❛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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HALL OF HADES, THE UNDERWORLD.
HADES
THE WORLD WAS GREY WITHOUT HER IN IT.
The day she had finally accepted me for who I was - in fact, loved me for it - was the day I had thought that all those centuries of meaningless existence would finally come to mean something. Perhaps, being lonely taught you what it was like to love and be loved by someone who was as new to it as where you. That maybe all this time, all this waiting... held some divine significance. That I would do it all over again. Wait a hundred, a thousand, a million years - to meet her.
Apparently, I was wrong.
Fate was a cruel, cruel thing. It was a vile mistress, tempting in its forbidden secrets, giving you a taste of something you craved so badly... before snatching it away from you.
The endless morning passed by in a blur, spoken sentences and whispered judgments passed one after the other. As if something... something in the air had died, leaving everything behind nothing but a series of robotic, mechanical motions.
Perhaps that was all I was ever destined to get.
"Anything else?"
The judges were clearing up at their table, Thanatos lingering glumly at my side, Hecate half hidden behind a pile of scrolls. We were back to where we were before - with none of her liveliness, her mirthful laughter, her bold, yet wild words. Charon looked up, the burning embers of his eyes hidden under the shadowy rim of his hat.
"That will be all for today, my Lord... unless you wish to-"
"We are done here then," I got up, words too cold, voice too brusque for my liking. It was hard - it was hard to be kind, to be gentle and yet fair - to be back to the hopeless, unknowing man I was before. As if she had left me, and all those qualities of mine that made me a man - they had left me too. It had brought out the worst of all that lived in me - and yet there was no one I blamed for it but myself.
Because none of this would have happened if I had caught Rosamund that day in the garden.
A sharp whistle blew from my lips as I beckoned to the angry, hissing hound circling the doors, as if waiting for someone about to arrive. The first time it happened, he would not come in the entire night. And now? Now I had accepted the reality, unlike Cerberus - who stood waiting at the doors of the hall every single day, waiting for the lady of the house to come back.
"Hades," Hecate's voice drifted across to me over the dying sunset. I turned to find Thanatos and her wringing their hands. "You have to forgive yourself for what happened. It's high time you stopped-"
"We are not having this conversation," I muttered under my breath, beckoning over the beast to me with a pale finger. He growled, nipping at my hand.
