Free Destroyer of Light by Rachel Alexander Page B

snapped. He looked at Persephone, her shoulders tensed, her face drawn. “Wife, I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
    He dropped his forehead into his hand and shut his eyes. Persephone leaned against him. “It’s all right. I shouldn’t expect you to have all the answers.”
    “I don’t think anyone has the answers right now. Too many impossible things have happened since…” he silenced himself, knowing where this led.
    “Since you brought me here,” she said, and watched him scowl. “Not all of them are bad things, Aidon. The grove, for instance.”
    “Well, our grove— and everything we know— will either end in flames or vanish into nothingness if she—” he bit his cheek and took a deep breath. “If this continues much longer.”
    “Do you think to somehow protect me from what my mother is doing?”
    “No.”
    “Then why are you holding your tongue?”
    “Because you asked me to. It was the first thing you ever asked of me.”
    “I recant. Speak your mind.” The gravity of the situation demanded honesty, but Persephone was quietly pleased that her husband had been so loyal to his promise.
    Aidoneus opened his eyes as wide as the floodgates she had just parted. “There’s so much I’ve held—” he swallowed. Where would he begin? “When I took you from the fields it was because Demeter was willing to sacrifice all, including you, to keep you from me. And even now, her stubbornness is destroying everything from the heavens to the depths of the Pit. I don’t understand why I became the target of her wrath when it was your father who mistreated her in the first place! He deceived and abandoned her, left her heavy with child, he killed her lover—”
    Persephone’s mouth went agape. “Her… My mother’s what?!”
    Demeter’s policy of keeping Persephone ignorant had stopped surprising Aidoneus a while ago, but this instance didn’t stop him from shaking his head at the injustice done to his wife. “Some years after you were born, a mortal farmer came across the shores of the Styx with stories about Demeter, and an infant goddess named Kore. His name was Iasion— a very skilled farmer, in truth. The greatest mankind had produced in those early days. Zeus had caught them… coupling… and struck Iasion down as he lay beside your mother. He died instantly— he didn’t even know what happened.”
    “Why would Zeus do such a thing?” she said, horrified. “He’d already abandoned my mother! Why couldn’t he just leave us alone and let her be happy?”
    Aidon pursed his lips. “Because he still loved her, in his own selfish, foolish way. He sought an alliance with Hera because she was a better match. And that was the most frustrating thing for me. I always knew that Hera was a better choice for him, but what could I have told your mother? Hera was craftier, more influential— clever in all the ways Zeus wasn’t, and they complemented each other perfectly. But that didn’t mean he loved Demeter any less.”
    Persephone scowled, angry, wishing she could have known at least something about Iasion, this singular man who had never caused her mother any grief. She also puzzled at why her mother hadn’t made her lover immortal— especially when he had given her so much joy.
    “After I learned what I could from Iasion,” Aidon continued, “his shade drank from the Lethe and was at peace in Asphodel, his name forgotten. But I could see what manner of man he was. He was too valuable to the world above to languish below, and when the time was right, after mankind regained Prometheus’s fire, I returned him to the mortal world. Before he left, I did something I had never done before, and had his shade drink from the Mnemosyne before departing.”
    Persephone shivered, remembering the flood of memories when she’d sipped a few drops of the Mnemosyne. “What happens to shades when they drink from it?”
    “The Pool of Memories gives them a chance to recall fragments of their previous life when