hard look. She wasn’t just the daughter of Demeter here. Already she had stepped onto the path he had hoped she would take. Power thrummed through her and shimmered the air around her like heat waves.
She reached out and set her thin fingers in his, delicately, slowly, clearly reminding him that her touch was an honor. “You’ll show me my castle, Hades.” Her words were filled with power. “After all, I am queen.”
The Mourning
Chapter 15
Ambrosius stared at the oracle and frowned. “You said she wanted to go to the Underworld with him. That story still sounds like he tricked her.”
“Did he?” The oracle’s brows lifted into her hairline. “Strange. I would have thought the entire thing was brought about because Kore wanted to live in the Underworld. Because Persephone wanted to come out of the little girl and take control.”
He shook his head. “I think he tricked her. You said the story was wrong, but he promised her a marriage and instead he gave her an Underworld.”
Her laughing response was cruel. “You see so little, mortal. Did she want a marriage from Hades? How would a virgin like herself know that she wanted to touch and be touched? No. She wasn’t interested in him at all. She wanted a throne, and that was what he gave her.”
Ambrosius didn’t know how to reconcile that with the stories he’d always heard of his goddess. She was the reason he did not fear death. He’d dedicated his entire life to studying her and her mother, but now, he wondered if he should have been studying her husband instead.
Back aching, he shifted forward and rolled to his feet. “I don’t understand your words, Oracle. The story you promised was one that would change my opinion on the Queen of the Dead, but...”
She hopped off the altar and stalked toward him with fire in her eyes. “What do you think was her intent in marrying Hades?”
“You said she desired the darkness—”
She silenced him with a jabbing finger. “I never said she knew what she desired. The darkness was her hope and her dream. It’s what she was destined to become. But that doesn’t mean she was willing. She didn’t know what she was getting herself into.”
But that made little sense. Persephone was the most powerful goddess to ever live, at least in his opinion. Of course she knew what she wanted. That was why she had taken the throne, but also, it was a struggle for her to get there.
He knew the story of her rape. He knew that Hades came out of the ground and kidnapped her, but it hadn’t been her choice.
Demeter wandered the earth for years, turning the fields to snow as she searched for her daughter. The mortals had suffered horribly and their suffering was entirely Hades’ fault.
Persephone hadn’t known what Hades would do. She hadn’t enjoyed the Underworld when she arrived and she certainly wasn’t the goddess who had walked into the nightmare and thought, this will do.
She had cried for a hundred years when he dragged her down there. That was where all her power had come from, the pain, the anguish.
She was happy to return to her mother and had to be ripped from Demeter’s arms to go back to the Underworld. That was the story he knew. The one they were told when they were just children and a reason to fear Hades.
He was the monster.
Not Persephone.
Ambrosius shook his head and opened his mouth to argue.
The Oracle pointed at him again with a frown on her face. “Say nothing, mortal.”
He snapped his jaw shut with an audible snap.
“Good,” she muttered. “I know you are fighting with the stories you’ve been told, especially considering the crowd you run in. You think Persephone is the innocent in this story, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“You think she was the poor, wilting flower taken away from her mother by the monstrous man in the Underworld.”
Again, he nodded, this time more aggressively. Hades was the monster in the story, the ultimate villain who had destroyed a vibrant light and turned her into the Queen of the Underworld where she was expected to cater to his every whim.
The Oracle tsked. “Foolish mortals telling stories about people they have no idea of. No, she wasn’t taken by the monster. She was the monster.”
The mere thought was even worse. Persephone was the goddess he called upon when he had the worst things happening in his life. When he lost his wife and daughter in a racing accident.