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managed to get it together, and the world is no worse for it.”
She looked right at Devon. She knew what she needed to say, to do. It wasn’t something she wanted… but he needed to know.
He was a God now, and it was much more than lights and Godfire.
She called the shadows and pulled him with their clasped hands to stand up with her. His eyes looked to hers right as the shadows encased them.
***
Persephone shadow jumped them to the bone-littered desert outside Tartarus. Devon stumbled on the rocky surface before steadying himself.
“Why are we here, Persephone?”
Persephone couldn’t look at him, look at the face she’d grown fond of as she revealed her
most loathsome secret.
“The day I told you about Tartarus, I said that it was meant to contain evil immortals,” she started softly, “Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Devon murmured.
She took a deep breath.
“I left something out,” she sighed. “I neglected to tell you that Tartarus was designed to hold my father.”
Silence.
Devon spoke carefully. “Why is he in there?” he asked. And though she did not want to answer,
she knew it was best he understood why her father needed to stay contained.
She would tell him the truth, their oath of honesty went both ways, but she worried about how he might look at her after she told him. Would he associate the evil that was her father with her?
Swallowing, she took a moment to figure out how exactly to explain it to him. Her hands were shaking a bit and her throat felt dry, the words not coming forth for her to speak. This was a subject she hardly ever allowed herself to think about, much less talk about. Her sisters rarely even spoke of it with her, preferring to look forward and not back.
“My father had it in his mind that any children born to him and my mother were a threat to his power. He was a powerful Titan, who married another powerful Titan, my mother. He never wanted children, but if he had to have them, he wanted them weak and not a true threat to the power he had usurped from his own father.”
She felt Devon’s attention on her, on the distress that must be painted clearly across her face.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she continued the story she never spoke of.
“That my father would lose his power and be cast off as his father had been before him was his deepest fear. My grandmother and uncles helped my father in overthrowing my grandfather, but no one knew that until my father himself was cast into Tartarus.
“My mother knew my father was not willing to allow anyone to overthrow him the way he had. She knew he would always see us as a potential threat, so she begged another Titan to find a way to keep any offspring from being born Titans. My mother bore my father all girls, all mortals.
“Thankfully, the Titan who helped our mother had bound our powers beneath mortal shells. The Titan did not, however, inform my mother that should we die, we would be as powerful as the Primordial Gods. The Gods before the Titans.”
Devon crossed his arms, his face pensive as she told him of her origins. She wasn’t sure how
to take his lack of reaction, so she continued.
“My father, being paranoid, didn’t care that we were mortal children. He still feared us, thinking we’d somehow become powerful, and he would be no more able to stop his downfall than his own father had been.
“He waited until my mother left one day to watch over a woman stuck in the long hours of
labor,” Persephone hesitated a moment, her mind going back to that day.
“He killed all but one of my sisters using a knife covered in hydra’s blood, just to make sure we died. I remember my vision going black as I yelled for my sisters, my father standing over me holding the knife dripping with my blood.” Persephone faltered, her voice hitching.
