Page 20 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

And yet I am no match for the beast who imprisons me. The God of Death.

When we land, it is not a gentle thing as it is when Mother takes me through the passage into Olympus. There is no grace to our arrival. No comfort.

Pain is an explosion that rockets through my every limb, carving the breath from my verysoul. Before I’ve even assembled myself, he is there. On me. Around me. Knocking me to a ground that is hotter, even, than the air that slithers over my flesh in a burning caress.

“Mine,” he grunts, like an animal.

The darkness that surrounds us is a void of snared screams and pleas for reprieve. Of loss and eternal seeking. I can see nothing but the glowing embers of his monstrous eyes. They are twin flames of torment, promising nothing beyond despair and destruction.

Fingers twist in the fabric that remains of my dress. I can feel the hot puffs of his manic breaths where they threaten to score into my flesh. Pushing away the pain, I try to roll away, to flee. But he iseverywhere.

He surrounds me, his bulk an advantage I do not share. And my whimpers fall on deaf ears.

He is a being of hunger. I’ve seen this before, in the starving animals that happen across the quick meal of a nearly spoiled carcass. There is little awareness in the frenzy, and that scares me even more. That this beast—this God of Death—this thing of hunger is hungryfor me.

“Stop!” I try, but it makes no difference. “My father will hunt you down and fillet you like a fish.”

He won’t. My father has little care for me. The fact his brother has stolen me from my mother, their sister, will be a thing of little consequence to him where he sits high on his golden throne of Olympus, next to the Queen who loathes my very existence with the hostility only a scorned woman can exude. Memories of her glacial stare cut into me like one of Ares’ death-bound spears.

The pain is alarming. It spreads like fire under my skin, and I realize it’s not the memory of Hera’s death-stare that cuts me, but the God above me. He—his teeth—he’s sunken them into the swollen flesh of my breast and he’s—oh Gods, he’s drinking from me.

With every deep pull, something foreign begins to swell inside me. I suck in breath that tastes like the scorch of anger, swallowing it deep into my lungs even as tears spill from my eyes to smudge the ash that rains from this terrible darkness, clinging to my skin.

My hands lift to plunge into his hair. The strands are long and messy, the waves thick and dark as the man’s black heart. I twist my fingers and try to pull him away as unexpected pleasure morphs to agonizing pain. He makes a noise, a growl deep in the back of his throat. A warning. I stop pulling even as my fingers remain twisted in his hair. He pulls blood from my body until I am humming with a kind of awareness, I’ve never experienced in all my days. It’s deep, like the darkest trenches of the sea, but it’s violent as the waves that crest a stormy surface, sinking ships and claiming lives.

He is spreading his hunger. Infecting me with his dark obsession. That must be what this is, because nothing else makes sense. I’ll never be able to carve this from the depths of me, no matter how long or violently I try.

Finally, after what feels like an age, he pulls back. My fingers fall from his strands, my hands landing limply at my sides. Thereis awe in the gutter of his voice as he rumbles, “Sweet. Should have been rancid.”

“I hate you,” I declare weakly. The words don’t feel like truth, even though I tremble with the honesty of them. Contradiction burns inside me.

His only response is to grunt another barbaric, “Mine.” And then his hands are twisting into the tatters of the cloth that covers my body.

Against the yawning hunger that dares to bloom in my core, I fight him. I claw, my nails scoring into the flesh of his massive chest. Under my violent touch, his muscles ripple and twist with every violent motion he makes to tear at the thin fabric that dares to try and stand in his way—dares to try and offer me a shred of protection against him.

The sound of tearing fabric is a backdrop to my shriek of feminine rage as I lift my foot and slam it into the wall of his chest. I expect him to fall back, to tumble onto his behind, but he doesn’t even flinch under the power of my defense. His resistance is brutish and disturbing. His hand around my ankle, like a cuff, is even more chilling. I whimper as he spreads me for him, his body moving between my legs where no man has gone before.

My innocence is my blindness for what comes next. I have no expectations in this moment. No shred of preparedness could have offered me readiness for the assault of his invasion.

One moment, I am whole. The next, I am split apart.

Confusion carves a divide in my mind as Hades thrusts into my body. He roots himself deep, unmoving. Into my neck, his fingers gripping into my flesh, pulling me nearer as though he is truly afraid I might vanish, he whimpers, “Home.”

There is something about the ravaged word. The distraught rawness of the simplicity it bears—it falls against me like a whip whose fiery tip brands my naked soul.

His body begins to shake. Against the ash that clings to the dew of our battle-torn flesh, I think I feel the hot fall of his tears where they glide over the column of my neck. The realization comes to me in that moment. He is a broken God unlike all the others. He’s been ravaged by loneliness, shredded by anguish, his pieces put back together haphazardly in the aftermath of an impossible wreckage.

The quaking of his body bleeds into mine, the sorrow infecting me like the venom of his bite. Filling me like the swell of his very body as it pushes deeper into my own. Only, I’m no longer fighting him. His soft whimper reverberates the echo of a lost soul that my own feels compelled to grasp hold of, to draw nearer. To tether. The violent shaking of his body grows, spreading into my own and bleeding from me into the rough, ashen land that cuts into my back.

The land quakes. The Underworld groans. A symphony of souls’ loose cries of desperation that spear me like arrows of tragedy imbedded into the innermost parts of me. My skin itches as something beneath it comes alive. I have been a powerless Goddess, a shame to Mother and Father. And yet I feel power now. It hums in the core of me, bursting from the deep in a sweep of arching power that resonates from the very womb Hades seeks to fill.

His fingers claw desperately at me now, his body climbing higher over mine as though he is attempting to climb deeperintome. To escape within the reprieve I offer from this cursed realm he’s been cast to.

I squeeze my eyes shut as the power inside my womb grows. And I realize I’m not pushing Hades away anymore. Instead, I’m pulling him nearer. In this moment, he is an anchor for the chaos that is swirling inside my core.

Hades thrusts deeper, and that power inside me detaches to soar untethered. It pours from the cry that spills from my lips asHades bottoms out inside me. I can no longer tell where I end, and he begins. He feels as much a part of me as the heart that rages in my chest.

Hades sobs brokenly into the pulse that thunders in my throat. “Home. Life. Home.Mine.”

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