Chapter Eighty-Four
Fallyn
Of all the ways I remembered dying, none were as peaceful as this.
My chest ached as it cried out for air, my body struggling against the might of Minerva’s spell, refusing to accept that my lungs were filling with water.
Hades’s eyes were open and oddly calm under the still tide.
His hands gently cupped my face before pressing a final, sleepy kiss to my lips, the last I would experience until this was over.
I held to the eerie, fragile peace, the silence found beneath the surface until at last all became fuzzy, and shadows overtook my vision. The end of my reprieve.
Shadows ebbed and curled around from all sides, making escape impossible.
The dense forest made it impossible to find the source, but I knew he was out there, toying with me.
No birds chirped, no insects hummed. The total silence which foretold doom to those that lingered.
I fought the sob that desperately clawed its way up my throat.
It was over.
I felt out along the ground with my magic, looking for him. For Hades himself, he who would take my life as a souvenir. Boots crunched heavily against the gravel and clay, slowly approaching from behind me. I whirled, seeing nothing but darkness, depthless as any void.
“Hades,” I choked. “Why?” Instead of answering, he stepped through the shadows so suddenly it stole my breath.
His raven hair hung low, almost eclipsing his eyes, but those black and gold galaxy eyes I loved so much still stared blankly, dully, at me.
Moonlight glowed through the ancient canopy above us enough to reveal a warning—the knife glinting maliciously in Hades’s hand.
My face itched with tears trickling down my cheeks.
“What have I done?” I beseeched an answer while he stood tall in his silence.
Another step closer. I inched away, only for my back to contact the wall of shadow he’d erected.
He stepped closer still, slowly, with the heaviness of inevitability behind him.
This time when his hand circled my throat, it wasn’t with a kiss of pleasure.
This time, when his hand crushed down, there was no hesitation, no mirth, no wicked smile as he teased.
He held my neck with the same ruthlessness I’d seen him use on the worst of humanity.
Those receiving the worst sort of punishments.
Those I’d seen him break and never think about again.
“Hades, I love you.” Somewhere between a croak and a whisper, I pleaded, “Why are you doing this?”
The sting of his refusal to answer was nothing compared to the blazing pain of the knife sluicing through my abdomen.
The air left my body, taking hope with it.
I couldn’t even scream. All I could do was cry silently.
With a jerk, he withdrew his weapon, and gravity and blood loss worked in tandem to sweep my legs from under me.
The dirt below was cold and unforgiving, still resisting but losing its fight with winter, just as I lost my fight with death.
Hades’s expression never changed as my vision darkened, and I never got my answer.
What had I done wrong?
Shadows snaked around my leg, stopping my momentum short and introducing my face into the cobblestone below. Stars lit my vision. Copper, tears, and the taste of oil melded through the gash near my mouth. I fingered my face, flinching on contact. Had I bitten through my lip?
Footsteps followed close behind me. He stalked me with the torch in hand, the one he’d used to set the perimeter of this village ablaze blocking my escape.
His was a sure, unhurried pace as I thrashed, as I channeled my magic, slashed with my dagger with the vehemence of a trapped, rabid animal, anything I could do to free myself.
The steel shot straight through the shadows that bound me.
Another shadow ensnared my wrist from another direction, fully binding me as the flames rose higher in the village, conjuring deeper screams from those who fell victim.
“Please,” I begged Hades as I watched the flames jump in the reflection of his depthless eyes.
“Not like this.” He responded only to pull my restraints tighter as I thrashed, screamed, and begged, not just for release, for mercy, but for understanding.
“Hades, why? What have I done? What have all these people done to deserve what you’re doing? ”
His answer didn’t involve words. Instead, his hand dropped the torch in the oil at my feet. I shrieked as the flames rushed towards me with a whoosh, a crackle, and a pop of the oil sizzling. Heat seared along my back, and my shrieks of fear turned to agony as my skin blistered.
He never looked away, even as my throat bled from my screams. Even as my screams subsided into silence. Even as the walls of the village tumbled around us, he never looked away.
Memory charms were funny things. You could never know what you’d get with them.
Sometimes you’d get a whisp of a memory you’d long forgotten about, a fragment of a memory of your parents cooing down at you from infancy.
I found out memory charms hold memories from past lives.
I saw myself burn at the hands of a madman.
The madman I was currently in love with.
I tried several more memory charms, exhausting far too much of my savings.
I saw more death, more blood, my name different in each memory, but the faces were the same.
Mine and his. For some reason, he targeted me through the ages, but he never revealed to me why.
After several hours of crying, of looking and examining the memory from every angle, and seeing the curse touch snaking its way up my arm, I knew I had to act.
I asked him to meet me here. I told him I was injured. He had no idea what awaited in this cave. The spell was ready; he just needed to step within the spell circle….
Footsteps alerted me to his presence. With a steady breath to bolster my nerves, I sat in the center of the circle, an obelisk shooting to the sky at my back. An obelisk he would know well soon enough.
“Diem!” Hades called me, just as he called me by all my other names over however long. I wondered if he remembered all of them or if we were both cursed to forget. I wondered if it even mattered. I cringed at my name sounding so casual, so concerned on his tongue.
“Over here!” It wasn’t hard to force pain into my voice. With the sharpened pieces of my heart, I would destroy him. While I might not live, he most certainly couldn’t harm me in any future lifetimes. This ended now.
I feigned a broken ankle, a simple illusion, just as he burst around the corner. The trust and concern in his eyes had me fighting a gag. I leaned against the stone wall behind me, keeping my weight on my one leg as Hades got closer to me.
“What happened, Diem? I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” His eyes dipped to the illusioned injury. “You’re hurt.” The care he took to lift me ever so gently squeezed the shattered remains of my heart splintered into my soul and stained it black with what I was about to do.
“Forgive me,” I whispered before shoving out of his hold and stabbing my knife into his heart.
His eyes went wide, confusion bleeding, contorting into a look of utter betrayal and shock. “What have you done?”
“I saved myself from you,” I spat. “You were going to murder me, just as you have for centuries. I bind you here, under sleep until I call you. You will never walk this realm again. You will never harm me, or anyone else again, Hades. Farewell.”
His scream of rage was cut short as my sleep spell pulled him under. For the first time in however many centuries, he wasn’t the one to emerge victorious.
I’d lost count of the ways I had died. My nightmares always cruelly reminded me of the sting of each blade, the crunch of bone yielding to a hammer, the prolonged, excruciating fear of suffocation, and the horror of burning, but in the wake of these memories I realized how they were nothing more than an echo in time.
There was a part of me, and I wasn’t sure how significant that part might be, that was vaguely aware that I was reliving these deaths for a reason, but where could the reason be in this violence?
Violence greets us all, little shadow. It’s what we do with it that makes us who we are.
With each death, I felt a piece of my soul break off, never to be whole again.
This might succeed in breaking me. My heart hardened with each needless death, each time devoured by agony left me in a colder, angrier place, until my soul knew nothing but chaos and torment to be relived over and over again.
My eyes closed awash in blood and flame and ash and opened under the cool drag of water. Arms secured me in place as my chest screamed for air, black and color spots dotting my vision. I heaved with my body, my lips parting on a scream as I thrashed against the one holding me under—
Except those strong hands let go of my arms and I clawed my way to the surface.
Air filling my lungs was a painful reprieve as I sucked breaths in over and over, alleviating the pain in my chest and bringing clarity to the darkness rimming my vision.
I was so close to drowning, but I got away this time—
Hades surfaced, gasping and sputtering, hands throwing his hair out of his face. Terror held me fast in its icy grip as I clawed my way onto land, looking for anything to use as a weapon.
“Persephone.” Hades’s voice was the gentle caress of the evening breeze.
He knelt in the water at my feet, his hands above his shoulders.
Hades, the god of the dead, the most ruthless god known to the mortal realm, the god who had killed me so many ways I couldn’t count was submitting to me. “Persephone, come back to me.”
Tears streamed down my face as this lifetime and all the others played in my mind like a fractured mosaic. “I loved you!” Images flitted past, dragging ghosts of emotion with them, cleaving what was left of my heart in two.
“I know.” Hades never looked away, even as a tear slid down his cheek, mirroring my own. “I loved you too. The nightmare is over now. You’re home. You’re awake. I vow it. I vow on everything I am.”
I struggled, teetering on a precipice, a chasm below I couldn’t fathom, with Hades reaching out his hand.
My mind was muddled. There was something about this that was different, but I didn’t understand.
It wasn’t until Hades tossed a dagger at me hilt-first, before it landed with a clatter on the cavern floor.
I dove on it, readying myself for an attack, a trap, pain.
None came. Even as I wielded the dagger at him. Even as he was two paces away. Even as I could have plunged it into his heart. This time, his sleep would be painful and eternal, yet he didn’t stop looking softly into my eyes.
Trust.
He trusted me.
But how? Why?
“I don’t understand,” I whispered as my head fractured around the memories.
Memories, nightmares—they were warning signs.
And every warning told me that the male before me was not to be trusted, but how was he a threat?
How was he a threat when a tiny part of me still sang for him? Still cried for him? Still craved him?
“I know, little shadow.” The god of the dead’s smile turned devastatingly sad.
“I told you once before, that I would rather bleed out at your feet than harm a hair on your head. So, if what you need to feel safe is my death, then take that dagger and do it. I will not stop you, nor will I begrudge you. Because Persephone, I love you. You made my heart beat again after centuries of it being still, and I would sooner die than see you suffer again.”
He loved me?
Somewhere deep within me, beneath the anger, the fear, the turmoil, somewhere deep and forgotten, something rejoiced.
Something celebrated. I never would have thought love could feel like violence, like a knife in the dark, and still be something I ached to choose.
Something cold within me thawed, something aching ebbed, and tears of another sort fell down my face.
Those eyes, a cosmos of a golden stars on a blanket of night, softened. Pleaded.
Against by better judgement, I dropped the knife.