Chapter Five #2
Turning on his heel, he disappeared into the throng of beings, leaving me with the twins and mystery goddess whose name I had only just begun stirring my brain around for, picking up memories and discarding them at record speed, searching for the answer.
“Persephone, right?” Apollo’s attention swung from where the Morningstar left back to me. I nodded, confirming before taking a nervous sip of my wine. Too much more, and the room might start to spin, so I’d better pick a different nervous habit.
“Is it true you’ve never been to Olympus?
You’ve just been in the mortal realm your entire existence?
” Artemis gushed, leaning in. I couldn’t help my sheepish smile, wishing I could hide somewhere, maybe in the wine chalice.
The way they homed in on me, it was the same way I’d seen mortals witness magic; with a mix of awe and suspicion.
“It’s true.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Today’s my first day.”
Artemis leaned closer still, her voice lowering slightly, “What about the Underworld? You’ve never been there either?
” Like a balloon pop shattering silence, I felt the mood shift within me.
The Underworld. Darkness. Death. So far removed from the light and love from Olympus or the beautiful and finite possibilities. “Gods above and below, you haven’t!”
“Mother told me it was a place of pure evil.” My voice dropped another octave, not quite a whisper. “That Hades isn’t invited to these revels because for him to leave the Underworld is to unleash evil upon the mortal realm and misfortune upon Olympus.”
A slow giggle, like a trickle of a stream, built into a crescendo from the goddess whose name I still didn’t know. With a startled glance, I watched as she began to howl with laughter.
“Hecate, laughing at her isn’t kind. She doesn’t know better.” Artemis scolded her with a touch on her arm. “She may as well be mortal for all she knows.”
I wanted to reject the idea that I was scarcely more than a mortal, but my tongue froze in my mouth. Hecate. She herself was from the Underworld. I felt my feet stick to the ground, and I fought hard to school my face into a neutral expression.
“Is that what Demeter is saying these days?” Hecate’s voice was somewhere between offense and amusement, as if she went back and forth and couldn’t decide which she felt more.
“You can’t be genuinely surprised.” Apollo’s murmur wasn’t quite under his breath.
I balked at the bitterness in Apollo’s tone. “What does that mean?”
The three deities exchanged a questioning look before settling on me with what could only be a quiet pity.
“It just means we aren’t surprised Demeter doesn’t like any of us.
Especially the Underworld.” Apollo’s answer was the quick smoothing of a wrinkled page, not quite enough to smooth away the lines of disquiet that had taken root.
I sipped my wine, mostly out of awkwardness, but it tasted as bitter as the tension thickened the air between us.
“Will you tell me?” My voice was so soft, so hesitant, I even wanted to shake myself.
“Mother doesn’t tell me why she harbors this hostility, no matter how much I ask.
” Perhaps they won’t, but as I cast my eye towards Zeus throwing his head back in a roar of laughter and clapping a god who could only be Poseidon, what with the gills, on the shoulder.
An unseedy idea began to form in my mind.
Perhaps with a few more chalices, I could loosen my father’s tongue.
Hecate caught and followed my gaze, a deep frown forming between her brows.
“Ask him about the mortal Demeter loved.” Her head bowed towards mine, her tone hushed, “That will give you the story from the source, rather than us.” With a pointed look at the twins, the three of them dispersed awkwardly, but not without backwards glances that I hardly noticed.
My eyes were on mother where she glared at an oblivious Zeus from over her own drink in a shadowy corner.
I took my moment to slip towards the perimeter of the party, steadily wandering towards the beckoning gardens with my thoughts in tow.
Mother had loved a mortal?
A prickle in the evening air made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.
The slight chill in the garden cloaked by moonlight wrought shivers from my arms. The temperature was lower out here than inside where the partygoers still boisterously sang and reveled.
It was definitely not the weight of someone’s attention. Someone unseen.
Nonetheless I peered around me, in case I’d walked somewhere unwelcome, but the gardens were as familiar to me as my own home, granting me a moment of respite from the excitement I knew I’d have to return to.
I welcomed the cool air even as I rubbed warmth into my bare arms to stave off the cold, hoping that weighted feeling would dissipate. It didn’t.
Instead, the shadows dug deeper, hiding all within them from view until I was not only alone in the pristine courtyard, but alone in the darkness that surrounded me.
“Hello?” I spoke to the darkness. “Is someone there?”
Silence answered back. Not even a chirp of a bird or a hum of an insect greeted my ears.
Unease creeped coolly up my spine, forcing my throat to constrict.
If anything, it was likely a prank, I told myself.
A test perhaps. I was not Zeus’s only progeny, just the newest one to Olympus.
Coming from the mortal realm meant I had no idea what to expect here.
For all I knew, everything that I was seeing was due to my own heightened awareness and anxiety.
I laughed at myself, hating how forced it sounded before turning to escape to the party trying not to think of it as fleeing—
—only to find the pathway completely swathed in darkness. The silence that I’d noticed earlier, how did I not notice that the party had fallen quiet? The world around me was eclipsed entirely, leaving me in darkness.
“Who’s there?” I forced my voice to a firm authority I’d seen my mother use countless times.
The same tone that had sent nymphs and gods alike scrambling to follow her directives.
My stomach soured as a chuckle answered back this time, its source unknown.
It echoed around me, bouncing and replaying, growing louder with each shallow breath.
I see you, the darkness hummed with bitterness. I know what you are.
I had never hidden that I was the goddess of spring.
“I don’t understand.” I readied my magic, unsure of what blooming flowers would do to help me defend myself.
I resented my power in that moment, knowing that spring magic had no applications into offensive tactics, nor had my mother let me come armed.
She had at least taught me to wield. The best I could conjure was a wooden dagger or spear if push came to shove.
You will, the shadows answered before that raucous laugh sounded again, surrounding me. I covered my ears as the volume intensified, eyes frantically searching for who I was speaking with.
Finally, movement behind me, the soft clack of a heel striking stone. Do I run? Or do I use the wooden dagger filed to as sharp a point as possible as a threat?
Shadows hissed as they blocked my escape. So much for running. My magic flared in a flash of green light, my now armed hand flew out to where the footfalls sounded immediately behind me.
A hand caught my wrist, the blow never landing.
In that same moment, the darkness receded in its entirety.
In the span of a single blink, the world went from being entirely encased in shadow around me and leaving me feeling as though I were running through a nightmare, to a male swathed in black robes with a matching spiked crown adorning his head.
Depthless black eyes flecked with gold, like small galaxies of their own, stared blankly back at me.
I recognized him.
The one mother told me to avoid at all cost. Evil incarnate. Mother said all the evil of all the gods had to go somewhere, and it went into him. The god of the dead.
And I held a wooden dagger to his throat.