7000 BC

Boeotia

Admete giggled. “He’s here.” Her eyes were fixed on a point over Kore’s shoulder, dancing with mischief.

Kore turned around, frowning at the cluster of trees and bushes at the edge of the forest that wasn’t quite thick enough to conceal the figure lurking in their midst. She waved a hand in dismissal and Admete and her gaggle of oceanids darted away, laughing and whispering suggestively to one another.

“You can come out now,” Kore said.

The man who hesitantly emerged from the mass of leaves and branches was tall and broad, clad in robes of purest black. His face was a collection of sharp features pieced together at somewhat severe angles, imbued with the pallor of one who didn’t get out much—but it was a nice face for all that, Kore thought.

“Hello,” he mumbled. It was the kind of tone that should have been accompanied by an averted gaze, but he looked at her with an endearing sort of shyness, hidden behind a solemn expression and a rigid posture.

“Hi.” Kore tried to smile to put him at ease, but it felt forced. She settled for raising an eyebrow instead. “Why were you hiding in the bushes?”

Hades fidgeted. “I was not hiding. But,” he conceded, “you were with your friends and I did not wish to intrude.”

“You’re—” A faint blush warmed her cheeks, and suddenly she was the one who had to fight the urge to look away—”you’re not intruding.”

Hades blinked. Then those somber, night-black eyes of his softened. “I’m glad.”

She couldn’t help melting a little at that. Everyone on Olympus wondered what she saw in him, but she’d take clumsy sincerity over hollow charm any day of the week. She glanced around their verdant, flower-speckled surroundings; the nymphs were nowhere in sight, but one couldn’t be too careful. Especially when one’s mother was not only overprotective but also a nature goddess.

“What you asked me last time…” She stepped closer to him, lowering her voice. “My answer is yes.” Some of that perennial tension drained from his body and a rare lightness beset his constantly pinched features, and she almost hated herself for what she was about to say next. “My mother, however, is not on board.”

He drew in a breath, but said nothing.

“She doesn’t want me to leave Olympus and she doesn’t like you very much—well, she says that of anyone who comes sniffing around, but you in particular…” Kore trailed off, belatedly realizing that, in her haste to fill the silence, she was only making things worse.

Any other god would have scoffed at overbearing Demeter, would have raged at things not going their way. But not Hades. After a long, long while, he nodded. “I understand. What do you want to do?”

It was that question—and the great care he took with it, so that it could be said gently— that spurred her to make the decision she’d been wrestling with for weeks. The gods were shaped by their roles and she was one of the youngest, Demeter’s daughter, never wholly herself. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had asked her what she wanted, and she knew more than ever that what she wanted was to be with him.

And so she told him, and his pale brow furrowed.

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” he remarked.

“Maybe not. But, if you ask me—” She smirked at him— “you could stand to have a little excitement in your life.”

 

~*~

 

1590 BC

Eastern Macedonia

The height of the Bronze Age came and went. The mortals learned how to build palaces and how to destroy them. They started telling her story, although of course they got all the important bits wrong. She didn’t mind very much, and neither did Hades, she thought. What they had was theirs alone, and as for the rest—well. Sometimes it wasn’t about what actually was, but what people—humans and other gods alike—needed to believe.

But, as it turned out, things really weren’t that simple. Her name changed, a slow transformation, time shivering at the edges as it passed. Then came the serpent weaving through the wildflowers, needle-like fangs closing in on a delicate ankle, and a boy went down into the underworld and sang and failed.

Orpheus hadn’t deserved what he’d gotten, Persephone thought. His only crime had been being a foolish young man, and weren’t all young men foolish?

She watched his head float down the Hebrus, carried away from her by the dark, storm-tossed currents. His body was at her feet, mangled beyond recognition—not that it would have been easy to identify without his face, anyway. The blood had long since stopped gushing from the stump of his neck and his various wounds, watering the grass in a thick pool that would soon be washed away by the pouring rain. It was late evening on Mount Pangaion, and the weather had taken a turn for the worse after Dionysus’ girls swept through in their orgiastic frenzy, falling upon the hapless musician with bared teeth and long nails and wild eyes.

Persephone gingerly prodded the carcass with the tip of her big toe. Orpheus had survived a descent into the underworld, only to get torn apart by maenads barely a week later. What a horrible way to die.

“Not the worst death I’ve seen.” The wind carried the deep voice to her as though it were smoke curling from a funeral pyre.

Persephone’s lips clamped together in a harsh line. “I’ll take your word for it,” she said acidly. “You’re the expert, after all.”

The man who had appeared in front of her sighed. He regarded her with weary, starlit eyes. “Will you come home with me?”

“Not tonight.” She needed space to think; Orpheus’ song was still echoing in her ears. She was barred from Olympus for the time being, but it didn’t seem like a bad idea to wander, to visit her old haunts.

Hades looked disappointed for the briefest of moments. It was only a flicker of emotion that twitched across his haughty features and was gone in a blink, but it had been there. Persephone tilted her head, narrowing her eyes at him from across the pitiful, twisted corpse.

“So clingy now, husband mine?” She didn’t try very hard not to sneer. “Autumn has barely begun. You have me for five months and a half.”

“Every month that I don’t have you is longer than a lifetime, Kore.”

Her heart skipped a beat, but she ignored it. He was trying to smooth things over after their raging argument. Oh, what a fight it had been, Eurydice’s shade sinking back into oblivion, the caverns beneath the earth echoing. Days later, Persephone still wasn’t in any mood to be mollified. He hadn’t even bothered to find her after she stormed out—he was only here because the boy was dead, and death was his domain.

“That’s not my name anymore,” she said in a tone that could have frozen the Styx. Summer’s child that she was, she’d learned something of the cold from him. “In any case, you don’t mean Orpheus’ lifetime, surely. It wasn’t very long. You saw to that.”

“The bacchae saw to it,” Hades stiffly replied. “I do not kill.”

“No,” she agreed, “but you set impossible tasks, and you sent the boy to his doom. He was wandering these hills, mourning his lost love.”

“That was hardly a task.” Hades spoke calmly, which only served to annoy Persephone further. Just once, she would have liked for him to yell. Even when the very walls of his kingdom shook with the stirrings of his temper, he had never been so affected by anything as to raise his voice. “All that Orpheus had to do was refrain from looking back. It was a test of faith.”

“Mortals always look back. You know that,” she insisted. “They are made of memory.”

“And so are we, my love.” He held out a hand to her, reaching for her across the grass and through the rain and over the dead. He was asking for a truce, in not so many words, but Persephone refused to give it. Orpheus’ song had done something to her that she didn’t know how to explain.

She shook her head and turned to walk away. Her husband’s hand dropped limply to his side at the periphery of her vision. She left him there and she followed the river, out to sea.

Her name had been Kore once, in the early days when the Minoans had yet to build their stone palaces. Then the god of the underworld came to her amidst the Nysian plains and her function shifted from maiden to dread queen, and the mortals wove her new name into the stories that they taught their children.

Granted, there weren’t a lot of mortals who worshiped her yet—or Hades, or any of their pantheon, for that matter. Apollo had assured her that would soon change. “I give it another thousand years,” he had quipped one summer afternoon in the stately halls of their father, daylight gathering around him even though they were indoors. “You’re a beautiful ray of sunshine married to the dour-faced lord of the dead. If I know anything about humans, I know that you’re going to be famous.”

Persephone wasn’t exactly holding her breath, but her half-brother was Apollo Moiragetes, the god of oracles. He probably knew more about the future than she did.

By the time the first faint slivers of dawn broke, she had reached the shores of the Aegean, the salt-stained breeze ruffling through her hair and robes and the water lapping at her bare feet. Had this been a century or so ago, she would have hoped that the sea nymphs would come to her and it would be like old times. But she knew better now; it was autumn, and she belonged to the Stygian realm, her touch bringing only decay. The oceanids, her friends since childhood, would steer clear of her until the spring.

Was that what she had wanted? It had been so long since she made her choice that she wasn’t sure anymore. She’d done it for the kind of love that Orpheus had sung of, the kind of love that Hades felt for her. That was why he’d offered the boy that bargain—but it seemed cruel, she thought, to break one’s own rules only to uphold them in the end.

Like offering hope just so it could be snatched away.

Persephone stood on the shore and waited for Helios’ chariot to blaze across the heavens, bringing the sunrise. Thorny black flowers bloomed at her feet, withering as suddenly as they appeared, their roots unable to find purchase in the barren sand.

~*~

 

612 BC

Cumae

Nineveh had fallen. The echoes of its destruction had reverberated through the tectonic plate, causing Artemis’ hounds to howl and the sirens off the coast to wail and Chiron’s children to thunder their hooves. In the air was the pervading sense of vague uneasiness that came with every paradigm shift.

Ishtar had fled to Greece to lick her wounds. This had put Aphrodite in a bad mood—goddesses of love were competitive by nature, because desire was a fiery, jealous thing, and the presence of her counterpart put her on edge. “I don’t know why she’s so depressed,” Aphrodite complained to anyone who would listen. “It’s not like she’s out of a job. It’s all the same pantheon over there in Mesopotamia, isn’t it?”

Privately, Persephone felt sorry for the visitor—or perhaps in this case refugee was the more appropriate term. No one loved Ishtar more than the Assyrians did. Her empire had been vast and rich, and now it was at an end.

But Aphrodite’s tantrum was making Olympus unbearable, and so Persephone left for the mortal plane.

It was the height of summer and she found herself almost missing Hades—at least he steered clear of all the pettiness and the politics. She would not see him for another few months; then, like clockwork, she would be annoyed with him and she would wish that she could go back to her father’s halls.

An endless cycle, much like the seasons.

Persephone’s steps took her to the Euboean colony near Naples. There was a cave here, carved out of volcanic tuff, and she followed the long and narrow passage to the innermost chamber where the sunlight was almost bluish as it fell in slats through gaps in the stone. To the north, an ornate jar made of cloudy glass had been placed on top of a low-lying ledge, and she stopped short as soon as her gaze fell on it.

“I neglected to ask for eternal youth,” drawled a guttural voice that came from everywhere all at once, filling the grotto with its hoarse, withered rasp. “Your brother drives a hard bargain.”

“Half-brother,” Persephone automatically corrected, her gaze fixed on the jar. It was translucent bordering on opaque, preventing her from deciphering its contents, but she had a pretty good idea of what was inside. The Sybil had been a beautiful woman, but—Persephone belatedly remembered—that had been four hundred years ago. “I was not aware that the two of you had a falling out.”

“Apollo doesn’t take too kindly to rejection.” The voice in the grotto had the peculiar quality of sounding both bitter and amused. “Although they will say that it was my fault for reneging on our deal in the first place.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” Persephone asked.

“I don’t know. Men.” If the Sibyl still had a body that was capable of shrugging, she would have. “Those who will one day write our history. That’s not a prediction, by the way—I just know what men are like. They could all learn a thing or two about letting a woman change her mind.”

“Any bargain involving a god is not to be judged by mortal terms,” Persephone pointed out.

“You say that with such conviction,” the Sibyl murmured. “As if you yourself did not give Hades the cold shoulder for over three hundred years after Orpheus looked back.”

Persephone said nothing. There was a sigh that echoed through that place of ashen rock and blue sunlight. “What brings you here, goddess of spring?” the Sibyl finally asked.

Persephone hadn’t descended to the mortal plane with the intention of seeking a prophecy, but this was where her feet had taken her and it was with ease that the words rolled off of her tongue. Only later would she wonder if she’d been following her instincts or if it had been the will of the Fates. “I want to know,” she said, “if I’ll ever stop feeling torn between two worlds, or if—” She took a deep breath—”or if it will always be like this.”

For a long while there was no sound save for the whisper of the wind through the ancient stone tunnels. When the oracle spoke at last, it was in a tone of mild reproach. “I mean, I’m not exactly a marriage counselor.”

Persephone’s fists clenched at her sides. Annoyance and embarrassment set in, but they were soon eclipsed by the determination to see this through. “So my marriage is the problem?”

“Your problem is that you’re one of those liminal types,” the Sybil replied. “You have stood at the thresholds of beginning and of end ever since you were Kore, who presided over the flowers that bloom and die and bloom again. That part of your nature was amplified when you crossed over into the underworld by eloping with its lord.” Persephone went still, and the prophet in the glass jar chuckled. “Yes, I know all about that. I can see well enough into the past if I bother, and I’ve had a very long time to bother. Everyone tells the wrong version of your story and they will continue to do so, never having any idea that the hapless, helpless maiden had something of the dark in her as well.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” Persephone said tartly.

“If you insist that I be really specific about it—then, no, you will never stop feeling the way that you do for as long as there is a time to sow and a time to harvest.” The Sybil sounded almost meditative now, her words weighty in the air. “You can’t change what you are any more than your husband can change what he is. At the moment, it is unclear to me whether that will be your downfall or if it will help you survive what lies ahead.”

The back of Persephone’s neck prickled as if the edge of some sharp knife were being trailed downwards from the base of her skull. “And what lies ahead?”

“Someone’s coming to shake things up,” said the oracle. “It won’t be for another few centuries yet, but they will call him the Son of God.”

“Which god?” Persephone asked, brow wrinkling. “Zeus?”

The Sibyl laughed, dry as dust and resonant with a vague triumph. “No,” she rasped once her mirth had faded. “Not Zeus.”

Silence dropped like a heavy curtain. Feeling even more confused and frustrated than she had when she first entered the grotto—which, she supposed, was to be expected of the aftermath of an Apollonian prophecy—Persephone turned to leave but, just as she had one foot in the tunnel that led to the outside world, something made her glance over her shoulder. The glass jar shone in a patch of blue-tinted light, small and beautiful and alone.

She would never be known for her compassion towards mortals, but perhaps Hades had been right and even the gods were made of memory. “Deiphobe,” she ventured, “is there anything I can do—anything you need—”

“No.” The voice was firm. “You have no power here. You can’t give me what I want.”

“What do you want?”

There was no response. Sensing that she’d overstayed her welcome, Persephone quietly padded down the tunnel on feet that were always bare. Ahead of her, the cave mouth glowed with daylight, as brilliant as a golden coin, and she had almost reached it when she heard the voice that had crept all the way from the innermost chamber and into her ear.

“Apothanein thelo,” whispered the Sibyl of Cumae.

I want to die

.

~*~

 

399 BC

Eleusis

Apollo had been right; Persephone was famous.

She sat on the edge of a huge stone altar in the middle of the Telesterion. It was so tall that her legs dangled freely in the air, toes unable to touch the floor as she observed her cult go about their secret rites. She vastly preferred this type of celebration to the one in Athens, which was too much of a spectacle for her tastes—although the power derived from hundreds of pig carcasses that the mortals laid on their freshly sowed fields was always welcome.

This portion of the Eleusinian Mysteries took place in winter. The initiates had sacrificed a piglet each, guts steaming in the frost-tinged air, and bathed in the Ilisos. Now they were gathered in the hall, their robed silhouettes gilded with flickering torchlight as the priests led them into a variety of chants addressed to Demeter and Persephone.

Her mother wasn’t here, of course, which was just as well. Persephone had heard that the winters made Demeter sluggish and cranky, and she didn’t want to have to deal with that right now.

As the mortals continued chanting, they started passing around goblets of kykeon, that strange brew of wine, barley, and grated goat’s cheese that would allow them to experience a revelatory state.

 “I wonder when they’ll realize that their hallucinations have nothing to do with you and everything to do with the mold in the barley.”

An exasperated smile flickered at the corners of Persephone’s lips. “Let them have their fun,” she chided, not taking her eyes off of her devotees. “It’s still belief.”

“I suppose,” Hades conceded. “And it seems as though you’re having even more fun than they are.”

She snorted, her gaze darting to where he hadn’t been only moments ago. He was leaning against the altar, his elbow close to grazing the side of her knee as he surveyed the rites with his usual haughty, impassive expression. But there was a certain furrow to his brow and a downwards slant to his full lips that made her remark, “You look tired.”

“Work,” he said shortly.

She understood. More people died during the cold months, when there was less food to go around, and her husband was nothing if not meticulous with his records. The Sybil had said that Persephone gave Hades the cold shoulder for more than three hundred years; it had been three hundred and thirty. She permitted him back into her bed during the Trojan War, when all the heroes were dying and no one had any idea what would happen next. Gods like Ares and Athena had enjoyed the carnage, while Aphrodite reveled in the desperate lusts that rolled through the opposing camps at night and over the fact that the conflict had started because of a woman. It was Hades who had steadfastly received the fallen into his realm, day in, day out, and one night Persephone had pulled him away from his ledgers and pressed the kiss that she had denied for centuries to his perennial scowl.

Now it was another winter night, much, much later, and he was looking like he had something on his mind. But, then again, he always looked like that.

“The philosopher is dead,” he said suddenly, the words a rumbling thread beneath the chanting from the crowd in front of them. “The one that made you laugh a lot.”

Persephone blinked. “What happened?”

“The Athenians judged him guilty of asebeia. He was made to drink hemlock.”

“He had friends in high places. He could have fled the city.”

Hades cracked the faintest of smiles. “That was proposed to him, but he said that no true philosopher worth their salt would fear me.”

“He was a little touched in the head,” Persephone opined, “but I also think that his teachings will last.”

“Nothing lasts,” said Hades.

They will call him the Son of God, the Sybil had whispered.

Apothanein thelo.

Persephone lifted her chin in defiance. “We’ll see.”

It wasn’t long before the kykeon began to take effect. The mortals rocked on their heels and swayed from side to side as the light of another world filled their eyes. They couldn’t see the goddess they were praying to, or her consort; they didn’t know that, as their chanting reached a fever pitch, Persephone’s heart beat louder than any drum as the raw devotion of every single person in that hall coursed through her veins.

Pure, concentrated belief. It made her head swim, heat pooling low in her stomach.

She lay back on the stone altar, hiking her skirts up her thighs. Hades shucked off his black robes and joined her, his broad body covering hers so utterly, kissing her as fiercely as he had in the dawn days when she said she would run away with him. She buried the fingers of her left hand in the waves of his dark hair while her other hand traced the ladder of his ribs and ran down the gentle slope of his spine, caressing every muscle within her reach. Even though his mien was generally as gloomy as one of Zeus’ thunderclouds, he was such a handsome man, her husband, and so finely formed.

And warm, too, but only for her.

He was already hard against her belly when he shoved aside the folds of her tunic, baring her breasts to air that smelled of herbs and incense. The more dramatic initiates—or perhaps the ones who had overindulged in the wine and barley brew—had dropped to their knees before the altar. They were weeping tears of joy, surrendering to their visions, crying out her many names. Persephone, dread queen, mistress, the fasting one, whom Hades seized. She closed her eyes and arched into her husband’s mouth and fingers as he laved at her breasts and strummed between her legs until she was ready for him, made of wanting and of shadows.

Some things last, she thought, drunk on her own power as he slipped inside her, as they rocked together on the altar, surrounded by her supplicants, by firelight, by star-fletched hymns of glory. We are eternal

 

~*~

 

1348 AD

Milan

Bodies littered the street. Persephone held a silk kerchief to her nose while she gingerly wove her way through piles of blackened, decaying corpses, some of whose sore-covered limbs still twitched faintly. There was the occasional moan from a ruined throat. Quite a few of these people weren’t dead yet, but they’d been left to rot just the same. There was no cure for la peste.

Some fool was playing a desultory tune on a lute, the sound escaping from what had to be the only open window left in all of Lombardy, mingling with the muffled cries for salvation from the inhabitants of a nearby house that had been walled up when its patriarch took ill. For a moment, the music and the wailing combined to form something that was like Orpheus’ song, and Persephone had to shake her head to clear it.

At the end of the street was an osteria, its doors flung open as if it were just any other business day, although it had in all likelihood probably been abandoned by its owners and then looted for food and drink by the desperate. Inside there was a large, solidly built man with skin the color of baked earth and a thick black beard sitting at one of the tables, drinking grappa straight out of the bottle.

“Hello, Resheph.” Persephone strode into the osteria and plopped down in the chair opposite his. “Is this one of yours?”

Resheph’s guffaw was not dissimilar to the roar of distant thunder, his teeth flashing white. “Persephone.” He handed her the bottle and she took a generous swig before passing it back to him. “No,” he said, “I had nothing to do with this. Even at the height of my dominion, I doubt I could have accomplished a plague of this magnitude.”

“Apollo’s, then?” Persephone suggested. “His power has also waned, but a little pulling of the strings here and there…”

Resheph shook his head. “I saw him in Dorchester a few weeks ago. They’ve been hit hard there as well. He was drunk, amusing himself with the flagellants, and he seemed too bitter for this to be one of his. In my expert opinion, this is something that the mortals did to themselves.”

Between the two of them, it didn’t take long to finish the grappa. Persephone had always liked Resheph; if he held any lingering grudges towards her pantheon, he never showed it, unlike Horus and Bast who made no secret of their theory that the Egyptian gods would have fared much better if the first Ptolemy had stayed in Macedon. “Serapis?” Bast apparently liked to grumble. “What the fuck is a Serapis? I’ll kill him.”

But it wasn’t as though Persephone and Resheph had much in common, either, and they sat mostly in silence until he eventually got to his feet. “Give my regards to your husband. Just a couple more months, yes?”

Persephone nodded. The plague god flashed her one last brilliant smile and left, and she couldn’t help but wonder if she would ever see him again. There were some deities who had completely fallen off the grid when the last of their temples were ransacked, while others had vanished over the course of the past millennium. These new days were anyone’s game.

Soon she heard the carts of the becchini—the gravediggers—trundling around the bend. They would shovel the corpses off of the street and bury them in mass pits outside the city; it wasn’t as bad here as it was in Florence, but they still extorted hefty sums for cleaning up. Some demanded favors from the women so that they wouldn’t carry away a still-living relative—Persephone jumped into the fray whenever she saw this happening, causing thorns to bloom in the men’s throats and stomachs, ripping their frail bodies of flesh and blood apart.

But she couldn’t save everyone. And, in any case, her ilk were not in the habit of saving. Perhaps if they had been, things would be different now. The new religion that had taken Europe by storm was much too in love with the idea of the world coming to an end, but it promised its adherents salvation—which, in all honesty, and given mortal nature, was looking more and more like a stroke of genius as each year rolled on into the next.

Fingers drumming idly against the empty liquor bottle, Persephone sat alone in the deserted osteria, waiting for time to pass.

 

~*~

 

1793 AD

Paris

In much the same way that gods such as Apollo and Resheph had flocked to the plague hotspots of the fourteenth century like flies to a fresh carcass, so too was Hades fascinated by the ceaselessly snapping jaws of the Terror’s most feared machine. The long black trousers and the cropped double-breasted plain jacket that constituted the uniform of the Revolution suited him much better, Persephone thought, than the knee breeches and ornate coats that had come before—although thankfully he’d eschewed those ridiculous powdered wigs even then.

As for herself, she’d conceded to the bare minimum of a chemise gown and a halfheartedly draped shawl, and she and her husband were just two more faces in the crowd that had gathered at the Place du Trône-Renversé to watch today’s executions. It was a chilly morning in December—Nivôse, Persephone corrected herself with no small amount of sardonic humor, it’s Nivôse now, or they’ll try to cut your head off, too—and a light dusting of snow sugared the cobblestone streets and the waiting guillotine. The convicted—mostly clergymen who hadn’t renounced their faiths and aristocrats who’d been too stupid or too slow to hightail it out of France—were all lined up, some weeping, others the kind of stoic that went hand in hand with going into shock. The audience was buzzing excitedly at the prospect of bloodshed in a way that reminded Persephone of the gladiatorial arenas, where she had been known by a different name.

Death as spectator sport. It was almost breathtaking, really, how the mortals never ran out of new ways to kill one another.

Hades touched her arm. “Look who’s here,” he murmured.

Persephone followed his gaze. Standing in the crowd on the other side of the guillotine, facing them, was an elderly man in dark robes whose hair and beard were as white as the falling snow. He sported a black patch over one eye while the other gleamed a pale, silvery blue color. He was leaning his weight on what at first glance could have been any ordinary walking stick, but Persephone knew that it was the spear Gungnir that had been carved from the wood of Yggdrasil, the world tree.

“Should we go to him?” Persephone asked.

“Why?” Only someone who knew him very well could have detected the vague trace of alarm in Hades’ tone.

“It’s the polite thing to do in these situations.”

“I’m sure he doesn’t wish to be disturbed.”

Persephone clapped a palm over her mouth, stifling a laugh. “You’re still so awkward—”

“He’s seen us,” Hades said, so grimly that it only served to make her laugh harder.

It turned out that Odin was also in no mood to socialize. He merely nodded at them before focusing his attention on the first of the unlucky to ascend the scaffold. Some lanky young lord, one of those who’d been crying, but…

They were usually calmer towards the end, Persephone had noticed. More often than not, the tears dried up, the trembling ceased, there was a firmness to the gaze that took in the daylight, the crowd, the blade hanging overhead—as if they were soaking up the world in preparation for what came after. She’d seen very few exceptions. Even that flighty Austrian duchess whom they’d made a scapegoat had gone with grace.

This one proved true to form, as did the others who came after him. “You grow fond of the mortals, my love?” Hades asked, attuned as always to her shifting moods.

“Perhaps I am fond of the ways that they can still surprise me,” Persephone replied. “Both the good and the bad. At least there is never a dull moment.”

Snow continued to drift down to earth in soft piles as the national razor sliced and sliced, the executioners lobbing the severed heads into baskets with unerring precision while the crowd cheered. Odin was in his element, seeming to stand a little straighter with each drop of blood that spattered onto the wood of the scaffold and the frozen ground. He was the god of the gallows, after all, and this, too, was a form of belief, although it wasn’t the same—would never be the same.

“You take what you can get these days,” Persephone observed.

Hades said nothing in response, but his dark eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the guillotine’s movements, on how the polished blade swung down on the back of each neck with a ringing finality, like Atropos’ shears cutting through the thread that Lachesis held between her ghostly fingers.

 

~*~

 

1815 AD

London

In hindsight, it had been a mistake to spend the last day of summer with the girls, as Demeter called them. Persephone had gone along mostly out of a sense of filial duty and a whole lot of curiosity—she couldn’t believe that her mother would have managed to pull this off, but here they were at the Kensington Gardens with Athena, Aphrodite, Iris, and Hestia, sitting on blankets that had been strewn over the browning grass, a feast spread out before them.

Demeter had been so eager to jump at the chance to invite the four other goddesses to a picnic that she hadn’t paused to consider whether she should. Persephone couldn’t even remember a time when they’d all been in the same room before, and that was saying something.

Iris was pretty and freckled, and possessed of a streak of mischief a mile wide. “I hear that Eris is in the city as well,” she said through a mouthful of roast beef. “Were you unaware, Demeter?”

“I was aware, but I did not think it wise to ask her if she wanted to join us.” Demeter shot a furtive glance at Athena, then at Aphrodite. “We all know what happened the last time she was at a feast.”

“If I recall correctly, the trouble started because she wasn’t invited to something,” Persephone mumbled, which earned her a look of utter betrayal from her mother.

“Oh, that happened so long ago, I’m sure we’ve all let bygones be bygones,” Aphrodite said airily, heaping more salad onto Athena’s plate as if to make a point, although the latter looked decidedly unimpressed. “How are you, Persephone, dear? So nice to see you wearing shoes for once.”

Persephone wiggled her confined toes out of reflex. “The same.”

“She’s going back to that dreadful man tomorrow,” Demeter sniffed. “I thought that, when our time ended, so would the old laws, but apparently not. And now I won’t get to see her again until the first thaw.”

Demeter had struck a nerve, however unintentionally, and Persephone wished she were anywhere but here as the other goddesses bristled. “Well, I’m not quite sure about the rest of you, but my time certainly isn’t done,” Aphrodite declared. “Sex always sells. The regent has been very good to me in that regard—”

“Yes, yes, we know all about George going hot and heavy with that marchioness,” Athena interrupted. “My word, but infidelity is forever your style, isn’t it, dear grandaunt?”

As Athena and Aphrodite bickered, with Iris egging them on and Demeter and Hestia clucking their tongues, Persephone tuned out and looked around. The gardens weren’t as busy now that the weather had turned cooler, but there were still a handful of picnics in full swing, as well as members of the ton taking a stroll in the finest outfits that money could buy. It was surreal to think that the country had just gotten out of a decades-long war even if the fighting had admittedly never reached London, and Persephone said as much out loud—more to herself than to her companions, but they paused in their arguments just the same.

“Ares was having a grand old time at the front, but I decided to sit this one out,” Athena confided. “It’s all getting just a bit senseless, these mortals trying to make empires that last. And who am I if not the goddess of sense?”

“Ares fights because he knows no other way to live,” Hestia said, munching thoughtfully on a veal and ham pie. “Not even our sweet Aphrodite could tame him. And speaking of that—what’s Hephaestus up to these days, darling?”

“Who else could have been whispering the plans for those exploding shells into Mr. Shrapnel’s ear?” purred Aphrodite. “As long as men are possessed by dreams of destruction, my beloved husband will be hanging around. In that respect, he and Ares will be the last ones standing, I suppose.”

Iris quirked an eyebrow. “So you think that some things can outlast desire, then?”

Aphrodite colored but, as she always did when she was under fire, she redirected it onto the easiest target. “Let’s discuss happier marriages, shall we? Persephone, you and Hades were looking very lovey-dovey during the Renaissance, as I recall.”

Persephone pressed one hand into the ground, the weight of Demeter’s piercing gaze heavy and sudden on her shoulders. “It was the Renaissance. Everyone was riding high.” She affected a casual tone of voice even while her fingers twisted in the grass. “We thought we were making a comeback, didn’t we?”

“Who knows, we might have—” Athena tossed Aphrodite a contemptuous glance—”if half of them hadn’t died of syphilis.”

Persephone caught Iris’ eye and the two of them ducked their heads to refrain from bursting into outright laughter.

Despite the quarreling, the picnic ended on a more cordial note relative to how it had started. Persephone left the gardens missing the Mediterranean, and it was a feeling that stayed with her after she bade goodbye to her mother at the ball they attended that evening and the clock struck midnight and the lively, fluid motions of the Scottish reel spun her into Hades’ arms.

Hades had not welcomed the return of the knee breeches—”You laughed when you first saw me in them, back in France,” he’d grumbled a few years ago. He favored the long trousers that were taking their sweet time returning to society’s good graces, although it wasn’t as if anyone would call him out on it, as the gods were noticed only when they wanted to be. Tonight he also wore an exquisitely fitted navy tailcoat that matched his cravat over a waistcoat of white cotton piquéand a muslin shirt entirely devoid of ruffles, standing out from all the other men in the ballroom by virtue of elegant simplicity. He looked good enough to eat.

“Since when do you dance?” Persephone blurted out.

“I don’t.”

Despite such a pronouncement, he managed to very capably twirl her out onto the wrought iron balcony overlooking the hedge maze, and they’d barely stopped moving when he leaned down to slant his mouth over hers and she surged up on the tips of her toes to meet him halfway. He tasted like honeyed wine, like starlight and like Greece. She growled in frustration when he pulled away but was quick to forgive him when he backed her up against the wall and dropped to his knees before her.

Music emanated from the ballroom, a golden thread spiked with the animated chatter of the guests inside, and Persephone’s heartbeat thrummed along with the spirited tempo as her husband lifted up her gauzy yellow skirts and put his mouth to her sex. Hades was all silky lips sucking sweetly and a clever tongue like a swirl of hot velvet, and it wasn’t long before her knees were buckling, her hips rolling against his jaw.

It was almost like being worshiped.

Surely it could be enough.

 

~*~

 

1936 AD

Nebraska

The next time they fought—for real, and for such a long while, and so bitterly—they had been in the new world for several decades. She was already harboring a grudge against him at that point—his stoicism during the war and the Wall Street crash had not sat well with her—but she’d kept it bottled up inside. It wasn’t until that Saturday morning in October that things came to a head.

Hades was currently based outside Lincoln, having claimed to develop a cordial loathing for the city life that most of the other Olympians had taken to like ducks to water. But it was a bad era to live in farm country. The Midwest was on its sixth year of drought, constantly ravaged by severe dust storms that swept through the land with a vengeance. Persephone could always tell when one of these storms was nigh; there was a static-charged heaviness to the air and the animals—what few there remained—grew restless.

She ducked back into the house not long after she felt those telltale wisps of electricity start crawling along her skin. Hades was seated at the table in the living room, drinking coffee. Even with so much great outdoors around, he was still as pale as marble—as death, she would have thought if she were in the mood to crack jokes—and he still draped himself in dark colors. His solemn eyes tracked her movements as she hung her coat up on the rack and removed her hat and gloves, as she walked over to join him with dirt stains on the hem of her floral-printed shirtwaist dress.

“You were helping the neighbors again?” he asked.

“Yes.” Persephone had woken up at the crack of dawn to visit the farms surrounding theirs under the guise of assisting the women with chores. “Crops are my mother’s forte, not mine, but last week I got the beets started, and today the potatoes.” If she’d done her job right, those households wouldn’t starve this winter. She hoped she’d done her job right.

“You really have grown fond of the mortals,” Hades remarked. “I’m not sure if that is wise.”

Persephone stared at him, exhausted, and for a moment all that she could see were the shallow graves dug in backyards marked by simple wooden crosses, the emaciated children clinging to their mothers’ skirts, the empty watering troughs, that skinny cow that had been shot dead both to put it out of its misery and to put some scraps of meat on the table, and the little memorials for sons and husbands who had fallen on the battlefields of Europe. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she snapped.

“You are expending the lingering reserves of your power to help them, and for what? Their time here is limited—and, given present conditions, you only prolong their agony.” Hades drained the last of his coffee and set the cup down between them. “I received a letter from Hermes. The winds of war have already started blowing through the old world yet again. Perhaps they never entirely ceased. No matter what you do—no matter what any of us do—the mortals will keep on obliterating one another until all of Gaia is dust.”

Fury rose up Persephone’s throat, thickening her tongue, rendering her unable to speak. She was shaking, knuckles of one hand clenched to white at the edge of the table. The daylight filtering in through the windows began to wane, as if the oncoming storm had hastened its approach, as if the land itself were echoing the simmering roil of her temper. And why shouldn’t it? she thought viciously. I’m an earth goddess. My altars are gone, but I still carry the ruins.

When she finally found her voice, it was laced with venom, brittle like glass. “What really gets me is that I know you’re not saying all of this with any ill intent. You’re simply stating things as you see them, because that’s the way you’re wired, because death comes for everyone and it’s all the same to you in the end. Sometimes I think you’re not cruel, you just are—but there are also times when I think that there’s cruelty in refusing to change. And there are times when—” She took a deep breath, a part of her knowing that, once these words left her lips, there would be no going back—”when I think I shouldn’t have eaten those pomegranate seeds.”

Hades’ star-cut eyes flashed. He looked… hurt. She hadn’t thought him capable of it. And he looked angry, as well. “You were the one who wanted to,” he reminded her. “Six seeds from the fruit of the dead, six months in the underworld. You said that it was the only way we could still be together.”

“The only way we could still be together without the Earth turning into a wasteland!” Persephone corrected, her voice rising. “And look at it now—and you don’t care—”

“To use your own words, drought is your mother’s forte, not mine,” Hades said coldly. “You are free to accuse me of cruelty all you like, but all I have ever done is keep my end of the bargain. With Orpheus, with you.” He stood up. The air swelled with static and with a high-pitched keen, and everything went dark as the storm broke over the Great Plains.

By now, Persephone had experienced enough of these dusters to know what was happening. Eroded and unanchored after the extensive, mechanized plowing of the Roaring Twenties, the crumbling topsoil was lifted up in the arms of the prevailing winds, sent whirling everywhere, blotting out the harsh light of the midday sun, particles of dirt settling on rooftops and on windowsills, covering the farmlands like a blanket. “The earth,” one of their neighbors had recounted, speaking of Black Sunday in 1935, “it swallowed me whole.”

But the dust would not touch the house of Hades. It would veil the space around it, yet never seep in through the cracks. The old gods still had some power left, even if it would never save them from time.

“I am the villain in your story.” Hades’ tone was solemn. His cadence beat on through the shadows and amidst the howl of harrowed dirt like Charon’s oar through the muddy waters of the Styx and the river of woe that was the Acheron. “I have made my peace with this. But, Kore…” Her old name cracked apart on his tongue and she could only sit there and blink up at him as the house’s foundations shook and the Great Plains trembled. “I suspect that, at some point over these long, long eons, you started believing that story, too.”

Persephone shook her head. “No, that’s not…” She trailed off and stilled, realizing that she truly had no idea if she agreed with him or if she felt like she was coming from a place where she could protest.

She thought about Orpheus’ song and what the Sibyl had said. She thought about every war there had ever been. She thought about the day the invading Germanic tribes had destroyed her temple in Eleusis, and how there had been no one left to rebuild it, and how her husband hadn’t been there to comfort her because it had happened in the spring.

The Sibyl was long gone now. She had only asked to live for as many years as there were grains of sand clutched in her fist. She’d understood that immortality was the long game and she hadn’t wanted to play.

“I just don’t think it’s enough that you care about me and nothing else,” Persephone whispered to Hades. “This isn’t what any of us wanted, but we can never die and so we might as well learn how to live in this world. That shouldn’t be too much to ask.”

Hades looked away. They stayed there in silence as the keening wind whistled in their ears, as pillars of dust rose to obscure the sun, as darkness fell on the prairie and swallowed them whole.

 

~*~

 

1999 AD

New York

By the time the last day of the millennium rolled around, Persephone had cut her wavy brown hair into a chin-length bob and incorporated words like carbon footprint and texting into her vocabulary. She’d taken up smoking during the sixties—it was another way to pass the time—and she was on her second cigarette on a rooftop overlooking Times Square with some socialite’s party raging on behind her when a voice like molten gold called out, “Persephone?”

Her mortal acquaintances knew her as Cory. It had to be another god—and it was. Two of them, in fact.

After sparing Apollo and Dionysus a cursory glance, she turned back to the view of the square, crawling with people and all lit up for New Year’s Eve. They were waiting for the ball to drop. The original design in the early half of the century had been a sphere of wood and iron, strung through with incandescent light bulbs; now it was covered in panels of Waterford crystal and it boasted strobes and spinning mirrors.

Clad in designer suits and sporting identical center-parted, messy-fringed hairstyles, Apollo and Dionysus joined her by the ledge, flanking her and lighting up their own cigarettes. Missing a third stooge, Persephone thought, struggling not to roll her eyes.

But maybe it was her.

“Sweet sister.” Apollo had been the one to call out her name, and he flashed her a charming smile now. “It’s winter, isn’t it? Where is your gloomier half?”

“None of your business.” Persephone hadn’t seen Hades in sixty-three years. The day after the dust storm, she’d woken up to find him gone. He was usually the one who sent her a message telling her where to meet him every year, but after Nebraska she hadn’t heard from him at all.

She missed him more than she would have ever thought it possible to miss anyone. At least back then—after their big blow-up over Orpheus and Eurydice—she had still returned to the underworld every fall. At least he had still been with her, even if they’d slept in separate rooms.

“No one knows where Hades is.” Dionysus blew out a cloud of smoke. “I think I caught a glimpse of him in the crowd when they tore down the Wall, but perhaps it was my imagination.”

Apollo snickered. “What on earth were you doing in Berlin?”

“I had a hunch that the club scene would explode. And I was right,” Dionysus said smugly. “It’s not a party unless it’s illegal, held in a power plant, and bursting with drugs and heavy bass.”

“Practically the same, then, minus the power plants,” Persephone drawled. “You really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

Dionysus blinked. “You’re in a mood. Have we done something to offend?”

“She’s pining,” Apollo declared with a sigh. “She and Hades are in a lovers’ quarrel. Aphrodite told me.”

Persephone narrowed her eyes. “If you already knew, why did you ask me where he was?”

Apollo winked. “I had to have my fun. The mortals are so uninteresting these days.”

“You’re just saying that because you have no more power over them.” Persephone dropped what was left of her cigarette onto the cement floor and crushed it beneath her boot. “No one prays to you anymore. Delphi is a tourist attraction, and it’s not even the most famous one. Treat the mortals with contempt and play mind games all you like, but in the end—” She shoved past him as she left the rooftop—”you needed them more than they ever needed you.”

“You’re projecting!” Apollo shouted after her. There was a desperation to his belligerence that made her smile.

This one’s for you, Sybil, Persephone thought, raising her hand to flip Apollo and Dionysus the bird without looking back.

 

~*~

 

2007 AD

Manila

There was neither autumn nor winter in this part of Asia, but the end of summer was marked by heavy rains that flooded the streets. Persephone sat in a café with her mother, idly watching the world outside the huge glass window run together in a blur of silver gray.

Demeter was stabbing a fork into her pasta dish as she espoused a litany of complaints. “Didn’t even so much as call to inform me of your whereabouts—had to find Hecate so she could cast a spell to find you, and let me tell you what traumatic flashbacks that gave me—now we only have a month together when we should have had six—”

“Sorry if I thought that after all these millennia we could go one single year without seeing each other,” Persephone retorted.

“What is the matter with you?” Demeter cried. “First you chop off all your lovely hair, then you and Apollo get into an argument, then you slowly start isolating yourself from everyone—and now this! Persephone, are you quite all right?” When her daughter was silent, she huffed and continued, “Look, if this is all because of that dreadful man—”

“That man is my husband.” Persephone didn’t know where that had come from, why she had interrupted her mother with those words. She hadn’t seen Hades in seventy-one years now.

Demeter’s mouth dropped open. She studied Persephone as if she had never seen her before. The muffled patter of the rain and the muted chatter and clinking of utensils from the other tables around theirs suddenly seemed much too loud. “Is that how it is?”

Persephone looked down, grabbing a packet of brown sugar from the caddy and stirring it into her tea. “I guess so.”

“Well. I never.”

You never what? Persephone was tempted to quip, but the fact that her mother looked like she was about to have a very mortal aneurysm made her hold her tongue.

A series of thumps and the brief screech of feedback made both of them glance over towards the café’s modest stage area, where the afternoon’s solo musical act was setting up. The boy was in his early twenties, lanky and dark-haired, a caduceus tattoo peeking out from the folds of his jacket’s lowered hood, the twin serpents winding up his neck and the staff’s wings spread just below the line of his jaw.

He was… familiar, even though Persephone had never seen him before.

Applause rippled through the crowd as the boy finished adjusting the microphone and experimentally strummed a few chords on his guitar. There was a wolf whistle from the table nearest the stage—obviously his friends. He grinned shyly, then launched into song.

The breath stopped in Persephone’s lungs.

It was a different instrument and the words were in another language, and ruins were all that were left of Eleusis and of the Necromanteion and of Sparta and of Troy, but she would have known that melody anywhere. The feeling was the same.

A girl burst into the café at the end of the first verse, mouthing “Sorry I’m late” at the boy as she sat with his friends. She was familiar, too, a former life behind her brown eyes that perhaps only a god could see. The boy winked at her and his voice grew softer and more heartfelt, fingers on guitar strings caressing into being each note of his love song.

Persephone turned her face to the rain-spattered window as tears spilled down her cheeks. With each drop that fell, a weight that she hadn’t even been fully aware existed was gradually lifted from her shoulders at the same time that memory dragged her down and wrapped around her and surged through her veins.

It really was the greatest song of all time. There hadn’t been a single dry eye left in the underworld when it was first heard. It had reminded Persephone of the dawn days and of her own young, impetuous love. It had forced her to confront the possibility that mortals weren’t mere playthings of the gods—not when their hearts could hold so much.

It had stayed with her.

Her mother was oddly quiet. Demeter hadn’t been there when Orpheus sang for the god of death, but of course she knew the story. Everyone did. And perhaps it was because history was a cycle, or because gods took on the shape of the stories that mortals made for them, filling in whatever roles were required, or perhaps it was simply because anyone would be moved by a melody that had caused even the Furies to weep—but, whatever the case, after the boy had wrapped up the song and the applause had faded—

—Demeter looked at Persephone and said, with resignation, with sorrow—but also with understanding, at long last—

“Hades is in Greece. Hera told me.”

 

~*~

 

2008 AD

The Underworld

Persephone rowed herself across the Styx. The last she’d heard of Charon, he was crabbing in Nova Scotia, but the boat and the oar had been waiting for her just the same. For a long while there was only water and stone and silence, and then the vast, hulking, three-headed silhouette of Cerberus loomed up from out of the shadows, flickering in the dim light. He whined softly when he saw that it was her, and she patted his flanks in greeting as he moved aside to let her pass.

It was eerily quiet. No longer powered by belief, the Stygian realm had shut down in most of its functions, a good majority of its denizens having long fled to brighter shores. The lampades were gone and so were their torches, and the beating wings of the Erinyes no longer thundered through the cavernous halls. The three sisters were doing well for themselves on the surface, Persephone had been told—they’d started a family business, a law firm.

The dead were still here, but they appeared to have gone dormant now that there was no one to hear their cries. Persephone could feel them in the walls and beneath the black waters, sullen and sluggish. She doubted that they knew what had happened, how everything had changed—they possessed no sense of self, or of the passage of the time.

She wondered if she envied them for that.

Hades was in the asphodel meadows, standing tall and cold and alone amidst the sea of translucent bell-shaped flowers that bobbed gently in the wind, their whorled petals glowing like tiny nebulae in the eternal twilight. If not for the fact that he was wearing a black suit and she was in jeans and a sweater and her hair was cut short, it could have been any other day in the Hellas that she had known.

He watched impassively as she approached, his hands shoved into his pockets. She stopped walking when they were both within arm’s reach of the other, but not touching. Not yet.

“You let Orpheus and Eurydice go, didn’t you?” she asked him. “You saw to it that they would get another chance.”

He shrugged. “I have some power left.”

Persephone stepped closer. “So—here’s some advice,” she said. “When you and your wife get into a fight, you probably shouldn’t walk out on her the next day and ghost her for over seven decades.”

Hades swallowed. Just the slightest hint of movement along the column of his pale throat, just enough to show her that he was not unaffected by her return. “I was unsure if you still wanted to be my wife. I didn’t wish to force you into—into anything,” he told her hoarsely. “We are still bound by the old laws, but I would prefer that you do not feel as if you have no choice.”

“I don’t feel that way.” With one more step, she closed the distance between them. “And I still want to be your wife.”

His stern features collapsed in something like relief. In response, her lips curved into the tiniest of smiles. Maybe she had just needed to miss him a little to realize that, while theirs would never be the perfect story, it would last. Just like the mortals would. Hundreds and thousands of years of conflict and famine and all sorts of disasters both natural and self-inflicted, and they were still kicking. The soul was stronger than death. And although Persephone didn’t need to be an oracle to tell that she and Hades would encounter more bumps and separations further down the road—if Orpheus and Eurydice had taught her anything, it was that everyone would meet again, someday.

“I’ve been thinking about your words from the last time we spoke,” Hades admitted. “Back then, I was disillusioned by—by everything that was happening. Over the years we were apart, I have tried to see what was in front of me, and what I have seen is that there’s nothing so bad that someone—even one person—won’t try to make good again. I believe that counts for something. I think that I want to learn how to live in this world with you.” He reached out to touch her face, cradling her cheek in one large palm. “But it will take some time.”

“That’s the thing about you and me.” Persephone turned her head to press her lips to the inside of his wrist. “Time is all we’ve got left.”