Receiver of Many

by Rachel Alexander

  “I’ve never seen scars on an immortal before…”

  “I was young and we were all very weak once we were freed; the Titans could injure us as easily as mortals wound each other. And I didn’t have bolts of lightning or a trident to help keep my distance. I needed to get up close when I fought them.”

  “What happened here then?” she said, tracing its ridge once more.

  “I think that one was from Koios, when we crossed swords at the base of Mount Othrys.”

  She imagined Aidoneus in his youth, the formidable warrior god, mightier than Ares. She pictured the hard muscles and sinews of his long legs protected by metal greaves and leather, his dark crested helm and golden armor flashing in the sunlit melee of battle. The sound of bronze against bronze, wood, and even flesh echoed in her imagination. Persephone quivered at the idea of Hades cutting down his foes like blades of grass, fighting his way through to duel with the ancient and deadly god of the oracles and intellect. Her eyes lit up and a smile teased the corners of her mouth. “Tell me more…”

  “Well, sweet one, there’s not much to tell about that battle… The Helm of Darkness had been very recently given to me for freeing the hosts of the Underworld. I hadn’t had it for long and foolishly thought that because Koios couldn’t see me, he couldn’t hear me either. He turned and slashed in my direction, and I ducked out of the way, just barely.” He looked down at the scar. “Or not enough, truthfully.”

  “How did you beat him?”

  He tilted his head forward. “Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  She nodded enthusiastically. He gave her a half smile, noting how adorable she looked sitting there with her hands clasped in her lap, unaware that her arms were drawing her breasts together into a deep and delicious cleavage.

  “All right, then… When Koios’s blade glanced off my arm, and because he couldn’t see me, it gave me enough of an opening to… ahhh… put my sword through his neck,” Aidon said, mumbling the last words.

  Her eyes and mouth flew open and she shuddered as the fight played out in her head in all its bloody detail.

  "Persephone, I told you… these stories might not be for you.” Between a horrific childhood and his exploits during the war, she was going to think he was a monster. He watched her face carefully. Maybe I am, he thought. Maybe I should have just left well enough alone…

  “No!” she pleaded. She took a deep breath and composed herself. “Please don’t stop! I can handle it,” she continued calmly.

  His mind played with the innocent double meaning of her words and the palpable heat of her flushed skin. Aidon’s fought back a surprised smile as he caught the scent of lilacs in the air between them. His story was arousing her. He narrowed his eyes and smirked, indulging her. “With the Titans, we discovered that the only way to subdue them was to be quick about it. They were gods of time; a long fight was to their advantage. I ran Koios through and pinned him to the rocks with my sword still in his throat, then opened a gateway underneath him to Tartarus.”

  “You could do that?”

  “All of us could do it, for a time. The cosmos was in chaos. The rules were not as they are now.”

  She nodded. “Go on…”

  “When I slid the blade out, he fell into the Pit. His hosts saw that their lord god was gone and fled into the fields of Thessaly, where your father’s Cyclopean army crushed them.”

  Her breath hitched and she leaned toward him again, her finger dancing across the scar once more. “Did it hurt?”

  “It certainly stung, but it was just a flesh wound. Now this one,” he said, turning to lay on his side and showing her a short scar on the outside of his right knee, “this one hurt.”

  She leaned over him as he sat back against the pillows and ran her hand over the jagged white scar. “How did you get it?”

  “I was… protecting someone,” he said, freezing. I’ve gone too far; I shouldn’t be telling this story, he thought.

  “From who?”

  “Iapetos.”

  Persephone paled. Her mother had told her stories about Kronos’s right hand, Iapetos the Piercer— the cruel god of finite mortality itself, and the former ruler of the Underworld. “Wh-who were you protecting?”

  “You.”

  She looked up at him in shock. “But my mother said he went to Tartarus before I was born.”

  “He did,” Aidoneus said. “I sent him there.”

  Persephone leaned against his chest as he lay back and felt him take a long breath. He ran his hand through the long strands of her hair that had spilled across his shoulder.

  “Right after Zeus freed us, and before we convened on Olympus, the six of us scattered across Hellas so Kronos couldn’t find us. All of us were very weak, and it was only with the intervention of a few of the Titans and Protogenoi that we survived at all. Zeus retreated back to Crete with Rhea, Tethys took Poseidon and Hera to Samos, Themis hid Hestia on Cythera, and Hecate took Demeter and me into the ether so she could hide us everywhere and nowhere all at once.”

  “My mother never said anything about— Hecate took both of you?” Persephone ran her hand along his chest. No one had ever told her this. She leaned into him, eager to hear about a history that had been kept from her, secrets that her mother had shied away from when she asked too many questions as a young girl.

  “She was our teacher; our priestess. Hecate is still my greatest mentor— more of a mother to me than Rhea ever was.” I shouldn’t be telling this story. He stroked Persephone’s arm and wondered if he should continue. She needed to hear about his past and if he didn’t tell her now, he would have to answer these same questions later, after she’d spoken with Hecate. He had trusted her with it this far. “Your parents were deeply in love with each other from the moment Demeter was rescued by Zeus. Nine years of bloody fighting passed before it was safe enough for the six of us to meet in one place on Olympus. We gathered to draw up plans for how we should end the war and what would become of us once it was over. We didn’t come to any kind of an agreement. As far as I’m concerned only one good thing ever came out of that first meeting— you were conceived that night.”

  Persephone looked down. She had been told that part, at least. It was the part Demeter would talk about most— how the young rebel god had caught her as she fell from Kronos; how he had fallen in love with her the moment she landed in his arms, shaking and blinded by the daylight; how his was the first face she had seen since the darkness, his youthful mop of golden hair shining in the sun. Demeter told her how Zeus fell in love with her first out of all beings— that they waited for each other after he freed her. “She told me that part at least; she always told that story. But never any of the other… details. Mostly because she said I was too young to hear about romantic love.”

  “That’s a pity,” Aidon turned toward her, “because then you would know about how your mother crept up on the sleeping Iapetos and tried to steal his spear.”

  “What?!”

  “Oh, she was very brave,” he said. Brave and foolish, he thought.

  “Why did she do it?”

  “Because Zeus started… turning his affections elsewhere.” He caught her stilled hand in his and looked down at her. “I’m sorry.”

  “Why? I mean, it’s sweet of you to consider my feelings, but I’m all too familiar with those stories. You don’t need to protect me from them,” she scoffed. She masked her pain well, and must have masked it for centuries, but Aidon could hear the hurt in her voice. “His infidelities are nothing new.”

  Is this why you cannot fully open your heart to me, Aidon thought, because you think I’ll be like him? He massaged her palm and wrist in his hand. “She was trying to win him back with an act of bravery. Demeter was already carrying you, loved you— grabbed my hand once and pressed it to her womb so I could feel you kicking at her. We hadn’t become the Olympians yet, and all six of us were more or less fighting individually for our own survival. She ‘borrowed’ my helm in the dead of night and w
ent to the heart of Mount Othrys itself, not knowing that its invisibility is tied to me, and only works for others if I explicitly allow them to use it. She took the spear, but Iapetos woke and saw Demeter run away into the ether with his favorite weapon. She led him straight to me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I have done? I woke up to Demeter flying at me through the ether with the deadliest Titan on her heels. ‘Aidon, forgive me! Save my daughter!’ she screamed. I pulled the three of us from the ether into Chthonia, where I had allies. Hecate and Nyx gathered up Demeter, and I met Iapetos at the river Phlegethon.

  “I had him; I was about to push him into the Pit, but I forgot to keep an eye on his other hand. He plunged his knife into my leg here,” he said indicating the raised, jagged scar above his knee, “and I lost my footing. Hecate took my helm from Demeter and pushed it to me through the ether. I put it on just as his sword was about to come down on me and disappeared, rolling out of his reach. But if I moved again, he would be able to hear me.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “I didn’t. Your father came charging in on his chariot, bellowing in rage, eager to defend your mother with the lightning he had just been given. The cacophony distracted Iapetos enough that I could rise to my feet. But with my helm on, Zeus couldn’t see me standing in front of the Titan. If he used the lightning, he would have struck me down instead of Iapetos, and despite being in tremendous pain, I had to act quickly.”

  Aidon paused and looked down at Persephone, enraptured by his story, and didn’t know how to continue. He had never told these things to anyone before. Everyone he knew was in the war fighting alongside him.

  “Don’t hold back,” she whispered. “Tell me.”

  “I took off his head.”

  She shuddered against him, her eyes wide. He felt her hand trail along his chest and her thigh squirm over his.

  “One clean stroke. We threw him into Tartarus. When it was done, Hecate had your father, your mother and me take an oath and drink from the river Styx. We began the alliance of the Olympians that very moment by sealing yours and my betrothal.”

  “Did Iapetos die?”

  “He can’t; Iapetos is deathless. He’s chained down there with the others, but only speaks in whispers now. Your father and I went to Tartarus to make sure Iapetos stayed there, and won the alliance of the Hundred Handed Ones. Given their… history… with Kronos, they agreed with pleasure to become the Titans’ jailers.”

  Persephone looked at him. “I want you to take me there to meet them.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “Persephone, speaking to the Hundred Handed Ones and seeing them are two different things. These are beings that can subdue gods. And there are other ancient horrors in Tartarus that you shouldn’t see— that no one should ever see.”

  She had drawn the power to reach into, the ether from Tartarus itself— had watched terror sweep across Aidon’s face as she opened the gateway and looked back at him. Ancient horrors. Was that what she was becoming? “Aidon, I need to know why they called to me; why they knew me. What am I? Am I… a thing from the Pit?”

  “No, my love, of course not,” he said drawing her into his arms. “Why would you ever think that?”

  “They called me ‘She Who Destroys the Light’.”

  “But, sweet one, that’s what ‘Persephone’ means in the old tongue.”

  She froze in fear. Was she cursed? She had been carrying that name all her life, though few ever called her that. The only one who had ever done so with any regularity was holding her right now. An invisible weight bore down on her chest. “Is that why my mother called me Kore, hid me, and kept me ignorant of you? …of all of this? Because she knew that if I came here I would become…”

  She didn’t finish, her voice cracking. Aidon hushed her and held her as she shook. He kissed her forehead, and stroked her back. The world above was cold and dark without her in it. He wasn’t about to tell her that. Besides, Demeter was to blame for that, not Persephone. Her mother would stop this nonsense soon enough. If not, Zeus would stop it for her.

  “They called me Praxidike.”

  “It means ‘justice’.”

  “It means ‘vengeance’,” she countered.

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Sweet one,” he said, turning to kiss her on the cheek as they lay side by side. Aidon laid his head on the pillow beside hers and looked into her eyes, watched her tears spill out and spread on the pillow. “There is nothing— nothing evil about you. You shine like a light down here. The reason I won’t let you go to Tartarus isn’t because I think you’ll become one with the Pit. It’s because you’re my consort and queen. You are my wife. I’m sworn to protect you and would never forgive myself if he— if anything happened to you down there.”

  She looked up at him as he took her cheek in his hand and brushed her tears away.

  “I love you, Persephone.”

  She looked away, fresh tears brimming in her eyes, unsure of how to respond to him.

  He closed his eyes and pulled her closer, whispering in her ear. “You don’t have to say anything right now, sweet one.”

  She shivered against him as his breath tickled her ear and neck. Hiding her growing feelings for him would soon be impossible. Persephone could feel the same energy she called up from the earth flowing freely between them right now. She knew he could feel it too. The reverberations of it raced through each other as though their very souls were merging. “What if there is something wrong with me? What if I’m actually an evil thing?”

  He pulled back from her with a smile, his gaze traveling the length of her body. He ran his hand over her waist and slowly down her thigh. “If there were any evil part of you, I surely would have discovered it by now, no?”

  Persephone blushed hot and tilted her face toward his. She kissed him, his hands running across her body, his flesh quickening between them.

  “Of course,” he said with playful eyes and half a smile, “I could look again.”

  She giggled and felt him draw away from her, crouching at her feet. He lifted one foot and then the other, running his hands from her toes to her calves and peppering her feet and ankles with kisses.

  “No evil here,” he said, smiling up at her. He ran his hands up her legs, and across her thighs, kissing the back of her knees.

  Persephone squealed, surprised she was sensitive there. She felt the heat of his kiss shoot up her spine and bucked as he held her steady. Amusement crept over his face at her reaction.

  Aidon turned his attention to her hands, massaging her palms while Persephone sighed and sank deeper into the pillows. He planted a kiss on each knuckle and then sucked one finger after the other into his mouth. Her breathing grew ragged. “None here,” he whispered.

  His hands, then his mouth moved up her arm to her shoulder. She shuddered when he reached her neck and gasped when he arrived at her breasts. He gathered the liquid flesh in his palms, carefully kneading them and teasing her nipples to points before sucking one into his mouth. She moaned as his fingers and tongue alternated back and forth between each peak.

  “None here,” he rasped between them with a last kiss placed over her heart. Aidon knelt between her legs and kissed down her stomach. She felt him grip her lower back, then her thighs, lifting and tilting her backward and drawing the back of her knees over his shoulders until at last he was facing his destination.

  He looked into her heavily lidded eyes, then kissed below her navel and above the line of her dark curls, running a finger between her labia. “And certainly none here.”

  “Aidon…” she whispered.

  She gasped and watched his mouth move lower, kissing along her hip bone and the inside of her thigh. “Wait, Aidon, I don’t know if you should—” Her words were lost and her shy resistance to where he kissed her next wore off very quickly.

  Aidon’s eyes rolled back and closed, his
senses filling with her heady taste and scent as he ran the flat of his tongue through her wet folds, then speared it to gently probe her entrance. She bucked forward and he wrapped an arm around her waist to steady her body so he could explore her with his mouth. Every kiss, every time he snaked his tongue into her, every nibble and every hum of adoration that vibrated into her wet flesh made her body twist and her voice cry out for him. Gods, why hadn’t he thought to do this sooner?

  Her thighs shook, splaying out one minute so he could hear her then trapping his ears the next, muffling her sharp cries. When he reached the top of her labia and flattened his tongue against her bud, Aidon opened his eyes to savor the sight of his wife lost in pure pleasure. He marveled at how profoundly each small movement affected her and watched her hands land hard on the sheets and pull the fabric into her clenching fists. Her half closed eyelids fluttered.

  Persephone couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Every ripple of his tongue through her nether lips drove a new wave of pleasure through her, arching her back, rushing through her breasts and up her spine as he hungrily kissed and drank her essence. She felt him shift her body as he bent forward over her and pushed two fingers into her channel. Persephone wanted to cry out his name, but had lost her ability to form words. Now she hovered at the precipice, singularly aware that this time felt different. The room started to tilt back and fall away.

  Aidon felt heat dripping around his fingers as he thrust them back in, curling them forward. His fingertips searched her channel carefully for the spongy ridges of flesh he’d been told to find, and when they reach their goal, he felt her hips rock and heard her voice cry out even through the wall of her thighs squeezing around his head. He sucked the hood of her clitoris into his mouth again, and the pull of his lips and the pressure of his curled fingers became an axis of pleasure piercing through her. She came with a scream, her channel pulsing wildly around his fingers. He stroked them through her as she climaxed, mimicking the motions of their lovemaking and prolonging her pleasure.