades laughed once—a sound like stone breaking.

“You do not restore balance,” he said. “You exploit it until it breaks.”

The ground answered him.

A fissure split the court, wider and deeper than any before. From it rose a darkness that devoured light itself. Not a god. Not a titan.

An absence.

The thing beneath the Underworld awakened fully at last—the Primordial Abyss, a remnant of chaos sealed away when order was first imposed upon existence. It fed on imbalance, on the gods’ endless interference, on mercy without structure and power without restraint.

The Abyss did not roar.

It pulled.

Souls screamed as they were drawn toward it. Even gods staggered as their strength was leeched away.

“This is what I have held back,” Hades said, his voice strained but unbroken. “This is the price of your meddling.”

Zeus faltered.

Athena’s certainty cracked.

Persephone saw it then—the truth she had been blind to. Hades was not the source of decay.

He was its containment.

“Hades!” she shouted over the chaos. “What happens if you fall?”

The Abyss answered for him.

Everything.

Understanding struck Persephone like a blade. Without hesitation, she stepped forward—toward the fissure, toward annihilation. Life met void, and the Abyss recoiled, shrieking in silent fury.

“Hades!” she cried. “I can anchor it—but not alone!”

For the first time in ages, the King of the Underworld reached out.

Together, death and rebirth wove a seal neither could create alone. Hades bound the Abyss with iron law. Persephone tempered it with renewal, transforming the prison from a wall into a living boundary.

The gods watched in stunned silence as the realm stabilized—not by force, but by unity they had never considered.

The Abyss receded.

The fissure closed.

And Olympus stood ashamed.

The Underworld did not celebrate its salvation.

It settled.

Silence returned—not the silence of suppression, but of equilibrium restored. The rivers flowed evenly once more. The dead resumed their journeys, no longer clinging, no longer fleeing.

Hades remained on his throne.

But he was no longer alone.

Persephone stood beside him—not as a judge, not as a weapon of Olympus, but as a queen who finally understood the weight of endings.

“You were the wall,” she said softly. “And I almost helped tear you down.”

“You saw the truth in time,” Hades replied. “That is more than the others can claim.”

Olympus withdrew, chastened but unchanged. They would interfere again someday. Hades knew that. Power rarely learned restraint.

But now, the Underworld had something new.

A balance not born of fear—but of shared burden.

Persephone divided her time between realms with purpose, guiding life and death without favor. Where souls lingered, she eased them forward. Where judgment hardened, she softened it—never breaking the law, only reminding it why it existed.

And Hades continued to rule in silence.

Not as a villain.
Not as a tyrant.

But as the unseen force holding catastrophe at bay.

Above, mortals spoke his name like a curse.

Below, existence itself endured because of him.

And when the realms trembled again—as they always would—

The wall would stand.

Not because it was feared.

But because it was necessary.