Page 59 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

“Magic.” Hecate moves to close the distance between us. Her eyes, so dark there is little distinction between the dark of her irises and the black of her pupils, do not drift from the swirling torment of paint on canvas. “Magic is everywhere, clinging to everything and everyone. It is abundant, if one knows to use it.”

“And you do?”

She wets her lips, painted black. “Of course.”

I can’t help but study the Goddess. Her beauty is sharp and lethal, gothic. I’ve never been drawn to gothic beauty, but hers is undeniable. The fluid way she moves is enchanting and somehow frightening. Harrowingly compelling.

Tearing my gaze from Hecate, I feel Hades watching me as I look back to the painting. That same familiar pull tugs at me even as the piece within me repels its nearness.

Confliction at its finest.

“So, is this how we talk to him, then?”

Hecate’s lips lift in a slow, catlike smile, but it’s Hades who speaks. “No.”

I look to him when he takes his place on my other side. “Then how?”

“We enter the prison, little goddess.”

My lips fall open.He can’t mean…?

“You meaninthe painting?”

Hades dips his chin once.

I gape for a solid minute, fear steeping. “How?”

“My dear friend, magic.” Hecate strokes the painting, clucking her tongue in a way that is both eerie and endearing. “He is angry.” Her eyes shift to Hades. “This may take some time.”

“But can you do it?”

She blinks slowly, the fan of thick black lashes sweeping the arc of high, sharp cheekbones. She says in her slow, to-the-point, way, “I can do anything.”

Hades nods to the painting, and Hecate’s black smile stretches. Her raven hair shifts around her body as though riding a breeze only she can feel. She steps toward the canvas that hangs inconspicuously here in the Tower of Pluto, in a realm on the cusp of devastation simply by harboring the prisons of these violent creatures.

I am captivated by the way she moves, her hips swaying as she drifts closer, the pale snow white of her flesh peeking from the cut-outs of black gauze that drape from shoulder to her middle finger, where the fabric is fastened to a ring on each hand. A black leather belt adorned with runes of silver cinches her tiny waist before her hips flare under the translucent cover of her wispy skirt.

In the week she worked in preparation for this moment, she has filled out. When I first saw Hecate, she’d been far gaunterthan she is now. Hades had explained that her form is slowly returning to its former state now that I have returned to the Underworld. Apparently, the realm feeds on me. On the power my soul harbours to sustain all that it is.

While I had been gone, Hades and the Gods of the Underworld had sacrificed their own power to sustain the realm. For each of the Gods, the sacrifice had shown itself differently. For Hades, he had been weak of form. Tired. Unable to portal with the ease he’d once been capable.

For Hecate, the realm had physically devoured her, wasting her away.

For Hypnos, it had drained him of reason, his dreams becoming senseless and varied, direction near impossible to decipher.

Thanatos had suffered a great weakness to his physical form, and had only recently been capable of wandering the Underworld in his greatly depleted corporal form. Even the souls who took solace in the Underworld had been touched by the hunger of the realm, their minds confused in the path they were to travel to their afterlife.

Now that I have returned, the Underworld is healing. However, the process is slower than Hades would like, that much is clear.

I can’t help but worry that maybe in this life, in this body, I do not possess the same power to sustain all that the Underworld is now.

I have kept my worry to myself, but it’s there. And every day it grows.

Hecate lifts her hand to the canvas, chanting words I cannot begin to understand, and yet my soulknows. She is melting the binds of the prison, decoding the enchantment she bestowed upon the canvas that contains the promise of destruction. I canalmost hear the magical click, click, click, of a complex lock releasing.

The breath lodges in my lungs when the swirling paint truly begins toswirl. The limbs of the tree that roots to nothing claw toward us with their talons of inky darkness. The galaxy of flesh and bone of ebony begin to dance as though alive under the call of her chant, and something violent roars from the depths.

A chill erupts in the room, as though casting the space in a breath of frost. Pinpricks of trepidation rise on my flesh, fleeing down my spine as the hairs on the back of my neck rise. A scream claws to free itself from the confines of my throat and my body burns with the need to run. But I don’t move. I am rooted to the floor,unableto move.

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