by Lianyu Tan
But now she was going home.
She knocked on the door connecting Hades’ chambers with her own. “Hades? Are you there?”
Hearing no answer, she opened the door and stepped inside. It felt empty. A chlamys lay on the floor, breaking the almost sterile order of the room. Persephone picked it up and brought it to her face, inhaling the scent of asphodels. She swung it around her shoulders and buttoned it in place.
She could read the labels on the scrolls now. They were sorted by author and time period: poetry, plays, medical texts, memoirs of great generals and human leaders. She lookedr through them aimlessly, well aware she was not meant to pry, when she glanced at the bottom shelf and found something more interesting.
She crouched down and picked up a scroll. It was one amongst many, unassuming, but when she unrolled it, she forgot how to breathe.
She read it twice. There were two signatures on the bottom: Zeus’s and Hades’. She recognized Hades’ hand from long exposure: the firm downstroke, the regular spacing.
Her marriage contract. The date was more than a century ago, occurring not long after that fateful celebration at Zeus’s palace. The papyrus was not fragile, despite its age; perhaps one of Hades’ sorcerers had enspelled it.
Between that time and her descent into the underworld, Hades had not sought her out, not even once. Why? Why wait so long to claim what—in the eyes of the gods—was legally hers?
She saw no mention of Demeter in the contract, which did not surprise her. Her mother must have been blindsided by the whole affair; no wonder she had retaliated against Zeus and Hades with the only power left to her.
She read it again. In print, she was reduced to a commodity—an expensive one, at that. No dowry for her but a bride price that could have beggared kings. Precious metals and gems from the earth, bales of wool, cattle, and more. Surely it was a sign of how much Zeus disliked Hades and had nothing to do with Persephone’s worth. Zeus would not have demanded of Hephaestus a single drachma, had he asked for her hand.
Below all the material goods was a single line: Semele, daughter of Cadmus and Harmonia, restored to her natural lifespan.
Semele. The name sounded familiar.
It seemed so long ago now, but hadn’t that been the name of Zeus’s lover, the one he’d tried to win away from Hades when Persephone had accidentally overheard their conversation?
Persephone re-rolled the scroll with numb fingers and returned it to its resting place. She tried to tell herself it changed nothing. It didn’t matter what Zeus and Hades had decided without her consent—she was going home.
She adjusted the set of the chlamys around her shoulders and left Hades’ rooms. The corridors of the palace seemed eerily quiet. Many servants had been reassigned to different duties, with extra bodies needed to process the ever-increasing flow of the newly arrived dead. The few people she saw all looked harried and exhausted, eager to be out of her sight.
Persephone walked through the library, her bare feet silent against the rugs. She would miss this, too—the smell of papyrus and carbon ink, the way the stylus gave her blisters after too much time spent studying—even Stephanus and his callous indifference to her status.
She stopped outside of Hades’ study and knocked.
“Not now,” came Hades’ voice, sounding muffled.
Persephone opened the door.
“Did I not say—oh.”
The study was a mess, by Hades’ standards. She sat behind a table littered with scrolls, the index finger of her sword arm stained with ink. Hades ran her hand through her hair; it was loose, tumbling in a riot of curls to the small of her back. She looked like a wild thing, like one of the savage goddesses of Anatolia. It was such a departure from her usual cool, composed self that Persephone did not know how to react.
“Close the door,” Hades said, her voice hoarse.
Persephone did so. The gentle click of the door settling into its frame seemed too loud. “Hades, have you... have you been crying?”
Hades set back her chair and stood. She went to a small table beside a set of klinai and poured herself a cup of wine, then drained it in one swallow. “I have not cried since the day Zeus and Poseidon bade me to rule over this place,” she said, still holding the empty cup, her gaze on the wine jug as if longing for another. “To show weakness before the gods is to suffer a fate worse than death.”
“I’m no god.”
“Ah, well.” Hades looked at Persephone, her eyes red-rimmed but dry. “I might shed a tear for you yet.”
“This melancholy ill suits you,” Persephone said.
Hades fluttered a hand in the air. “My apologies, wife,” she said mockingly. “Should I bare my breast and pray to Gaia to deliver me of my woes? Or should I put on a smile and behind closed doors punish those left beside me for their crime of following a goddess too weak to hold her own?”
“You are not weak.”
“I had not heard.” Hades poured herself another cup and drank it, slower this time.
Persephone plucked the empty cup from her grasp. “That’s enough.”
Hades glared at her. “You have what you wanted. Why are you here?”
Persephone placed the cup and the wine jug on a sideboard, out of Hades’ reach. “I came to say goodbye.”
“Fine. Goodbye.” Hades retreated behind her desk and sat down, picking up a reed pen. “Now, get out. I have work to do.”
Persephone could not be moved so easily. “I saw my marriage contract. The one you made with Zeus.”
“So?” Hades began to write, her pen scratching out a few short words before she glanced up again. “What?”
Persephone was no longer the little girl who’d been awed by Hades’ reputation, who could be cowed by a voice raised in anger. She refused to be that girl. “You traded Zeus’s lover for me,” she said.
“Among other things.”
“You never let the dead leave the underworld.”
Hades sighed. “Usually.”
“You never let them leave.”
“Clearly, that is untrue,” Hades snapped. “You have seen the evidence.”
The enormity of that decision gnawed at Persephone. “Why?”
“Why the moon and stars?” Hades asked dryly. She stared longingly at the wine jug.
“Why break your word... for me?”
Hades wiped clean her reed pen. “I never gave Zeus my word that he could absolutely not have her; I only said he had nothing worth my time.”
“But then...”
“After that day... I could not stop thinking of you.” Hades crumpled her sheet of papyrus, ruining it. “The echo of your pulse haunted me.”
“You signed that contract over a hundred years ago,” Persephone said.
“And if I were prescient, I might not have bothered and saved us all a world of pain.”
“Why did you wait so long?”
“It matters not.”
“It does to me.”
Hades threw her hands in the air. “I was not yet certain of my intentions. To condemn another soul to this life—I had to be sure.”
“What made you sure?”
“Fortune. You were there, so close to my domain, and for once, without your mother’s protection—it was fate. I could not ignore the workings of the Moirai.”
“That’s not it,” Persephone said, biting her lip in frustration.
“What do you want?” Hades demanded. “Do you want a ballad, something flowery and charming in the voice of Erato?”
“I want the truth. You owe me that much.”
Hades clasped her hands together and pressed her lips to her knuckles. She did not speak for some time, but Persephone waited, unwilling to be the first to break the silence.
“You have always had—a light about you,” Hades began slowly. “As your powers have matured, it has only grown. It called to me that day I saw you.”
“The day you refused Zeus.”
Hades nodded. “And if not fate, then
what should I name it? There is no death without life and no life without death. Something in each of us yearns for the other. You have felt it, too.”
Persephone labeled her fascination with Hades a sick obsession. Her weakness. “I don’t know what I’ve felt.”
“I feel...” Hades paused. “You disarm me. I burn in Tartarus each day from your hatred, when all I wish is to have and to keep you and to never allow another person to lay hands upon you again.” She leaned back in her chair, her gaze raw with longing. “You stole my heart, and now it beats, fragile and weeping, within your fist. I should despise you for that.”
“I don’t hate you,” Persephone whispered. “Perhaps once, but not anymore. Not for a long time.”
The air seemed too heavy, too pregnant with possibilities. She held Hades’ heart? What did that even mean for them? “Will we meet again?” she asked.
Hades placed her palms on the table. She had accidentally touched her face with her ink-stained hands, leaving a smudge on her cheek. “Our lives are endless, to a point. I will doubtless see you in the overworld, at one event or the other.”
“But not as your consort.”
“No. You have made your feelings on that subject abundantly clear,” Hades said, pronouncing each syllable with precision.
Persephone’s feelings were as tangled as the threads of the Moirai. There was no logic to them, no harmony; nothing to ground her in this swirling sea of confusion.
You stole my heart.
It had never been her intention.
Nothing about this made sense, least of all what she was about to do.
Persephone’s hand went to the fastening on her chlamys—on Hades’ chlamys. She unbuttoned it and allowed it to drop from her fingertips. “I leave tomorrow, with Hermes,” she said, unpinning her fibula on first one shoulder, then the other. “You have given your word.” She unhooked her girdle, setting it aside. Her chiton pooled on the floor. “But first, I would have you bid me farewell properly. As my”—she took a deep breath—“as my wife.”
Hades remained behind the table, her face an expressionless mask. She did not speak, but her throat contracted as she swallowed.
Persephone took a step toward her, rolling her hips as she’d seen Aphrodite do. She was bare save for her perizoma and strophion, and as she walked, she drew the pins from her hair until her curls hung loose.
She reached the table and swept its contents—scrolls, tablets, pens—to the floor, though she was careful not to move the inkstand.
Hades gasped.
The table was myrtle, stained with ink. Persephone climbed on top of it and crawled the short distance to Hades, keeping her back arched, her movements sinuous as a cat’s. She reached out with both hands to take Hades’ face.
Hades stared at her, gaze ravenous as her once-impeccable control began to slip.
Persephone leaned in and kissed her.
Hades’ lips were soft, like she remembered, and tasted of wine. Persephone drew back and traced them with her fingertips, then brushed her thumb over the ink stain on Hades’ cheek.
“If you do this,” Hades said, her voice a breathy whisper, “if you do this... I will not let you leave.”
She might have felt threatened by that, once. “You gave your word,” Persephone said. “And here, your word is law. Not even you can escape it.” She kissed her again, her fingers entangled in Hades’ hair.
Persephone knew she shouldn’t want this, knew there was nothing compelling her to choose this, knew it did not sit well with the old narrative of Hades as her keeper and Persephone her unwilling conquest. This blurred the lines, made it impossible to untangle the scores of who owed what to whom.
It did not mean she forgave Hades. She might never forgive Hades.
But if she blamed Hades, then she blamed herself even more, for needing this, for needing her.
When Hades finally touched her it was a blessed relief. She straddled Hades’ lap, one hand hooking over her shoulder to cling to the back of the chair, the other fumbling to untie Hades’ girdle. Her own underthings were long gone, forgotten like the scrolls she’d swept off the top of the table.
Hades’ fingers hooked inside of her, binding them together, her other hand braced against the small of Persephone’s back. The stretch was exquisite, and Persephone closed her eyes, her hips naturally rocking back against Hades’ hand as she allowed her body to set its own pace.
All those months, those empty nights alone with her poetry and her cold bed, she could have been having this... but no. She hadn’t wanted this, not before. Now she was leaving, and everything had changed.
Hades lifted her off her lap and laid her on the table so that her legs sprawled over the edge.
Persephone opened her eyes and gazed up at Hades, taking a perverse joy in knowing that the next time Hades sat down to this desk, she would think of Persephone’s body, spread out and pierced by her. She hoped Hades would remember the sight for years to come. Hades worked too much, anyway.
“You will be the death of me,” Hades said.
“You’d never lose your immortality for long enough,” Persephone said. “The first time your successor tried to change the drapes, you’d be ousting them in a coup.”
“You think so?”
“I think”—Persephone sighed, a pleasant shiver running over her skin—“you should concentrate on what you were doing with your thumb.”
For once, Hades didn’t argue. She lowered her head and sucked one of Persephone’s nipples into her mouth, applying enough pressure to make Persephone moan.
She shouldn’t be enjoying this. Hades’ touch ought to make her cringe, to fester on her skin like a wound, not to make her crave more.
But Persephone had not been born for a pure and virginal life, unlike Athena, unlike Artemis, and if she could not accept Hades’ love, perhaps she could accept Hades’ fingers on her sex and Hades’ mouth at her throat.
She did not think to complain when Hades bit her, bruising her; she was beyond thought at that point, her mind spiraling out, her consciousness bursting into an ocean of pleasure.
She savored the moment, basking in it, for once unencumbered by shame or doubt. She leaned her head against Hades’ shoulder, her arms loosely twined around her neck, breathing in the scent of her hair.
Hades clasped Persephone to her as if she’d never let go.
That would not do. “You’re crushing me,” Persephone said.
“You can breathe.”
Persephone rolled her eyes and squirmed, flipping them so that Hades lay on the table and Persephone hovered above her.
Hades looked... different. There was a haunted cast to her face, a fragile translucency to her skin. Her hair was atramentous against the myrtle, spilling out around her like a halo.
She was wearing too many clothes.
Her peplos was held at the shoulders by seams, not fibulae. Persephone took no small joy in ripping the fabric, ignoring Hades’ anguished gasp.
“It will mend,” Persephone said, peeling the fabric down to uncover Hades’ strophion. “Your rooms are full of these.”
“Coan silk, Persephone!”
Persephone wrinkled her nose. “Why would you want something made from bugs when you could have good, honest linen?”
“It dyes better. Black is difficult to set.” Hades sat up and untied her strophion herself, as if to prevent Persephone from destroying more of her clothing.
It was the first time Persephone had properly seen this part of her undressed, in the light. What she’d thought to be a birthmark was instead a long, jagged streak of scar tissue that ran from below her right breast to her left hip, wider and thicker over her hip. It had long since healed, shinier and paler than the surrounding skin.
Divine flesh healed well, and even the worst injuries responded to treatment by sorcery. Persephone had never seen such a scar on another goddess. “What happened?” she asked. She reached out and lightly touched it, her fingertips seeking out the shift i
n textures.
“A memory from the war,” Hades said.
There had been many wars but few terrible enough to leave such a mark. “The Titanomachy?” she asked.
Hades nodded, her features tense as Persephone explored the mark with her fingers.
“Why do you keep it?”
“As a reminder,” Hades said, her eyes closed.
“A reminder?”
“That my failures are not simply my own but shape the world around me.”
Persephone did not know what to say. “Is that why you work so hard?”
“Harvest comes but once a year. Humans die every day.”
“That’s no excuse. Your scribes are clever. They could do more, if you let them.”
“Our burdens are not for them, Persephone.”
Persephone glanced away, a bitter taste filling her mouth. No, those burdens were meant to be held by her, as Hades’ consort. Her departure placed them back on Hades’ shoulders.
“Come,” Hades said, reaching for her. “As you say, we have but one night. Let us not speak of prosaic things.”
Persephone leaned over, kissing her. She might not be the queen Hades deserved, but she could be here, in this moment, and lend her all the comfort she could muster.
It wasn’t enough, but she gave it freely. Hades clutched her too tightly, after they’d both been sated, her head nestled against Persephone’s neck and their legs intertwined, her arms like a vise. Persephone laced her fingers with Hades’ and kissed the salt from her cheeks.
22
The Ascent
In the morning, Hades accompanied them as far as the river Styx. She was serene of face and wore her elegance as armor, nothing like the raw and tender goddess who’d held onto Persephone so tightly the night before. Which one was more true, the ruler or the lover? She’d had more than a year to find out, and yet she still wasn’t sure.
Behind them, Hermes waited alongside Charon and his boat. Persephone turned her back on them to say her last farewells.
