Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
P ersephone
“Is there electricity here?” If I could take my eyes off the view below, I would turn to look at him as he speaks.
“Not in the sense that you know it, no.” I can feel the heat of him at my back, and I can’t stop the shiver that crawls like a whisper over my skin. His hands come around to bracket my body against the thick stone railing, draped in midnight starlight. His breath is warm where it skates over the skin of my neck. “The Underworld is powered, primarily, by elements of magic.”
I point to what looks like an ancient city below. “Is that what keeps the torchlights lit? Magic?”
“In a sense.”
He chuckles when I turn to scowl at him. I accuse, “You’re being very vague.”
“I apologize.” He moves even closer, and I feel the hardness of his front against my back. Inside my chest, my heart thunders. I’m certain Hades can hear it, but he pays it little mind as he explains, “Have you heard of Hydra’s Sinkhole?”
My thoughts stutter at the abrupt introduction of yet more myth that, I’m guessing, Hades is going to claim truth to. “Wasn’t it considered one of the entrances into the Underworld?”
“It was.” Hades pulls my hair to one shoulder, brushing his lips against skin now pebbled with goosebumps. “First, it is important to note that many of the entrances, portals, doors—whatever you wish to call them—into the Underworld have been sealed now for centuries. Very few remain. Hydra’s Sinkhole, or Lake Lerna was one particular entrance famed for the beast who guarded the door. Are you familiar with Lake Lerna?”
“Um…” It’s hard to think with his mouth on my skin, but I want to know this. I want to know everything. “No.”
“Lerna, in ancient Greece, was a vibrant region vital to ancient life. The land was colored in springs and lakes and mountains. The region was rather well populated for its time, the culture rich with belief and reverence for the Gods who ruled over them. This ancient civilization existed quite happily alongside the Lernaean Hydra, who lived, mostly undisturbed and without trouble in her lair between mountain and sea. She was born in the Underworld, sired by Tartarus.” His voice softens. “She has always been a beast of judgement and honor. I tasked her with the duty to guard Lake Lerna, which hid in its depths a sinkhole into the Underworld.”
I gasp as he spins me to face him, catching my eyes with his own. “It is crucial to understand that this entrance did not simply lead one into the Underworld, but directly into Tartarus. Entering Tartarus is a dangerous thing for any soul. It is why no soul begins in Tartarus but is placed there only after extensive judgement is carried out.”
Gone is the teasing lilt to his voice when he began his tale with his lips against my skin. I fight against the shiver that threatens. “I understand. Don’t go into Tartarus.”
His hands curl around my arms. “Never enter Tartarus.”
“Okay.”
He nods, but he doesn’t look entirely satisfied. Still, he resumes his tale and I cast my gaze back to the city below. “For generations, the village that settled in the region and the Lernaean Hydra, coexisted peacefully. Until the youth in the village thought it intelligent to challenge her. I know now the idea came not from them, but from scheming Gods who whispered such ideas into their ears.”
“Why would they do that?”
Hades’ eyes are hard. “There were few who wanted access into the Underworld, into Tartarus where the Titans were imprisoned. Access, I refused to grant.”
“For what purpose?”
He peers into the distance, but his jaw pops as he grinds his teeth. Low and dangerous, he finally answers, “Centuries later, and I still do not know.”
My mind is whirling. Why would the Gods have wanted access to the Titans they fought so hard to contain? “What happened with the village youth?”
“They were slain,” Hades says simply. I flinch at the horror of it. “She guarded the whirling center of the lake, where no swimmer who dared to venture would have survived the pull into the Underworld. Into Tartarus. She did as she was born to do. She guarded the portal, again and again. By ending their mortal lives herself, she saved them from the eternity of torment they would have known had she allowed them to slip, alive, into the bowels of the Underworld. When she served them their swift deaths, she gifted them the right to arrive in Souls Landing, where they would accept their death by drinking from the River Acheron. She slayed challenge after challenge, year after year, until the village no longer saw her as the protector she was, but a vile beast. An abomination. A monster.” Hades shakes his head sadly. I’m not sure who I feel more sympathy for. The youth, so foolish. Or the Hydra.
“What happened?” I sense there is no happy ending to this tale.
“The people called to Zeus. They begged him to end the Lernaean Hydra’s reign of death.”
Every inch of my body is cold as the myth comes alive in my mind. I whisper, “He sent Hercules.”
“He did.” Hades’ jaw is tense. There is an ocean of anger in his eyes when he speaks of Zeus. Of the Hydra. I want to sooth it away, but the wound of a past transgression isn’t so simply mended. This one has had centuries to fester.
“They battled violently, splashing water from the depthless lake onto the land. The Hydra held her ground even as Hercules bestowed upon her a thousand cuts, finally weakening her enough to sever one of her heads from her neck. She’d had only nine, you see, before Hercules slammed his blade into her flesh.” His eyes drift from mine to somewhere far in the distance. “For each head he cut, she grew two more. She had fifty heads when Zeus struck Hercules’ blade with a bolt of lightning so strong, the sword burned with flames. He struck her a final time, severing the last head. The Olympian lightning infected her wound immediately, halting the growth of her heads and casting her into an eternity of torment.”
“No.” Horror-struck, my hands lift to cover my gasp.
A dangerous light flickers in Hades’ eyes. A muscle in his jaw ticks. “I heard her wail of agony echo from the pit which she guarded. Hercules severed a second head, and her blood rained on the land, burning like acid in the earth it touched. It created the marshes historians wrote about in the centuries after. The marshes that exist today. She screamed for mercy, and he cut a third head. The entirety of the Underworld heard her cry of agony. In one last attempt to save the souls she guarded from entering the very pit into Tartarus, she cast her body into the whirling pool she sacrificed hundreds of years to guard.”
“What—” I want to cry for the creature who, to this very day, legend calls a monster.
“The lake, infected with the blood that gushed from her severed heads, fell into the portal after her. And her blood, magical as it was, sealed the land and the portal behind her. It has remained closed for centuries. Today, the lake is dry, but the history remains for anyone who dares look close enough.”
“That—Hades that’s awful.”
“Yes. Much of what the Gods have done is awful.” His hands move from my arms to my waist, and he again turns me to gaze out over the view of a torchlit city, where rolling hills of deepest green bleeds into meadows of swaying white that glows under a sky of glittering night. “You asked of the torches.”
I hardly recall asking after such a tale. But, swallowing hard, I nod. “Yes.”
“You’ve seen the black liquid in which the flames that light the lanterns on the palace walls dance, yes?”
Again, I nod. “Yes.”
“It is the same liquid that feeds the torches in Asphodel City. The same liquid that feeds the flames in all the Underworld. As soon as that liquid is spread too thin, or gone, the flame dies.”
“What’s the liquid?” I’m hesitant to ask. I think I already know.
“It is the blood-infused water from the bottomless lake which now fills what is known in the Underworld as Hydra’s Sinkhole.”
“And…” I begin hesitantly, my gaze drifting over the land that glitters with dancing flames. “Hydra?”
“She swims in her sinkhole, alone, weeping. Once a fierce protector, she has become a vicious, angry beast. The Furies and I are the only ones she allows to pull from the well. The only ones who can travel close to the sinkhole and not be pulled into the depths to rest eternally in her bed of bones.”
“She hurts.” I pity the fearsome beast. She is misunderstood, like most feared things.
“Yes. Deeply. She loved the people she guarded, the souls she saved from torment. It hurt her to know they turned on her as they did.” Hades sighs a long and heavy sigh. “She still bleeds from the wounds of Hercules’ flaming sword. The heads he severed left behind an eternally unhealing wound.” A note of sadness taints the edge of his words. “I have tried to heal her. I have failed.”
Over the hand that rests on the balcony railing, I rest my own. He spreads his fingers to take mine between and we stand like that in silence for a long while, simply holding hands. I have a feeling his mind races alongside mine.
As for myself, I feel as though I’m reeling in a dreamland. Nothing seems possible, and yet I sense somewhere deep inside that none of this is fake.
“I feel like a fool for believing any of this is real,” I whisper into the darkness.
“Why?”
I shrug against the mass of his body at my back. “I don’t know,” I lie. Then I add, “I’m not sure I trust my own mind.”
“Your mind is the greatest of all the minds I’ve encountered, in all the thousands of years I’ve existed.”
“How—” I pause and turn in his arms again. He’s so beautiful, but there’s an ageless danger to the dark aura of him. It’s been there since the moment I met him, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. To pretend it doesn’t exist. Not to look too deep into the darkness of all that he is. Now, though, I can ignore it no longer. It’s there in the lines of his face, the depths of his eyes. It’s the emotion that clings to the deep of his words, his view of the world. “How old are you?”
Hades looks down at me for a long while. His brows furrow and smooth and furrow again. “I’m not certain exactly how old I am. In the beginning, age was not something we took into consideration. The passing of time wasn’t measured as it is today.”
“Give me an estimate.”
“Touching one million earthly years. Perhaps a few hundred thousand years older, even.”
My mind simply stops functioning. The magnitude of his admission is simply too much.