Page 2 of Aïdes the Unseen
“Whatdoyou come for?”
He hesitated. Then, “I heard laughter, and I was curious.”
I laughed, soft and light as a petal falling. “So the god of the Underworld follows laughter into the sun.”
His expression didn't change, but there was something, a shift, subtle as the way shadows lengthen in late afternoon.
“I’m not what they call me,” he murmured, and there was an edge beneath the words. “I don’t steal souls. I don’t hunger for death. I keep what is lost. I remember what the world forgets.”
My heart ached, not from pity, but from recognition.
“I’m Kori,” I said. “Kore, if you want the name my mother uses when she’s angry or proud. Goddess of spring. Joy in bloom. Life with a heartbeat.”
He looked at me, and something in his gaze softened. Like he hadn’t expected the world to smile at him and mean it.
“Aïdes,” he said, the name folding in on itself like dusk wrapping over twilight. “Some call me Hades.”
I offered my hand. It glowed faintly in the places where my fingertips brushed sunlight. “Well, Aïdes,” I said, voice playful,“since you’ve come all this way for laughter, you might as well stay and enjoy it properly.”
He looked at my hand like it was a secret too beautiful to trust. Then slowly, almost reverently, he took it.
Our fingers met, opposites in every sense. Heat and cold. Bloom and decay. But not fighting.
Fitting.
Around us, the light didn’t retreat, nor did it dominate. It shifted, dappled, folding around us as if it had no choice but to find a way for both of us to exist in the same breath.
When I looked up at him, really looked, I saw not death, not shadow, and not the dread king painted by trembling myths.
I saw the man who walked into the sun without a crown, seeking only the sound of joy.
And I wondered—dangerously, deliciously—what would happen if he ever looked at me like I was joy itself.
The humans laughed and danced below, unaware that the seasons had shifted in a way no equinox could measure.
Spring had touched shadow.
Twilight softened the world.
It always did. That liminal hour when everything—colors, thoughts, even time—felt more fluid. Where shadows stretched long and slow across the grass, and the sky flushed like it was shy to let go of the day.
I didn’t leave.
Neither did he.
We wandered, not down to the village, but sideways through the meadows, past the murmuring creek that still remembered my childhood footsteps. The mortal songs drifted faintlythrough the air, distant and golden, but here, it was only us. Stillness wrapped around us, not awkward, not heavy.
Comfortable.Curious.
“I didn’t expect you to walk,” I said after a while. “I thought Death rode chariots made of bone and fire.”
He glanced at me. That ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth again, as if it had long since forgotten how to fully bloom. “That’s what they say. You’d be amazed how much humans invent about me. The truth is more... ordinary.”
“Ordinary?” I raised a brow. “You don’t feel ordinary.”
He looked ahead, into the softening mist that edged the trees. “Power isn’t the same as presence.”
A thoughtful silence followed.
