Chapter 19
Something Was True
LYRA
One second, I was with Hades, longing to tell him everything, to pour it all out, and struggling so hard not to, even while I tried to help him. He seemed so…lost.
In the next instant, I was standing in the hole inside the pillar of the earth.
“Shit, Lyra,” was the first thing a shaken-looking Boone said as he ran a hand over his face. “You told him your name?”
But nothing reset. So…no harm, no foul? And Boone, apparently, wasn’t picked up by broken time, left behind to wait for me. Figures.
Regardless, we’ve been stuck in here ever since.
The ground shakes beneath us, and I barely crack an eye to see if the tree roots of the earth pillar are shivering with the quake. “There’s another one,” I mumble sleepily.
Boone doesn’t even shift positions, lying with his back to me. “Yeah.”
The quakes have been happening every so often in the days we’ve been stuck in this painfully boring space.
At least we think it’s been days, but really, we have no clue how much time has passed with no light outside the small flame Boone keeps stoked at all times.
It’s not like phones work down here, and neither of us is wearing a watch.
Or the earthquakes could be lies like all the rest.
A thought train on loop in my head for days now. What if this is real? What if it’s a lie? What if it’s something else, like a glamour, to entice me to let them out? They use truth to tell lies down here. A thief’s trick.
We have yet to see the Titans, though. So that’s something.
The shaking stops, but that’s when a new sound—a strange sound, not hissing, but raspy and soft—makes me go still as I strain to hear it better. Then I bat at Boone’s back. “Hey…”
He sits up. “Was that outside?”
I don’t have a chance to answer because the noise gets louder, now reminding me of how nylon ropes sound when doing a rapid free rappel. We’re both on our feet in an instant, facing the place Rhea made a door before. I think. It’s a round-ish room formed by roots, so who can tell.
“It’s not coming from inside,” he says.
We slowly move to the center of the space, standing back to back, listening and watching for…anything.
“Boone,” I whisper, pointing.
A tiny crack has appeared in the wood of the wall I’m facing, and something is trying to wriggle through. Something…green.
The color registers as the break in the wall grows and vines burst their way inside.
They keep pressing outward, making the hole bigger and bigger, but no one comes in.
Boone and I look at each other, then he leads, and I follow him outside.
It takes a second of blinking in the brighter light of the lava and fire from the wastelands beyond for my eyes to focus after days in the dim.
No one is out here, either.
However, the vines and flowers covering the outside of the pillar are still moving. Almost like the flow of a lazy river, but they’re going up rather than down, in an undulating swirl of lush greens with pops of color.
Boone puts a hand on my wrist when I go to move closer.
He whistles the signal to keep a lookout just before he scoots back and to the right, carefully leaning over, only to jerk away abruptly, his back going ramrod straight.
He stands there, blinking at whatever he saw around the bend of the pillar, as the still-moving vines continue rasping and shooshing quietly.
“What?” I ask.
“There’s someone up there,” he says.
I frown, glancing between him and the pillar. “A Titan?”
He shakes his head.
Frowning at his back, I scoot around him and carefully lean over like he did…just as a petite woman with big doe eyes comes into view.
She stops as soon as she sees me, hovering in the air, suspended by the vines. Her wide-eyed gaze takes me in, then slides over my shoulder to Boone.
Then, with zero warning, she smiles.
And she might as well have floated in on a cloud of magic wearing a sparkling pink ball gown, like Glinda the Good Witch of the North. Because the effect is the same. Utter captivation.
She’s pretty in an ethereal way down to the last detail, with deep-brown skin and endearing freckles. Her hair is midnight black at the roots but turns a rich burgundy rose that fades to pale pink at the tips, which hang in curls down her back to her waist.
Flowers are woven into a crown around the top of her head, and her sundress is white with embroidered flowers.
She’s barefoot, her delicate toes painted a glittering rose pink that matches the tips of her hair.
And eyes that are more lavender than blue remind me of a baby doll, wide with thick, curling lashes.
The scents of honeysuckle and jasmine float on the still air between us.
She needs no introduction. I know exactly who this is.
The woman Hades is supposed to have been love-obsessed with and grief-stricken over but who in reality is more a beloved niece.
The goddess who made him put flowers in the Underworld and decided how Elysium should be run.
The partner he made Queen of the Underworld by pact rather than marriage.
Before he met me. The same goddess we were trying to rescue when we got sucked in here.
Persephone.
“I managed to get out of the room they put me in the first day,” she says in a voice that sounds as delicate as flower petals. “What’s wrong with you?”