Series: Willow Winters
Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
* * *
Hades doesn’t know that side of me. I never thought to tell him. If only I could in this moment while my memory serves me so well. Regrets flare from how we started. So much regret and pain.
Lightning strikes in a vision storm in the distance, the thunder booming immediately after and ripping through the skies so violently it causes my heart to race.
Swallowing thickly, I gather up the courage to ask my father. The atmosphere is still and tense here. Lighting strikes violently from the sky and I know it’s my father’s anger. My fingers twist around one another and I hesitate.
Alone in my rooms, I stare at a scry of my own. It cannot reach through crossroads, like the Underworld, and yet, it’s how I first saw him. There was a way…chills glide down my arms as if to confirm. He broke the gods’ law of realms to see me. Perhaps I don’t need my father. Perhaps if I stare long enough, Hades will appear. It’s a torturous thing to be subject to my father’s will.
The perfectly polished obsidian stares back at me as I’m tucked in a corner of the bed. Staring and wishing, but hopelessly dependent on the wills of others.
I look at myself in the mirror, the morning light shining on perfect glass. And for a moment, I see my mother.
Not Hades, but the memory of my mother from last evening.
We sat together, her arms around me and my head on her shoulder, while she told me over and over how upset she had been. How she missed me like she would miss her own heart. How she would miss the sun or the seasons in the mortal world. Her voice swelled with pain over and over, and her hands would clutch at my hair, then relax again when she realized I was back.
I’ve never seen my mother so distraught. I know how I longed for her, but I had Hades and my magic to occupy my thoughts. My mother had a hole in her heart and my empty room and no knowledge of what had happened to me or whether I still had breath in my lungs.
I cried with her when she confessed she barely had hope that I was still alive, but hope was there.
I told her I missed her, too. It was the truth. It is the truth. I was so afraid, in the Underworld, that I might never see her or speak to her again, and that thought had been unbearable. It made me fold up into myself, scared to move a muscle in case I made those horrible thoughts come true.
I missed her—but I do not like the idea of her causing so much pain in the mortal world. That is the kind of change that speaks of ruin. Her anger is frightening. Her vengeance is brutal. I’ve never known this side of my mother, but then again, she’d never known loss like she did those days of my absence.
Lightning strikes again and this time I only flinch. The war still rages as Demeter copes with Zeus's betrayal. It seems impossible to calm my mother. To soothe her pain.
I don’t know how to explain to my mother that she does not need to be ruined. I wasn’t ruined in the Underworld, and I have not been given back to her a broken shell of myself.
If anything, I was a shell of myself before, on Olympus, when my powers were ebbing away and I was staring into a future as a forest nymph.
Eventually, food was brought. Hades’s order repeated in my mind again.
Do not drink the wine your father gives you.
I looked at the cask of wine brought by the servants. Would that wine count if it was not given to me by Zeus himself? I did not drink it, choosing water flavored with nectar instead. If my mother noticed, she did not point it out.
We stayed together as the sun set, glowing in through the windows until at last the stars covered the sky. I got into my bed, which felt as strange and new as the rest of Olympus. All the nights I slept here before seem like they were lifetimes ago. Perhaps I did not expect to lay my head here again. Perhaps that is why it took me so long to fall asleep.
My mother sat by the bed until I drifted off. When I woke in the night, she was not here, but she returned in the morning, not long after I woke.
We had tea and light and airy sweet cakes for breakfast. She brought out a gown for me to wear, simple and white, yet beautiful, and I sat at her feet while she braided my hair.
And still she cried, her tears falling on the delicate fabric of my dress. Demeter’s sadness is palpable, I feel anguish for my mother.