Page 24 of Aïdes the Unseen
She was spring.
Spring always left.
I would wait at the edges. In the hush. In the pause before the first dew. Hope was not my nature, but it washers.
And Gaia help me—I would follow heranywhere she dared bloom.
Even into the light.
The wheat had turned gold.That was how I knew it was safe to come. Safe enough, anyway. She wouldn’t be alone—no goddess is truly alone at the height of her power—but her mother was gone from the fields. I felt Demeter’s absence in the soil. The hush wasn’t fear. It was…watching.
Still, I stepped lightly. Harvest was a holy thing, and I’d never been welcome at holy things. Not unless they ended. This was a celebration ofwhat endured.
The ground did not shy from me. It did not bow, either. It simplyallowedme to pass. I think, perhaps, because she had walked beside me once before. That blessing lingered longer than I deserved.
I found her near the granaries, barefoot and brushing chaff from her fingers. She wore no crown. That unsettled me more than it should have. She always wore a crown near the equinox. A circlet of barley and gold, vines and woven laurel. Power and harvest made visible.
Today she had pulled her hair back with a ribbon, and her dress was wrinkled, and she looked—Gaia save me—young.
Not fragile. Not weak. Juststill becoming. Yet she turned to me as though she had known I was coming long before I did. “Aïdes,” she said simply, with a smile that didn’t try to be anything but true. “You waited.”
“As long as I could,” I admitted. My voice came rougher than I meant it to. Drier. Like something disused. “You… look well.”
“I am.” She turned back to her work, plucking a bent stalk from the sheaf beside her. “You came while she’s gone again.”
“Yes.” There was no point denying it.
She dusted her hands against her skirt, eyes flicking to mine. “You don’t have to.”
A pause. A long one.
“I do,” I said, quietly. “Because she will not meet me in peace. And I will not come to you through war.”
Her eyes softened, but she shook her head. “She hasn’t forbidden me from seeing you.”
That stopped me. Not because it pleased me. Because itterrifiedme. “She hasn’t?” I asked, carefully, as if the words were still dangerous in the air.
“No.” Kore looked toward the fields, where the stalks bent in the wind, sunlit and full. “She knows. She feels the thread. But she hasn’t spoken of you. Not in warning. Not in anger. Nothing.”
I stepped closer, the silence between us tightening like a drawn bow. “That’s not permission. That’s restraint.Tension.She’s waiting.”
“She trusts me,” she said, but I could hear the question beneath it. Like she didn’t know if she believed it.
“No,” I said, too fast. Too firm. “She fears what you might choose.”
That made her still. Not angry. Not sad. Just… thoughtful.
“She has reason to fear,” I added, softer now. “I am not part of this world. I am not meant to be part ofyou.”
“You keep saying that,” she replied, still not looking at me. “As if meaning has already been written.”
“Hasn’t it?”
She turned then, slow and sure. “Then why do you keep showing up to rewrite it?”
That hit harder than I wanted it to. I didn’t have an answer for her. Not one I trusted.
We walked, not toward the trees this time, but through the fields themselves. The grain brushed our thighs. The windrustled overhead. In the distance, I could hear songs—harvest songs, rising in rhythm with scythes and laughter.
