7. Return
RETURN
AIDEN
I’m arguing with myself again.
This has become an increasingly common occurrence over the last eighty years, though I’m not really sure anyone else would consider it an argument versus the god in my head driving me mad while I try to drown him out.
‘Cause, see, in my opinion, calling it an argument implies that both sides have an equal chance of winning.
I haven’t got a prayer.
Hades… he’s patient.
Aiden stopped knowing how to be the moment he was promised escape once he paid the price to a magic it took him seasons after seasons to admit existed.
Hades understands that eternity is not measured in years, decades, or even centuries.
He has governed the dead since long before I carried his soul, and he knows better than anyone that everything comes to the Underworld eventually.
However long it takes, the soul of his missing queen will be born and returned to him, to be his bride no matter what, for forever—or until our latest reincarnations fade or die or give up on that eternity to start the cycle again and again.
Over the millennia, Hades has been reborn more times than he can remember. No matter what, his myths… his legend… his story ends with him claiming his Persephone, and nothing else matters but a single goddess and the cacophony of the dead.
Eighty years ago, I was promised a soulmate. I couldn’t have Veronica while I was still mortal. As an immortal—as the latest incarnation of Hades—I was promised my own Persephone, and as the years have passed, I no longer can find it in me to be patient.
Not because I expect her to save me. The opposite. For a man like me… I would only ruin her. I don’t deserve a Fate’s-given bride, no matter what Hades says.
She will be yours and mine. You just need to go to her.
“I can’t have her,” I mutter. He can hear my thoughts the same way that his voice echoes throughout me whenever he rises up and scolds me for losing faith. I know that. That still doesn’t stop me from speaking to him as if he wasn’t a part of me. “And I can’t search for her. You know that.”
You will, he insists. You must. Persephone is the only light in the Underworld’s darkness. She will save us both. From your twisted madness and my eternal loneliness, she will be worth all we’ve waited for and more. Especially now.
I huff.
Twisted madness?
Right.
I’m the mad one while he’s just lonely.
How is that so when I’ve secretly hoped that my supposed soulmate might be true to me unlike Veronica was while he swears he can scent sweet flowers and know she’s a whisper on the breeze when all I get is the stink of the fire and brimstone of the Pit?
Who’s the mad one here again?
Then again, considering we’re having the same argument for the thousandth time, that Persephone will save us from the crushing weight of ruling the dead of the Underworld, keeping the remaining prisoners in Tartarus, and making sure none of the shades I’m responsible for escape to the above…
the land of the living in the Other realm that’s kept me trapped from the moment I touched a mirror and accidentally followed Johnny Wallace to a mythical world that shouldn’t exist…
I think that answer is pretty much: both of us.
Johnny Wallace. He started this whole thing all those decades ago…
only he wasn’t Johnny Wallace, was he? He was Narcissus, a Greek hunter who was cursed by Nemesis to fall in love with his own reflection.
In the legends, he died from wasting away.
In my past, the magic in this strange world caught up to him and he croaked in time to wake up the slumbering god inside of me.
He was the first shade I led to the Underworld myself. He was the only shade I brought down to the Pit. The magic captured me, too, and from the moment I appeared in the dark and gloomy palace of Hades, I’ve never been allowed to leave the Underworld.
And, yet, all this morning, Hades has insisted that I abandon my throne and make an appearance in the above. That Persephone is there, and unless I go to her, she’ll never find the Underworld.
And, hell. Would it be that bad if I saved her from this torture—from me—by staying where I am rather than follow the old story, break through to land of the living in a golden chariot, and kidnap her to be my bride?
That’s how their story passed all those ages ago. Before the pomegranate, before tricking an innocent goddess into staying with Hades so he had a queen he could adore, he stole her… and I… after all I’ve done, it would be cruel to do something like that.
I don’t know why Hades is so sure that I can.
Not only are the portals mirrorside closed-off to me because I haven’t paid my debt to the magic by playing my part and reliving my legend, but the one time I tried to end this existence by jumping into the Estige—the River Styx that winds its way from the above to the Underworld—the fire that brackets the walkway leading outside of the palace of Hades reared up, blocking my path.
Of course, Charon—the ferryman that is a bridge between the living world and the land of the dead—explained that, like the shades I’m responsible for, I belong in the Underworld.
The magic might let me leave one day—when it suits itself, I’m sure—but it’s been eighty years since I left the land of the living above.
To make it worse, despite insisting that he senses her near, Hades believes he’ll be able to wait as long as it takes to see his Persephone again.
Easier said than done, I tell ya. For half the year—during the seasons that the old myths tell him Persephone should be here—the immortal god doesn’t understand why she isn’t, and this isn’t the first time he vows on Olympus itself that he is convinced she’s coming to him only to be disappointed when the seasons change and we’re still alone together, working each others’ last nerve.
Where is she, he asks, his grave voice an endless refrain in my head. Where is my queen?
If I knew, I’d find her, give her to Hades, then…
I don’t know. After all I’ve done… I can’t imagine there is any woman—either in the Other or the mortal realm—who would want a half-mad mate who was a Greek killer back mirrorside.
Maybe I’ll leave the shell of my tired body to the god who insists it’s his anyway.
My soul can join the Underworld, and I… I can finally be free.
For now, I stand on the balcony overlooking the Asphodel Meadows, one hand wrapped around a silver cup of nectar I have no intention of drinking, while shades move through the plains below, simply existing until the magic that powers the realm chooses one to be reborn in the mortal world.
The palace is quieter at this hour. Not silent—nothing in the Underworld is ever truly silent thanks to the moaning from the Fields of Punishment—but…
settled in the way that I’ve never been since the moment Hades woke up inside of me, making it clear that—despite my protests to Zeus—I am a god.
For eight decades and way-too-many seasons, I have been. Nothing changes, either. I exist. I endure.
And, though I try to hide it, I hope…
The newly dead have already been judged. Estige is still; no ferrying for Charon at the moment. Even the Furies are resting, curled together near the lower gate in a tangle of wings, claws, and dark hair, waiting for their master to send them off to take vengeance on the lowest of low.
The realm is at peace today. If only I could be, too.
Instead, I’m ignoring the way that Hades is moping while thinking about how, if the Furies are designed to go after no-good murderers, why don’t they see the darkness inside of me that came with all the Greek souls I kept from the Underworld by killing them mirrorside?
It doesn’t matter that I haven’t taken a life since Johnny Wallace was the last name on the list my old boss gave me.
Or that Zeus, during the early visits when he was trying to explain to his new “brother” what was expected of me as the most recent Lord of the Underworld, tried to explain that mirrorside…
who we were before we recognized our true soul no longer matters.
But it does matter. To Aiden Murphy, it does.
Which is why I’m refusing to leave the balcony to follow another of Hades’s whims. At least twice a season, he does his best to convince me that my soulmate is here, and I believed him at first. But there’s only so much disappointment a man can take.
I thought my life was over when I lost Veronica.
No. Not quite, and all these years later, I barely remember that heartache.
I received Veronica’s Dear Aiden letter during the final year of the war. That’s nothing compared to being promised the one soul meant for you—even if you don’t deserve her—only to discover time and time again that she isn’t there.
So, rather than be blocked from going above again, I stay where I am and stare beyond the river toward the passage that leads to the Other as I wonder whether I will spend another eighty years waiting for the Fates to remember me.
She exists. I know that much.
Persephone has always existed somewhere, just as Hades has existed inside of me from the moment I was born to my mam in the year 1919.
The old stories have faded from the mortal world, but their power hasn’t disappeared.
Souls return. Magic repeats itself. The same forces that once shaped gods and legends take root in new bodies and wait for the right moment to wake.
I woke at twenty-seven when the man I was paid to kill died after seeing his reflection in a dark lake in a mythical realm.