Page 1 of Hades and Persephone: Crown of Souls

Chapter

One

Persephone

The first timeI woke up somewhere unfamiliar, it was on Hades’ yacht.

This isn’t that.

Wherever I am now—it’s like something out of a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare. I can’t tell. I’m not sure if I feel afraid or comforted. Like I’m where I’m meant to be. Settled, even.

But that’s madness.

I’ve never been here. I’ve never seen anything quite like this place.

I can’t recall how I came to behere.

Everything is foggy, even as I try to stretch the bands of memories that feel there, but distant in a way I am able to do little more than graze them with slippery fingertips.

Everything is distorted. There, but far away. There’s an urgency within the need to remember. But that doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t stretch the band in my mind far enough to recover what hovers in that distorted place of remembrance. It feelsblocked, somehow.

I don’t move from where I lay. If I’m being honest, I think I’m a little afraid to move. Inside my chest, my heart races with quick, shallow beats. As though it, too, is wary of being too loud.

Slowly, cautiously, I push my hand away from my body even as I keep my wide eyes fixed on the ceiling. If thethingabove me can be called something so ordinary as a ceiling.

Between the sheets—I am in a bed—my hand moves over material that feels like silk, but it’s not silk. I’ve always hated silk. The way it snags at rougher skin. This is something other. Or it’s a finer quality of silk than I’ve ever touched before. It’s smooth, no snag. Somehow, the material is cool and yet warm. Where I lay is so warm, I feel as though it radiates a form of heat all its own. Yet the material I slide my fingers over now is cooling.

I want to look. I want to see if it holds the same shine as silk. But the thing that is the ceiling has me transfixed in some place between wonder and fear.

It is castle-high, arched to a single point in the very center of the room. But it’s not castle-stone that crafts the view above me. It appears to be forged of daggers of midnight violet glass that encapsules hundreds, nothousands, of flickering stars. They rain down the waving glass from an unknown base higher than I can see, to the terrifyingly pointed glass tips that threaten to spear anything and everything inside this room, before finally winking out. The process repeats over and over, hypnotic.

I’m not sure how long I lay like this, watching the fall of stars thatcan’tbe stars. I’m mesmerized by the slow trickle toward me in much the same way I’ve so often found myself hypnotised while sitting in the front seat of Dad’s pick-up truck, on our way home under the dark blanket of an Alberta winter night, the headlights igniting the blowing white snow.

Finally, I gather the courage to decide the ceiling won’t come falling down on me if I move. Heart thundering, I push myselfup to sit and the rest of the room comes into view. It’s a lot. Too much to take in at once, but I decide the sheets are, in fact, silk. They shine.

The bed is massive. It’s definitely bigger than the standard king. As I lower one cautious foot to the floor, my fingertips graze the dark wood of one of the Gothically carved bedposts. Eyes drifting over the sharply carved images in the wood, my breath snags. It’s—these images—the slashes scored deep—are the depictions of a monster. A beast. Something utterly horrific.

Mama would say demonic.

Yet I don’t feel the sense of fear I feel I should experience. There’s something else in the undercurrents of my emotions right now. Something too deep to grasp. A shard too small to pluck from the abyss, even as it stings like a sliver under skin.

I tear my gaze away only to find my eyes landing on the image, a painting, fastened to the wall of onyx stone above the bed. The stone is jagged, as though this room was built into the side of a black mountain. But the painting, in shades of black and veined with the burnished tones of magma, depict a being so monstrous—so demonic—I should look away.

I should be brought to my knees in fear. Paralyzed.

I am none of those things.

I don’t know how it happens, but I find myself standing atop the bed I’ve just gathered the courage to escape. My bare feet dip into the soft clouds of pillows draped in a purple so dark it flirts with black. My fingertips trace the horrific lines of the monster painted onto the canvas.

I can’t breathe. There is something in the back of my mind.

Again, I can’t grasp it. Can’t snag it no matter how I try. It is there but blocked.

My hands drift over the beastly image of the being of nightmares and shadows, to the eyes of magma and flame that seem to peer right into the depths of my raw soul. I feel ravagedin a way I can’t explain, breathless and aware. Pebbles rise on my flesh. A tightening twists in my belly.

He’s monstrous and yetbeautiful.

“He’s mine.”It’s a whisper that hardly spills into the quiet around me, and yet it’s the moment thathearrives. He appears from the shadows of the darkness as though he is made of them, crafted from the very ether that encapsules the darkest of dreams.

---