Page 32 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

In the distance, a small hut crafted of thin wood planks stands rickety against the howl of the wind. My ears pick up on a high, constant whistle as the whipping wind slithers between the cracks in the wood of the hut. If the heavy clouds ever loosed the rain theykeep, he might have been able to slap mud over the slivers between the wood to silence that high, maddening whine. Such a thing would have been a reprieve he does not deserve.

My shoes crunch over dry, cracked land that begs for moisture that will never come. Not here. Not in this world.Not for him.

Red lightning arcs in the sky, reminiscent to the blood I’ve bled into this land. This canvas. It flashes again, striking the land just outside the hut’s door. The whiplash of the strike is loud, and I can tell by the curse of my name that follows, it’s a constant and yet unpredictable thing. By design, of course.

Something smashes inside the hut, and wood splinters.

I smile.

“Hyperion,” I call, letting the wind carry my voice to the Titan who hides inside. A Titan crafted to possess the golden glow of the sun, the light of life. The same glow I’ve seen reflected in the eyes of my wife reborn.

The rickety door bangs open, wood splintering and falling to the dry earth before I see the Titan. His once golden hair is now bleached of all color, his tan skin as white as an arctic snow, and thin enough that I can see the dark silhouette of his ebony bones. The bones that mark our lineage as Gods. His eyes, once sky blue, are the color of the gray clouds above when they land on me. Hatred spills into his faded eyes, thebranches of it growing from roots established long ago.

“Hades.” My name is a growl. A curse. A threat. “Has this new world failed you so quickly?” His lip curls, cracking like the dry earth beneath his bare feet. Red blood beads over the crack, reminiscent to the arc of ruby in the stormy sky. “Your weakness grows.”

I let my hands slide into my pockets, letting my gaze drift over the rags that try and fail to conceal his windblown flesh from the violent world of my creation. Before this world dies, those windblown rags will turn to dust, scattering like ash in the wind.

“Whether you remain in this world or not, Hyperion, is entirely up to you.”

Interest arcs like lightning in his angry eyes. He laps at the blood of his cracked lips with a dry, nearly shrivelled tongue. He rasps, “I’m listening.”

“I am here for information.”

Rags lash at thin flesh like a whip, scoring marks of red into the pale of Hyperion’s bony legs as he dares a step closer. “Information regarding?”

“A child,” I say cautiously. “A girl.”

Hyperion cocks his head. Even through the pale, thin flesh of a wasted Titan, his once magnetic features bleed through. “Who is this child?”

My teeth grind as the wind gusts, pushing pebbles over a crusted, water-starved land. I don’t wish to tell him this, but bound to this world of isolation, there isno one he could tell, even if he wished to speak. “Persephone.”

His eyes flash with much more than interest now. “She has been reborn?”

Gossip always spreads. Before I’d kept the Titans bound to their own personal prisons within my art, they’d roamed the fires of Tartarus, not unreachable by the chatter that traveled the lands of the Underworld.

I still recall the way they’d roared their rejoice at her brutal death. The celebration of enraged Titans had split the land of Tartarus for new rivers of magma to flow. It had been so loud, so raucous, souls felt it in Asphodel City as a quake in the land. A first of its kind, and what I would come to learn was the first instance of my prison realms’ failure to contain the beasts that roamed in wait for their day of destruction.

I admit, “She has.”

“And you’ve found her.”

I don’t see the point in telling him she found me. That she heard the call of my soul, the torment I suffered without her. That, despite the impossibility of it,shesoughtme.

“Yes.”

Hyperion narrows his eyes on me. “Why are you here, Hades?”

I decide to get right to it. “Did you father her?”

For a moment, he can’t hide his shock. “Persephone?”

“Yes.”

“A child with Demeter?” The Titan has the balls to laugh, even knowing I could sentence him to a world far worse than this. A world of night. His laughter fades and his eyes sharpen. “What am I getting out of this conversation, Hades?”

“A new world,” I offer my deal. “One where the sun will touch your flesh.”

His body shudders, knowing the worth of a deal offered by me, and how infrequently I offer such things. “Will it be warm?”

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