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She knows what is coming and she grieves, too.

I hold my mate tighter.

Persephone swallows hard. “On the cave wall, I carved our joining. The joining of woman and beast—of God. Us.” She shudders. “It came alive for me. The drawings in stone. They all came alive for me, Hades. I saw—” Her words break, voice cracking. “I saw so much.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“It hurts.” Her voice dips in grief. In fear.

The sound of it chills the heated blood in my veins in a way that I have never been chilled.

The God inside me repels it, rejects it.

She speaks again. “The red moons—the blood moons—they were my fertility. There was a pull from them which called for us to mate. To create.”

As soon as the words are between us, I know they are truth.

“I was never supposed to get pregnant until now. I don't know why. I don't know why the Moirai sanctioned this now, but they did. And the reason is because—well, I don't know the reason, Hades. I just know that we are never going to be able to raise them. We're going to have them, and they're going to die, and we're going to bury them under the Elysian Tree. Their souls are going to be given to human women, and they will bear our children. They will love and raise our children in a way that we can’t.”

“No.” I shake my head, refusing to believe the words she speaks even as I can taste the truth of them.

“Yes.” She nods sadly through her tears. “It is written.”

I swallow hard. Emotion burns my throat, but I manage to ask, “There is more than one?”

Tears streak down her face now. Her lips tremble.

Her body trembles.

“We're having twins,” she tells me. “Girls. They're so beautiful, Hades.”

Her hand falls between us to cradle her stomach, where the lives we made are growing. The lives I already love—that will end too soon.

I cannot bear it.

“I will fix this.” I am desperate for her to believe my promise, I think, so I can believe it, too. “We will talk to the Moirai, and I will fix this. We will raise our own children.”

She shakes her head. “We can't.”

Tartarus, but her eyes are so sad.“Little goddess.”

“I understand now that I've taken the time. They're meant for more.” Her sad eyes implore me to understand, too. “They're going to change the world. No, they're going tosavethe world. But they won't be able to do that if they don't sympathize with humanity.” She touches my face with her trembling hand. “We cannot raise them as Goddesses and expect them to understand what it means to behuman.”

Her eyes are daggers into mine. They dig deep into the gutted trenches of my soul, threatening to carve out my very heart.

“This is the sacrifice we must make.” Glistening tears fall in streaks of grief-tainted love down her face. “For all the realms. For life.”

I refuse to believe this truth. “You interpreted the carvings wrong, my love.”

Her eyes soften even as the tears continue to fall. “I think that is why I had to die.” I flinch at her words. “I was always fated to come into this world a Goddess, only to be stripped of everythingthat was me, down to the barest parts of my soul—to be reborn as a human so that I might sympathize with the world the Gods created and destroyed—so that it could be healed. So that I could help heal it.” She shifts onto her knees. Her eyes never leaving my own. “There's a war brewing, Hades. We're meant to fight in it. We're meant to sacrifice them for the better of all—even if it breaks us.”

She collapses against my chest, and I finally understand.

I understand why I was never able to plant my children inside her womb—to gift her with life.

It is not simply that the Moirai had not sanctioned their birth within her body as a Goddess. I have had her multiple times under the blood of the fertile moons since I brought her to the Underworld, but I had only had her once in my Gods’ Form.

And now I understand why she can suffer my heat, because it was that heat that was needed to craft the souls of those who will one day bear the power to destroy Gods.