Page 127 of Aïdes the Unseen
The light shifted.
The chamber exhaled.
The air thickened, the pressure folding inward like gravity had changed its mind. The dog stood first, alert and tense, fur bristling just slightly.
Graven’s hand reached for mine.
Then, she arrived. No door opened. No signal sounded. Demeter simplywas.
The air grew sweeter. Thick with the scent of crushed wheat, rain-soaked loam, and wildflowers caught at the edge of overgrowth. The room dimmed from the weight ofharvest and ruinwrapped in skin.
She stood across the stone span of the chamber, wreathed in green gold and shadow, hair like firelight and eyes that had once wept for the child she thought she’d lost.
Her gaze locked on mine and the silence shattered. She looked exactly the way I’d always imagined her, and nothing at all the way I remembered.
Demeter.
The name landed in my chest like a weight and a flare. Recognition and recoil, grief and rage, all folded inside the hollow between heartbeats.
She stood framed by golden light that had no source, the air warping faintly around her with life. With season. Withexpectation. Her presence was so thick I could barely breathe through it.
But Idid.
I took a breath.
And I didn’t bow.
“Hello, Mother,” I said, the words scraping my throat like roots tearing through stone.
She flinched.
It might have just been a flicker. But I saw it.
Then her face hardened into the kind of calm only grief can wear. “Irina,” she said carefully. “Or is it Persephone again?”
I didn’t answer.Shedidn’t get to decide which name mattered most.
“I remember,” I said instead. “Not everything. Not yet. But enough.”
Her expression didn’t change. But the ground beneath my bare feet shifted subtly. A slow, warning thrum beneath the stone.
Graven moved slightly beside me. I felt his stillness. Ready. Absolute.
Demeter’s gaze flicked to him. “You brought her here.”
“She came here,” Graven said quietly. “I didn’t force her.”
“No. You never did, did you?” Her voice twisted around the words like thorns. “You just waited. Watched. Took her when she didn’t know enough to say no.”
“Ichosehim,” I snapped, sharper than I meant. “Irememberchoosing him.”
Her eyes darted to mine again. Pain etched around them. “That’s what youthink. But it wasn’t your choice. Not then. Not the first time.”
“Because you made it first.” The words fell out before I could stop them.
Demeter went still.
The dog growled low, deep in his throat.
