Tartarus (place)

Tartarus is the darkest and deepest area of Hades' realm, known as the Underworld, where the gods imprison their enemies. Tartarus is also the primordial Greek god of the abyss.
== History ==
While Erebos is the main realm of the dead in Greek mythology, Tartarus also contains a number of villains from Greek history. In early stories, it is primarily the prison for defeated enemies. The first beings to be jailed there, however, were the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires, by Ouranos, although Kronos later freed them. After a while he put them back and had Kampê guard them, but they were freed by Zeus and his siblings so they could fight for his cause. The Titans were condemned to Tartarus after their battle with the Olympians. The Hekatonkheires, after the Titanomachy, became the guards of Tartarus with the Titans imprisoned. Kronos is known for being held there.
During the Classical period, writers and playwrights such as Plato and Aristophanes depicted Tartarus as being the place in which the souls of those individuals that were wicked were sent to in order to face punishment. But in this series, the souls of the wicked, including those who, in myth, were sent to Tartarus (Tantalus and Sisyphus), are condemned to face eternal torment within the Fields of Punishment.
According to the Greek poet Hesiod, a bronze anvil falling from heaven would take nine days and nights to reach earth, and an object would take the same amount of time to fall from earth into Tartarus. Tartarus is described as a dark, gloomy pit, surrounded by a wall of bronze and beyond that a three-fold layer of night. It is one of the primordial beings that sprung from Chaos, along with Gaea, though some believe it was a son of Aether and Chaos, whilst Orphic sources claim Tartarus to be the unbounded first-existing entity.
== Description ==
According to Annabeth, the Tartarus is a place of pain and suffering for gods and mortals, among others, designed to hurt them, with acid air, water of sadness (in case of the River Cocytus) and the ground made of broken glass. The Tartarus has a greyish atmosphere and its clouds are blood red. The ceiling is so high that it is invisible from the ground, stretching for miles and miles to plunge into darkness in the form of plateaus. Multiple pointed mountains and volcanic chasm adorn the landscape. A few long, thin, black trees (like insect hair) grow in the flatter areas, and multiple monsters emerge like worms from blisters that form on the ground. The main wall of the cave is made up of multiple precipices and obsidian cliffs, where the rivers of Hades descend, presumably in the form of waterfalls, although this is not mentioned. The landscape descends to the most dangerous area, where the heart of the god himself is found. As it descends, the terrain loses its composition of black gravel and begins to have a rather skin-like appearance, with a large membrane covered in a thin layer of earth or dust, smooth and warm, on which multiple cave mouths made up of piles of stones. A dense black mist covers the lower areas of this region. Taking the source of the rivers and the obsidian cliffs as the North, in the South direction is a forest with a cold climate and humid by the dark mist, with tall black and round trees, but without branches. Annabeth compares them to hair follicles. This ends in a cliff whose bottom is unknown.
=== Known places ===
==== Hermes' Shrine ====
This sanctuary dedicated to the messenger god is relatively close to the River Phlegethon, inside an immense crater. It consists of multiple black marble columns that surround an altar of the same material.
==== Damasen's Swamp ====
The swamp where Damasen and his eternal enemy the Maeonian Drakon live is located west of the forest. The soil is variable, sometimes with thick mud, sometimes with pebbles and gravel, with large stones here and there. Multiple hawthorns grow throughout the swamp and the air smells of stagnant water. Multiple decadent-looking plants grow around the tar grounds and a thick yellow mist surrounds the site. In the centre of the swamp is the Damasen Hut, created from the drakon parts.
In The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, Nico di Angelo and Will Solace find the hut abandoned and covered in dust as Damasen has yet to finish reforming from the Battle For Control of the Doors of Death.
== Known Inhabitants ==
* Kronos (scattered)
* Erebus (by some accounts)
* Nyx (leaves during the night and comes back during the day)
* Children of Nyx
** Akhlys
** Arai
** Geras
** Eris
* Hemera (leaves during the day and comes back during the night), child of Nyx
* Arke (messenger of the Titans thrown down after the first Olympian war)
* Typhon
* Chimera (According to his collar in The Lightning Thief)
* Titans (some were known to have been released, others may still be prisoners)
** Hyperion (essence consumed by Tartarus)
** Krios (essence consumed by Tartarus)
** Koios
** Menoetius
* Gigantes
* Numerous Monsters that were slayed by heroes.
** Kelli
** Serephone
** Telekhines
** Cyclops
* Bob/Iapetus (formerly)
* Small Bob (formerly)
* Damasen (reforming)
* Amphithemis
== Trivia ==
* It is said that Tartarus is darker than Erebos, which is ironic given that Erebos is the embodiment of darkness and Tartarus' brother (being himself a Protogenos).
* As revealed in Percy Jackson's Greek Gods, the Titans are imprisoned in a maximum-security zone of Tartarus, surrounded by huge bronze walls, and a lava moat, guarded by the mighty Hekatonkheires (though it used to be guarded by Kampê and her minion demons).
* Typhon is currently imprisoned in Tartarus, but the myth says that Tartarus is Typhon's father by Gaea. This fact ironically means that Tartarus is the jailer of his own son, though probably not by choice.
* Tartarus is once misspelled as "Tatarus" in The Lost Hero.
* Between both series, five entrances to Tartarus have been shown. One in the Underworld (main entrance), one in the Labyrinth (destroyed/sealed off), one at the bottom of the Hudson River made especially for Typhon, one in the catacombs of Rome, and one at Epirus, the House of Hades (via the Doors of Death, which have now been removed)
* Nico di Angelo, Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase and Will Solace are the first demigods to survive Tartarus (although Gaea's forces finally captured Nico and sent him to the mortal world). In Nico's case, he was captured and sent back to the mortal world, but the experience nearly drove him insane. Percy and Annabeth had the help of the Titan Bob and Gigantes Damasen. Nico didn't think it was possible for a demigod to survive Tartarus due to his experiences in it when telling the Seven about his experiences there and his half-sister Hazel told them no mortal had entered Tartarus and returned.
** A Nereid mentions in The Lightning Thief that Harry Houdini was so skilled in escapology, that he could escape from Tartarus. While he did escape from the Underworld, it is unknown if he ever actually escaped from Tartarus.
** Nico survives going through Tartarus twice, the second time with his boyfriend Will Solace. On this occasion, they had the help of Gorgyra's Canoe, Small Bob, a reformed Bob and eventually Nemesis, Hypnos and Epiales.
* According to Nico, Tartarus is so bad that not even the gods go there. Even Thanatos won't go near it.
** Only the Elder Olympians have travelled to Tartarus once, to free the imprisoned Elder Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires.
** The exception to this are the children of Nyx such as Nemesis and Hypnos. However, Nemesis is mentioned to only be able to spend short periods of time in Tartarus.
* Along with his creator Chaos, Tartarus is the only known figure to be both a place and a Protogenoi, with the possible exception of Gaea.
* According to Hesiod, it takes nine days to reach the bottom of the pit. However, time is very hard to tell in Tartarus - nine days in Tartarus could be 9 seconds in the mortal world, and vice versa. Bob says basically the same thing, that time is hard to tell in Tartarus, though he may have been confused due to his memory problems.
* The five rivers that run through the Underworld, the Lethe, the Styx, the Cocytus, the Phlegethon, and the Acheron, all flow into the heart of Tartarus.
** Unlike the other rivers, the Acheron flows in a circle and thus eventually makes its way back to the Underworld as revealed in The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure.
* The heart of Tartarus contains one side of the Doors of Death, although this was only temporary as they were chained there.
* Monsters can be killed in Tartarus, but they just reform again in a different place. 
* The map of Tartarus shows a door leading to the mortal world, which is presumably used by monsters after reforming.
* Just by being in Tartarus, demigods have their healing powers repressed leaving them at a much greater risk of injury or death. In addition, being in Tartarus weakens Will Solace, son of Apollo, as he's so far from his father's domain of the sun.
* It is implied in The House of Hades that Leto had once been in Tartarus, but the exacts of that event are unknown.
* As with Hades (the place), Tartarus is commonly used in the series to replace the word "hell" in the curse "what the hell".