Page 1 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

Chapter

One

Persephone

“Persephone!”Like it has so many times before, the voice pulls me violently from sleep. It’s an animal sound, my name in the roar of desperate rage. Beneath the anger, there is an echo of something more. A symphony of ancient anguish.

It cools my blood, pebbling my flesh with unease.

I’ve been waking to the call of a man no one else can hear my entire life. As far back as I can remember, I can recall the pain of his rough, unchanging anguish. The soul-deep rage that clings to the pain—too deep for me to possibly explore.

Too deep for anyone to explore. I can’t evenimagine an ocean trench being vast enough to encompass the breadth of his sorrow. His torment is a tortured melody that tears me from sleep, and more recently, interrupts even my waking moments.

There was once a time, when I was too young to know better, that I would ask others if they heard him. My Sunday school teacher had guffawed in horror, clutching the gold cross around her neck. Mom and Dad had hushed me, explaining it all away with excuses or calls for attention. Until the calls became too frequent, and I started seeing the doctors.

Even as a child, I could see something in the doctor’s eyes when he asked me about the voice I heard. He pressed to know if this voice told me to do things. Bad things. He pressed for my most secret and shameful thoughts. Only, I didn’t have any.

My thoughts regarding the voice even then had been worry. A sorrowful fear that another was hurting beyond comprehension. A sense that I alone could see to that hurt. Could make it better. Could ease it, if just a bit.

During my visits with the doctor, Mom and Dad would wait. Mom’s nails were always bitten to the bed, her knees jumping anxiously. Dad’s head was always bowed between his shoulders, as though he carried a weight too massive to bear. It didn’t take me long to learn that what I heard was not normal. It was not normal in a way that would eventually bear aterrible kind of consequence I did not want to have to pay.

Deep in the night, when the voice would wake me and I’d creep from my room to Mom and Dad’s for comfort, I’d heard their hushed arguments. They whispered of mental illness, of disease, and a life of hospitals.

Dad spoke of barbaric treatments. Mom spoke of prayer. They feared something was deeply wrong with me. Something terrifying and shameful.

I was a test from God, or a curse from the devil.

Their marriage was cracking. Because of me.

I learned in those early moments that I could not share this pain I felt in the depths of me. I could not share the man’s anguished cry of my name. Not with the doctors, the church, or even with my parents.

I could not confide in the two people I should have been able to trust wholly and without restriction.

I terrified them.

At the tender age of seven, I learned to keep the voice to myself. I stopped telling them of how I woke in the night. I denied hearing the voice when asked. The doctor gloated in pleasure when he diagnosed me with an imaginary friend, not unlike many other children. He claimed my parents had no need to worry, and they eagerly believed him.

My Sunday school teacher sighed in relief at the news, but never quite looked at me as she did the other kids.

I learned what normal looked like and replicated it to please those around me. For years, it worked. I think it’s still working.

I attended school, and worked hard to top the honor roll. I danced and played sports. I tended the farm with Dad, and worked with Mom in town in her flower shop. I sat between them in the pew every Sunday, my mind far, far away.

I grew a soul-deep love of art; paintings in specific. Though I had no ability with the brush, my appreciation for art never waned. Nor did it grow spite in the yawning shadow that is my lack of talent. I looked at a brushstroke and felt somehow closer to the voice that called my name in my mind. To the unexplained agony that festered in the depths of my soul.

Beneath the night sky, under the white shadow of a full-bellied moon, I felt alive. Staring into a golden flame, I burned with desire I could not name. And I’d been entirely obsessed with all things Greek Mythology, since I studied Ancient Greece in grade six. The Gods and Goddesses fascinated me to no end, even though Mom was always quick to tell me the myths were nothing more than stories, and there was only one God. Our God.

Still, the bookshelves in my room were bursting with texts and stories about the Gods and Goddesses. Maybe it was my name, Persephone, that drew me to the myths. I was captivated by the stories of Hades’ claiming of his queen. The cruelty in the capture of ayoung girl. The deceit woven into the fabric of an unwanted love. The centuries and centuries—the millennia—of hateful spite that followed in the aftermath as a Goddess—a mother, scorned by the loss of her daughter to the God of the Underworld, starved the earth for six months of the year in what the people would begin to call theseasons.

I’d once asked Mom why she named me Persephone, and she had told me she’d liked the name Stephanie, but it was too common. She’d read the name Persephone in a book, and it had resonated. And that was how I’d become Persephone. Funny how, now, everyone calls me Annie.

I haven’t been calledPersephoneoutside of the man who roars my name in my mind. I haven’t heard my name outside of my dreams, in ages.

Mom’s hands come to either side of my face, and she leans in to press her warm lips to my forehead. Behind her, Dad’s scruffy jaw is hard.

He doesn’t want me to go. He’s been vocal about this, unusually hostile, even.

For the most part, Dad is a teddy bear in blue jeans, plaid, and dirt-caked fingernails. But he’s always been somewhat unreceptive when it came to my obsession with Greek Mythology. He’s only little more receptive of my fascination with art, and slightly more so of the degree in archeology I aspire to work toward, specializing, of course, in the Hellenic Republic.

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