Page 52 of His in the Dark

“What would you like for me to tell you?” she asks. Her fingers crest on a gold chain that wraps around her waist and over her shoulders, forming an “x” over her chest. It’s beautiful against the cream pressed silk with lace edges. It’s a dress my mother would love I think.

I answer without much thought at all, wanting to stop where my mind was headed. “Anything you know.”

Her brow raises in surprise and her lips upturn into a smile. “Anything?”

There is something about her words during our first conversation that makes me certain I should start from the beginning. The drain on my powers made it impossible to think of anything but the near future, when I would not be a Goddess at all. I should let my knowledge grow in me the way I let her words about freedom flourish.

I vaguely wonder if Hades told her about my magic. I wonder what she knows.

“Whatever you like about magic,” I tell her and take a seat on the end of the bed getting comfortable. “Tell me that.”

Silvie tells me the earliest stories she can remember about magic, and continues to do so whenever I wish for her to come to me. I cannot tell if this is making a change in me, but I listen anyway.

It might not be the stories themselves that matter as much as the feeling they give me when I listen. In many ways, I feel more secure than I ever have. In other ways, I feel like a child again, my eyes open to all the possibilities of magic instead of the few laid out before me.

As the path has opened my eyes to Hades’s home, Silvie opens my eyes to curiosity.

Magic cannot flourish where there is fear.

Listening as if I know nothing, being able to step back and think about magic in a way that’s far more innocent than I’ve felt in a long time… It helps. I have to believe it will help me.

And if it does not?—

Imustbelieve it will help me, no matter the outcome. No matter what. My mother’s voice is echoed in Silvie’s stories.

I begin to make a habit of believing it. Each time I go out on the path, I encounter a soul who dips their head when I pass. This is not a sign of mockery. This is a sign of respect. Each time it happens, my curiosity increases.

They know nothing of me other than stories they’ve been told. And what exactly is that? Do the stories change? Are they real? Or is it simply its own kind of magic?

I listen to all Silvie has to say about magic, then listen some more. She walks with me some days in the dark halls that seem to be brighter as my eyes adjust. I keep my gaze and my mind on what is in front of me, not the home I was stolen from. I do not resist my reality and suddenly I see the freedom she spoke of.

“There is a way, then?” I ask Silvie one morning, as she is sitting at the table with me, her hands folded in her lap. “What you mean by all this is that there is…anotherway to have power here.”

“Yes, my queen,” she answers.

I stare out the window, but I do not see the gardens and the Underworld beyond. It’s blurred to me.

There is no life in the Underworld, so I will not be able to use my powers to create. There is only death. I do wonder if Hades made the crystal gardens and the dead blooms that have dried and lined the path for my comfort. At first they were only a reminder of what I lost, but as I watch the garden grow with dried petals that were ash on the mortal realm, I learn to enjoy their beauty.

Maybethatis the freedom Silvie spoke of.

But, I decide, there is only one thing to do, and that is to practice magic.

I start by enchanting bells on the doorknob under Sylvie’s watch. They will ring if anyone tries to enter, and will only allow those who want my highest self to flourish to pass through the threshold. Vaguely I wonder if Hades will be able to enter.

It’s a simple spell she says. Three old bells who have seen enough to know what will come. And one little jar that hangs from the rope with the words:I am protected and guided and safe in these quarters. Only those with who want my highest self to flourish to pass through the threshold.

“Do you feel it?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I answer although that stirring in the pit of my stomach feels much like what I felt with Hades. The pleasure, the safety, the warmth. I have not felt it before.

When Silvie is gone for the day—or for the time being, as I can summon her whenever I wish—I kneel at the hearth and think of magic, not my powers. They are both divine and worthy. I think of the forces that whirl through the Underworld and Olympus above.

At first, there is nothing. I’m not familiar with this kind of magic. I had thrown myself into studying myownpowers and only wanted to draw life out of the earth so I could prove that Ihadthem—the gifts that I had been granted at my birth, from my mother and father.

Now I must reach in another direction.

I close my eyes and try to feel those other sources of power.

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