91. Epilogue
Chapter ninety-one
Hecate
The Underworld had always had a quiet to it, but this?
This was unsettling. This was the silence that stalked around long-forgotten crypts.
The gutted quiet that remained after something had been inextricably brutalized to an undignified death with their mouth still wrenched open in a silent scream.
From my place at the now overcrowded Asphodel wards, I could still see glimpses of the fallen House Hades.
My chest constricted, squeezing the air from me as bile rose in my throat to secretly bear witness.
It was bleeding.
Hemorrhaging.
Shattered.
I could hear the Underworld crying out in anguish, in promises of retribution as Lilith took up residence. As she took a seat on the throne.
As she and the Morningstar both mistook squatting for sovereignty.
Hades was gone. Persephone, just beginning to come into her power, was gone. The weight of their absences was like a snapped tether, resounding and raw.
Anger warred with desperation, tightening my chest further, until I couldn’t stand the weight of this injustice.
The only comfort was the knowledge of Demeter’s deed before her fate, protecting her daughter until the bitter end.
My hands flared to life, stalking towards the edge of Asphodel with enough magic, enough rage, enough promises of ruin to peel back their skin from their bones. Make them suffer.
The air split before me, swirling my black hair around. A pulse of magic—foreign and familiar simultaneously. Magic that sent gooseflesh ghosting along my nape. I glanced around, feeling a new gravity pulling my attention.
No—demanding it. A rising chorus of three—layered, ancient, infinite—coiled around me.
“You cannot.”
The hollow ring of the Fates came without warning. Without emotion. Their every word was inevitable, like the floor giving way for the hanged man. I couldn’t see them, Clotho, Lachesis, or Atropos, but I felt every whisper of movement, like a sentient will that entwined my limbs.
I bared my teeth, sinking low into my heels, my rage igniting in a flash of gnashing teeth and shadows coiling like serpents around me, though they couldn’t fight the Fates any more than I could hold mist from the Styx.
“Traitors.” My fury was quiet, but resonate.
Weighted, like the echo of rolling thunder you felt through your very body. “You’re in my way.”
“If you interfere now,” it’s hard to tell who speaks the way each voice is plaited together like three strands of a braid, “the one who would call himself a god will win.”
“And you call this a victory?” I snapped, pacing the line of the wards, unable to turn my gaze away from what remained of House Hades.
The burned labyrinth ignited a match in my chest, sucking away at the air in it.
My voice cracked against my will. “He has House Hades, the center of the realm. The Underworld is unmoored, divided.”
“And aloft, safe from him.” The Fates answered altogether. “He has lost his way into the Underworld. His corruption must rot from within.”
My chest squeezed painfully, bile coming back to burn my throat.
Persephone.
Part of me fractured inward at her memory.
She’d had no idea. No idea she’d been the key to all of this.
She wasn’t the architect of the destruction; she was the unwitting hinge it all swung upon.
I saw the fury on her face when she purged the wards, allowing me to finally seal them. Her ignorance was plain to see.
Which makes the devastation burning in my chest surge into something white hot. My rage twisted, reforming into something darker, sharper. A weapon searching for a target.
I scathed at the Fates, that they would design something like this.
“You fucking knew,” I seethe, my wrath scattering dust around me.
“You knew she was his key to the rot affecting the wards. You knew Hades and Persephone would fall into their fucking hands. You watched him hunt us like necrosis from a wound.” The wind turned violent around me, casting projectiles about.
“You let the Underworld be razed to the ground and you did nothing to stop it.”
The silence from the Fates stretched long, eliciting a bitter, humorless laugh from me, before a collective sigh, the first semblance of emotion from them. As close to an admittance as I’d get from the cloy cunts of past, present, and future. “You cannot help them today.”
Magic shot through my body like an oversensitive nerve struck far too hard. “You expect me to what? Stand here, guarding Asphodel, Elysian Fields, Tartarus, and the outer lands and all the souls here? When Hades and Persephone are forced to kill each other in the over world?”
“Yes.” The combined threads of their voices left my very soul disquiet.
It’d been centuries since I had cried, and there wasn’t a single being in existence to have ever seen it. Tears stung, stabbing behind my eyes, begging to be set free. “You ask too much of me.”
“Then you doom us all,” they answered with finality. “Even us.”
The words dropped like stones between us.
Even my magic stopped its tempest in the dark, as if it too were stunned.
A small whisper of sweet-smelling air brushed my face—a caress from the Fates.
I froze. The closest I’d heard of anyone having been touched by the Fates in all my eons.
I wanted to argue. To fight. The dam broke, bringing with it a flood of grim, reluctant acceptance. Tears blurred my view of House Hades.
“How will I know?” I gritted out, hating the despondence in my voice. “When I can save them?”
For once, their answer wasn’t a riddle in need of solving. Nothing annoyingly cryptic, though that didn’t do anything to dilute the bitterness continuing to saturate my entire being. “You will know. It will be an unfailing knowing, and when you feel it, know that we sent it with our favor.”
I opened my mouth to ask what that meant, but the air itself sagged, tense no longer. And then they left me in the fathomless, depthless shadows, isolated in the grim embrace of sacrifice and desolation.
I would silently watch as my friends died throughout their cursed lifetimes.
Centuries later...
I’d always been a patient being, but this sort of torture had remade my definition of the term. Being connected to the fallen King of the Underworld and the goddess who would be its queen in the throes of this curse was a punishment I wouldn’t inflict upon anyone.
I stared coldly at House Hades.
Maybe I could think of someone I’d inflict it on, though it hinged on the Morningstar caring about someone besides himself.
Cerberus whined, sensing my distress, a heavy weight pressed against me. Three massive heads all nudging me, one after the other in a marriage of warm breath, slobbery kisses I resented, and familiar, comforting rumbling that filled the space between silence.
Being patient as the Fates had bade me meant hearing Hades’ call in the mortal realm.
Feeling the pull of his influence. I had to physically anchor myself to this plane to avoid revealing myself in his.
Summoning, after summoning. Death after death of Persephone, each one more gruesome, and to know Hades was the one dealing it.
To know that he lived in anguish until the curse repeated and recycled, depleting his memory to begin anew.
He begged me sometimes. Commanded me other times.
But the ones that gutted me were when he cursed me, thinking I’d deserted him, feeling the open connection to his summoning and my declining to appear.
His voice frayed with each passing generation, as if weaking in the wake of this wicked curse.
Even if his mind didn’t remember everything, his soul did.
I listened to each one.
I glare at the open air where I imagined the Fates watch stoically.
Dutifully, I answered none.
My chest cleaved open, breaking open again with the end of each cycle, waiting for the moment I could finally answer. Every time I feel her death, I grew colder, losing a piece of myself, as surely as Hades lost himself when he realized. Each time, I felt the impact like a blade between my ribs.
Until even I couldn’t decide if I recognized his voice outside the hollowness, the gut-wrenching anticipation. I couldn’t hear Persephone, but in those moments if she were close enough to Hades, I could feel her. Her fear, her unwavering heart.
I could do little but watch Lilith stalk the hallowed halls as the Morningstar’s dutiful servant. I could do little but witness her take up the throne, a queen in her own mind. I watched demons parade around the grounds, though they could do little but inhabit it.
I could do little against the Morningstar or his siege on Olympus. I had to remain here. If I fell, I feared so too would the wards. Demeter and I had reached an understanding, and I passed as much information to the Olympians as I could to aid their fight.
What little I could do for my sovereigns, I did dutifully.
With the quiet, vicious devotion of a goddess scorned, I tended to the souls of the realm.
I bolstered the wards until even the end of existence would struggle to find us, let alone the Morningstar.
I was the goddess of thresholds, and with all these souls as my witness, I would not fail.
Not again.
The Fates had promised a fracture. Whether within the Morningstar, his alliances, or whether Olympus finally drove him back, I would wait for the opportune moment.
Light flickered briefly before being engulfed by the darkness once again.
When that opportunity rose, when the door opened for Hades and Persephone, the threshold would welcome them.