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They now lived alongside the ruins of what once was and a reminder of what could have been.
Enough was enough.
After the Great War left civilization in shambles, Persephone and her sisters determined that a new level of godly intervention was needed. Since the sister Goddesses held no true universal power to hold the humans accountable, as that was up to Chaos, they decided to direct their rule as the humans had, through institutions that gave structure to the post-war world.
The three sisters stepped into roles that controlled the human’s accessibility to such disastrous methods of harming their fellow man.
One of Persephone’s sisters, Hera, became the Archon, the ruler of Zephyr. She oversaw the Senate, the central governing body comprised of representatives from across the continent.
Amphitrite, her other sister, held power over trade routes as the leading government official in charge of the Zephyr Maritime Administration.
Persephone led Cerberus Financial, the umbrella organization of all financial institutions in the post-war world. She held power over the economy, and any weapons of war could not be bought without her knowledge.
The sisters used Halcyon as their central location in the human world and were able to maintain relative peace in the great city. The Goddesses could only do so much to rule the human realm without an all-out dictatorship, but they held enough power over government, transport, and the financial system to keep humans in line.
It wasn’t the world peace the human’s ancestors had dreamed of, but it had gone from a forest fire — both literally and metaphorically — to small manageable fires here and there.
Persephone was unsure of how much the human populace knew of the Goddesses. Sure, their identities were still unknown among man, especially Persephone’s. She was the sister who did not spend much time among mortals outside of work.
She was to guard the dead, and that was something she did well.
Closing her eyes to the world outside her window, she wondered what the Moirai had in store for her. She was not summoned to their domain as often as her sisters were, and so she couldn’t formulate a good guess as to their antics. Hera, with all the time she spent in Halcyon, would have probably known the Moirai’s intention before they had called for her.
The town car turned onto the main road that ran through the city and they finally neared the large spiral building. They had made better time to the central tower than she had expected, and so she didn’t have much opportunity to stop and mentally prepare herself as best she could to handle walking into a situation blind.
Her sisters happily reminded her almost every time they crossed paths that Persephone was a bit of a control freak, and this impromptu meeting was pushing her controlling tendencies to the edge.
She worked to remain a paragon of calm, to keep as much to her mortal form as possible. However, she found it easy to slip into her Goddess form when she was stressed or around smaller deities who triggered her magic’s dominant instincts.
Still, she did not want the humans to see her other form. She could only imagine their fear when she had black eyes, blue flames, and shadows swirling around her, not to mention the horns and black claws.
Those really did not help with public relations.
Persephone opened her eyes as the car came to a stop in front of Fates Consulting. The sun glinting off its metallic surface was almost blindingly bright. Hearing her driver cut the engine, she took another moment to prepare herself. She had enough experience and had heard plenty of stories from her very dramatic sister to know walking in and out without some fanfare was not possible.
Her driver, Charon, opened her door a couple of minutes later, probably sensing that she needed a moment. Charon had served faithfully by her side since she took up her mantle as Goddess of the Underworld. Deceptively frail and dressed in the finest driver’s suit, Charon bowed slightly as Persephone stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“Charon,” she growled in warning once she exited the car, straightening her black pantsuit and rolling her shoulders back. It aggravated her to no end when her people did this, the bowing, and they damn well knew it. Only Charon and Thanatos had the audacity to tease her this way.
“Forgive me. I am old and forget easily,” he said, smiling coyly. Persephone tilted her head to
look at him and arched a brow.
“I allow you and Thanatos far too much leniency. I need to start demanding more respect. Perhaps a century in the Torture Fields will suffice? Thanatos could use a good disemboweling.”
Charon let out a loud, rusty laugh. “You’d give him too much joy to know he got to you. He’d consider it foreplay, the cheeky bastard,” he stated with a wink.
Rolling her eyes, she conceded that the man she had trusted to bring her souls and coffee would indeed still be an ass in any form. Maybe she could let Cerberus, her loyal hound the financial institution was named after, romp around in Thanatos’ room later. Persephone knew that was the only true way she could infuriate the man.
As she walked into the Fate’s Consulting firm, she felt all she had planned for the day go straight out the window. She knew that whatever the Moirai had in store for her was going to make her life so much more difficult than she needed it to be right now.
Hopefully, it wouldn’t take more than a day to handle, but she prepared for the worst.
***
Persephone had found the Moirai to be consistent in one thing and one thing only—their dramatic natures. The room where they worked the strings of fate changed with their moods.
Today, her seat in front of the Moirai was a crushed black velvet armchair that shimmered with an impression of Persephone’s shadowy magic. Hera had warned her of this. They were reminding her of her position and status as the Goddess of the Underworld by placing such a chair for her to sit in.
