❛THEY WOULD TELL YOU OF A KING WHO STOLE ME HELPLESS FROM MY SUNSHINE GARDEN.❜
They won't tell you about the woman who came to him sublime, lily eyes and lily lips. A king does not ask permission from his prize, but she, oh she, she knelt, kissing m...
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GATES OF TARTARUS, THE UNDERWORLD.
PERSEPHONE
THE WORLD SHATTERED INTO A MILLION FRAGMENTS OF CHAOS.
A cloud of rolling darkness swept the forest like a wave of blood rolling across stained marble tiles, relentless and yearning in its pursuit.
Around the forest, faces paled - eyes going wider than plates as the darkness curled and roiled and wisped like a living thing, waiting for me to give it direction. The Gates were nothing but a great, yawning hole, a rip in the seams of the world tearing wide open to fling its horrors onto the rest of them.
There was comfort in that darkness. There was peace in it. There was a safety in the certainty of its great, great terribleness - knowing it could never be worse than what it appeared to be. Knowing that it would never betray me.
Knowing that death and destruction was its only nature.
There was only red.
I could see only red.
Red, and red, and more red.
Screams erupted around us like wildfire, setting the forest ablaze with the screeches of a million tormented souls. The voices that ripped from them were a dying, dead thing - long gone from the world, waiting eons and eons to be set free.
And I did not hesitate to give that freedom to them.
That shimmering, glittering cloud of death was a beautiful thing.
Beautiful, like the heart of the god she took from me.
Wicked, like the lies about the god she stole from me.
And heartless, like the nature of the mother who ripped him from this world.
Around me, each of the hundred copies of Demophon drew out a hundred copies of that same damned sword, twisted runes of bright silver etched onto the pommel - ready to give fair fight.
But they were nothing. Nothing against the death, the destruction that answered at my beck and call.
"All of them," I whispered to the shades. "I want every last one of them gone."
Because it went without saying that the only one of them breathing at the end of this was to be Demeter.
The voice that barked at those monstrosities was not my own. That terrible, terrible voice was not my own - something else entirely, as it slipped from my lips and poured out into the world. It was a creation of death, of loss, of suffering, of watching the man I loved bleed out at my feet.
Thanatos's spear flashed around the forest in silver arcs, men dropping like flies. Hecate's voice crashed and fell like a wave at her behest, incantations murmured louder and louder with every passing second. Cerberus was a swirling whir as he snapped and tore apart men with disturbingly surprising ease - his canines stained the angry colour of crimson.
