Free Harvest Moon by Mercedes Lackey

from Olympia. There just aren’t that many of us that need real food.”
    â€œTry the Elysian Fields, at least there’s light there,” Hecate suggested. “Persephone, there has to be some of your mother’s powers in you, go coax something to grow, then eat it. That will make you part of this realm. That’s what works for the Fae realms, and The Tradition should make it work here.” She pointed a thumb at Brunnhilde. “Now, you, and your mate. What is it, usually, Hades? Nearly impossible tasks?”
    Hades nodded. “As few as one, as many as seven.”
    Brunnhilde quickly saw where this was going, and nodded, though not with any enthusiasm. “And a year and a day, usually,” she said with resignation. “Damn.”
    â€œHades, you figure out some tasks for the barbarian woman. I think the best thing to do with the man is to set him to guard Demeter so she doesn’t manage to get herself abducted by something nasty, or fall down a well, or something.” Hecate pondered. “I’ll manufacture more tasks for him if I need to. Or who knows? He might just fall into some, thanks to The Tradition. Let’s see if we can’t get this happening sooner than a year and a day, or everyone and everything in Olympia is going to starve to death.”
    She got up and reached for her torch. “Wait!” Brunnhilde said.
    Hecate paused.
    â€œThis was all your fault,” Brunnhilde said, pointing at Thanatos. “I want something in exchange for going along with this and not just summoning my father and giving him an excuse for a war of the gods.”
    Hecate raised one eyebrow. “She has a point. And I’m a goddess of justice, among other things.”
    Hades nodded. “All right.” He sighed. “What is it you want?”
    Brunnhilde smiled in triumph. “I want you to make my husband an immortal.”
    Â 
    So this was Elysium.
    It was certainly pretty. Flowers, flowers everywhere,underfoot, overhead in the trees, clouding the bushes. But not a hint of fruit. Nothing like a vegetable garden. No fields of grain.
    Which, all things considered…was not at all surprising. Everyone here seemed to be blithely uninterested in the humbler tasks, or indeed, in work of any sort. Well, it wasn’t as if they had to work; they were spirits after all, they didn’t eat, or drink, they had everything provided for them. But it made her feel just a little impatient, looking at them lolling about, doing nothing but exercising, having games, discussing ridiculous things like “How do I know the color blue is the same to you as it is to me?”
    Hecate was at least right about one thing. Elysium did have light. It had its own sun, and its own stars, which were in the heavens at the same time. She had gone to it by means of an imposing gate in an otherwise blank wall; here the gate stood, quite isolated, in the middle of a field of—yet more asphodels. She had the feeling that she was going to be very, very tired of asphodels after a while.
    Perhaps if this experiment worked she could get other flowers to bloom in the gardens of Hades’s palace.
    There was none of that all-enshrouding mist here. Aside from the extraordinary sky—in which the sun, as near as she could tell, did not move, but simply winked out from time to time, making “night”—it was rather like the slopes of Mount Olympus, minus the animals and birds. No flocks of sheep, no songbirds, no insects. Hmm. And no bees.
    Which means I am going to have to pollinate whatever I am trying to grow by hand.
    But it wasn’t wilderness. It was all very tame. Mannered groves, manicured meadows big enough to conduct games in, hills with just enough slope to make a good place to watch, rocks where they were most convenient to sit on, small, “rustic” buildings or miniature temples dotted about.
    And everywhere, people. Which she ignored, because she