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

Chapter 31

Chapter

Thirty-One

P ersephone

“I shouldn’t have gone to him.” Minthe says nothing where she sits close, her arm heavy where it rests around my shoulders. “Hades told me not to and I didn’t listen.” I laugh bitterly. “I asked you and Thanatos to take me instead. I thought I could help him. Felt I needed to apologize.”

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you reject me?” I sniffle, still shaken by the experience.

“If you didn’t listen to Hades, I wasn’t sure you would listen to us. Thanatos agreed, because I promised I would not leave you without help.”

“He’s not the Addison—the Adonis—I remember.”

She sighs a heavy sigh. “The souls in the Vale of Mourning never are. Neither are the souls lost to the Elm of Lost Dreams. They are there because they must overcome that which they can’t let go of from their living lives. Some souls spend only a short time there. Some spend years. Some never make it out and require a sip from The Lethe to finally find release.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

She shrugs her shoulder. “The souls know. The Elms speak to them, words we can’t hear. But they know they need to overcome the dreams they lost, to accept those dreams are gone, so that they can move forward. So that they can again live.”

“Why can’t they just cling to their dreams? What harm can it really do to them?”

Minthe’s brows furrow. “If the souls are unable to release their lost dreams, they will carry them into the afterlife and then into any lives they choose to live again. There was once a time when Souls were released from the Elms into the Grove of Persephone if they simply found their way to the border. The Elms have learned, and no longer release the souls even if they make it to the border. They are not released into the healing grove until they take those first healing steps for themselves, or until they are pulled back into the Styx and offered a sip of The Lethe instead.”

“It just seems so cruel.”

“We all suffer cruelty. It is how we choose to overcome it that counts.”

She’s not wrong, so I nod. We stay in silence for a while on our perch on the White Mountain. In that silence, my anger toward Demeter only grows, as though it is fed by the very stars that overlook us, and the pain that drifts up from the forest of Lost Dreams.

“I hurt so many people.” I don’t mean for the words to escape, but there’s no bringing them back once they do.

“What do you mean?” Minthe asks gently.

“I was such a silly young thing. It’s hard to reconcile her with who I am now. I never would have fallen for the insanity that I fell for then, now.”

Minthe and everyone else in the Underworld had been briefed about our conversation with Uranus. It was widely known now, how Demeter had manipulated me into being with others in a play to break Hades. To shatter the bonds of the truly mated.

“You were conditioned, Persephone.” Minthe’s lip curls in hateful disgust. “You would be surprised what people will do, who they will become, under the pressure of manipulations the like that Demeter directed over you. It was a deep manipulation of a psychological nature. One you had no hope of rising above.” Shame heats her cheeks. “I’m only sorry that I didn’t see it for the manipulation it was. I didn’t know that when you invited me and Leuce to your bed with Hades—that it was because of Demeter.” Emotion rattles in her voice. “I thought we were close. Closer than so many others. I—I felt your love for us. I just didn’t realize until now that it wasn’t the same love I felt—” She pushes hair behind her ear. “The love I feel for you. You’re our family. You always will be.”

I can’t make myself meet my friend’s eyes. I have no memory of sharing her or Leuce with Hades, and for that I am so grateful. Still, I know it happened. I also know Demeter was livid that I’d done it. I recall that much from the vision of my first death.

“Demeter didn’t make me include you and Leuce. That was—that was all me.”

“Hey,” Minthe calls, forcing me to meet her eyes. “It wasn’t you. It hurt you to share him. It hurt him to be shared. I sensed it then, I think, even though I didn’t understand it until now. Maybe I thought you enjoyed the pain.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I only know that Demeter had her hand in everything you did.”

“Not that,” I insist. “She was enraged that I’d done it.”

Minthe snorts. “Oh, I know.”

I peer at her. “What do you mean?”

Minthe frees a strained laugh as she tips her eyes to the stars that shimmer in the sky. “Myth is always steeped in truth, my friend. The myth of me being turned into a mint plant is one of those myths that are steeped in truth. Only, they got some of it wrong, as myths are prone to do.”

“What did it get wrong?”

“Myth tells the tale that you turned me into the plant in a jealous rage because Hades took me to his bed.” She watches me closely. It was a jealous rage, and the reason was, in fact, because I’d been invited to Hades’ bed. But Hades never invited me there. And it wasn’t your jealous rage that turned me into a mint plant.”

“Demeter,” I whisper.

“Yep.” She pops her lips. “Bitch of a Goddess is crazy.”

Her earth slang makes me laugh. I can’t help it. Minthe has been much more reserved and put together here in the Underworld than I ever recall her being in the living realm. Now, hearing her like this again, it’s familiar in a comforting way.

“Yeah, she really is.” We laugh together until our laughter dies naturally.

“You were the one who saved me, Persephone. You stopped her spell and brought me back. Hades and Hecate both tried and failed. Demeter’s magic was too strong. But not for you.” She stretches her legs out for me to see the twisting vines of green that crawl up her legs. “You could have completely healed me, but I like the vines.”

“I—I healed you?”

Her eyes drift over my face. “Leuce, too. Demeter tried to turn her into a poplar tree on the mountain. She kept the silver-green of the underside of the leaves as the color of her eyes.” Minthe’s eyes sparkle. “They used to be this rich chocolate brown and mmm,” she moans, “I’d loved them.”

“I didn’t realize…” I frown, because Demeter’s angry words calling me a fool for saving the nymphs echoes in the maze of my memories.

“I’ll love you forever for saving her, you know?” Minthe squeezes me around the shoulders. “Demeter hurt her a lot more than she hurt me. Leuce was—is—” She pauses, and I wait. “She was far prettier than me. Demeter took Leuce’s presence in Hades’ bed as a personal threat, and she wanted her to suffer. The screams that rode the wind down the mountain that day were—” Her shiver is violent. “They were the worst thing I’ve ever heard. When we got to her, she’d fused to the earth. Bark protruded from her skin that seeped with blood. She was in agony.” Minthe flicks away a single tear. “She hadn’t begged to be saved, like I’d begged. Leuce had begged for death.”

“Minthe.” I grab her hand and squeeze it.

“You worked yourself to exhaustion to save her, but you did it. You never gave up on her.”

“I want to punish her,” I admit quietly. “I’ve never wanted to punish anyone in my life.”

“We all want to punish Demeter. She deserves it more than most.”

Minthe sets her face as she looks down at a garden of amethyst. It seems to spear up from around a gigantic hole of black. It’s on the wrong side of the River Phlegethon, so I know I’ll never explore it…and yet…

It calls to me.

“What is that down there?” I point to the black hole.

“Tartarus.” Minthe’s voice is filled with warning. “We don’t go there, Persephone. I’m serious. It’s not like the Elm of Lost Dreams.” I can’t miss the urgency in her voice. “I wouldn’t be able to save you from that place. No one but Hades would—and that’s if he could find you.”

“I never went there before? In my other life?”

“Never.”

“How did Demeter do it? Go in there—into The Pit—and mate with Hyperion?”

“It wasn’t as well designed then as it is now. Remember, it was well before you were created. Well before you birthed the realm that is now the Underworld. Since then, it’s had millennia to become the place of torment that it is. I’m not certain even Demeter and her cunning could survive it now.”

I sigh. It’s a heavy thing wrought with frustration.

“I still want to know what that place is.” I point again to the black hole in the land.

“That is Hydra’s Sinkhole. It was once?—”

“Lake Lerna.” I can’t ignore the fluttering response of my heart to the call of the inky darkness that is the pool surrounded by jagged crystals of amethyst.

“You know of it?”

I do my best to sound uninterested. “Hades told me about the Hydra. About how Zeus sent Hercules to murder her, but instead he sentenced her to an eternity of torment.”

“Zeus has always been a monster.” Minthe shakes her head. “And Hercules has always been his prodigy.”

“Funny.”

Her eyes slide to me. “What’s funny?”

“How myth makes Hercules out to be the good guy.”

“More like annoying.” Minthe snorts. “He’s far from the good guy. He might even be worse than Zeus.”

“And that?” I point beyond the inky black pool to the swirling columns of deeper purple, blue, and crystalline white that stretch high between mountains that literally look as though they’re on fire. Like a galaxy trapped in a burning universe.

“That’s the Erinyes,” Minthe explains cautiously. “They aren’t exactly friendly. They rarely leave their temple of vengeance.”

“And the red mountains?”

“We call them the burning mountains.” Her tone takes on an almost wistful quality. “They are made entirely of fire opal, and I swear, they are one of the most beautiful things in the Underworld.” She sighs on a half smirk. “Too bad they’re in Tartarus and that’s a no-go place for us ordinaries.”

“We’re not ordinary.”

“True. But we’re not the kind of being that can withstand the scorch of Tartarus and come out unscathed.”

“I’ll give you that,” I concede.

Minthe bumps my shoulder. “Tell me you won’t try and go there, Persephone.”

“Why would I do a thing like that?” I ask instead—and it works, because Minthe laughs a light laugh.

I force myself to laugh, too, grateful I don’t have to outright lie to my friend. Because there’s something about that dark pit surrounded by that jagged garden of amethyst that calls to me like a siren in the deepest dark of the sea.

The time will come, I suspect, when I will be no more able to ignore the call of that inky darkness than I can ignore the call of my need to connect with Hades.

My eyes map out another path down from the White Mountains. Over the boiling river on a bridge of thin amethyst, into a garden I sense is more treacherous than even the Garden of Silence and it’s sound-devouring stones.

I know that I won’t be able to resist forever. The time will come when the call becomes too much.

I can only hope when that time comes, I’ll be strong enough to survive whatever it is that lives and lurks in the dark depths of that garden.

Because I know something lurks. And that something is the thing that calls to me.