Page 141 of Where Darkness Bloomed
“I am your husband.” His voice was dark as the Styx, deep with the emotion churning in his veins. “I am stronger than you. Older. More powerful. I’ve held dominion longer than the earth has known your name.”
His thumb brushed her chin, reverent. “There is no force on Olympus or beneath that I wouldn’t face for you.”
A shiver passed through her. But when she looked at him, her eyes were shadowed, pained.
“Do you see though?” she asked quietly, edged with urgency. “I know his secret, Achilles. The power to end the mortals’ bloodshed lies with me.” Her hand curled against his chest, as if anchoring herself in him. “Help me. Take me back to the mortal world, and I—”
He stiffened.
She wanted him to—
Anger surged, raw and volcanic, cracking his composure like fault lines beneath the earth.
“No.”
The word fell harshly.
He rose abruptly, still naked, leaving her in the tangled furs. Shadows licked along his back as he stared down at her.
“You would ask me to deliver you over to Zeus’s wrath?” he demanded. “I lost you once. Do not ask it of me again.”
Anguish rippled across her face. She rose too, drawing a blanket with her.
“Look at the Styx,” she begged, the words splintering. “Innocents by the thousands, slaughtered. I see their bodies in my dreams!”
The words dug into him like talons, digging into the darkest parts of him, long-hidden. His jaw clenched so tightly, it throbbed.
“I hold the power to spare them. To stop this,” Persephone said, her voice steeped in sorrow. “How can you, who hold justice above all else, stand silent while they suffer?”
Her words were the final blow. The stone that shattered the dam.
Bitterness, old and buried, burst forth in a torrent. It burned the back of his throat, acrid and suffocating. The truth came, bitter as ash, cracking like thunder against stone—
“I did not turn from them.Theyturned from me!”
His eyes were shadowed as they found her, cold as glacial steel.
“I offered them justice, mercy. Peace after their short and brutal lives. I built all of this”—his hand slashed to the balcony, toward the endless landscape beyond—“forthem.”
“And still, they fled. They looked at me and saw only death. Decay. They shuddered at my altars, cowered in their prayers, always afraid of the one who would greet them at the end.”
He choked back the rest, silencing the tide before it could rise again. With a sharp turn, he jerked his himation over his shoulder like armor, stepping away before his fury could lash out again.
He’d been a fool to speak, to try to explain what could never be understood.
She was bright as starlight, the cherished goddess of spring. Mortals welcomed her with garlands, with songs. He was the god they feared to name. The end of all things.
They didn’t see the justice he upheld, the mercy he granted to the otherwise forgotten. Only death.
And the cruelest irony of all—
The Fates, in rare mercy, had entwined them together. Him andher.The only soul who had ever turned toward him instead of away. Yet even she stood for them, the mortals who rejected him so utterly.
Her hand touched his arm, soft as rainfall.
He looked down to find Persephone gazing up at him, sorrowful.
A long silence stretched between them, thick with words unspoken. Then, finally, her voice broke through quietly.
