I amchaos bringer.
Persephone.
STYX COMES OVER AND WEspend the evening down in the lake room. It was her idea to come here but I still can’t shake the dread. I’ve spent too long using it to spy on my parents and just being here unsettles me.
‘This feels so weird,’ she says. ‘My river is not happy at being mixed with all these others. The Phlegethon is so polluted.’ She wrinkles her nose.
‘I guess that’s why it’s on fire.’
‘Hmm,’ she agrees. ‘But Hades tells me you haven’t been using the Lake of the Five Rivers for its best purpose.’
‘And that is?’
‘You have access to a whole planet of entertainment, and you’ve been eavesdropping on your parents? Come on,Persephone.’ She grins at the name. She’s very enthusiastic about the change. ‘There’s a festival for Dionysus happening in Athens right now. And that means theatre.’
Styx waves her hand in the water and performers appear in the lake.
Sitting on a pile of blankets, we spend the evening watchingthe show. The play is a little odd – it starts with a net over a house – and my vision keeps drifting to the humans watching. They’re enraptured, delighted, and the few who aren’t seem to enjoy their discontent. They whisper to their neighbours and sit up a little straighter with the superiority their contempt gives them. Theatre – the afterlife should definitely have a theatre.
At the end of the show, I turn to Styx. ‘Hades asked me to marry him.’
‘I beg your bloody pardon,’ she gasps. ‘And you let me sit through all that without saying a damn thing?’
‘He said that, if I want to stay here and I am worried about my parents stopping me, we could get married and they wouldn’t be able to drag me back to the surface.’
‘Oh, this is so exciting,’ she squeals. ‘When is it happening?’
‘It’s not,’ I say. ‘I didn’t say yes.’
‘Why not?’ she asks. ‘You like him. He likes you. What more do you want?’
‘Love?’ I suggest. ‘And I do not “like him”.’
She simply looks at me and I scoff. ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to imply but it’s untrue, whatever it is.’
‘Sure.’
‘Besides,’ I say slightly louder. ‘I’d like to actuallywantto get married if it’s going to happen.’
‘Yeah, but this sounds less like a marriage and more like a scheme, and you love schemes.’
‘But I’m not getting married for one.’
She shrugs and stands. ‘Well, I think we should all get drunk anyway. Come on.’
She marches upstairs and we search the empty halls ofthe cold palace until we find Hades at a potter’s wheel, so focused on the clay in front of him that he doesn’t notice us enter.
‘I made a new type of soil from that.’ I nod at the clay.
He startles but grins sheepishly. ‘How was the theatre?’
‘You’re proposing without talking to me about it first?’ Styx demands.
Hades carefully presses a final line into the clay and doesn’t even look up at her. ‘I do many things without talking to you about them first.’
‘And how many work out well for you?’
‘Most.’ Hades shrugs.
