Page 9

Chapter

Nine

P ersephone

I have yet to stand at the base of the black mountain, with intent to climb. From afar, the pathway up the black mountain appeared, although harrowing, stationary. The steep stone steps fixed in place, as anyone might expect.

Such is not the case.

I gape in horror at the stone that shifts now before my eyes. The pathways winding like a snake to the mouth of a cave so high up the mountain, its toothy upper lip is nearly masked by the rolling doom of a dark cloud that expunges even the glitter of everlasting night.

“It’s so dark.”

I don’t realize I’ve spoken the words until Hades responds beside me. “The black mountains are always under the cover of black clouds.”

“And the pathways shift,” I say, pointing to the slithering of stone over stone. I shiver. “Like snakes.”

“The path to the Moirai is different for everyone.” The displeasure in Hades’ voice is loud.

My head whips to the side to look at him. I’m pretty sure I’m scowling. “What do you mean?”

“Your path to the Moirai and mine will be different, little goddess.” He flashes a wry grin. “Second-guessing this visit yet?”

I steel my spine. Casting my gaze over the snaking trails, I mutter a tense, “No.”

“This is not necessary, my Persephone.” Hydra speaks softly in my mind. Her ancient wisdom gives me pause. “There are those who never return from this climb.”

I straighten my shoulders. “I’ll return from this climb. They need my daughters, remember?”

Silence is the only response I am given. I tip my head back again to glare up at the toothy mouth of the cave that looms in line with the cover of coal black clouds. There is no shine to the clouds that smear their cover across the peak that stretches between the realms.

Since telling Hades about the daughters I carry in my womb—and the other Gods of the Underworld learning of their conception, and fate —it’s become clear to me that I’ve always been a tool crafted by the Moirai in their long game of reformation of the hierarchy of Gods.

I have lived and lost and sacrificed for the plans of Fate. I think I deserve to know now what the end goal is. Now that the ultimate sacrifice is being demanded of me. Of us.

And I deserve a chance to—to speak with the Moirai and plead my case to raise my daughters.

I deserve this. And if it means climbing this damn mountain, then by Gods, I’ll do it.

I take a step onto the stone path that hovers before me and silently thank Hades for handing me the first pair of pants I’ve worn in the Underworld as I swallow a sharp yelp.

The stone grinds and groans as it whips to the far left, away from Hades and Hydra.

By the time I chance looking in their direction, I’m horror-struck to find that they are tiny pinpricks of life way, way down below.

My heart lurches in my chest and a curse slips from between my lips, dripping of the animosity I feel toward the three sisters that hide away in this protected mountain.

They are the reason for every pain I have suffered, and every pain I will suffer.

The path shifts again—the climb before me growing steeper and steeper until I’m hanging on with fingertips that ache. In my shoes, my toes curl to cling to the lip of a mountain step I am very aware may change and drop me to my death.

“You want my daughters, you crazy bitches,” I gasp, clinging to stone that ripples with life. “If you let me die now, they’re gone. What then?”

It’s no surprise, there is no response.

But I know they speak to Hades.

From the flat of the stone, a ridge swells.

I reach for it with a hand that is drenched in the sweat of fear and exhaustion.

Turmoil rises inside me as anger I’ve not let myself feel before this moment needles the knowing I hate that I’ve mostly accepted.

The knowing that I will give my daughters to save the world, even as I still try, desperately, to think of a way out.

“It’s not right.” Tears burn my eyes. “You can’t expect me to carry them and not love them. You can’t expect me to just let them go.”

“We have not asked you to let them go.”

I stiffen, never having heard anything so clear and yet disembodied. It consumes my mind, a physical thing that moves beyond the boundaries of sound. It invades.

And yet I recognize it. The Moirai. The voices that predate even the ancient Gods.

Voices that are not of this world, even as they have guided its creation.

Voices that are of the Universes.

A ledge grows beneath my feet, holding me on steady ground as a vision floods my mind, stealing my sight.

A memory, I realize. They had once been my guides.

Their voices a tender tether tugging me away from the pain of a living end, and into the care of Hydra.

My soul fell through earth, grieving—mourning—and all the while they spoke to me softly.

Their voices a cocoon that held me together through the fall, and straight into the care of a beast who would become my bonded protector.

I see that, too. The handing of my spirit from the arms of the three—the keepers of universal law—to the one they entrusted to devote herself to me. To healing. To life.

It has always been intended, me and Hydra.

I was always meant to be born a giftless goddess.

I was always fated to crave a love Demeter could not give.

I was always intended to die in the Lethe, where my soul was fated from the spark of its conception to take refuge with the protector who had always been called monster.

It was always intended that I be born to my human parents, that I know their unending love.

That I bask in their human protections, so fragile and yet so strong.

And they were always intended to grieve me.

A flash of sunlight blinds me before the vision settles into one of Mom.

My heart contracts. She’s standing at the kitchen sink window that overlooks a barren farm field touched with the first signs of cold weather.

Her hand is clutching the cross she wears around her neck for comfort, her eyes misted with a grief I know will cling.

Then I see Daddy. His sun-weathered hands pulling her into his plaid covered chest. He drops a shaky kiss to her hair and squeezes her just a little tighter.

The scene is sad, but it swiftly changes to one in the future.

Mom is happy. She is laughing, sipping wine on a ship deck and Daddy is sitting close, watching the fall of the sun into an endless stretch of water. They’re holding hands, at peace.

“Even as there is healing after loss, you live forever in their hearts.” It’s those voices again. The Moirai.

Mom and Dad drift away to another vision. A lifetime of pain cuts through me, slicing into limb and organ and hope . Thousands of years of agony stretch inside only a few minutes, and I scream.

I realize, through the terrible pain, that I am being fed Hydra’s suffering. Sweat beads my brow and my knees threaten to buckle. My forehead finds reprieve in the cool chill that pours from the black stone as I catch breath in lungs that shudder.

“You were always meant to heal her suffering. And she was always meant for you .”

Hades’ roar in my mind is deafening. It echoes the one the Moirai pull from memory—the one which finally led me to him.

But this time, there is a subtle tugging I can’t ignore.

A ribbon of something darker, something which led me to obsess with ancient Gods and the smear of paint—a remembering of a life lived that was not yet finished.

I was always intended for him. Bound to him.

“His war is your war, for you are one split in two.”

I am internally brutalized when my mind finally quiets.

But there is only time for a gasped breath before another swell stretches from the stone.

It comes just in time for the one beneath my feet to fall away.

I cling, my feet dangling with nothing to catch me.

I’m thousands of feet in the air. The fall would be disastrous. Deadly.

Hydra roars.

Her fear and rage sets fire to the blood in my veins, and my fingertips curl into stone, clinging. My muscles burn, and I swear they tear as I hold my weight, my feet scraping the mountainside for anything I might catch.

Sweat trickles toward my eye, and fearing the sting of it, I wipe it on the arm of my shirt. The streak of red I leave behind on the white is alarming. I’ve cut my forehead on the stone. Or the stone has cut me. I’m not sure which.

This realm is built on the sacrifice of my innocence.

It is fed by the power of my soul.

It will continue to feast on my blood, sweat, and tears. Continue to thrive with every thunderous beat of my heart.

Three voices speak as one. “ The Underworld will survive, becoming the Kingdom of Gods and Kings, in the sacrifice of its dearest twin goddesses.”

I whimper. Just as I think I am going to fall, that it’s the end for me, my foot catches on a ledge that wasn’t there before. The mountain shifts beneath my body, the perpendicular slope tilting to a slanted incline in which my body falls heavily into.

My overheated body sinks into cool stone.

I gasp in breath that tastes of shadows and memories and sacrifice. The emotional toll just as significant as the physical.

My eyes roll back in my head with exhaustion a moment before they snap back open at the sound of Hades’ dark roar of rage. I see him to my side, trying to reach me with a frightening desperation even as the mountain fights his attempts, pulling him further away.

He’s in his Gods’ Form. The rippling black muscle and veins of flowing magma would be terrifying to any other, but they are a comfort to me.

A comfort and a pain. A pain because I can’t help but think of the last time, I’d seen him like this—the time I first had him like this.

The time we conceived the daughters I’ve not yet felt inside me, but know they are there.

A tiny spark of new life crafted entirely of love.

“There is no truer sacrifice than love’s sacrifice.”

I whimper again, pleading to the Fates, “Look at him. Look how he loves us.”

There is no answer.

I try again, “He won’t survive losing them. We won’t survive losing them.”

“The world won’t survive you keeping them.”

The mountain shifts again. This time I find myself sliding down at a speed that is terrifying. A scream rips from my lungs. Hades and Hydra roar, but it fades into the darkness I am pulled into.

I see two worlds simultaneously. It is as though they are layered one atop the other.

One is elevated. The people are smiling and happy and prospering.

The greedy governments have been stripped and cast aside.

A new and enlightened ruling in which truly serves not only the people, but the globe as a whole, exists.

It is no longer divided, each country having something to offer.

Trade and enlightenment and genuine care become the currency at which we prosper.

There are countries, but the divide is gone.

Differences and culture are respected and celebrated.

Learning is the highest wonder and spiritual awakening the highest goal.

There is no more hunger or slavery or hatred or racial divide.

No need to conquer or eliminate. There is comfort and encouragement and love.

And lurking beneath it in a layer that bleeds torment and anger is a future world in which we never escaped the path we’re now on.

One in which governments rage wars at the expense of the people to line their coffers, and slavery is still as present as ever in the form of the working class taxed beyond the ability to sustain life .

A slavery to big pharma and corporations, their only intention to generate monetary wealth from the souls it feeds into its inescapable prison.

Where races are blindly pitched against one another in an effort those in higher power use to throw attention off the crimes they commit.

Where people are fed anger, and their only outlet is more crime.

A world where the politics of vengeful, dark Gods bleeds into the governing’s of humanity—a world where, in a future not too far away, utter devastation steeped in hatred and fear spreads like a plague.

In one world, we’ve given our daughters. In the other, we have kept them for ourselves.

I can make only one decision. There is only one decision to make.

The mountain levels, saving my fall.

I pull heavy breaths of air into my lungs, my raw fingertips clutching at stone.

Tears leak from my eyes, and I swear I feel the saw of grief cut my heart in two.

Daring a look up the black mountain, I see that my path is finally stationary. Gone is the cloud cover that concealed the mouth of the cave. My path is clear.

And my battle is complete.

The path to the Moirai is different for everyone, not because they like to toy with us separately, but because we all have a different mountain within our minds that we must first climb before we can sit before them.

Much like I’ve always believed we must climb the mountain of life before we can bask in the loving light of God.

I don’t know why, but there is a deep comfort in that thought. A comfort that finally offers me the strength to begin the climb that will lead me to face my Fate.