The Goddess of Spring
The Goddess of Spring.
On the hundredth day the world had been frozen solid, the gods of Olympus came down to the gates of the Underworld.
They said the surface was already little more than a vast tomb. The wheat fields had died black to their roots, the rivers had frozen with their beds laid bare, and mortals lay prostrate on the empty temple steps, offering prayers in place of grain.
As the Goddess of the Earth wandered the world in search of her lost daughter and tightened her grip around its throat, there had only ever been one place for all that resentment to flow.
The King of the Underworld. Lord of the dead. The kidnapper who had stolen the Goddess of Spring.
That was me.
I stood with the darkness of the wide-open bronze gates at my back. At my feet, Cerberus growled with his three heads lowered, and the black waters of the Styx flowed soundlessly beneath the gods' feet.
"Hades."
Demeter called my name. The frozen air seemed to crack open at the sound of that single voice. The goddess's golden hair had faded white as if frost had settled on it, and the eyes fixed on me overflowed not with a mother's love but with hatred.
"Give me back my daughter."
Behind her, the gods of Olympus looked down at me as one. Zeus, lightning in hand, held his silence with the same face he wore upon his throne. Hermes, rarely without a smile, averted his gaze. Even the god of war had lowered the tip of his spear in this place.
Kidnapper.
No one spoke the word aloud, yet it was heard all the same. Every god's eyes pointed to the same accusation.
It was absurd.
By rights, I should have done exactly that. I should have driven a black chariot through the fields of Nysa, snatched the goddess as she picked flowers, and dragged her down into the darkness. That was how the myth was written, and I had struggled against it for a long time because I hated that fate.
This marriage, at least, I would avoid.
I knew that by the gods' standards it was a match beyond reproach. In the stories I knew, the two of them eventually sat side by side as King and Queen of the Underworld. But I was not a god — I was a modern man who had settled into a god's body.
Persephone was Demeter's daughter. Demeter was this body's younger sister. Which made Persephone my niece.
And the age difference... One had lived since the war with the Titans; the other was a Goddess of Spring who had only just begun to bloom. Counting the years between them was meaningless from the start.
It might have been commonplace among the gods, but I was different. Even now, when the years I had spent in this body far outstripped the time I had lived as a human, the modern common sense lodged in my head had never quite been erased.
But after running from it for so long, I had ultimately brought her to the Underworld. I had no choice. In that moment there truly was no other path left open to me — a board so perfectly arranged that only a single exit remained while every other door had been locked in advance.
I had thought the threads of fate were woven that way. I learned far too late that the hands that wove those threads did not belong to the goddesses of fate.
"I'll say this one last time, Hades."
Demeter spoke again. The rage from a moment ago had subsided, but beneath her voice lay the same winter that had frozen the world for a hundred days.
"Hand over Kore. Then I will lift this winter."
Kore. Her mother still called her daughter by her girlhood name — the name from the days when she picked flowers at her mother's skirts. I alone in this place knew how poorly that name suited her now.
Instead of answering, I steadied my breath. Familiar footsteps were walking out from the darkness behind me — light, unhesitating steps that came to a stop at my side, bringing with them a flower fragrance that had no business blooming in the land of the dead.
"Mother."
Persephone said.
"I was not kidnapped."
It seemed as though I could hear the goddess's breath catch. Demeter's eyes wavered for the first time. Zeus's brow furrowed. A low murmur spread among the gods.
Before those frozen gazes she took my hand without shrinking back in the slightest, interlacing all ten fingers one by one, as if she would never let go again.
Spring took Death's hand.
No. She seized it.
"I walked down here of my own free will. Into this darkness. To this man's side."
The kidnapped goddess was nowhere to be found in this place. Only the goddess who had arranged the board so that she would have to be kidnapped stood there.
Persephone looked up at me. In the eyes of the gods, she would have appeared a pitiable yet resolute goddess protecting her love. But I could not possibly read the smile that bloomed toward me that way.
See? I told you.
It would turn out like this.
A chill ran down my spine.
So. To explain how things came to this point, I suppose I'll have to tell the story from the beginning — from that distant day when the news that a daughter had been born to the Goddess of the Earth reached even this Underworld. From the day I still didn't know that the Goddess of Spring smiling in a flower field was the most terrifying being in this world.