Page 83 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

He tips his eyes to my feet in the water. “I know when you’re in the sea, Persephone.”

Grains of sand spill through my toes as I lift my feet and lower them again. “You can feel when I enter the water?”

“I can.”

“How?” I’m dumbfounded. The magnitude of the sea—the vastness. It shouldn’t be possible.

“Atlantis can feel you. I feel through Atlantis,” he explains as though it is so simple.

“Atlantis still searches for me?” I ask, thinking of his earlier explanation when he’d said Atlantis had recognized the power of Chaos inside me when I’d entered the waters of her oceans.

“Atlantis will always be aware of you.”

I sit with that for a moment as Poseidon settles beside me. I sigh as the waves stretch to caress my skin. “I wish I could visit her.”

I can feel Poseidon’s eyes on me. The heat that spills from the shock of iridescent blue. “I could try to take you.”

My eyes snap to his. “I thought—isn’t it at the bottom of the sea?”

“You possess the powers of Chaos.”

I shake my head. “Not like that. I can’t control the power inside me.”

Poseidon laughs low and smooth. The sound is warm, like the setting of the golden sun into the calm stretch of glassy blue water. “I wasn’t surprised to learn that Uranus had consumed Chaos for her powers.” I can’t take my eyes off him as he stares out over the glittering sea that blends into the dark of the night that stretches so far into the distance, I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. “I also wasn’t surprised that he was never able to harness her powers. To use those powers at will. To manipulate them.”

“Why?”

His eyes slide once again to mine. “Do you understand what Chaos is?”

“She’s the Mother Goddess.”

“She is. But most importantly, she is Chaos. And Chaos is wild and untamed. She is an eruption of land that bleeds power and feeling, sentient. She is an explosion of power so great and wonderful, from it births Gods and Goddesses. She is the greatbeyond and the fire that lights it. She is everything, and the power of everything can never be harnessed or controlled. She works inside you, because you don’t cage her power. You don’t try to twist and manipulate her power into the thing you need it to be, but instead, you allow her power to createthroughyou.”

He considers for a moment. “With you, she birthed life into the Underworld, crafting a realm in which possesses the power to defeat Olympus, and the evil that occupies the living realm. The evil spread by Gods who have lived far too long, unchecked.”

I’ve never heard an explanation quite like this. I’m not sure how I feel about it. Because I’d been considered a giftless goddess for so long in my first life. I recall Demeter alluding to it in hazy memories, and Uranus had confirmed as much. My power hadn’t come into play until far later in my life.

And still that power hadn’t been my own, but that of Chaos.

I can’t help but feel disappointed in myself.

Poseidon murmurs, “You don’t look pleased.”

I sigh and rearrange my face. “It’s silly.”

“You can talk to me, Persephone.” He shifts closer, so close that his arm brushes against mine. “I have always cared deeply for you. My feelings have not changed in all the time you were lost to us.”

Discomfort slithers cooly inside me. “You said we never—that I didn’t—um—with you.”

His smile is tinged with sadness. “No, we didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“There was a time you invited,” he admits to my horror. “And even though I hungered to accept, I could feel your hope for rejection. I loved you too much to sacrifice the friendship I had with you for a night. To add to the hurt you felt with Hades. I didn’t understand it then, but now I know it is the connection I have to Chaos through Atlantis—the connection I have to you through them—that gave me that insight.”

I press my palms to my burning cheeks. “I was a terrible person.”

“You were tragically manipulated, twisted beyond a point of healing.”

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