Page 34 of Aïdes the Unseen
Then, fool that he was, he reached for her hand. Just to touch it. Just to see. Power lashed out—not mine.
Kore’s.
It bloomed from her palm like a bloom of dusk-touched flame, like soil cracking to reveal something unnameablebeneath. It didn’t strike him down, itwarned. A curl of shadow, a snap of wind, a sudden pressure in the air like a coming storm.
Ares pulled back sharply. But his eyes lit. “You’re dangerous,” he murmured, low and nearly reverent.
She smiled then, all teeth. “I have to be. I live with ghosts.”
Gaia help me, Ilovedher in that moment more than any eternity could hold.
Ares turned to me, finally. Still grinning. Still tempted. “She’s going to draw attention,” he said. “More than me. More than her mother. They’ll come.”
“I know.”
“Do you care?”
I met his gaze with all the weight of every grave, every silence, every ending the world had ever known. “Let them.”
When Ares left, reluctant, intrigued,achingfor battle, I turned to her again. She stood in the echo of what she had summoned, the remnants of power still spiraling like wind around her hair and throat. “I didn’t know I could do that,” she said softly.
“You didn’t take power,” I murmured, crossing the space between us. “Youarepower. You were only waiting for the world to stop pretending otherwise.”
Her eyes lifted to mine. “Do you still want me like this?”
“I want youmore,” I said. When I pulled her close, this time it was not to consume or to protect. It was tohonor.
The shadow crown on her brow may not have been made by my hand, but I would die a thousand times to defend it. Time bled. Not forward. Not back. Simply... away.
In the realm beneath the world’s heartbeat, it lost meaning, as it always had. Centuries might pass in a breath, or a night might stretch so long the stars above forgot how to turn. But it was not time I marked.
It washer.
Kore.
Except, no.
Not anymore.
Even I had stopped thinking of her by that name. Not aloud, not even in thought. That name had belonged to spring. To a girl with soil under her nails and sunlight on her cheeks.
She was still that—she wouldalwaysbe that. But she wasmore.
She had been more the moment she took her first step through the door I’d left open. When she strode into the dark with her crown of starlit shadow, unafraid. When she looked at death and didn’t flinch.
I didn’t need to give her another name. Names were the weapons of gods. Tools. Chains, sometimes. If she had wanted one, if she had asked for it, I would’ve carved it into the stone bones of the world.
Instead, I called her nothing butmineand never once did I mean possession. I meantpresence.I meantbelonging.Not because I claimed her. Because she stayed. Because shechose.
The Underworld changed around her. Walls that had stood still since the river first began to run now breathed anew. The air held a softness in the quiet hours, a strange, warm hush. Not grief.
Something gentler.
Rooms long forgotten bloomed with moss and pale flame, not bright enough to banish the dark—but enough to ease it. The spirits came closer to her each passing day. Even the Furies, once sharp as razors, softened in her presence, blinking like wolves at a firelit threshold.
She never tried to fix them.
She simplysawthem.
