Persephone #2
I wish, for just a moment, I could forget where I was. That I wasn’t in the pit of the underworld. That I could go home. That I could feel mother’s magic, the rumble of a tempest coming in over the wheat fields.
Where life thrived. Not this blackened wasteland of decay.
I smiled at Audenth, allowing her entry. We sat together in window seat, staring down over the dead.
“How are you doing?” Audenth tried, handing me the bottle. I sniffed it, regretting it immediately at the burn in my nose. I’m supposed to drink this? Audenth’s musical laugh sounded, making me look up quizzically. “It’s better you don’t smell it. Nobody drinks Lethefire for fun.”
“Bottoms up then, I suppose.” I murmured with a laugh of my own. I raised the bottle up to the open air between us, “To not drinking for fun.”
I swallowed, only to discover why the word fire was in its name. The liquid torched the lining of my throat, settling like lava in my stomach as I coughed. No wonder the dead drank this. If I drink too much of it, I feared I may be forced to join them.
Audenth clapped me on my back as I regained breath. “Now you’re one of us! Don’t worry, everyone’s first experience is rough. You handled it better than most.”
Handing the bottle back to Audenth for a drink, I turned fully to her. “Why are you here, Audenth? Did Hades or Hecate ask you to keep an eye on me?”
Her face fell.
“No! It’s not like that.” She sighed, wincing though a swig. “I suppose I get your apprehension, but…I remember how I felt when I first got here. First got my sentence.”
That raised my eyebrows. “Go on.”
“It was ages ago now. I forget sometimes how long I’ve been dead, and time moves so differently here.
” She said, a sad smile forming on her face.
“Some of my family died too. They’re here you know.
My parents. My sister. They’re waiting for me in Asphodel Meadows.
” The question burned between us, begging to be voiced. “You can ask about it. It’s okay.”
I nodded. “Why are you not in Asphodel? Why are you not with your family?” The molten Lethefire chilled under a theory. “Is Hades truly so cruel to intentionally keep you from them?”
Audenth smiled sadly. “I know why you think that. That’s why I’m here. Because I see the way you look at him. No, Hades is not cruel. He even lets me visit from time to time as a bonus. One I don’t deserve.”
Don’t deserve? Audenth was arguably the sweetest being I’d met in eons, what could she possibly have done?
She took another drink before offering it to me.
“When I was young, I watched someone be killed. It was an accident. I couldn’t sleep so I went to the stable to pet my horse in the small quiet hours of the night.
And that’s when I saw it. My brother killed the person who’d been badgering us to marry me for months.
When law enforcers came by, I lied and said I saw nothing.
That the man in question hadn’t been around here in some time.
When prodded for who might have done it, I panicked and blurted out a name.
Rison Deardre. My brother's rival. Our neighbor. It was a name I thought little of, figuring they were just looking into leads and knowing they wouldn’t find any reason to think it was him.
He was hung the very next day. Tried for crimes he didn’t commit. I said nothing, afraid for my brother. All the while, knowing I could exonerate Rison, I said nothing.”
I gasped. Not in accusation. In horror. I grasped her hands, feeling them ice cold. I tried to rub warmth into them, wondering if I could warm someone who was dead with enough love.
“What happened next?” I podded, my hand going to hers in what I hoped was a supportive gesture. “I’m listening.”
“When I died far too many years later, I was sent before Hades because the judges couldn’t agree on a punishment.
I thought I’d be in Tartarus but Hades heard me, looked into my soul and saw my intent.
My genuine fear and confusion. My lack of malice.
Instead of Tartarus or even the fields of punishment, I’m to do one hundred years of servitude before I see my family in Asphodel.
My brother is here too, working in the kitchens. ”
“One hundred years for a lie?” I took a swig as I processed that. “Is that not steep?”
“I deserve worse,” Audenth said. “Hades charged me with fifty. It was I who asked for more.”
Why?”
“Because my lie killed someone. Someone innocent. If I have forever here, do I not owe it to them, and to myself to truly pay for what I took?” Audenth smiled ruefully before looking back over the ground far below.
“Why are you telling me this?” The words reluctantly left my lips.
“Because Hades is many things. Yes, he’s fearsome and intense.
I was terrified when I landed here, expecting eternal torment and cruelty.
What I found instead was order. Stillness.
Fairness. And relief.” she sighed with a tight smile, glancing at me, “A great relief. You pity the dead but the dead pity the living and the burden you still have. You were grown in sunlight and love so it’s not wonder you would acutely feel like this place represents the absence of those things.
But the Underworld isn’t ruin and decay, but what remains after the sun has set and the love rests until reunited.
Hades tends to that which life leaves behind.
I’m telling you this, because I recognize the uncertainty in your eyes. I wore it once too.”
I didn’t know what to say, so my lips hurried to the bottle as Audenth’s words, and the insight they brought catapulted painfully around in my head, calmed slightly by the burning in my throat. “Thank you for telling me. Even if I don’t know what to do with that information yet.”
Audenth patted my hand before letting herself out, leaving me to my thoughts.
I fully anticipated to feel anger. On Audenth’s behalf perhaps. A trapped soul caring for her captor, but there was nothing but lightness in her. As if she were the sun the Underworld was missing. She wasn’t ruined. She was happy.
It brought to mind the time of harvest mother always made me watch.
The stalks of wheat cut low to the ground, leaving it looking desolate even before winter’s ravaging touch.
One of the first lessons mother taught me, the first time I’d witnessed my flower bed culled by the frost that decay isn’t the enemy of life, but its shadow. Two sides of the same coin.
I shook my head, two conflicting narratives rattling for my attention.
Mother told me my entire life this was a place of evil. Of cruelty. I glanced around, the lapping shores of the Styx and Acheron echoing even from here. If the Underworld was cruel, its cruelty was a quiet one. A patient one.
Or, I thought bitterly, I wasn’t being shown the truest face of the Underworld nor its master.