Page 42 of Aïdes the Unseen
Then silence. A moment suspended between possibility and fate. The gods waited. All of Olympus balanced on the edge of a single heartbeat.
Persephone turned her face to me.Onlyme. Her voice, when it came, was quiet but unwavering. “Can you accept that, Aïdes? That I will leave you—to bring spring, to soothe her pain? That I will walk from your arms and your realm for a time?”
Gaia’s tears.
I felt it like a wound, clean, deep, and righteous. Yet, I saw the way she looked at me. The flame behind her eyes. The lovethat refused to be shadowed. If I said no, she would stay. She would burn the world to do it.
But she would grieve, and I could not bear to be the hand that dimmed her. So I bowed my head, doing as I swore in my being I would do, and chose her. “Yes,” I promised. Even if it cost me the sun. Even if the hollow left in her absence might one day unmake me. “Because,” I added, “your heart is worth more than mine.”
Her lips parted. She looked as if she might fall into me, and I was already gone to her, devotion thick in every breath I took. “I will always return,” she said, softly. “Not because I’m bound. But because Ichooseto.”
Then she turned to the gods.
“To all of you, I amPersephonenow. Do not call me Kore. I am not yours to command, or barter, or mourn.” She raised her hand, and the very air shimmered with shadow and sunlight twined together. “Ichooseto walk both paths. I will bring spring when it is time. I will return to shadow when the harvest sleeps. Not because you demand it. But because Iwill it.”
The gods could only bear witness. The pact did not come from Zeus. His anger over the fact burned in the air. No, this pact came from Persephone.
Then it was sealed, not by decree, but by the echo of every heartbeat that had ever straddled the space between sorrow and joy.
Persephone turned to me once more and took my hand in hers. She smiled. Not as the maiden. Not even as the queen. But asherself.Whole. Unbreakable.
Eternal.
And so it was…
Persephone, goddess of the turning year, split her time as no other deity had before her—half in shadow, half in bloom. When she rose, she walked the fields in bare feet, bringing warmth to sleeping roots and laughter to the skies. The mortals danced, theanimals birthed young, and Demeter—though never as she once was—tilled the earth in silent reverence.
When she descended, she ruled the Underworld with neither mercy nor cruelty, but grace. The dead whispered prayers to her name, and even the shades found gentler dreams. I walked beside her not as master or captor, but as beloved.
And thus the world spun on.
A cycle, a song.
Spring and fall.
Life and death.
Until one day?—
She did not rise.
And she did not descend.
The flowers bloomed late.
The dead stirred without peace.
Demeter cried out to the wind, and I scoured every corner of my realm.
But my queen was gone. Not taken. Not lost.
Gone.
No gate opened for her. No footprints pressed the earth. No scent lingered in the air.
So, as the poets would one day write:
There came a year when spring never came, and the dead waited longer than death required.
