Page 132 of Where Darkness Bloomed
Persephone hesitated, sensing the wound buried beneath his words. “Too late?” she asked slowly.
A shadow drew over his face. The grove fell into silence once more, the wind catching like breath.
“Zeus loved my mother,” Dionysus said finally. “He swore to grant her any wish. She asked to see him as he truly was, his divine form.” His gazeturned distant, as if watching the moment unfold. “When he revealed himself, his power consumed her. I saved her soul, but her mind...”
He paused, the silence heavy with old grief. “Her mind was lost.”
The grove stood hushed, as though the trees bowed in mourning with the god of beautiful sorrow.
“As recompense,” Dionysus continued, “Zeus made me the god of wine.” Then, quieter, rougher: “And of madness.”
A half-formed truth slid suddenly into place. Madness. Not a punishment, a sanctuary.
It was why Dionysus didn’t fear it, why he embraced it. Let it course through him like sacred fire, drank it like the richest wine, breathed it in like a lover’s sigh. In madness—chaotic, fertile, consuming—lingered one that he had loved. Only there could what was lost be touched again.
It was devotion. A son too wild to surrender. A god too divine to forget.
The terrible beauty of what he revealed stole the words from her lips.
“I never knew,” Persephone murmured at last.
Dionysus looked at her then, the wildness unmasked, dancing behind his eyes. But when he smiled, it was bittersweet.
“It is easier to toast the god of wine,” he said softly, “to dance and drink in my name, than to acknowledge the god who walks among the untamed, the unbound. I am a liberation to some. A warning to others. A reminder of how fragile the mind truly is.”
Her heart clenched at the raw edge in his words, but she pressed on softly. “How did you find your way to the Underworld?”
“I took the path.”
“The path,” Persephone repeated. “Where does it begin?”
He studied her for a moment. “There is a cave in Epirus,” he replied. “Near Thesprotia, along the coast, a cave of black crystal.” A nod. “The path begins there.”
A cave of black crystal.
Like the dream—
Her breath hitched. She inclined her head and, with quiet reverence, whispered, “You have my thanks, truly.”
With a languid shift of his stance, Dionysus offered a rueful smile. “There is an obstacle.”
“Yes.” Persephone straightened, nodding with quiet determination. “But I believe Charon will grant me passage.”
Dionysus laughed—a rich, indulgent sound. “I have no doubt he would,” he replied smoothly. “But a different obstacle.”
Persephone drew in a breath, then asked, more carefully, “What is it?”
“Cerberus.”
The sun’s warmth seemed to bleed from the air, leaving a ghostly chill behind. A shiver curled down her spine.
Cerberus. A monstrous hound with three vicious heads, insatiable hunger, and a scent for trespassers. She’d never seen the famed beast, Hades’s most loyal guardian.
Her voice emerged as a whisper. “Cerberus guards the path?”
“It is the only pathway between the living and the dead,” Dionysus confirmed with a nod. “And it is fiercely guarded by him.”
“But he let you pass,” she countered, hope flaring like a torch in the dark. “How?”
