Page 37 of Aïdes the Unseen
“I regret nothing,” I said. “But you may regret staying.”
Power gathered beneath my skin, not fire, not rage, but the endless gravity ofno.The immovable weight ofmine, not as a claim, but as a shield. If he reached for her, the walls would fall. The river would rise. The dead themselves would answer.
Wisely, he didn’t.
He watched us both—her with hunger, me with cold calculation—and stepped back.
“One day,” he said, eyes on her, “you may want more than devotion. You may wantadoration. When that day comes, call my name.”
She smiled. It was almost pitying. “When I want artifice,” she said gently, “I’ll look to you.” With that, she turned her back on him.
I watched her go. She did not waver. Shenever had.
In that moment, I knew, I understood. There would be others. Gods who could not abide her beingfree.Beingchosen.Beingmore.
I would never chain her. Love, if it was true, stood ready to fight. I would fight the whole pantheon, if I must.
Because she was not just spring. Not just Kore.
She was the dark before dawn. The bloom that breaks through stone. She wasthequeen who walked into shadow and made it bloom.
Chapter
Six
AÏDES
It began as a whisper. Not words. Not wind. Butnumbers.More than usual. Too many.
Souls streamed down the rivers, not in a trickle or tide, but a flood. Slipping past Charon’s skiff before he could speak their names. Sliding into the gates not from war, not from plague, but from hunger.The dead did not lie.
The whisper I heard in the shuffle of their feet was a single, terrifying truth. Starvation.The kind that takes not with fire or fury, but pitiless cruelty. Fields unbroken by plow. Trees heavy with ice. Children, too tired to cry.
I felt it like a crack beneath the stone of my chest. The Underworld had always made room for the dead. But this? This wastoo soon.
Too many.
I called the shades to stillness and summoned the records, but even before they reached my hands, two gods stood at my threshold.
Not warriors.
Not lords.
Not threats.
But beggars.
Small gods, usually proud enough to ignore the underworld entirely. Now, desperate. One brought an offering of barley, scorched and spoiled. The other, a woven crown of hay long since gone dry.
“They come to you,” one said, kneeling, “becauseshewill not listen.”
“Demeter?”
They nodded. “She does not walk the earth. She does not hear us. She has become ice and rootless rage.”
“And the mortals?—?”
“Perish,” said the other. “Even those who pray to her.”
