Chapter seventy-nine #2
Hades’ jaw tightened, the tension rippling like a stone thrown into a still pond. “Don’t insult her intelligence.” His eyes flared beneath a grim stare. “Or mine.”
“Mind your tone, god of the dead,” Demeter snipped back, her tone sharp and snide.
“You know something, Mother.” I turned to Zeus with a pleading look. “Father. Why won’t you answer us?”
“The Morningstar is turning us against one another.” Zeus’s tone echoed like the very storms he summoned. “He’ll twist any thread that frays. Don’t be the fray, daughter.”
“That’s not an answer.” Shadows whipped out around Hades, lashing like whips.
“Old wounds don’t need to be reopened,” Demeter scathed, her words every a bit a lash as Hades’ shadows.
Her neck muscles corded under the stress of her rage.
“He reveres chaos, and he aims to destroy the delicate balance of light and dark. Of life and death. He would see it destroyed, where he can reign.”
Hades’ darkness deepened. At some point Cerberus had padded up behind me, his soft fur pressing against me as his three heads dropped in a menacing growl to those who called themselves my parents. Hades dropped all semblance of niceties, the air trembling with his power.
“We’ve known each other many millennia. You forget I know when you’re lying. You’re both hiding something. I’ll ask you once more, and you’d better have an answer and not another deflection. What does he want with Persephone?”
“You forget yourself, Hades,” Demeter seethed a hiss. “You would do well to remember your place.”
Hades straightened, a curl of shadows whispering from his shoulders. “And you’d do well to remember whose realm you stand in.”
Tension snapped, recoiling like a broken hair tie. A low hum trembled, vibrating the very ground we stood on, as if the Underworld itself trembled in fury. Or perhaps trembled in the fear of its fury-bound master.
Demeter opened her mouth on a barb—
—I stepped between Hades and Demeter, drawing all eyes to me.
“That’s enough.” A cleansing breath. Though Zeus and Demeter wouldn’t meet my eye, I had their attention, now I didn’t know what to do with the weight of it. I turned to my mother. “He wants me. That much is obvious. You know why, and I deserve to know too.”
Zeus opened his mouth, his head hanging low, too low for the King of the Gods. I saw it, a resolution in his eyes. Demeter saw it too.
“We swore an oath,” she seethed at him, thunder booming in time with her words. Lightning flashed as Zeus rose to her challenge.
“He will come again. And soon,” he said over the storm. “And when he does, we must hope that the god of the dead knows how to guard what he loves.”
Hades lips pressed together in a grim line.
“Of that you can rest assured. The Morningstar will have her only when I lay dead and the Underworld is in tatters.” I didn’t miss the harsh intake of breath from Mother, nor the flash of pain she couldn’t hide.
All those years ago, Hades threw mercy to the wake of law.
Now that law and sense were gone, her devastation was plain to see, however complex.
In a way, I understood. Hades was partially to blame for her lover’s demise, according to her, but he was also now charged with her daughter’s protection against her will. “Now say what you evade.”
Zeus hesitated, fingers fidgeting in his white beard, but spoke it at last. “He has the power to see potentials. He wants what sleeps inside you. A power you proved today is slowly waking.”
“Potential?” I blinked. “What potential?”
“A spark. Older than Olympus itself.” Demeter sighed, her composure shattering at last. Even her anger evaporated, like her body had run out of the energy required, leaving her looking frail. Morose. Hollow, like a stiff wind might carry her away.
“You’re speaking of Titan magic.” Hades’ tone was sharper than Ares’s axe. “That’s impossible.”
“It should have been,” Zeus agreed stoically. “She’s not just the goddess of spring. She’s a fertility goddess, like those of old.”
The world froze. Time itself stopped. I wasn’t even convinced my heart was beating.
Fertility goddess? I had the potential for titan-like power?
“We aren’t certain of how it happened,” Demeter said softly, reaching out to touch me. Her hurt expression didn’t cut me like it should have when I recoiled, the storm of emotion thrumming through me. “The memory we erased was a mercy, not a malice.”
“If I listen solely to you, I’ll never know what I think.” From the corner of my eye, I felt Hades straighten. His lips pressed into a knowing smile. “Tell me what happened.”
My pulse pounded. This was the first time I dared to command my mother, and it did not go unnoticed.
“What you need to know is that the Morningstar doesn’t just have some sway with death and shadows.
He has the power to see any being’s potentials.
Every version of themselves and what it takes to coax it.
It makes him incredibly dangerous. He sees your power, your potential, and he’s drawn to it like a moth to a pyre.
He hunts you for himself. And if the cycle of life and death closes with you, should you join yourself with a god that harnesses death, it will be realized. ”
Zeus shuddered as his gaze closed in one me
“What do you mean? Join myself with a god that harnesses death?”
“When life and death collide. Combine magic as one being. A union more sacred than marriage, more divine, more devout than any other bond. Where magic joins, and flows between you both.” I glanced at Hades, the true god that harnesses death. That must include him.
“So, he doesn’t want to destroy me.”
A beat. “No. Demeter’s voice was grim. “He wants to claim you. Own you. Merge your very souls. In chains if necessary. The union doesn't require your consent.”
The Underworld shuddered.
“Your power makes you a weapon in his hands,” Zeus confirmed, his head hanging low, marinating in his shame. He refused to look at Demeter, keeping his back to her.
“All this time.” My hands shook. My rage that had long simmered today finally boiled over. “I wasn’t just your daughter. I was your secret. You kept me away from everyone my entire life!”
Demeter, to my surprise, flinched.
“You are my daughter. You are mine to protect. To love. Had others known—”
I laughed through a sneer, cutting her off. “But he does know. And I was ignorant to it.”
Everyone knew who I’d meant.
Zeus stepped closer, taking my trembling hands in his.
“You misunderstand, daughter.” Though I didn’t miss the way Zeus’s unreadable eyes landed reluctantly on Hades over my shoulder.
If the cycle of life and death were complete within me, then my power would eventually awaken.
The gods with dominion over death. Hades. And the Morningstar.
The shudder I’d felt after our joining the first time with Hades. It wasn’t the Underworld.
It was me.
It was the key opening a lock, and the door would eventually open.
“We sought your protection. This spark is not a gift; it’s a curse. A weapon—one the Morningstar covets and will use to raze all our existence to ashes.”
Wrath poured off Hades in waves. “And you thought hiding her would keep her safe?”
“It’s worked until now,” Demeter cried.
A silence followed, long and suffocating.
A silence we all suffered the weight from.