Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls (Gods of Myth #3)

Chapter 9

Chapter

Nine

P ersephone

His words draw a kind of sharp buzzing to the surface of my flesh, as though I am a charged being in an electrically stimulated environment. They echo in my mind. An alluringly haunted melody composed from a time well before my existence.

“I had to have you.”

Or maybe it wasn’t before my existence. Maybe…

No. Some things are impossible. Some things…

“I had to have you.” I had to have you. I had to have you.

He whispers, as though he knows the words are on loop in my mind. “I had to have you, Persephone.”

I swallow so hard, it’s audible. I croak, “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I don’t understand.” Or at the very least, understanding this feels impossible.

“You are the girl in the garden, reincarnated.”

“Reincarnated,” I laugh the word, but it’s an unhinged, unnerved sound entirely absent of humor.

“Is it so hard to believe?”

“Yes.” No. Visions assault me. Tricks of my mind flash images I’d blamed on insanity. “I don’t know.”

I don’t know what to think.

Hades’ voice is soft. The soothing lilt of it urges me to consider, to open myself to the possibility of yet another impossibility. To believe. “I loved you from the first moment I saw you in that garden. I never stopped loving you, Persephone. But I fell in love with you again the moment I saw you standing before my painting in the Tower of Pluto. I recognized you, immediately.”

“I look like her?”

“You look like you.”

I glare at him. “You know what I mean, Hades.” I force my eyes away and admit quietly, “I don’t feel like her.”

“But you are her, Persephone. She is you.” His hand moves from my jaw to the bare skin covering my breastbone. “Two lifetimes, two bodies, but one soul.”

Under his hot touch, goosebumps rise. “Do I look like I did?”

“There are very subtle differences,” he admits thoughtfully. “But you could pass as the same person. The differences are more in how you act. In who you are now from who you were then. I believe it is greatly owed to your life experiences and being brought up as a human rather than a goddess.”

My mind short-circuits at that. At the mention of being a goddess. Demeter’s child.

I shiver. Then I frown. “Say it’s all true…”

He chuckles at my reluctance to process this reality. “I’m listening.”

“How long ago did I first live?”

“Thousands of years have passed, Persephone. I am unable to give you an exact number of years, as you were first born to a time when time was not yet recorded as it is today.”

Heavens. I can’t grasp the magnitude of that. Of the time that has passed. Of just how truly ancient he is. “God, you’re old.”

This time, he laughs. “I am that.”

I can’t help it, I smile too. There’s just something about this laughter he shares with me that feels so rare, I am incapable of remaining unaffected.

His laughter dies and he admits quietly, “When I first took you, you weren’t especially happy about it.”

I consider what I know of the myth of Hades and Persephone. The way he stole her from her mother. The pomegranate seeds. The other women. The nymphs. The affairs…

The rape.

“Will you tell me about it?”

“I’ve already explained I was not the God of,” he clears his throat, “Composure that I am today. I’ve also explained why that is. The darkness I lived with, and the eternity in which it had been all I’d known. The hunger that burned inside me to once again feel life.”

“Yes. I understand.”

He hesitates. I wait. He speaks, “Your abduction was not a gentle thing, Persephone.” He sounds so agonized by the truth of our past. I want only to sooth him. To absolve him of these sins. “You fought me, screamed and begged.” He shudders. “At this time, I possessed the power to portal myself in and out of the Underworld at will. It was the first time I’d attempted to portal out, however, and happenstance had it, I appeared right where you were.”

“You were so beautiful, there in the garden on your knees. You looked up at me with that halo of white gold hair, and eyes of the finest emerald green. It was as though an arrow struck me clean through the heart. Obsession like I’d never known it ripped like a hurricane through my being, washing everything that was not you away.”

“Hades…” The way he’s looking at me now, with burning obsession—is this how he’d looked at her— at me —then?

I’ve already given him my heart, and even I am afraid. How she—how I —must have felt. I can only imagine.

“I reached for you, and you screamed. I pulled you up from your knees, and you fought against me. The scent of you, floral with the heady undertones of wheat burning in a summer field—I knew immediately who you were. Who you belonged to. Perhaps it’s partly what drove me to steal you away in that moment. Fear that she would come. That Demeter would take you from me.” His eyes shutter then, pain scoring his face. “If I’d known the way the Earthly realm would fight to keep you, I may not have forced the descent into the Underworld as I did. But I did. I pulled you down, kicking and screaming. The other girls in the garden cried out for you, a symphony of feminine injustice—the first of its kind—even as I pulled you deeper into the earth. Earthly talons cut into your flesh, spilling your blood. Roots and rock and earth—they all tried to keep you from me. To save you. But the Earthly realm was no match for the obsession that drove me deeper.”

I feel it happen. The slipping of my mind from this time into another, ancient reality. My vision blurs. I think I might even cry out. Starlight winks in and out of existence and the sounds of merriment from the city below cut in and out as though I’m attempting to secure a radio channel out of range. There is static.

And then there is nothing. Nothing but fear.

And pain. There is pain.

I am unable to scream beyond the suffocating scent of wet earth that threatens to invade my lungs. Sloppy fists of earth and stone connect with my flesh as gnarly fingers of twisted roots cut into my body, spilling pebbles of blood the starving earth laps up as he pulls me deeper and deeper. The sound of hooves split against the earth like the crack of my father’s thunder. Snorts of hot breath remind me of angry penned bulls as they spill from the four horses drenched in black so rich they’d gleamed blue under the hot sun that bore down on the field in the moments before—before…

Before he took me. Before he threw me into the carved bone chariot of glistening onyx.

I know who he is. The God of Death.

Everyone knows who he is.

But no one has seen him. No one even dares to whisper his name, lest he make his dreaded appearance into the land of the living. A reaper. A thing of death. A monster.

An outcast.

My mother’s brother.

Hades.

He’s far bigger than I imagined. He is far bigger than me. His hands, like vices, grip me painfully as he pulls me deeper into the darkness. From my realm into his.

Only, I am not dead.

Or perhaps he means for me to be.

Terror pumps blood through my heart faster. Waves of it surge through the organ so painfully, I fear it may burst.

And then the earth simply gives way. Hades grunts a primitive sound of victory, only giving credence to the beast that he is. His hands circle my waist, so massive I feel his fingertips connect at the line of my spine as he shoves me against his broad chest. Fresh earth sticks to the flesh that is slick with sweat, but beneath the scent of soil is something deeper and darker. Woodsmoke billowing into the darkest night, the flame hot enough to burn. And something else. Something far darker. Something far deeper. Something decadent and rich and terrible.

I claw at his chest as the chariot of onyx simply vanishes. We fall through what feels like an ocean of space. He is the only solid thing around me, and yet I try my hardest to break away. Even if it means I fall to my own end— I try.

And yet I am no match for the beast who imprisons me. The God of Death.

When we land, it is not a gentle thing as it is when Mother takes me through the passage into Olympus. There is no grace to our arrival. No comfort.

Pain is an explosion that rockets through my every limb, carving the breath from my very soul . Before I’ve even assembled myself, he is there. On me. Around me. Knocking me to a ground that is hotter, even, than the air that slithers over my flesh in a burning caress.

“Mine,” he grunts, like an animal.

The darkness that surrounds us is a void of snared screams and pleas for reprieve. Of loss and eternal seeking. I can see nothing but the glowing embers of his monstrous eyes. They are twin flames of torment, promising nothing beyond despair and destruction.

Fingers twist in the fabric that remains of my dress. I can feel the hot puffs of his manic breaths where they threaten to score into my flesh. Pushing away the pain, I try to roll away, to flee. But he is everywhere .

He surrounds me, his bulk an advantage I do not share. And my whimpers fall on deaf ears.

He is a being of hunger. I’ve seen this before, in the starving animals that happen across the quick meal of a nearly spoiled carcass. There is little awareness in the frenzy, and that scares me even more. That this beast—this God of Death—this thing of hunger is hungry for me .

“Stop!” I try, but it makes no difference. “My father will hunt you down and fillet you like a fish.”

He won’t. My father has little care for me. The fact his brother has stolen me from my mother, their sister, will be a thing of little consequence to him where he sits high on his golden throne of Olympus, next to the Queen who loathes my very existence with the hostility only a scorned woman can exude. Memories of her glacial stare cut into me like one of Ares’ death-bound spears.

The pain is alarming. It spreads like fire under my skin, and I realize it’s not the memory of Hera’s death-stare that cuts me, but the God above me. He—his teeth—he’s sunken them into the swollen flesh of my breast and he’s— oh Gods, he’s drinking from me.

With every deep pull, something foreign begins to swell inside me. I suck in breath that tastes like the scorch of anger, swallowing it deep into my lungs even as tears spill from my eyes to smudge the ash that rains from this terrible darkness, clinging to my skin.

My hands lift to plunge into his hair. The strands are long and messy, the waves thick and dark as the man’s black heart. I twist my fingers and try to pull him away as unexpected pleasure morphs to agonizing pain. He makes a noise, a growl deep in the back of his throat. A warning. I stop pulling even as my fingers remain twisted in his hair. He pulls blood from my body until I am humming with a kind of awareness, I’ve never experienced in all my days. It’s deep, like the darkest trenches of the sea, but it’s violent as the waves that crest a stormy surface, sinking ships and claiming lives.

He is spreading his hunger. Infecting me with his dark obsession. That must be what this is, because nothing else makes sense. I’ll never be able to carve this from the depths of me, no matter how long or violently I try.

Finally, after what feels like an age, he pulls back. My fingers fall from his strands, my hands landing limply at my sides. There is awe in the gutter of his voice as he rumbles, “Sweet. Should have been rancid.”

“I hate you,” I declare weakly. The words don’t feel like truth, even though I tremble with the honesty of them. Contradiction burns inside me.

His only response is to grunt another barbaric, “Mine.” And then his hands are twisting into the tatters of the cloth that covers my body.

Against the yawning hunger that dares to bloom in my core, I fight him. I claw, my nails scoring into the flesh of his massive chest. Under my violent touch, his muscles ripple and twist with every violent motion he makes to tear at the thin fabric that dares to try and stand in his way—dares to try and offer me a shred of protection against him.

The sound of tearing fabric is a backdrop to my shriek of feminine rage as I lift my foot and slam it into the wall of his chest. I expect him to fall back, to tumble onto his behind, but he doesn’t even flinch under the power of my defense. His resistance is brutish and disturbing. His hand around my ankle, like a cuff, is even more chilling. I whimper as he spreads me for him, his body moving between my legs where no man has gone before.

My innocence is my blindness for what comes next. I have no expectations in this moment. No shred of preparedness could have offered me readiness for the assault of his invasion.

One moment, I am whole. The next, I am split apart.

Confusion carves a divide in my mind as Hades thrusts into my body. He roots himself deep, unmoving. Into my neck, his fingers gripping into my flesh, pulling me nearer as though he is truly afraid I might vanish, he whimpers, “Home.”

There is something about the ravaged word. The distraught rawness of the simplicity it bears—it falls against me like a whip whose fiery tip brands my naked soul.

His body begins to shake. Against the ash that clings to the dew of our battle-torn flesh, I think I feel the hot fall of his tears where they glide over the column of my neck. The realization comes to me in that moment. He is a broken God unlike all the others. He’s been ravaged by loneliness, shredded by anguish, his pieces put back together haphazardly in the aftermath of an impossible wreckage.

The quaking of his body bleeds into mine, the sorrow infecting me like the venom of his bite. Filling me like the swell of his very body as it pushes deeper into my own. Only, I’m no longer fighting him. His soft whimper reverberates the echo of a lost soul that my own feels compelled to grasp hold of, to draw nearer. To tether. The violent shaking of his body grows, spreading into my own and bleeding from me into the rough, ashen land that cuts into my back.

The land quakes. The Underworld groans. A symphony of souls’ loose cries of desperation that spear me like arrows of tragedy imbedded into the innermost parts of me. My skin itches as something beneath it comes alive. I have been a powerless Goddess, a shame to Mother and Father. And yet I feel power now. It hums in the core of me, bursting from the deep in a sweep of arching power that resonates from the very womb Hades seeks to fill.

His fingers claw desperately at me now, his body climbing higher over mine as though he is attempting to climb deeper into me. To escape within the reprieve I offer from this cursed realm he’s been cast to.

I squeeze my eyes shut as the power inside my womb grows. And I realize I’m not pushing Hades away anymore. Instead, I’m pulling him nearer. In this moment, he is an anchor for the chaos that is swirling inside my core.

Hades thrusts deeper, and that power inside me detaches to soar untethered. It pours from the cry that spills from my lips as Hades bottoms out inside me. I can no longer tell where I end, and he begins. He feels as much a part of me as the heart that rages in my chest.

Hades sobs brokenly into the pulse that thunders in my throat. “Home. Life. Home. Mine .”

The Olympians, so high on their thrones in the sky, did this to him. When they cast him to this realm of darkness and despair, they crafted this being of torment. He is the aftermath of their thoughtless banishment, and after he helped defeat the Titans. After he helped my father secure the throne he rules upon. They banished his great power to a place of despair and had the audacity to think the hardships of this realm would not bludgeon his soul beyond recognition. Would not shape the powerful God he’d been in legend into the monster he now is. The monster in which I have become the sacrifice—the one to pay the penance of their disloyalty.

Bolts of power rocket from my womb to spear the very heart that is cracking wide for this banished God. It is in this moment that I understand how hate and love are two sides of the same coin. So vastly different, and yet so similar are these emotions. It is no wonder the ease with which one can bleed into the other.

The God of Death, the monster of exile's creation, begins to moan what can only be a prayer—only, he is praying to me, the powerless Goddess. For forgiveness. For love. For home. For punishment. For forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness. Forgiveness.

The power inside me that has never been before, ruptures.

Maybe it leached from him into me, born of venom. Maybe it was always there, buried too deep to reach by the mundane existence in which I had endured, beholding the title of Goddess that being birthed by Demeter, Goddess of Harvest and Agriculture, awarded me. Maybe it was formed under the same pressure of pain in which crafted the monster above me. I do not know. All I know is it ruptures from the depths of me to spill its seed of life into the Underworld, just as Hades spills his seed into me .

He grunts a broken sound of pained release as I scream into the ashen night of this eternal purgatory. The quaking land splits around us, cracking. Somewhere in the distance, a tsunami of rushing water surges to fill the maze of cracks in what will become the rivers of the Underworld. I know it in my bones, see the map of this yet unborn realm in the messy constellations that erupt in clusters behind the sealed lids of my eyes.

The earth shudders and roars as my back arches off the ground, my chest connecting with the wall of Hades’ broad chest. Against my breast, his heart strums a song of fear and wonder. In sync with the arching rise of my chest, mountains split the land to rise high in a quest to graze the blanket of everlasting onyx that paints the sky, but none are so high as the one which stood before .

The mountain in the corner of this realm of torment in which beings far darker and more fearsome watch the wreckage of the girl I’d been, as this realm and its monster of death reconstruct me into a woman of devastation and power. A mother of darkness. A keeper of sins. The threads of my fate weave with the God who captures my innocence, and I bear upon the aftermath of his possession a crown of souls so heavy, I shall never be free from its weight—it fastens so tightly around my heart, binding me to this ancient God once lost to torment. A God I am destined to pull back from the brink.

The coin of hatred and love spins round and round inside the heart that drums within the binds of the crown that rules this realm.

Hades pulls back to sit on his haunches, pulling me with him. He is still impossibly hard inside me even though I can feel the warmth of his spilled seed rooting inside the womb he seized in a brutal battle won. Echoing the chaos that whirs wildly in my mind, his prayer for forgiveness plays on repeat even as he sins again, his hunger driving him to push deeper into my body, taking a rhythm of self-hatred and desperate need.

But now I am the keeper of his sins, the mistress to the darkness that binds him in its endless prison. I am Queen—ruler, not of the souls who wander this realm—but of their King. I am the Goddess to their God. The light to his dark.

Like love and hate, light and dark, life and death cannot exist without the other. We forge a new coin. We are dual sides of the same piece, eternally bound by the joining of him and me. The forging of us.

The earth trembles as onyx spears of glittering stone harpoon from the ashen earth, birthed from the mountain where they watch. The heart of this once barren realm laps hungrily at the spill of our connection which drips to feed a ravenous land. Around his broad hips, my legs spread wide, and for the first time since this began, I move. I take .

I turn the table on this possession to feed the yawning source of untethered hunger that spreads power throughout all of me—to feed this place—the child I was always meant to nurture. The soul of a realm I was always intended to suckle with the very life that grows inside my womb. I am not the Goddess of no power. I am the Goddess of Fertility and New Life. A Goddess intended to awaken light within darkness.

Rolling my hips, I urge the seed from his hunger as I drip with need of my own to feed the realm that calls to me, crying in hunger and desperation. Behind my still closed eyes, the stars begin to morph from their constellations of rivers, now formed within the rough terrain. Beneath me, Hades, God of Death, takes his position of surrender even though, in my mind, he is still my over taker—the monster who ravaged me. But I am his Queen. The coin of hate and love spins faster and faster.

Pleasure builds within my core for the first time, ribbons of it twisting to dance with the threads of an ancient power promised to me well before my creation. I ride him faster and harder, the blood of my innocence spilling into this land, ribboned with the seed of his wicked claiming—of our joining. Within the innocence the realm tastes, the wrongness of the possession that was my ravaging, a sense of justice veins the bed of the River Acheron, and the House of Judgement rises from the watery depths to hover precariously over a jagged land the dead will climb to kneel before the Crown of Souls in a ritual that will determine the value of a short earthly life lived, and their eternal life now in the Underworld.

I see it all, the entire formation of this realm. I feel the clenching pain of each new formation that erupts from the contractions of this dark land to birth something new . And I ride my dark King through it all as together we craft a land of justice and reward, of healing and tribulation, of acceptance and love, of home and afterlife in the wake of devastation and suffering.

His hands come to cradle my face, and he breathes, “Little Goddess,” in the moment that my pleasure crests. The contraction of my womb is a vicious blend of pain and pleasure that has my lips parting as chaos whips violently inside me to do what she does best— birth everything from nothing .

Hades curses low as my head tips back on a low moan and my eyes burst open to cast a sea of stars into an eternal night. I shatter around him, a bolt of light spearing hotly from the depths of me. I break apart as the Underworld contracts one final time. Two fissures appear in the sky, from each births a sphere. One is bright and white, veined in threads of molten gold. The other is just as bright and white, but the threads that weave it glisten like liquid onyx. Two moons.

The dark and the light.