by Eris Adderly
The Lord of the Underworld drew out his bident and painted her with a withering eye.
“Hate me or no, I expect that fruit eaten by morning, little flower. Or, so help me”—the æther split in two in the wake of his iron weapon—“I will feed it to you, myself.”
With the threat in place, Hades stepped through, and the orchard was silent again.
It was the first time he’d called her ‘little flower’ and it had hurt.
This was what it was like. Her mother had warned, and she’d refused to listen.
But you don’t have to suffer this. Not forever.
She turned over the pomegranate to consider Polyxene’s ring.
No, indeed. Not forever at all.
*
The Helm of Darkness was the only thing between Hades and a terrified riot of mortal shades where they gathered on the shores of the Lethe. To walk among them unseen was not a necessity, but their cowering and wailing would not help him think. By contrast, their milling procession in his unfocused line of sight helped to still him the way beings of brighter realms might be stilled by gazing at a pond of gliding fish.
If I could only drink from the river myself. Forget this entire disaster.
The souls of the dead took up the waters of the Lethe to forget all their previous incarnations. If they chose to spin from the dark womb of the grave again, to bloom on the earth anew, it was the bargain the Underworld required them to make. It was their only chance to begin again, wiped clean and innocent as a babe.
And what of his next life? In the past, he had divided his existence in two: the time before the War, and the time after, in which he’d ruled this domain away from the struggles and machinations of his peers.
Now, he would portion his ages another way. There was the time before Persephone … and then there would be everything else. There was little doubt left: his actions had destroyed the ‘everything else’ for them both.
He had heard the sons and daughters of men in his realm describe the winding trail of the Lethe as a disorienting sight to behold. The River of Forgetting, they said, appeared to both exist and not exist, at once. To look upon it was to know the lead-grey current was present, and yet to blink and shake their heads as though they couldn’t quite remember what it was they’d just seen, or why their gaze had fallen where it did.
As the realm’s immortal lord, Hades had no choice but to accept the truth of their tales. Other than its contribution to the darkening of his extremities, the Lethe left him unaffected. He was as blind to its influence as he was to any number of important realities, it seemed.
Realities like tears over a cursed pomegranate.
Regret reached between his ribs again with a clawed hand. It took hold of things vital and soft, squeezing and twisting.
The betrayal on her face accused him, lovely features contorted in his mind’s eye to reflect the damage he’d done.
Should he have known? Could he have known?
Aphrodite’s veiled suggestion, once a distasteful scheme, had become a matter of unfortunate necessity, as Hades saw it.
Persephone, it turned out, did not feel the same.
His ability to read the motivations of others had yet to fail him in such a spectacular fashion. She wanted to stay with him, did she not? Or at least return after this charade with Hermes played out to its ridiculous end. He’d pictured her leaping to eat the fruit, to make certain no further Olympian schemes could part them for long. After the last time they’d made love, he’d only assumed …
Yes, made love.
He let the word roll around in his skull, just short of forming on his tongue. The Lord of the Dead had never loved anyone, possibly not even himself. Was this what it was to love? To ache in the other’s absence, to covet their smiles beyond any sanity of his own?
How had he arrived at a point such as this?
There was Aphrodite blackmailing him into abducting a goddess he’d never met. There was his instant lust for Persephone that had grown into … into what? Coming to care about her pleasure and pain? His enjoyment of fulfilling her desires? What had happened to him?
When had the idea of marriage vows become anything more than lip service he’d paid to Aphrodite?
When had he begun to love her?
Does it matter, when you’ve destroyed it all now?
He had never attempted to force her into anything until the pomegranate. All the pageantry of asking for her obedience, his games of restraint, had been just that. Pageantry and games; titillations meant to cater to his dark fancies—and hers, if he could believe his good fortune. Every step of the way he had sought her permission, had extracted promises she would speak if they reached her limits. She never had.
The Olympians had entrusted him with countless deaths over untold ages, but never a single life. Not until Persephone, and it had been her own. She had trusted, she had served, she had begged, and she had surrendered. All with such a naked, honest desire as Hades had never seen.
And now he had become the villain, just as she’d named him in jest the night he’d come to her with the belt. When the inevitable ties of the pomegranate—her captor’s fruit—brought her back to the Underworld, Persephone would feel nothing but resentment.
If he forced her, she could not choose him. She would never share his company with the same blissful abandon she’d shown this last week.
She would not love him.
It had become the most miserable fate he could imagine, and he’d brought it upon himself. He had done everything wrong. Actions which in the past wouldn’t have made him think twice now haunted him as sickening. Sickening and awful and wrong.
Well what are you going to do about it, Polydegmon? Wallow in self-loathing here on the shores of the Lethe?
He removed the Helm and every mortal in sight shrank back with a collective gasp. His bident drew out between his hands, and the Underworld tensed at his whim, ready.
*
The Elaionapothos rested in its platform state, and Persephone sat on its edge, elbows on knees, clutching the pomegranate in grim hands.
Hours and hours staring at the fruit had seared her mind barren, like a cloudless summer sky traversed by nothing but the sun. She’d thought every thought it was possible to think, and they’d abandoned her to a stillness by turns until the space inside her head grew eerie with quiet.
Every thought save one.
“I will feed it to you, myself.”
She had no doubts he could do it. Her abilities were nothing in this realm. His command of the stone, the power he had to come and go unseen? Those alone would likely be enough to accomplish his ends, and if Hades was any peer to the lords of the other two realms, then the displays she’d seen thus far were but a sliver of his entire might.
Persephone shivered.
What choice would be left to her n—
“Goddess.”
The double doors to the chamber burst inward, rebounding against the walls. Persephone leapt in her seat and fumbled the pomegranate. Hades strode into the room, collapsing his bident as he came.
Her heart was in her throat.
“Hades, wai—”
“Have you eaten it?”
She looked him up and down in disdain.
“No.”
His eyes found the red fruit, discarded on the floor. In a heartbeat, he was across the room to retrieve it, to stand in front of her, holding it out in one dark-fingered hand.
She crossed her arms over her chest, the refusal clear. Hades sighed and something loosened in his shoulders.
The god knelt at her feet.
“This is a heavy thing I have asked of you,” he said, placing the object of her displeasure upon her knee but not releasing his grip.
“You didn’t ask,” she said. “You commanded.” She made no move to touch either him or the offending pomegranate.
“Yes,” he said, “and for that I am sorry.” Was there sincerity in those bottomless eyes of his? Who could trust anything
now? “If you will only listen, my lov—”
“Don’t call me ‘love’.”
His head tilted down and to the side, jaw tightened, but he continued.
“Persephone, you were right.” She blinked at him, forgetting to glare. “About the control, the fear. About everything. I cannot give over control of this to the Olympians. It is too important.”
When the line of her mouth firmed up even more, he set the fruit on the Oil and returned the imploring hand to her knee.
“I thought,” he said, meeting her eyes at last, “you would want to stay with me. I thought this—” He seemed to bite his own tongue, before trying again in a more measured fashion. “I thought, with the pomegranate, we could … it would give us some assurance.”
“Assurance?” She could feel her brows climbing.
“That even after Hermes came for you, Demeter wouldn’t be able to keep us apart. Not for long. We both know she’ll have you locked away even more strictly now that this”—he gestured between them—“has happened.”
“It seems you and my mother have plenty in common.” She uncrossed her arms to lean forward on her hands, seething. “You both want to keep me locked up.”
He inhaled, a deep, rib-expanding breath, and let it go. When he spoke again, he sounded tired. “That is not true.”
Her silence challenged his denial, but Hades was not deterred.
“This,” he said, taking up the pomegranate again, “can be a way, but it is not what you think.” When she opened her mouth to snap at him again, he held up a hand. “If what we’ve shared means anything to you at all, you will hear my plan. Please.”
Against her better judgment, Persephone listened.
It was ridiculous, and it answered none of the questions that burned in her chest. It was also the only way she would leave the Underworld unscathed. The weight of Polyxene’s ring reminded her there were other escapes as well, provided she could get through this first, and trickiest of doors.
His words stopped and Hades stared at her, waiting for acceptance. When she said nothing, he dared to reach for her hands. To gather them up and close them around the fruit of his realm.
“Please,” he said, and such a foreign word on his lips, for him to repeat with such frequency. “In the orchard. That was a mistake. That is not how I wish it to be between us.”
Persephone looked at his hands over hers, a study in darkness and light. The Lord of the Dead had persuaded her before, and blinding joy had made the cost dear.
Still, the goddess saw no other way.
“Very well.”
Hades nodded. Rose to his feet.
He offered her a hand, and she took it, questionable though their alliance was, and stood up after him.
“There is one more thing I must ask of you,” he said, “before you leave this place.”
She scowled. “Have you not asked enough?”
“Do you agree this is a complicated matter?”
Her eyes narrowed, but she tipped her head.
“Then I hope you will agree not to complicate it further by speaking to any of the others about the Elaionapothos. If there is one additional distraction we don’t need, it’s a race among immortals to lay hands on a new object of power. Not to mention if they come to realize the lord of the third realm has an advantage …” He shook his head. “I might almost say I regret its creation, but how can I? It brought me to you.”
If such a thing were possible, Persephone softened and hardened at the same time.
“Please,” he said. “They cannot know.”
Agree and leave. The only way.
“I will keep your secrets, Hades,” she said, brandishing the pomegranate like a weapon, “but you will not break my trust again.”
*
Hermes stood before the Throne of Tears, the bearer of ruinous, if expected, news. The Lord of the Dead faced him from the seat of his rulership, stoic in a way he appeared to reserve for other gods. Persephone sat on his thigh, the picture of a lord’s chosen consort, just as they’d agreed.
He’d asked her, for appearances, to arrange herself just so, but she was no longer blind to his motivations. It might be the last stretch of physical contact they had, and Hades was going to squeeze from it every last drop. She tried to convince herself, for her own sake, that she wasn’t sitting there trying to do the same.
“And Basileus expects to simply rescind his word, not two weeks gone?” Hades looked down his nose at the Messenger. “Did he not imagine the Fair One’s matchmaking would be effective?”
The arm around her waist curled tighter. The result of this meeting was inevitable, but the impression Hermes left with was not. Persephone nestled further against the planes of Hades’s chest.
“My Lord, you must understand,” Hermes said, with a subtle bow, “there will be nothing left for any of us if Persephone does not rejoin her mother. Demeter’s wrath on the mortal plane … it’s killing them. What would you have us do?”
To see the mischievous god speaking with such humble sobriety had Persephone frowning again. Just how dire had matters become up there in her absence? Had her mother lost her mind?
“The sons of men barely make offering to me now,” said Hades, “and yet my realm flourishes as they pass across the Styx. Why should it trouble me if Hôrêphoros fills the Underworld with their shades in mountains with her petulance?”
His fingers pressed in at her hip, somehow warm against the chill in his voice. Against her better judgment, she leaned into the half-embrace.
There had been such joy. Is this how mortals experienced their little lives? Everything so temporary? So easily broken? The nights in his arms, in his thrall, they were all slipping away like so many clouds through her fingers.
Hermes paced the floor, a little of the Trickster she knew returning. “You claim you want Persephone for a consort, Polydegmon.” Slate blue eyes glittered and a blond brow ticked upward. “Will you have your beloved watch her mother destroy herself along with all of us? Will you ask your bride to watch the flowers and trees she loves wither and die, and to stand aside and do nothing?”
The god spun his words with careful and clever intent, but that did not stop them from carrying a pang of truth. Her arguments with herself and with Hades centered around this very question, though the Swift One could not have heard them. She considered the Lord of the Dead from the corner of her eye, the trappings of his mad plan making her squint.
If looks could have turned another immortal to stone on the spot, the one Hades fixed the Messenger with then would have had Medusa nodding in approval. When he broke from the glare at last, it was only to nuzzle his mouth behind her ear and steal his last and lightest of kisses. It was no more than a brush of lips and Persephone had to allow it. Their audience was watching.
“The agreement remains,” he whispered. She tried to keep her features neutral as the hand at her waist began slipping up her side to her shoulder.
He turned to the fleet-footed god and cleared his throat.
“Very well,” he said, voice just the wrong side of too loud. “I will permit you to leave here with Persephone today, Swift One, but understand this”—his fingers came in a possessive circle over the front of her throat—“the daughter of Zeus at my side has eaten the fruit of my realm. By consuming the pomegranate, she has bound herself to me by the laws of the Fates, which even your lord on Olympos will not dispute. Have her explain this to the Lord of Lightnings, and to her mother.” A thumb nudged her jaw, making her face tilt toward his. “She will return to me, whatever they demand.”
The god who set her blood on fire was making no subtle display of his claims, and if fury wasn’t enough of a struggle for her to contain, arousal managed to make up the difference. Were they alone, she would claw his eyes.
Right before spreading your legs. You’re a disaster.
Hermes was agog. “Is this true?” he asked her. “Have you eaten the fruit?”
Hades released his hold and she st
raightened herself.
“He speaks the truth, Messenger. I am bound to the Underworld. To Lord Hades.”
She didn’t look down, but felt him capture her hand and lace their fingers together into a squeeze. Now his trust in her would have to begin. With the secret of the Elaionapothos, with so many things.
“But Persephone, this”—he made some ineffectual gesture at the pair on the throne—“this—”
“This what?” she said, standing. “Do they not believe me capable of making my own choices on Olympos?” She hoped her words were a jab for Hades, as well.
Hermes tried to swallow the new development, no doubt reworking at a frantic pace the way he would report it to Zeus. He looked from her to Hades and back again, and it was the Lord of the Dead who broke the silence.
“Be off with you then,” he said. “Fulfill the letter of your lord’s command, and have him see the truth with his own eyes. But you will respect my consort, Messenger.” Hades stood now, radiating menace so the hall seemed to shrink around him. “I expect Persephone to return unmolested. The consequences for failing me in this will only begin with a permanent expulsion from my realm. They will end somewhere you do not wish to contemplate. Do I make myself clear?”
“Indeed.” Another quick bow and Hermes took a step away from the throne. It was the only time Persephone had seen him cowed.
Their audience had concluded with far less debate than she’d anticipated. Something rushed away from her that she could not control or grasp with her hands, so many waves retreating from a shore.
The goddess stepped down from the dais in a daze, the pomegranate looming large in her thoughts.
It’s over. Done.
And when her father found out? Well … she was not able, at that moment, to distinguish relief from lament.
“Lord Hades.” Hermes accompanied his curt goodbye with a nod and turned to the throne room doors. “Goddess?” Neither of them could travel the æther unaided in this realm. They would have to depart by less efficient means.
