by Eris Adderly
The fervor built. Her eyes couldn’t stay open, but purple and white lights banded behind fluttering lids. Nonsensical sounds bubbled in her throat as she jerked like a blind thing, seizing.
The throbbing came at intervals, and those intervals decreased. Faster, faster, that florid pulse thundered a crescendo in her ears, her sex, until there was no silence between its ruddy beats at all.
It overtook her.
There was nowhere to hide, no way to delay, held wide and fast by the Elaionapothos as she was. Her mouth came open to choke on the enormity of feeling, the helpless rush as she surged her completion around Hades’s fingers.
Even before the convulsing subsided, Persephone knew the pang of a terrifying truth.
It will never be enough. This. Him. Never.
A hand was smoothing hair away from her face, kisses made tracks up the damp line of her neck. Her muscles were limp and euphoria rang in her ears. For a time, there was nothing but the sound of her slowing breath and the Lord of the Dead petting her cooling skin with a feather’s touch.
When the silence broke, it was with his voice and, at the same time he shifted against her back, she remembered he was very naked.
“Tell me the truth, Goddess,” he said. “Have the Sons of Man served your needs?”
There was something about the question more intimate than the cries he just pulled from her body. It was a truth no other knew, save perhaps, in some small part, Polyxene. And what about him kept compelling answers?
She shook her head. “They haven’t.”
He moved again, higher, almost caging her upper body with his. She could see his face now, and those black eyes held her as surely as the Elaionapothos.
“We have something in common, you and I.” Hades traced a thumb over her lower lip. “We’ve tried to slake our desires on mortal flesh and skill, but it hasn’t quite satisfied, has it?” Another tiny shake of her head.
Part of his very presence uncoiled her instincts to defend or prevaricate; charmed them into a placid line, the subdued and weaving will of a snake. It was a dangerous lull—she might answer anything. Agree to anything.
“Let me share with you my own truth, Persephone,” he said. “I have known no immortal flesh.”
How naïve does he imagine me?
“You’re the lord of a realm.”
“I’ve made it no secret,” he went on, “though I doubt anyone on Olympos bothers with talk of me. Not when your maidenhood has been such an intrigue all this time.” His smile curved and grew, teasing with the lines at the corners of his eyes.
“But Aphrodite,” she said. “She was here. In your rooms.”
And where Lust goes …
His hand moved to cup her jaw, eyes focused and grave, once more. “There has never been a shred of interest on either of our parts,” he said. “Aphrodite’s very essence and mine are in complete opposition. She would never tolerate my demands, nor would I hers.”
“What are your demands?” A whispered question, coming more wide-eyed than Persephone would have liked.
“Discipline,” he said. “Surrender.” He let the backs of his fingers slide down her trapped arm to where it sank into the Oil. Parts of her tired from bliss began to warm again with want. “The nature of lust is not control of the self. It pursues pleasure for its own sake, of its own will.”
“You’ve”—she swallowed, wetting her throat—“you’ve strange ways of showing me I should go without pleasure.”
“I never said that.” He leaned down for a kiss, which she gave, her stomach tightening at the hard length pressing at the small of her back. Hades pulled back just far enough to speak.
“I’ve asked for your obedience. I’ve asked you to give over your will to me.” Sweet creation, those words! And was she arching against him? “Your pleasure is mine now, to allow or deny, but this”—he rolled his hips—“is too important. It is beyond my games. Will you make with me, Persephone, the only union the deathless plane has ever known between the Sky and the Underworld? Shall we be one another’s first taste of our own kind?”
Hades spun enticing words, but the goddess teetered on a knife edge, grasping for signs of certainty that might tip her.
“If I say ‘no’?”
All motion ceased.
“I will not force you, Green One. Is that what you want? To stop?” She could read it in the tilt of his brows, the tension in his arms. He did not deceive.
“No,” she said, “I don’t want to stop.”
The rough kiss came as a relief. She couldn’t have stared into those black eyes any longer without losing something of herself. The cost of this bargain was already high enough.
A cost you don’t seem to mind paying so very much, do you?
A heavy erection slipped between her thighs, sluiced through new wetness.
No. No she did not.
His fingers closed over her wrist, just above the Oil. “Shall I free you?” he asked.
Persephone took a full breath in and out while some gathering force thickened the air between them. Her lips parted. Did her pupils dilate when she decided?
“No.”
A hiss and a growl. His hand disappeared and she felt wrist and knuckle bumping and rotating between her cheeks, streaking her own fluid lust over his cock. The blunt head nudged, ready to end an age-long ignorance for them both. Consequences hovered.
“Goddess.”
The one word signaled the last of his restraint.
In the silent space between thought and deed, a sliver of clarity opened against the haze of want. Neither of them had gone seeking this. Abandoned hope and blackmail had brought them here, but they both saw a new path and took it. And Hades didn’t chase, as the others had done. There was no fawning or posturing. There was only his call, which she’d chosen again and again to obey.
Come to me. Come to me. Come.
The Lord of the Dead hilted himself, filling her, and Persephone gasped.
And gasped again. The loud crack of stone hitting stone broke the heady spell in the chamber, and something inside her jarred loose with it. Something marrow-deep, familiar and unfamiliar at once. She could almost grind it between her teeth.
Hades froze, impaling her from above. Where her line of sight came into focus out over the plane of the Elaionapothos, a stalactite the size of her arm had fractured away overhead and fallen to the limestone floor. Behind her, a grunt as the god both acknowledged and chose to ignore. The distraction lasted a breath, maybe two, and then Hades began to move.
He drew back and pushed home again, this time deliberate, slow as luxury, to the tune of a measured groan. Persephone stretched around him, the last of the day’s reservations scattered on the wind. Here was the most forbidden of forbidden things, and she would have it. Her choice. Hers, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
“Hades.” His name was everything. A cry of victory, a demand, a preening affirmation, all ground out in a voice she hardly recognized as her own.
He answered her with a slow roll of hips, his weight and pressure bearing her flat, pillowing her cheeks against his groin. There was no way he could touch her in enough places at once. Chest to her shoulders, lips at her cheekbone, the firm hold of a thumb at the small of her back—never enough.
And the Oil. Fates, the Elaionapothos. It held her indefensible; spread her for him, yet made her secure. The restraint at her wrist and knee removed all worry over decisions, all choice but to accept into her body the god who would court her for a wife.
Submit and be free, was the seductive song it sang, and Persephone found her arousal twisted up into a tight knot of intensity she’d never known.
A trio of percussive cracks interrupted them this time, and the goddess jerked at the sound of more stone hitting the floor, somewhere out of sight. There was a rumble of more rock grating against itself, and Hades slowed to a near standstill.
“Is there something wrong?”
“I don’t … think so.” Uncertai
nty stowed away with his assurances and Persephone’s brow furrowed.
“Is this … usual?”
“No,” he said after a pause, “but I don’t care.”
And he didn’t. Dark fingers gripped her at the waist and fitted her down onto his cock. They did this again. Again. Again.
Persephone moved with him as best she could, her back arching to take as much of the god as would fit. When his rolling gave way to the more primal need to thrust, Hades hunched to capture her mouth, their bodies now mirrored arcs. A circle made whole on the deathless plane, decay feeding into growth, the fruit of the grave nourishing spring-white buds and pumping the veins of green leaves until they withered and gave suck to death again.
They moved and worked together now, every push and flex rougher than the last, as though the coupling were a war. More of the cave formations fell, but it was nothing, now. All around them, impossibility frolicked. Stalagmites grew from the ground, glistening, building in sweaty heartbeats proportions meant to take ages, before crumbling and forming again. The air was thick, humid. Limestone glittered. Crystallized. The Oil of Desire held her and Hades had her.
The approach made her eyelids flutter. The drag of his cock, the shifting of swollen flesh—it was just out of reach, always one more push away. She grimaced, straining.
“Hades! Nnnh!”
“Makes two of us,” he slurred against to the top of her ear. The hand at her hip crept around, fingers seeking, finding. She made an angry sound of amplified pleasure, the infuriating ache so much closer to relief.
“I’m close, love,” he said, working her from inside and out. “Come for me now.”
The words did as much for her as any dancing touch, any filling cock. Her eyes snapped open.
“Come for me.”
Lungs filled. And filled. Her muscles tensed and burned.
“Come!”
Come to me. Come for me. Come.
Everything burst in a pulsing gush. The tightening of her belly forced out her held breath. The grip of her sex pulled at the length he fed her and Persephone came around Hades with a wail.
Chips of shattering stone pelted the Oil around them. There might have been a jolt to the floor, but the goddess couldn’t be sure under the pummel of hips, the staccato of profanities as Hades reached his limit.
“Persephone!”
He bottomed out, lancing his need with a growl. The pressure on her furthest places bordered on pain, but it didn’t matter. Too much of Hades was exactly the right amount, and he gave her just that, in jet after scalding jet. Filling her with ages of unspent need.
For a moment, nothing could be still. The Elaionapothos rippled beneath them. His cock twitched and she throbbed around him in the reckless wake of orgasm. Even the light in the room flickered from bright to dim, for it, too, required Hades’s control to maintain and the god had lost his grip on such things.
There were kisses along her cheekbone and Persephone felt the tremor in his arm as Hades tried to hold himself upright. With a final push, as though he might summarize all that had just taken place, he slid a hand down her arm and drew it from the Oil. The black non-liquid relinquished her knee as well, like dark soil pushing up a spring shoot. The Lord of the Dead collapsed behind her, heaving an exhausted sigh.
Her freed fingers flexed and clenched, testing their own use after time spent amid the inexplicable hold of the Elaionapothos. She straightened her knee, stretching, and felt her thighs slide together, the proof of boundaries leapt.
At least a dozen of her long breaths strung themselves end to end, making a line along which Persephone could pull her mind back into same plane as the rest of her body. Parts of her wavered in a dizzying way she’d never encountered among the Sons of Man. Her head was clear of noise, of the oppressive, listless chatter that at other times kept her just off balance. Here now, at last, she’d had the thing Demeter had assured her was so ruinous, and she was cleaned out, calm, and floating in unblemished peace.
He had brought her here.
Hades, the Unseen One, god beneath the earth, had done this for her. He and he only.
Persephone blinked, seeing the chamber around her for the first time in what seemed like hours. She pushed herself onto her back, and then rolled to her other side to find him.
I’m in bed with the Lord of the Underworld. Light of Creation, look at him!
It was true. There he lay, face, chest, and thighs as white as the Oil was black. A dark hand sprawled over his belly, and she followed the lines down to the curve of his cock, where it fell lax now in the sheen of their coupling. Every bit of languid nudity begged for the touch of her hands, from the charcoal arch of a foot to the mist-pale temptation of an exposed throat. So what kept her from doing just that?
He had to have felt her staring, because he turned his face to look up at her from under heavy lids. The haze of completion softened the trouble in his smile, and his arm fell wide away from his body, inviting.
And why not?
She nestled into his side, fingertips fanning along his ribcage, one bent knee draping over his. Discarded chitons were a joyous catastrophe beneath them.
What n—
Cold! Something wet popped her on the shoulder and she gave a little gasp. Hades’s eyes opened at her jerk and she looked to the ceiling just as another drop of water pocked down against her skin.
The overhead landscape of the chamber still hung heavy with descending stone, but there was no way to mistake it for the same dead cavern she’d seen on her way in the door. There were stalactites and stone curtains, yes, but they were new, and in different locations. Where before, there had been dry relics of the space’s forming, now there were wet inverted spires of living stone, dripping humid life onto their knobby counterparts rising from the floor. Onto her. The bones of the earth in Hades’s private rooms almost seemed to blossom, for lack of a better word.
“My Lord, is this normal?”
He huffed amusement and gathered her close at the hip. “Little flower, not a single piece of this is normal. Not you, not this”—he made a lazy gesture around the room with his free hand—“not any of it.”
She cast a wary eye around the altered space, the potential violence she saw now in the columns of stone. “Will it”—she bit her lip—“will it happen every time?”
The hand at her waist moved up into her wild hair, gripping and drawing her down near his face. “I have no idea, Persephone,” he said, awakening to mischief again. “But your assumption there will be other times is most encouraging.”
So was the hot tongue in her mouth, the scrape of nails at her scalp. If this was the ‘ruin’ to which obedience brought her, Persephone would obey and let him raze her to the ground, then beg to be remade so he could destroy her again.
*
It was a very different thing to put clothes back on with another immortal’s eyes on him. It was not the absentminded formality that came after bathing or sleeping. Hades wanted to liken the feeling to something, but there was nothing to which he could.
A daughter of Olympos was in his bed—well, atop the Elaionapothos, the nearest thing—stretched out on her side, head supported on her hand, green eyes following his every move. She’d thrown the red linen of her own garment in a haphazard drape over her curves, whether from some inexplicable modesty or mere habit, he didn’t know.
There appear to be any number of things you don’t know.
He fastened the remaining shoulder of his chiton with its fibula and moved to tie off his belt.
Why had he thought the occasional mortal woman would be an acceptable substitute for this? For her? Would he go on with the affairs of his realm, behaving as if nothing had changed?
And the cavern, lurching back into a formation cycle the moment their bodies had joined. An unnerving sight, yet the ichor in his veins sang with the seductive melody of growth and decay.
This whole arrangement should have been an inconvenience, but he’d accepted it might become e
ntertainment, instead. An amusement to pick up and put down at his leisure, for a time. What it would not—could not—become was a need, an ache.
Persephone blinked at him through languor and a lazy smile. “Had your fill already?” she said.
Hades swore to himself. Had his fill? Had his fill? She ought to be beneath him again and squealing right now, but the Lord of the Dead kept his face under control.
“The Underworld is a demanding realm,” he said, coming to stand at the edge of the platform. He trailed fingertips over her ankle, but she pulled the limb back, moving to sit upright instead. Fabric threatened to slip below her breast.
“And you’ll be abandoning me again for how long?”
Did she sound … eager?
“Provided I find my duties as I left them,” he said, “perhaps a day.”
“A day.” Eager became annoyed. “You’re going to lock me in here to stare at your furniture until you return?” He raised a brow, but she anticipated his doubts. “What chance would you say there is of me finding a way out of the Underworld on my own?”
Hades smirked. “None.”
“So,” she said, coming up to sit on her heels, “why not let me explore? Or are you afraid of a single, powerless immortal running loose down here in your caves?”
The sight of her disheveled on her knees had him biting back a snarl. Powerless? Hardly. But there was no need to be a tyrant, not when she’d agreed to his terms.
“Very well, Persephone,” he said. “As I am more than capable of finding you no matter where you may disappear to within my realm”—he paused to watch her face for understanding—“you have leave to wander.” Something in her shoulders relaxed at this, and he nodded, satisfied.
On his way out the door, he ran a hand up one of the damp stalagmites and rubbed slick fingertips together, frowning. It made no sense.
He turned to her before slipping into the corridor. The goddess hadn’t moved.
