Tartarus
The end of down. The prison that waited.
Both a god and a place, as far beneath Hades as earth lies beneath the sky — and the cell every defeated power in Greek myth eventually occupies.
The Myth
Tartarus is one of the few figures in Greek myth who never fully resolves into either a person or a location. Hesiod lists him among the first beings to come into existence — alongside Chaos, Gaia and Eros — and then uses the same name for the pit beneath the world.
The Theogony is unusually specific about the distance. A bronze anvil dropped from heaven would fall for nine days and nights before striking the earth on the tenth; dropped from earth, it would fall nine more before reaching Tartarus. Homer’s Iliad puts it the same way in Zeus’ own mouth: Tartarus lies as far below Hades as the sky stands above the earth.
It is a prison, not an afterlife. Hades receives the ordinary dead; Tartarus holds what must be contained. The Titans are sealed there after the Titanomachy, guarded by the Hundred-Handed Ones. Typhon is buried beneath it. In later authors it acquires more familiar tenants — Tantalus, Sisyphus, Ixion — and by the Roman period it has drifted decisively towards being a place of punishment for mortal sinners, which is closer to the Christian hell than to anything Hesiod described.
With Gaia, Tartarus fathered Typhon, the last and worst challenge to Zeus’ rule — the deepest part of the cosmos and the earth itself combining, one final time, against Olympus.
How I Tell It
Tartarus is usually introduced late, as scenery — the hole the Titans get thrown into once the plot needs somewhere to put them. Hesiod has him present at the beginning, before there is anything to imprison. I wanted that chronology kept, because it changes what the Titanomachy is: not a war that found a prison, but a prison that had been waiting.
From the lowest point of this boundless void, Tartarus emerged. It was not a place, but a presence. Tartarus was the ultimate inversion, the sinkhole of creation, the wound in the cosmos where gravity pulled without end. Even Chaos recoiled from him, for Tartarus was too concentrated, too absolute.
It lay silent, brooding, neither malicious nor kind. It simply was. The limit to descent, the end of down.