Page 107 of Where Darkness Bloomed
Then a shadow crossed her face. “You knew he lied, the king. I thought—” She faltered momentarily. “I thought he spoke the truth. I would have believed him.”
The admission hung in the air, and he heard the faint distress within it.
Hades threaded his fingers through her dark hair. “This is my dominion,” he said, softer now. “Not merely a throne I sit upon, but a nature woven into my being. I see the soul as it exists—what the living bury, what the dead cannot outrun. All is laid bare before me.”
His thumb grazed her cheek, gently reassuring. “Do not regret your merciful heart,Persephone. It is not weakness.”
A breath left her—not quite a sigh, her fingers lacing with his.
Then her gaze shifted, drawn over his shoulder to the fountain beyond, where water rippled endlessly over black stone.
Slowly, she stepped away, her hand slipping from his. He let her go, watching the graceful rhythm of her steps, the soft radiance of her presence moving through the shadowed hall.
She stood before the fountain, gazing into the sluicing water. “But the water... it changed him.”
“No.” Hades stepped down from the dais, following.“It revealed him. It is Stygian water.”
She looked up. “Stygian?”
“The River Styx is the mother of all waters,” he said, stopping beside her. “Even the springs of Olympus flow from her veins. We gods swear our most sacred oaths by the Styx. The oath-bearing waters strip away all falsehood.”
Persephone’s brow furrowed, eyes returning to the fountain. “I didn’t know.”
“Few do.”
For a moment, there was only the faint ripple of water.
Then she spoke again, softer: “The woman and her children killed by the Greeks… they were innocent.”
The grief in her voice wrapped itself around him like ivy, delicate but resilient.
“Should the gods not protect mortals like them?”
Compassion radiated from her, raw and ungoverned. A tenderness born from her time in the world above, from seasons spent in sun-warmed soil, where life grew and faltered and reached. It had shaped her, softened her divinity in ways that both stirred and unsettled him.
“Mortals’ lives are often unjust,” Hades replied gently. “But Zeus has forbidden Olympus from interfering in their war.”
“But you,” she said quietly, “you are not an Olympian.”
He hesitated. “I am not,” he said at last. “But neither do I interfere in the world above. My duty to them lies here, in death.”
“They were children.” Her voice caught on the words, and she glanced away.
Her sorrow twisted something inside him. He stepped closer, cupping her cheek with his palm.
“Children who now dwell in Elysium,” he said softly. “In paradise, for eternity.”
Persephone swallowed hard, nodding, but he saw the glitter in her eyes. It was a wound words could not soothe, he knew this. No comfort could undo the horror of lives so violently stolen. Of innocence torn apart by cruelty.
He had long grown used to the tide of mortal brutality. It rose without mercy—war upon war, greed feeding grief, an endless churn of violence passed down like inheritance from generation to generation.
But this war… it reeked of something fouler than ambition. A slow, seeping decay cloaked in fire and glory, spreading like poison in the roots of the world. A world that had forgotten mercy.
The silence held, until he felt her gaze and looked down. Persephone was watching him, her eyes intent, searching his face. As if she could see the shape of his thoughts, reading them there.
“You study me,” he remarked quietly.
“You are troubled,” she replied. “Weary.”
