Page 21 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

The Olympians, so high on their thrones in the sky, did this to him. When they cast him to this realm of darkness and despair, they crafted this being of torment. He is the aftermath of their thoughtless banishment, and after he helped defeat the Titans. After he helped my father secure the throne he rules upon. They banished his great power to a place of despair and had the audacity to think the hardships of this realm would not bludgeon his soul beyond recognition. Would not shape the powerful God he’d been in legend into the monster he now is. The monster in which I have become the sacrifice—the one to pay the penance of their disloyalty.

Bolts of power rocket from my womb to spear the very heart that is cracking wide for this banished God. It is in this moment that I understand how hate and love are two sides of the same coin. So vastly different, and yet so similar are these emotions. It is no wonder the ease with which one can bleed into the other.

The God of Death, the monster of exile's creation, begins to moan what can only be a prayer—only, he is praying to me, the powerless Goddess. For forgiveness. For love. For home. For punishment.For forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.Forgiveness.

The power inside me that has never been before, ruptures.

Maybe it leached from him into me, born of venom. Maybe it was always there, buried too deep to reach by the mundane existence in which I had endured, beholding the title of Goddess that being birthed by Demeter, Goddess of Harvest and Agriculture, awarded me. Maybe it was formed under the same pressure of pain in which crafted the monster above me. I do notknow. All I know is it ruptures from the depths of me to spill its seed oflifeinto the Underworld, just as Hades spills his seed intome.

He grunts a broken sound of pained release as I scream into the ashen night of this eternal purgatory. The quaking land splits around us, cracking. Somewhere in the distance, a tsunami of rushing water surges to fill the maze of cracks in what will become the rivers of the Underworld. I know it in my bones, see the map of this yet unborn realm in the messy constellations that erupt in clusters behind the sealed lids of my eyes.

The earth shudders and roars as my back arches off the ground, my chest connecting with the wall of Hades’ broad chest. Against my breast, his heart strums a song of fear and wonder. In sync with the arching rise of my chest, mountains split the land to rise high in a quest to graze the blanket of everlasting onyx that paints the sky, but none are so high as the one which stoodbefore.

The mountain in the corner of this realm of torment in which beings far darker and more fearsome watch the wreckage of the girl I’d been, as this realm and its monster of death reconstruct me into a woman of devastation and power. A mother of darkness. A keeper of sins. The threads of my fate weave with the God who captures my innocence, and I bear upon the aftermath of his possession a crown of souls so heavy, I shall never be free from its weight—it fastens so tightly around my heart, binding me to this ancient God once lost to torment. A God I am destined to pull back from the brink.

The coin of hatred and love spins round and round inside the heart that drums within the binds of the crown that rules this realm.

Hades pulls back to sit on his haunches, pulling me with him. He is still impossibly hard inside me even though I can feel the warmth of his spilled seed rooting inside the womb he seizedin a brutal battle won. Echoing the chaos that whirs wildly in my mind, his prayer for forgiveness plays on repeat even as he sins again, his hunger driving him to push deeper into my body, taking a rhythm of self-hatred and desperate need.

But now I am the keeper of his sins, the mistress to the darkness that binds him in its endless prison. I am Queen—ruler, not of the souls who wander this realm—but of their King. I am the Goddess to their God. The light to his dark.

Like love and hate, light and dark, life and death cannot exist without the other. We forge a new coin. We are dual sides of the same piece, eternally bound by the joining of him and me.The forging of us.

The earth trembles as onyx spears of glittering stone harpoon from the ashen earth, birthed from the mountain wheretheywatch. The heart of this once barren realm laps hungrily at the spill of our connection which drips to feed a ravenous land. Around his broad hips, my legs spread wide, and for the first time since this began, I move.I take.

I turn the table on this possession to feed the yawning source of untethered hunger that spreads power throughout all of me—to feed this place—the child I was always meant to nurture. The soul of a realm I was always intended to suckle with the very life that grows inside my womb. I am not the Goddess of no power. I am the Goddess of Fertility and New Life. A Goddess intended to awaken light within darkness.

Rolling my hips, I urge the seed from his hunger as I drip with need of my own to feed the realm that calls to me, crying in hunger and desperation. Behind my still closed eyes, the stars begin to morph from their constellations of rivers, now formed within the rough terrain. Beneath me, Hades, God of Death, takes his position of surrender even though, in my mind, he is still my over taker—the monster who ravaged me. But I am his Queen. The coin of hate and love spins faster and faster.

Pleasure builds within my core for the first time, ribbons of it twisting to dance with the threads of an ancient power promised to me well before my creation. I ride him faster and harder, the blood of my innocence spilling into this land, ribboned with the seed of his wicked claiming—of our joining. Within the innocence the realm tastes, the wrongness of the possession that was my ravaging, a sense of justice veins the bed of the River Acheron, and the House of Judgement rises from the watery depths to hover precariously over a jagged land the dead will climb to kneel before the Crown of Souls in a ritual that will determine the value of a short earthly life lived, and their eternal life now in the Underworld.

I see it all, the entire formation of this realm. I feel the clenching pain of each new formation that erupts from the contractions of this dark land to birth somethingnew. And I ride my dark King through it all as together we craft a land of justice and reward, of healing and tribulation, of acceptance and love, of home andafterlifein the wake of devastation and suffering.

His hands come to cradle my face, and he breathes, “Little Goddess,” in the moment that my pleasure crests. The contraction of my womb is a vicious blend of pain and pleasure that has my lips parting as chaos whips violently inside me to do what she does best—birth everything from nothing.

Hades curses low as my head tips back on a low moan and my eyes burst open to cast a sea of stars into an eternal night. I shatter around him, a bolt of light spearing hotly from the depths of me. Ibreakapart as the Underworld contracts one final time. Two fissures appear in the sky, from each births a sphere. One is bright and white, veined in threads of molten gold. The other is just as bright and white, but the threads that weave it glisten like liquid onyx. Two moons.

The dark and the light.

Chapter

Ten

Hades

I seethe moment the vision leaves her. Watch as the memory—of what I do not know—releases her from its relentless hold. She springs up and away from me, as though desperate for space. As much as I ache to fulfill her every desire, to answer the call of her every wish, I am unable to abide her in this. In space. From me.

In the thrashing of her waking nightmare, a memory so ancient it should have been lost to the folds of time, the sheet had slipped from her body. Now, she is naked where she leans over the balcony railing, sucking in deep breaths of open mountain air.

The sight of her cuts me like a blade through the belly on a battlefield, spilling all that I fight to keep contained.

Pushing from the lounge chair with the sheet in hand, I move to close the distance between us. Her body trembles, but her hands leave wet prints when they move from the dark stone railing to grip the sheet like a lifeline. Gently, I pull her hair fromwhere the sheet traps it beneath the sheet, feeling emotion lodge in my throat when I see it. The spread of red. As though the ends of her hair have been dipped in liquid rubies.

Desire bludgeons me.She is lovely.

She shudders, calling my attention from the ends of her hair toher.

“Another memory?” It’s the first she’s had in my presence. There had been no reaching her.

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