Destroyer of Light

by Rachel Alexander

  Aidon gripped her waist to press her closer, then grunted in discomfort when the heavy apron she wore slammed against him. He broke away from her for a moment, cursing. “Damn these ceremonial clothes!”

  She grinned and unlatched the gold clasps at her shoulders and waist. The entire piece slumped loudly to the floor, a haphazard pile of red jewels and delicate gold chains strewn at their feet. He smiled and drew her in again, holding her against his body, feeling the heat growing between them.

  “I’m glad I sent them all away,” she whispered against his neck. She kissed him at the pulse point above his collarbone and felt him push aside the mantle she wore. He reached over the edge of her chiton to cup her breast, and then pulled the nipple over the edge, licking his lips and dipping his head to taste her. She gently pried his hands off her. “Aidon, this is the throne room! What if someone walks in on us again?”

  “Sweet one, Hermes… unwisely disturbed us… but he’s not part of our realm. I assure you, no one we rule over would be foolish enough to burst into any room where I am alone with you.”

  He looked down at her with an expression that someone unfamiliar with him would have mistaken for annoyance or frustration. And it was frustration, in part. He wanted her. He wanted every barrier standing between him and his entry into her body removed in that instant. He’d said as much amidst the heated words that had rolled off his tongue when he’d spoken to her in the language of those who worshipped her in Eleusis. Persephone teased him— dangerously stoking the raging fire. She moved her leg between his thighs and grazed past him again, listening as he hissed sharply at the contact. Persephone nipped at his jaw line, moving her hand down his stomach to splay her palm against his arousal.

  Aidoneus exhaled sharply and spun her around, holding her from behind as he sat them down on his throne. He thrust his groin against her. Pinning her limbs to her sides with one arm wrapped around her waist, he firmly held her by the hips with the other.

  “Are you regretting giving me a separate throne, my lord?”

  He kissed her beneath her ear, her pulse fluttering under his lips. She squirmed on his lap when he lightly pulled at her earlobe with his teeth. “Now that you mention it…” He barely held back a laugh. “Can you imagine the look on my judges faces if we held court like this?”

  “Aidon!” She giggled, half-heartedly slapping at his hands as he groped her breasts from behind and pulled her back against him. She felt him squeeze upward again, and their mirth faded back into desire. His arousal dug insistently into her rear as he nibbled at her earlobe and ran his thumbs over the hardened nipples ghosting through the front of her chiton. Persephone gyrated against him until she felt him nestled between her cheeks through their clothing.

  He pulled back and whispered softly in her ear, his voice vulnerable. “Would you consider letting me take you this way?”

  He pushed up again to drive home the implication. She blushed and looked around. “Right now?”

  “No, no no…” he soothed and lightly kissed her neck with a smile. “In our own bed, of course, with… careful preparation. Someday, when we’re both thoroughly relaxed and able to go slowly.”

  Persephone’s breath caught at his suggestion. His fingertips danced across the underside of one arm, causing her whole body to shiver and grind seductively against his once again. “I didn’t know that interested you, husband…”

  “Knowing you in every way possible is what interests me, wife.” He lightly grazed her arm with his fingernails, until he found where she had jumped before. When he reached it, he was rewarded with another wiggle of her bottom against his groin. Heat pooled low in her belly, matching his heat below her.

  Her legs shook and she turned to kiss him. He wrapped an arm around Persephone to support her, turning her further still until she pulled her feet up onto the hard ebony arm of his throne and sat sideways in his lap, mating her tongue with his. She broke away and leaned her forehead against his. “Yes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to know you in every way possible as well,” she whispered. He heatedly locked his lips against hers again. Persephone delighted in his taste until he broke off, breathing heavily. Hades grabbed one of her slender ankles before moving his hand up her leg, drawing a slow path inward. “Perhaps very soon we can—”

  A bang on the door thundered through the quiet throne room. Both sides burst open with enough force to gutter the torches.

  “My queen! Lord Hades!” Hypnos flew in, his silver wings beating furiously as he cleared the doorway and alighted in the center of the room, out of breath.

  His eyes flared in anger as Persephone scrambled to get out of his lap. She stood awkwardly next to the throne, righting her clothes.

  Hypnos brought his hands up as if to shield himself from Aidon’s rage. “Aidoneus, please. I wouldn’t have dared to knock on the door, much less come in, if it wasn’t deadly serious!” Hypnos nodded to Persephone. “Forgive me, my queen. A thousand apol—”

  “Say your piece and get out, Hypnos!” he bellowed, his previously aroused mood stoking his anger. Aidoneus watched his friend cower and his wife jump at his voice and forced himself to calm down. “You can apologize for this incident later.”

  Hypnos took a deep breath. “He’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “Sisyphus escaped.”

  “That’s not possible!”

  “It gets worse. Aidon, my brother…” The silver haired god’s lip quivered. “Minos and Rhadamanthys are with him, but…”

  “Where are they?”

  “The shores of the Cocytus. Aidon, we need you there. You’ll want to bring the staff.”

  Aidoneus paled and stood up. He looked back to her contritely. “Persephone…”

  “I’m coming with you,” she replied. There would be time for apologies later.

  3.

  While Hypnos went to find Nyx, Aidoneus and Persephone hurried down the staircases to the entrance of the palace. Without saying a word, he pulled her close against him and enveloped them both in dark smoke. They emerged from the ether at the farthest ends of the Fields of Asphodel, the darkness dissipating around them. Aidon grasped her hand and walked quickly toward the River of Lamentation, his long strides forcing her to walk briskly. The gray earth and flowering stalks became scattered and shorter as they went, then disappeared entirely, replaced by jagged rock.

  Along the silent River Cocytus, black hooded shades stared into the waters, weeping despondently. The stench of the water made bile churn in Persephone’s throat, bringing her back to a day long ago, when Attica had gone to war and the fields of wheat were razed. Demeter had shielded her from the sight of crows picking apart the remains of horses and hoplite soldiers. But her mother couldn’t conceal the acrid smell of blood and decay. It was as if the Cocytus had washed through those fields, and preserved all the foulness within its stagnant depths.

  Wailing and cursing interrupted her morbid reverie. Just ahead, Thanatos writhed in pain, his wings beating incessantly against the ground like an injured bird.

  Persephone picked up her skirts and quickened her pace, feeling sharp rocks abrade her ankles. She winced at the first scrape, then set her jaw against the pain. Aidoneus jogged next to her in long, heavy strides, his staff level at his side like a spear. She cried out in the direction of the judges. “Minos! What happened?”

  The judge joined her, following as she ran to where the Minister of Death lay. “My queen,” he said, out of breath, “we don’t know!”

  “What’s wrong with Thanatos?”

  “The Ephyrean was here one moment,” Minos shuddered, “then the next, the chains…”

  Persephone blanched as Thanatos turned toward her. A master of sleight of hand…

  The manacles that once held Sisyphus’s wrists were now on Thanatos’s arms. The links of iron chain laced through flesh and bone, grotesquely exiting his skin on the other side. There was no blood, no other sign of injury; he was a god. But, there was
pain. Against all instinct, she forced herself not to be sick. The bile welling in her throat since she reached the shores of the Cocytus abated, replaced with empathy. The sight of her husband’s friend, her friend, in such agony superseded the ghastly sight of the chains impaling his arms. “Thanatos! Stay still.”

  “My queen, you do not need to see this!” he yelled out, turning away from her.

  Aidoneus walked to him, his heavy staff thumping on the ground with each step. Persephone ran over to Thanatos and knelt down to cradle his head, narrowly avoiding a thrashing wing.

  “Please,” he said through gritted teeth, “Don’t… This was my fault—”

  “No. This wasn’t,” she said, wiping beads of sweat off his forehead with the cloth of her mantle.

  “Sisyphus planned it all along,” Hades snarled, speaking to Thanatos. “He spent the entire judgement distracting us. Throwing us off guard. I should have read his thoughts… I should have been reading them the whole time. I let this happen.” He knelt next to Thanatos and placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m so sorry, my friend. This is going to hurt more than you can imagine.”

  “It already fucking hurts!” he screamed.

  “What are you going to do?” Persephone said, looking up at her husband.

  “Break the chains, pull them out,” Aidon said quietly. He inspected the chains. “Most of them are missing…”

  “Just do it already!” Thanatos gritted his teeth.

  “You may want to look away—”

  “No,” Persephone said. She remembered from her youth when one of the Naiads had tended to another, removing a forgotten fishhook stuck deep in her heel. Persephone took the edge of her chiton and tore a strip of it away, wadding it up in her fist.

  “What are you doing?” Thanatos said dizzily, the pain making him nauseous.

  “Making sure you don’t crack your teeth,” she muttered, twisting it into a bit.

  Aidoneus kept his voice calm and motions steady. “You will heal. But the pain—”

  “Of course I’ll heal! I’m a fucking god, aren’t I?!” He forced a smile around the pain.

  Persephone twisted the wool again and put it between Thanatos’s teeth. He looked up into her eyes. The mask of anger, his feigned mastery of the pain, melted into fear. His eyes widened in panic, a vulnerability he only allowed her to see for a moment. She stroked his forehead. “Just be still, Thanatos.”

  She held him and watched as Aidoneus rolled a small boulder over to where he lay.

  “I thought nothing could break the Chains of Tartarus.”

  “Everything has a weakness,” her husband said quietly, raising the raven standard. “Hold him steady!” he called out to Minos and Rhadamanthys.

  Aidoneus draped the center of the chain over the boulder, stretching out Thanatos’s arms. The judges gripped him at the elbows and held his wings while Persephone leaned his head in her lap. “It will be all right,” she whispered to him.

  “On three,” Aidoneus said. Thanatos started breathing hard around the twisted wool, bracing himself. Persephone nodded. “One, two…”

  The staff landed with a resounding crack, and Persephone flinched away from the noise, feeling the ground lurch and shake. Death bit down hard and screamed through his clenched jaw, his arms flailing, flinging Minos to the earth while Rhadamanthys desperately maintained his grip. The boulder beneath the chains was broken into rubble. She tried to calm Thanatos, and saw Minos grasp his free arm to still him. The chain lacing through his wrists burned red hot from where it had been struck. Persephone smelled seared flesh and tried to push it from her mind so she wouldn’t retch. She focused on Thanatos’s face again, wiping away a tear that trailed down from his right eye. “Thanatos. Please! Be still… I’m sorry. I’m so sorry…”

  A female hand appeared from behind her and rested on Thanatos’s forehead. Persephone saw a beautiful, pale face framed in weightless black hair come into view beside her. The woman whispered to Thanatos. “Shhh…”

  His head slumped to the side and his eyes shut. Thanatos stopped moving his wings and lay still, his breathing light. The strange goddess gently pulled the twisted wool from between his teeth. She hovered above Persephone, then moved as though she were swimming through the air to face the young goddess.

  “You did nothing for which you should ever apologize, Aristi Chthonia,” she said softly. “No matter what anyone tells you.”

  Aristi Chthonia. The name the House of Nyx and the Hundred Handed Ones called her. There was only one being this could be. Persephone kept Thanatos’s head in her lap and bowed her head to the last of the Protogenoi. “Lady Nyx.”

  The elder goddess smiled and lightly lifted Persephone’s chin until the Queen’s blue gray eyes met her silver rimmed ones. “You never need bow before me, Queen of the Underworld,” she said, smiling. Her face grew solemn again as she stroked Thanatos’s unconscious forehead. “Especially not after showing such kindness to my son.”

  Hypnos alighted on the ground behind them. “Mother—”

  “He’ll be fine,” she said, and caressed Thanatos’s sleeping forehead again. “My poor, sweet boy…”

  The Goddess of Night grasped Death’s right arm in one hand before closing her eyes. The alabaster flesh on it disappeared for a moment and released a chain, the links falling neatly between the bones and onto the rocks below. She opened her eyes and his arm was made whole but for deep pits on his skin, the edges darkened where the broken chains had burned him.

  “Hades…”

  The bone of his left arm was squeezed within a link of chain. Aidoneus knelt down and stared at Persephone, his jaw set tight. Just this once, my love, look away… his eyes seemed to say to her. She kept her gaze trained on his face as he focused again on his task. Hades yanked the link out, snapping the bone in two as he did so. The sound made her stomach turn. Her husband winced as he pulled the metal away. Though he was unconscious, Thanatos jerked to the side, then stilled, his head held steady in Persephone’s lap. Nyx patiently waited until the bone healed, knitting itself back together, before she released his arm. His scarred flesh appeared over it once more.

  “We are all healing more slowly these days,” she said, then looked to Hades. “Where is the rest of the chain?”

  He sighed, frustrated. “Sisyphus stole it. I almost wonder now, Lady Nyx, if he allowed himself to be captured. The things he said at trial… If I had read him, none of this would have—”

  “This is not your fault, Liberator,” Nyx said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Nor yours, Persephone.”

  She gathered Thanatos’s limp form in her arms, the fringes of the darkness that surrounded her rushing in around him. They gingerly touched Thanatos, the wavering tendrils drifting softly over his limbs as if to comfort him.

  “You’ll know what to do,” she said to Aidon, pointedly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That you’ll know what to do,” she repeated. Nyx looked back to Persephone. “The tidings Hecate brought to me were ill, indeed. We must hold strong together, now more than ever. They will look to you, Aristi Chthonia, for guidance.” Nyx rose upward toward Erebus, carrying her son, until she disappeared into the mists that hung above the riverlands and the darkness beyond. Hypnos nodded quietly to Hades and Persephone, worry etched across his face, then followed his mother and brother into the fog.

  Persephone turned to the others, her heart sinking under the weight of Nyx’s words, and saw her husband staring at the ground, his brow furrowed, his mouth set in a thin line. She walked over to him and laid her head against his chest. He brought an arm around her shoulders.

  She looked up at him. “Has this—”

  “No; never before.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know,” he said under his breath, looking out across the Cocytus and the shades weeping at its shores.

  Persephone leaned into him. The pathways leading toward the palace from the marshlands of Acheron teemed wit
h shades waiting to be judged. The emaciated, spectral forms desperately tore the asphodel roots from the gray earth and bit into them, heedless of the fact that whatever hunger they still felt was an illusion— a shadow of the manner in which they died. Their bellies were distended by starvation. Another boatload disembarked with Charon’s guidance and walked solemnly toward the Trivium. She remembered what Kronos told her in the Pit and shuddered. Again, his terrible prophecy played out in her mind in all its vivid detail. Destruction, violation, rape, the end of all things…

  Rules that bound the cosmos were bending, twisting, and disintegrating. The world above was breaking apart— and with it, she realized as ice poured down her back, the world below.

  ***

  “Merope.”

  The nymph startled awake. She sat up in bed, looking around her small room for the voice. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and shadows cast by the single oil lamp burning low beside her bed. Ever since Queen Persephone had given her this room she’d kept it lit to hold back the encompassing dark. Merope looked to the door, then the plainly decorated walls, and lastly to the small ochre vases arranged on a table opposite the bed. The chair in the corner was empty but for a soft fleece thrown over its surface. She turned and glanced at the dark curtains draped across the window. A flash of light caught her eye.

  The oil lamp’s flame glinted again before she saw the shape of a man crouched on the window ledge, a face staring out from under a black hood. Her heart leapt into her throat, choking back her ability to scream. Merope backed up on her bed in fear, pulling the sheets up to her neck.

  “It never ceases to amaze me,” the shadow said, hopping down from her window and examining the flashing sickle that terrified her, “how this instills fear even in those already dead. Perhaps because it’s the last thing they see before coming here.”