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Persephone pushed the anger and hurt down until it was nestled between her hatred for Hades and her grief for Pelops. Opening her eyes again, she nodded at Styx. “Thank you for telling me.” The voice that spoke was foreign and cold.
As she approached the river’s edge, she noticed the ferryboat meant to aid crossing souls was nowhere in sight. “Where’s Charon? Don’t I need to pay for my crossing?”
“Only mortals do that.”
“But I cannot cross the river. I can’t even see into the river; it’s completely black.”
“What do you think the drink was for?” Styx snapped.
Persephone wanted to protest, but Styx was glaring at her with such dark ferocity she kept her mouth shut tight.
Instead, facing the river, and looking toward the dim glow of the palace gate, allowing a fraction of her anger to fill the hole in her chest again. She wanted to watch the light in Hades’ eyes dim as she crushed his soul in her bare hands, as she calmly told him everything that had transpired below, and let her festering wrath attack him.
Starting with her feet, Persephone quickly dipped her body into the river. The bottom was too deep to touch with her head above the surface, but the inky blackness deterred any wish to find out just how deep it went. She kept her head high above it, straining her neck and shoulders.
It was colder than the wind Hades’ was constantly sending her way, colder than any winter she had experienced in her short decades with the mortals.
The water was so black it was opaque, and Persephone could not see her own arms as she swam across it. Things grazed her skin, slimy and slithering across her body as she waded through the water. Her hands touched small, bony objects with every stroke as she pulled herself across the river. She ignored them.
Oaths rushed by her in the current, oily and thick compared to the water itself. The icy hands of hatred and loathing hugged her waist, trying to tug her under, but she pressed on, straining against the pressure pulling at her.
At the halfway point, Persephone attempted to swim faster, the cold and eeriness of the river pushing her to hurry, but she had no strength left. She was slowing, making less and less progress the longer she was in the water.
Limbs stiff from the cold, the constant exertion Hades had forced on her, and the fear of what lurked beneath her, Persephone paused, and turned to float on her back.
She did not know how long the drink Styx had given her would protect her from the river. She wasn’t even sure that she cared. Persephone no longer had anything left to live for; Pelops was gone forever at her husband’s hand, her mother thought solely about increasing her own worship, and her friends lied about having monstrous children. She could happily float down the Stygian river until it branched into the others, floating around and around the Underworld for eternity.
Shutting her eyes, Persephone focused on the current swirling beneath and around her, stagnantly floating atop it. It hadn’t touched her since she stepped in, only rushed past her, pushing the things beneath the surface around her. It was soothing, despite the circumstances, to lay in water again, and relax as she melted into cool water around her.
Hades’ wind returned not long after Persephone stopped swimming. It pushed her to the far edge she had been swimming towards, and lifted her out of the water.
Dropping hard to the ground, her body collapsing onto her legs underneath her, Persephone groaned a breathless “metrokoites” to her husband, who she knew was listening.
A light, breathy chuckle followed the wind as it retreated, wrapping itself around her wrist in farewell this time. She pulled from it’s grasp roughly, falling onto her back as she came free of it.
Rolling onto her front, she rested her cheek against the dry grass, resting her eyes. With the river silent behind her, the field silent before her, Persephone fell asleep to the sound of her own breathing. First ragged and hoarse from swimming through the thick water, then deeper and slower as her heart slowed and steadied.
She was snoring in seconds.
§
Persephone woke to Hades’ deep voice whispering in her ear, the words unintelligible, but threatening. She jolted up onto her hands, locking her elbows to stay upright as she looked around.
Hades was not there.
“It’s just your imagination,” she said to herself. “If he was here you would feel his presence. Just relax, he is not here.”
It didn’t help shake the feeling of his gaze on her. So she ran.
First toward the river, mistakenly, almost tumbling into the murky, black water. She turned on her heel just in time to fall back to the ground, and pushed herself back to her feet to run unsteadily into the Field of Asphodel.
Finding her rhythm took a few sloppy strides, almost tumbling to the ground with every push of her toes, but once she had it she was flying. Running was actually easy after the rest she had on the riverbank, she felt like she had slept for days and woke fully recharged and ready to face her gods’ damned husband.
She was about halfway through the field, the glowing in the distance growing brighter than before when her head snapped forward and back as she collided into something. She fell down again on her already sore and bruised butt.
Looking up at the thing she had smashed into, her eyes landed on a man. A grey, almost translucent man in tattered robes with matted hair and cloudy, unseeing eyes. A soul. When she stood to apologize, his glassy grey eyes looked right through her as he ambled past her, as if she wasn’t there at all.
Persephone looked around for the first time since she’d left the river’s edge. Thousands of grey souls walked through the flowers, dragging their feet in a slow pace through the grass. Occasionally, they bumped into one another, moving on without a glance or an apology, as if nothing had happened.
