Page 2

Chapter

Two

P ersephone

“All the time my soul was missing—it was here?”

“Yes.” Hydra’s melodious voice is husky in my mind as she walks alongside me in the tunnels, illuminated by the rolling firestorm above us.

“How was I reborn?”

Magenta light flashes, throwing a collage of shimmering specks on the walls of the cave, reflecting the scales that shift with Hydra’s every move.

“Your spirit began to feel a need. It pulled you deeper into the tunnels until we arrived below the Tree of Elysian, the Tree of Life.” Her heads slide sideways to take me in. “Come. There is much I must show you.”

We continue down the maze of halls, side by side. “Has Hades ever been down here?”

“Never.”

“Could he?”

“There is nowhere in the Underworld in which he is prohibited.”

“Why hasn’t he come down here?”

“Hades is a complex God. He not only possesses the ability to feel guilt, but he is haunted by it.” She continues forward, her pace slow to keep with my own.

“Many of the other Gods do not suffer as Hades suffers. Perhaps it’s his responsibility to judge the sins of the living, but he has developed a keen sense of right and wrong.

A sense the Gods of Olympus have not bothered to sharpen for themselves. ”

“You think guilt has kept him from traveling here?”

She nods her heads. “Hades sent me to the living realm to guard the portal into Tartarus. It was he who bestowed upon me the honor of guarding the souls of the living, so that they would never suffer an unjust punishment in death.”

I inhale a sharp breath. “He blames himself for the way Hercules harmed you. For the way you continue to suffer.”

Her eyes snap to mine. “You remember my story?”

I blush. “Hades told me a little.”

She sighs. “I believe he carries the guilt of the pain I bear. He has tried to heal me, and he has failed.”

We enter another cave mouth where another inky pool glistens like still obsidian in the center under a high arched ceiling of rolling shades of magenta.

I watch Hydra move to the edge of the pool, dipping her heads and diving into the deep. I gasp, because she was there one moment and gone the next. In only a second, her massive body is entirely submerged, taking all evidence of her with it. The water doesn’t even ripple.

I wait for long moments, the sound of my heart a drum between my ears. Alone in these twisting caves, my fear returns. The silence is crushing.

I’m spiraling into terror’s quick descent when she crests the surface again. I don’t realize just how far gone I’ve slipped into my fear until I see her, and a little sob escapes between my lips.

She swims to the edge, the splash of her large wings lifting her from the water just as effortlessly as she’d entered. Her nostrils flare as she scents the air. “You are afraid?”

“You can—smell that?”

“I am sensitive to you.”

“I thought you left me,” I croak.

“I would never leave you.” I think she frowns. “My pain binds me to the waters. The longer I am out of the water, the more unbearable the pain of my wounds.”

“Oh.” Something tugs inside my stomach. An uncomfortable tightening. “The water eases your discomfort?”

She nods, but says, “Come.”

I follow her again as she sets off for yet another tunnel. I can’t begin to know how deeply beneath the Underworld we travel now, or how the pools of inky water have not flooded these tunnels. I suspect, like so much that sustains the Underworld, it has something to do with magic.

I should feel uncomfortable or at the very least nervous for wherever it is I am being led, but I don’t. With Hydra, I feel only security. I feel only safety.

When my bare feet begin to ache and my muscles sing with exhaustion, I ask, “Where are we going?”

Hydra stops to peer at me. Again, she inhales. “You are in pain.”

“My feet are sore.” I brush off the pain with a flippant wave. My pain cannot measure her own, and I feel guilty for feeling it at all.

She lowers her big body to the floor. “Climb on.”

I feel my face singe hotly. “I can’t ride you.”

“Of course, you can.”

“No.” I shake my head. “You’re in pain, too.”

“My pain is centuries old. In all the millennia I’ve lived with this pain, you were the only relief I ever knew.” She lowers her heads. “Please, climb on.”

With nothing for it, I sigh and move closer.

My palm connects first with the shimmering scales of what I would call her hip.

Her tail is thick and fearsome, tipped at the end with a barbed ball.

The barbs split into a divide of two, running the length of her tail to extend slightly outward.

If she were to whip her tail to the side, she would easily impale any foe.

Unable to help myself, I stroke my hand down the length of her body to her tail. A rumbling purring sound echoes from deep inside her and I smile. “You sound like a kitten.”

“You once told me you like those.”

“I do. Very much.”

“You should tell Hades you would like one.”

“Do you think I could have one here, in the Underworld?” When I continue to stroke down the length of her tail, coming closer to the barbs that extend outward, they suddenly snap down to blend with the rest of her tail in a ridge rather than the spikes.

I gasp. Hydra laughs a deep and beautiful sound.

She tells me, “Anything your heart desires, Hades would find a way to give it to you. Besides, there are plenty of animals in Asphodel City.”

I’m still stuck on her spikes having shifted like that. “How’d you do that?”

She laughs again. I really love the sound. “I don’t want to hurt you. Now, climb on.”

I do as she says, climbing slowly onto her back and settling between her wings.

There’s a slightly translucent quality to her wings.

Not transparent, but close. I’m reminded of holding a leaf up to the sun, and the way I could see the veins of life inside the leaf within the green.

Her wings are like that. She’s so beautiful. So powerful.

“Are you a dragon?”

“Some have called me by that name.”

“But are you?”

“I do not know. I am me.”

“But you breathe fire?”

“No.” She begins to move, and I hold onto the spikes that band around her neck, like a necklace. “I breathe like you. But there is fire inside me, fire I can expel if I wish.”

“Do you wish it often?”

“No.” She continues to move down the tunnel.

“How far underground are we?”

“Very.”

“And I lived down here with you? In these tunnels?”

“Yes.”

“We just roamed down here for thousands of years?”

“You liked to draw. I would bring you stones that you would scratch into the walls. There are thousands of pictures, and over the years, I’ve come to realize they tell a story.

A story of what must come.” There is a glow up ahead.

It is a volatile shifting of magenta and violet that catches and holds my gaze.

Hydra tells me, “It is where I take you now.”

I can’t make myself speak as she lumbers closer to the glowing void.

When she finally steps from the tunnel into the largest cave yet, I am speechless.

It’s a thing of dreams, a wonder of this realm, surely.

The cave is wide and high. Impossibly high.

The firestorm within the stone stretches from the ceiling into the cave walls, rumbling like a low boil under sketches that look like runes.

They flash, illuminating brightly as the firestorm rolls under the stone in a sequence of prophecy that chills the very marrow in my bones.

“I did this?” I gasp after long minutes. I slide down her back and tail, stepping onto the cool cave floor.

The floor of the stone is a thick coal black, blending almost seamlessly into the pool of obsidian in the center.

That black stretches up over the walls of the cave, as it had over the walls of the previous caves.

I assume that the ceiling of the caves is crafted of a clear crystalline stone that allows the fire inside to be seen.

It appears I’ve chiselled away enough of the black stone on the walls to craft a story of what is to come that is illuminated by the rolling flame within it all.

And as each image appears bright before fading to bright again, I can feel the memories of a life in between coming to me. They click into place as though they are a story told to me on an ancient tongue, older than time.

I see the rise of Primordial Gods and Titans, and the fall of both.

I see the war of the Gods, and the rule that has lasted an eternity, twisted by an immorality bred of the Gods that has spread unchecked like a toxin to humanity.

I witness the birth of a child prophesied by the Moirai—three from a place beyond this universe.

They have settled here to scribe the events of the realms of this world.

To guide the spiritual evolution of this realm, so ancient to those who are born to it, and yet still in its infancy to the three who stand sentry.

I see the final war. The Gods who will fall.

I see three Gods who will stand above all, ruling together as one.

They are violence and justice and strength.

They are love and honor and loyalty. They will be bound by the birth of two.

Twins, one born of darkness, and one born of light.

One to temper violence and the other to temper impossible strength.

I see the coming together of monster and woman. A mating beneath twin moons. Fertility.

The sketches come alive, as though animated in the stone by a magic so ancient and timeless it cannot be of this world.

I see a Goddess swell in the arms of her God, and as the firestorm rolls behind the sketch, it brings life to the image, for I see tears roll down her face.

A whisper spills in my mind. It is not my Hydra.

“Love. Grief. Sacrifice .”

I see Olympus, and the crumble of an ancient realm that bleeds malice. I walk the halls of it, Hydra at my back. A figure I do not know bends the knee before me, a face man then woman. Lies play in the eyes. They are beautiful and golden, but their heart is cloaked in gloom and doom.

The image shifts again. My Hydra is close, but wary.

She is healed and strong and I am proud and brave.

But a blade blessed by lightning swings to cut me in two—I don’t see it.

The lives I nurture inside me are vulnerable.

His aim is to destroy all that they are, for they are the end of all that has ever been, and the beginning of everything that has yet to be.

Before the blade of lightning can strike me, I am saved by a thing of darkness. A blade that crawls with shadows and bleeds flame.

The image transforms again as a sob catches in my throat.

I trace my finger over the flashing sketches of the twins—over the moons I carved long ago into the chests of daughters not yet born. From the moons in their chests burst the strings of an unbreakable rope that binds them all. And I know.

I know.

The infants that are of me and Hades—sanctioned by the Moirai and the universes beyond—come alive.

They peel from the wall; ghosts I watch pulled on strings from the arms of parents who love them desperately.

Those strings never break even as they are placed beneath the tree of life, their skin cold with a blue that will scar the whole of my heart for the rest of eternity.

Two leaves fall from the tree, and the Underworld contracts as two women in the living realm portal my daughters into this world in a way I can not.

The images float back to the wall where they appear again as sketches that flash under the firestorm, no longer touched by the magical animation of life.

I fall to my knees, sobbing violently.

“Why?” I cry, holding the life I now know is a spark of light inside my belly, already bursting through my heart. “Why do I have to sacrifice them?”

“They are fated to the Gods who will rebuild the realms and save humanity.”

“But I could raise them. I love them.”

Hydra’s eyes spill inky tears as her heads come close, one resting in my lap to look up at me. She nuzzles me before she pulls back. “I’ve thought on this for many, many years, for you grieved their loss even then. And I thought on why you were taken, your soul stripped of its memory as a goddess.”

“And?” I can hardly see her through the blur in my eyes.

“You must sacrifice your daughters to the human world so that their hearts might be soft to the plights of humanity, such is your own heart now as it never could have been—not truly—had you been raised again as a Goddess.” Her words of wisdom are a blade that cuts me to my core.

“They will advocate for humanity in the coming war. They will soften the hearts of the Gods who will fall for them. The Gods whose hearts they will win and hold forever dear. The sacrifice must be made, Persephone, for the good of all the realms. They are your daughters. They will always be your daughters, even if you do not raise them yourself. But they are fated to be Queens.”

Hydra moves again to the wall where a sketch glows brightly.

I see two beautiful women. One bright and light, the other dark and elegant.

Both carry within them the spirit of Nyx and Eros and me .

Chaos. The power is no longer bound to one realm, one Goddess.

It surges between all the realms, connected by the most powerful of all the powers. Love.