But there is one thing that can change all that: Blood.
Yes, this sounds completely disgusting. Any warm-blooded human being finds the idea of drinking blood completely icky, oogy, squitchy, and well, just plain gross. But the Dead are not warm-blooded human beings. They are, well, Dead. And the only thing that can make them feel Alive again, if only for a brief time, is blood.
Blood is Life, and to the Shades in the Underworld the taste of blood, the feel of blood, gives them the thrill of Life again. As the blood courses through their bodies, the Shades thicken, gain substance, form, emotion.
There was a time, back before the Decree for Underworld Preservation and Sanctity was passed, when people would waltz through the Underworld all the time, carrying fresh blood with them. The smell would lure the Shades, who would crowd, clamor, and claw as if they had already drunk the stuff, as if merely the promise of blood gave them enough Life to fight for a taste.
But if you were the ruler of subjects who were half comatose by nature, any substance that transforms them into crowders, clamorers, and clawers would make you distinctly nervous. And the prospect of any old Tom, Dick, or Herodotus waltzing through your realm and being able to lure and excite your people would not be an attractive one.
Blood did not belong in the Underworld. It changed the Shades. Made them unruly. They couldn't control their actions. They began to have delusions of Life-and nothing is more disruptive to a realm of the Dead than delusions of Life. In his Decree for the Promotion of Underworld Hygiene, Hades proclaimed that blood would be strictly forbidden in the Underworld (excepting, of course, inside the Palace. Hades liked his boar extremely rare).
What Hades did not know was that not all of his employees obeyed his decrees scrupulously. And the most unscrupulous disobeyer of all was an Immortal named Philonecron.
Philonecron was actually born in the Underworld, the son of a daughter of Poseidon and one of the demons who staffed the employee mud spa. He grew up playing along the banks of the Styx, skipping through the Vale of Mourning, frolicking in the Plain of Judgment.
It wasn't bad, growing up in the Underworld. There were quite a lot of Immortal kids, actually; what with such a large number of Immortals working there, most of them only tangentially related to one another, romances sprung up right and left, and sometimes those romances resulted in families. Or at least children. Whether birthed, hatched, or regurgitated, new babies were a common occurrence in the Underworld.
And of course with children came institutional needs. And the Underworld adapted. Day care. A good school system. Interspecies medicine. Children are a nether realm's most valuable resource, and Hades made sure they were treated accordingly. And he was rewarded; most of the kids grew up to work in the Administration, serving Hades loyally (and eternally).
As a student, Philonecron took a long time to pick a career path. His teachers pronounced him highly intelligent but lacking discipline, the sort that would rather spend his time writing sonnets about gastronomical distress than doing his geometry homework. His first internship in high school was with the Erinyes in Tartarus, but his guidance counselors thought he seemed to enjoy the job a bit too much. After graduation from high school he worked in a few low-level agencies before settling in at the Department of Sanitation.
But Philonecron had other goals. He wasn't going to be a garbage man forever. He had a plan.
For, despite what his teachers thought, he had been paying attention at school. He'd learned all of his history well. And he knew that there was only one thing that mattered in the world, and that was power.
Philonecron wanted power. Not pretend power, like the bloated Managers, lording over Recreation or Meal Services as if they were kingdoms unto themselves. He wanted real power. He wanted everything. He wanted to rule.
Oh, not the Universe. He had no desire for the earth, for the stars and the heavens, for Mount Olympus and all it surveyed. That was too much. All he wanted was his own world, his home, the Underworld. Anyway, he'd learned well that people who tried to overthrow Zeus did not come to good ends. But as far as he could see, no one had ever tried to overthrow Hades. And Hades was ripe to be overthrown.
Over the millennia King Hades had become complacent, lazy. Everyone knew it; they were just too scared to say anything. He sat in the Palace counting his gold, mooning over the Ice Queen, and letting the Administrators make up work for themselves.
The Underworld wasn't supposed to be like this. It's the Underworld, for the love of Zeus – the Dark Domain, the Realm of the Dead-it shouldn't be run like some two-bit provincial government. Bureaucracy isn't even a Greek word. The Underworld needed a strong ruler, a man with a vision, a man handy with a whip, a man who could live up to the promise of the domain, bring back the days when it meant something to be a Greek god. The Underworld needed Philonecron.
But getting the Underworld to realize this was another matter. Taking control would not be easy. Hades was firmly entrenched. And all his Administrators enjoyed their petty positions of power. Hades had them all in his shadowy hands. Philonecron knew the whole Administration was designed only to perpetuate itself-all the Departments and Sections and Agencies only assured the complacency of the people who worked there, and kept Hades wedged in his throne.
The Underworld was now designed to serve the Administrators – the Immortals who served in the burgeoning bureaucracy. None of it was for the Shades. The Shades were the true subjects of the Kingdom of the Dead, and yet no one paid them any attention at all. No one cared about the Shades.
Really, Philonecron did not care about the Shades either, but he wasn't about to tell them that. Because the Shades outnumbered the Administrators at least five thousand to one. If someone could only incite them… It took him quite a while to get past all the Underworld Preservation protections and start collecting the blood. You couldn't just go waltzing through the doors to the Upperworld anymore; the only Immortal who could go through without a pass-besides Hades himself, and he never went anywhere-was Hermes, the Messenger. And there was just no bribing that guy. Philonecron had tried.
But he was not to be thwarted, and soon he figured out that since the Messenger was the only one who could get through the doors, all he would need to do was follow him out. The wing-footed fruitcake would be too busy showing off his speed to notice.
And he was. In and out of the doors of Death Philonecron went, lurking in the shadow of the Messenger. Even more so than he had expected-he had thought that once he was in the Upperworld, he would wander freely, yet once there, he found himself strangely drawn to Death, in fact, to the site of the same Death that had called the Messenger through the doors in the first place. He found, too, he could travel only so far from the Death before he was drawn back to it.
No matter. With Death, so often, came blood, lots of it, especially in this day and age. War and murder were everywhere, and firearms produced so much blood;
Philonecron wished he had invented them. Disease ate away at life bloodlessly, but in the vast, sterile buildings that housed the sick and dying there were great storage facilities of blood, almost as if someone there, too, had been trying to stage a coup in the Underworld. In a quieter Death scene, a heart attack by a lone man, there were always neighbors somewhere, sleeping too soundly to notice a quick exsanguination spell. Nothing too harsh. Just a couple of pints. You'll be a little dizzy in the morning. Rest up, drink some apple juice, you'll be fine.