Page 11 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

“He did.” Hades’ jaw is tense. There is an ocean of anger in his eyes when he speaks of Zeus. Of the Hydra. I want to sooth it away, but the wound of a past transgression isn’t so simply mended. This one has had centuries to fester.

“They battled violently, splashing water from the depthless lake onto the land. The Hydra held her ground even as Hercules bestowed upon her a thousand cuts, finally weakening her enough to sever one of her heads from her neck. She’d had only nine, you see, before Hercules slammed his blade into her flesh.” His eyes drift from mine to somewhere far in the distance. “For each head he cut, she grew two more. She had fifty heads when Zeus struck Hercules’ blade with a bolt of lightning so strong, the sword burned with flames. He struck her a final time, severing the last head. The Olympian lightning infected her wound immediately, halting the growth of her heads and casting her into an eternity of torment.”

“No.” Horror-struck, my hands lift to cover my gasp.

A dangerous light flickers in Hades’ eyes. A muscle in his jaw ticks. “I heard her wail of agony echo from the pit which she guarded. Hercules severed a second head, and her blood rained on the land, burning like acid in the earth it touched. It created the marshes historians wrote about in the centuries after. The marshes that exist today. She screamed for mercy, and he cut a third head. The entirety of the Underworld heard her cry of agony. In one last attempt to save the souls she guarded fromentering the very pit into Tartarus, she cast her body into the whirling pool she sacrificed hundreds of years to guard.”

“What—” I want to cry for the creature who, to this very day, legend calls a monster.

“The lake, infected with the blood that gushed from her severed heads, fell into the portal after her. And her blood, magical as it was, sealed the land and the portal behind her. It has remained closed for centuries. Today, the lake is dry, but the history remains for anyone who dares look close enough.”

“That—Hades that’s awful.”

“Yes. Much of what the Gods have done is awful.” His hands move from my arms to my waist, and he again turns me to gaze out over the view of a torchlit city, where rolling hills of deepest green bleeds into meadows of swaying white that glows under a sky of glittering night. “You asked of the torches.”

I hardly recall asking after such a tale. But, swallowing hard, I nod. “Yes.”

“You’ve seen the black liquid in which the flames that light the lanterns on the palace walls dance, yes?”

Again, I nod. “Yes.”

“It is the same liquid that feeds the torches in Asphodel City. The same liquid that feeds the flames in all the Underworld. As soon as that liquid is spread too thin, or gone, the flame dies.”

“What’s the liquid?” I’m hesitant to ask. I think I already know.

“It is the blood-infused water from the bottomless lake which now fills what is known in the Underworld as Hydra’s Sinkhole.”

“And…” I begin hesitantly, my gaze drifting over the land that glitters with dancing flames. “Hydra?”

“She swims in her sinkhole, alone, weeping. Once a fierce protector, she has become a vicious, angry beast. The Furies and I are the only ones she allows to pull from the well. The only oneswho can travel close to the sinkhole and not be pulled into the depths to rest eternally in her bed of bones.”

“She hurts.” I pity the fearsome beast. She is misunderstood, like most feared things.

“Yes. Deeply. She loved the people she guarded, the souls she saved from torment. It hurt her to know they turned on her as they did.” Hades sighs a long and heavy sigh. “She still bleeds from the wounds of Hercules’ flaming sword. The heads he severed left behind an eternally unhealing wound.” A note of sadness taints the edge of his words. “I have tried to heal her. I have failed.”

Over the hand that rests on the balcony railing, I rest my own. He spreads his fingers to take mine between and we stand like that in silence for a long while, simply holding hands. I have a feeling his mind races alongside mine.

As for myself, I feel as though I’m reeling in a dreamland. Nothing seems possible, and yet I sense somewhere deep inside that none of this is fake.

“I feel like a fool for believing any of this is real,” I whisper into the darkness.

“Why?”

I shrug against the mass of his body at my back. “I don’t know,” I lie. Then I add, “I’m not sure I trust my own mind.”

“Your mind is the greatest of all the minds I’ve encountered, in all the thousands of years I’ve existed.”

“How—” I pause and turn in his arms again. He’s so beautiful, but there’s an ageless danger to the dark aura of him. It’s been there since the moment I met him, but I’ve chosen to ignore it. To pretend it doesn’t exist. Not to look too deep into the darkness of all that he is. Now, though, I can ignore it no longer. It’s there in the lines of his face, the depths of his eyes. It’s the emotion that clings to the deep of his words, his view of the world. “How old are you?”

Hades looks down at me for a long while. His brows furrow and smooth and furrow again. “I’m not certain exactly how old I am. In the beginning, age was not something we took into consideration. The passing of time wasn’t measured as it is today.”

“Give me an estimate.”

“Touching one million earthly years. Perhaps a few hundred thousand years older, even.”

My mind simply stops functioning. The magnitude of his admission is simply too much.

Chapter

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