by Eris Adderly
It was his very own Hall of Judgments, right here in his private rooms.
He lay on his back, fist clutching what remained of the torn chiton Persephone had worn the day she fell into his domain. As he’d done dozens of times already, Hades brought the grey cloth to his face and inhaled the fading memory of her scent. An angry erection refused to leave him be.
How had he let Hermes walk out of his palace with her, unopposed? He could have had the Trickster bound in stone. He could have seen that thrice-damned pomegranate down her throat any number of ways. Who could have stopped him?
No one.
But you wanted her to choose. Her presence here must be her own idea, or it will be meaningless.
The Elaionapothos moved under his free hand where it lay on the flattened surface. He rolled on his side and the Oil responded further in a boiling of slick curves. Again, the twitch of his need was in hand. Again, he began the pointless strokes.
It had happened twice already, in the time since Persephone had left him. Though a deathless god had no need of sleep, he’d resorted to its attempt for the sake of escape alone. But solace refused him its mercy.
Closing his eyes had become a cruelty as it never had. She waited for him there; the scent of spring and petal-pale curves for him to ruin with his lust. The music of that voice, calling his name. Green eyes holding his, permitting, accepting.
Those eccentricities of his desire nature, which had him forgoing a consort these many ages, had met their match in Persephone. Against all reason, she’d understood his sickness, if that’s what it was, and had offered herself as a remedy. He’d grown to believe no immortal lover would tolerate his urges and yet, each time they’d welled up and Hades thought he’d go mad, she’d opened herself and said, ‘Take’.
She was the only immortal to have given freely to him without asking anything in return. And the more savage he became in the taking, the more zeal she poured into her surrender.
Persephone was his every desire and the Elaionapothos existed for one purpose alone: to give those desires a shape.
And so it had, after a fashion.
He ran a palm over the shifting black form at his side. If he closed his eyes, its surface felt all too real. He palmed a counterfeit breast and it was warm and soft with the proper weight and give. A nipple tempted his tongue, but he knew the salt and sweet of his little flower was beyond reach. The Oil would offer back a tasteless nothing.
When he opened his eyes, some nameless horror rippled along his spine and up through his throat. Here was the forgery of his love, wrought by his wishes and an object of power. The glossy black curves pretending to be his Persephone repelled with the chill of the uncanny. Sightless eyes stared out into a void, and they were not hers.
Not hers.
Hades levered himself away from the Elaionapothos, his own growl of disgust propelling his limbs. The false Persephone melted back into the slick platform while he stood back several paces, breath coming ragged with the violence of need.
The flames of indignation stoked him and the fury vented through his hands. He pulled at his cock, a punishment and relief at once.
When was the last time his passions had driven him to this? He couldn’t say. Before Aphrodite’s bargain, his ages below the earth had served to subdue his fervor. But no longer. Persephone’s gifts had ruined him, and his fist pumped over his ache in a poor imitation of her perfect embrace.
You had it. You had it and you lost it!
Completion tore from his throat in a roar. The sum of his fury slicked his pumping fist, drops of bitter seed, of useless temper, splattered the limestone floor. Hades’s vision blurred to scarlet as he stood, laboring for his breath.
Everything was out of his hands. His rulership meant nothing, would buy him nothing. What purpose did it serve? Even as he would draw the time near, the equinox retreated from his grasp.
And if she doesn’t return? If you are not her choice?
He staggered down to one knee, knuckles to the floor, and swore an oath no other god would dare repeat. On the mortal plane, there were tremblings in the earth, and the Sons of Man fled to their altars with offerings and fear.
Persephone, it turned out, had been right: Hades needed control. He needed her. And for all his power and reach, the Lord of the Dead had neither.
The act of gathering sandals and chiton again, of clothing himself and raking the wrath of his fingers back through his hair, had to suffice as an avenue to composure. He had eternity, but it was useless.
In a flickering of will, the columns of his throne room took the place of stalactites around him, and light shuddered, baleful and violet at the edges, from his sigil in the floor.
Hades assumed the seat of his power and tapped the veins of the Unseen Realm with a word.
“Hekate.”
*
Persephone ground her teeth at the newest disruption to her peace. Helios was only beginning his climb from the east, and she’d spent the time before dawn watching the stars dim over the fields of Nysa. A return to the birthplace of her troubles, a suitable cradle for thought in these days since she’d returned to the upper realms, and then the rift had opened in the æther.
Now Demeter stood over her shoulder, glowering into the sunrise as Persephone sat, arms around her knees wearing a matching scowl.
After a building storm of silence, the goddess spoke over the dawn, her voice low and dark. “I spent ages protecting you,” she said. “You repay my efforts this way?”
Persephone controlled the breath she let out through her nose. From the corner of her eye, she could see her mother’s chiton rippling in a breeze that affected none of the grasses around it.
“You speak as though it were my choice to tumble into the abyss,” she replied through a tightened jaw. “I did nothing to invite this.”
“You could have refused him.”
There would be no peace. No peace here.
“Oh?” She tilted her eyes up to her mother at last, her brows rising with them. “With what power? Or do you believe the Lord of the Dead tolerates refusals in his own domain?”
Now the elder goddess deigned to fix her with a look. “And the pomegranate?” Her lip curled, hand coming to her hip. “Was it the only seed of his you couldn’t refuse?”
Persephone made a face, and her arms unfolded so she could brace her weight on her palms and lean back for a better look at what her mother had become.
“You’ve let him ruin you,” Demeter said.
Persephone looked her up and down, incredulous. “Are you ruined?” she asked. “After your time with my father?”
The immortal mouth turned down as though it harbored something sour. “My mistakes were yours to learn from, Daughter.”
“Ah”—she pushed herself to her feet—“so I’m a mistake.” Demeter opened her mouth, but Persephone swept her response aside, along with leaves and dirt from her chiton. “Let me banish any false notions you may have had, Mother. I ruined myself on the staves of Man ages ago. Many, many times over.” She pressed home the emphasis with a deliberate enunciation, relishing at last the way her mother’s face condensed in denial.
“You did nothing of the sort.” A wind began bending heads of grass, rustling tree boughs at the edge of the field.
“Oh, but I did.” She couldn’t help a flash of teeth as she stepped around the goddess, orchids bursting around her feet as she went, their petals lurid and suggestive. “You wasted your worry for Hermes and Apollo, but I knew mortal flesh across oceans and empires and time. Consider well the reasons Lord Hades came to know this before you did.”
“Willful child.” The force of rushing air grew, carrying dying plant matter with it in whirling eddies. “You will listen to the wisdom of no one. And now you will what?” She stepped toward her daughter. “Abandon your duties to the call of immortal cock?”
The scattering of orchids withered to black as the goddess advanced, but the building violence of Persephone’s emotion had th
e field writhing with spontaneous life. Ivy zig-zagged across the ground like lightning. Tree ferns exploded from the earth. A forest of sundews shot up in the wake of her retreat, higher than her head and bristling wet, poison to match her words.
“And my ‘duties’ require me to exist alone?” she said, raking the air with clawed fingers. “To never know love?” Low-lying flytraps snapped shut.
Demeter’s scythe appeared in her hands and the mother goddess began to shear through rampant plant-life. “You have known my love since your birth,” she said, eyes the color of a storm as she carved her way toward her daughter.
Willows lumbered full-grown from the soil on all sides, massive and whipping their branches in what was now a howling, aggressive wind.
“Ah yes,” Persephone shouted over the gale, “the two are entirely the same. Why ever did I not think of this before?”
Out of a cloudless morning sky, the air flurried with snow. Withering cold crisped their breath and Demeter came at her, relentless. Tree limbs popped and shattered under ice and the same was on her mother’s tongue.
“What you haven’t thought of, Persephone, is your reason for being.” Split trunks crumbled to ash as she curled her fingers into a fist. “Each of us is born into a purpose.” She came forward, freezing, as her daughter seethed to a boil. “How will you fulfill yours from the Underworld? Hm? You said it yourself. With what power?” Drifts began to pile up against the carnage of growth and destruction. “The mortals will suffer under your need for ‘love’,” she said with a sneer. “Will you place your wants above those who rely on your gifts?”
The words hit Persephone like a fist in the gut, and brambles erupted from the earth around her, thick as sea serpents and snarling to her defense.
“I could ask you the same question, Goddess of the Seasons.” Thorns stabbed outward in every direction, woody and coiling with spite. “Or have you forgotten the deluge of shades you sent to the Third Realm in your fury to have your way?”
A hum welled beneath Persephone’s feet, and she teetered on the blade edge of refusing it all. Something familiar and yet unfamiliar began to crackle and grind along her extremities. She tasted iron.
Demeter was shearing past the brambles with arc after arc of her scythe, some nadir of threat dilating her pupils as she came. Her voice groaned now, ancient and deep. “You do not belong there, Karporphoros. No more than some cowering mortal belongs here.”
Persephone’s bones were the bones of the earth. Some dormant portion of her will sounded to a terrifying depth in a single choking heartbeat, and brought back the only answer it could.
Stalagmites thrust up from the ground in a maw, gnashing a barrier between her own choices and everyone else.
“You do not decide where I belong anymore, Mother.” The scythe swung. “I decide.” Chinked against stone and stopped. “I do.”
The Goddess of Growing Things stood white with fury, while Demeter stared open-mouthed at Underworld stone negating Olympian power. Right there. In the upper realms, right out in the open.
And Persephone … Persephone had decided.
She’d decided everything was too much. Every desire, every responsibility, every sacrifice. All of it. She could please no one, and so she would please no one.
The æther rippled and she melted through it, away from her mother’s dumbfounded face.
At least no one on this plane.
*
Blackness furled above the throne room floor and twin torches smoldered into being. Enodia was with him.
“My Lord.” The goddess folded two and six hands at her waist; blinked one and three pair of eyes. Hades shored himself as he must against her shifting, tri-fold presence. He gripped the arms of his throne.
“I will wait no longer,” he said. “I must know what she does.”
Hekate hovered with her usual cryptic serenity, the possibilities of her being too nebulous to stand on a floor in any defined place or time. “You agreed to alllow herr wwill to prevail, Polydegmon.”
“She will have her choice,” Hades said, tightening his jaw, “but I will know what it is.” He slid forward to the edge of his seat, voice lowering with his need. “You have dominion over every crossroads, Hekate. You will find her at her time of choosing, at the forking of her path, and you will learn her mind for me.”
The layers of her voice shushed together, a friction of discarded snake skins. “I cannott agree on the wissdomm of ssuch a disscovery.”
Light dimmed in the columned space, flickering with the hold on his patience. “I do not ask for agreement.”
The ruddy orbs began to bob in orbit around their mistress, lazy at first but picking up speed. The goddess closed a number of eyes and let her arms fall to her sides, her focus moving between planes. “But perhapss you assk for knowledge to abate yourr mmisery,” said Hekate, even as she acquiesced and settled into her element. “I can promise nno ssuch—my Lord.” There were frowns. She made several faces at once. “Do you tesst me, Hades?”
“What is it?” He was leaning forward now, ready to leap out of his seat. Enodia’s torches whirled faster, making their way toward a blur.
“The Green One toils withinn the confflux as we sspeak,” she said. “Did you know thisss?”
“What do you mean?” He felt his knuckles strain. His nails began to etch granite. “How would I know anything?”
More than one of her heads tilted back as she sank, events on another plane enfolding her sight. “Her decisionn iss imminent.” Silence from within the ring of red light. A fluttering of so many eyelids. “She battless her mmother.”
“What?”
The one word echoed at a low boom among columns of stone, but Hekate was elsewhere, seeing events he couldn’t.
“Demeter remindss her daughter of her obligations to the mmortalss,” the goddess said, “annd it painss her.”
Hades began to slide the iron ring from his finger, the line of his mouth turning grim. “They were not to interfere.”
Terrifying smiles warped the scrying faces. “Perssephone is clever,” she said, some thread of pride entering her voice. “Shhe gainss in power, she—”
Enodia gasped, a chorus of shock, and the torches flared to a halt, all but winking out at the disruption. Hades was on his feet, bident in hand.
“By the thrice-damned Fates, what do you see?”
Only Hekate Perseis, Destroyer and Lady of Shades could stand before the raised voice of Hades, unflinching.
“It …” She searched for something. “My Lord it matters nnot. She …”
He gripped his weapon.
“She. What.”
“She hass chosenn.”
Some searing thing clawed from inside his chest. He knew, but needed to punish himself. His steps flowed from the dais, sending him to loom and hiss over the immortal dashing his hopes.
“What did you see?”
Enodia folded her hands again and faced him with manifold eyes. “Your goddess hass called the Underworld,” she said. “Ourr rrealm has ansswered.”
The mere beginnings of Hades’s fury looked like the culmination of others’. The tines of his bident boiled to a livid amber, the very teeth going white as though he’d pulled them from the Phlegethôn. The doors to the hall burst open under a howl of sourceless wind.
“It was to be her choice,” he said. “Hers! They were not to interfere!”
Hekate stepped out of his way.
*
The mortal plane weighed heavy on her limbs, but it was the ring on her finger that pulled her. Persephone descended into Smyrna from where she’d emerged on the mount, south of the city proper.
Dawn saw the markets beginning to swarm, the Sons of Man abuzz in furious trade, even before Helios had cleared the line of staggered rooftops. Only the slimmest of her efforts kept her mortal guise in place; her strides ate up the crowded streets between her and the fate of her choosing.
The door to Polyxene’s home was under her knuckles, their pa
rticular rap coming from long memory. As soon as she heard movement on the other side, Persephone flew right past the exchange of their normal safeguarding phrases.
“Good Mother, I have come.”
A young woman who stood under an awning two doors away looked up from the linen she wrung of water and cocked her head at the stranger. Stepping through the æther directly into Polyxene’s dwelling might have been less conspicuous, but terrifying the woman with such a sudden appearance would do no good at all. Nor could she know whether the healer would be alone.
At the dull sounds of a latch, the door swung inward and Persephone faced the wide eyes of an unprepared mortal.
A mortal with far more white in her hair than the goddess had seen on her last visit. The woman gaped at her, and Persephone struggled to keep herself from doing the same in return.
“May I enter your home, Polyxene?”
The woman rattled a nod and stepped out of the way, holding the door wide, and then closing it after her.
“My goddess!” The incredulous greeting came even before Persephone released her hold on her guise. No one else addressed her as ‘Good Mother’ or tapped on her door, just so. Still, Persephone shed her false appearance and stood as herself.
“Polyxene, I’ve come as I promised.”
“Goddess, it has been”—the woman’s eyes darted around the room and she made some helpless gesture—“it has been so long. I believed you would never return.”
Only now was Persephone seeing the darkness to the lines on Polyxene’s face, the slightness of her frame more pronounced than she remembered. As she stepped backward into the space, her focus expanded to her surroundings. The shelves were less heavy with containers, the surfaces less crowded by baskets and drying greens.
She dragged her gaze back to the ominous portent of silver hair. “My friend, how long has it been?”
“Eight … eight years, Goddess.” Polyxene ducked her head, as though such a revelation might anger her matron.
Eight years? Did time skew so awfully between the Underworld and the mortal plane? But Hades had said as much, hadn’t he? “The mortal and deathless realms come together in odd ways.”