Page 123 of Aïdes the Unseen
She didn’t need to speak. The squeeze of her hand brought me fully flush to her side. The dog sat again, close enough that our knees nearly brushed his shoulders.
The chamber brightened slightly with presence. Whatever waited here, whatever truth was about to unfold, it hadwaited for both of us.
Not just her, the goddess reborn. Not just me, the death-god lost in devotion. But thetogethernessof us.
We faced the pool.
It began to change.
The pool’s surface broke without a sound.
No splash. No ripple.
The water bent around the rising image, ushering it forth in welcome.
Irina inhaled softly beside me. The dog didn’t move.
The memory took form in threads of silver and dusk—light stitched into shape until it became somethingreal.
A courtyard. Walled in by wild olive trees. Moonlight so pale it was nearly blue, spilling over stone steps and marble pillars. The scent of sweet grain and tilled earth, green things and gold things, the kind of scent that sticks to your skin when you’ve walked too long beneath the sun.
A girl knelt by a well. Not a child. Not yet a woman.
Not yet stolen.
She looked up. Her face was Irina’s. Not completely, but enough that my heart lurched. In this life, this memory, she was Kore. She bore the flush of springtime across her cheeks, the strength of growing things in her hands.
There was a tension in her. Even then.
She was listening to apull. A calling from the earth. From somewhere deeper.
Just behind her, unseen by that younger self, a shadow moved through the trees. I stiffened at the approach. It wasn’t me as I was now or Hades as I had been then or even Aïdes, as I approached her.
Yetsomeonewho watched her with ancient eyes.
I felt it before I saw her.
Demeter.
She stepped into the memory like someone walking back into a wound. Beautiful and sharp, cloaked in gold and green, the harvest woven into every step. Her presence hit me like a memory I had no right to feel this sharply.
Irina leaned forward slightly, eyes wide in… conflict. A sharp thread of pain tugged at the corners of her expression.
Then the memoryspoke.
Demeter’s voice filled the chamber, not booming, or even divine, butpersonal. Terrifying only in its precision.
“You don’tneedto know what lies beneath, child. You areenoughhere. With me. This is where you belong. Where youwere planted. I made this world bloom for you. Isn’t that enough?”
The younger Kore did not answer. Though her fingers curled tight around the well’s edge, and her gazeshifted. Downward. Into the dark.
Towardme. Even then, before we had truly met.
The pool shimmered again, the memory flickering, losing clarity. Butnot beforeI saw Demeter step forward and gently press her hand to Kore’s shoulder.
Not beforethe girlflinched.
It wasn’t harsh. It wasn’t cruel.
