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“I am sorry. Thank you for your sacrifice,” she whispered to the small animal in her lap.
Raising it above the hole, she plunged the dagger into its soft throat, whimpering as the blade sunk in easily and the edge of her hand grazed its fur. Bright red blood poured into the hole as soon as she removed the blade, throwing it away from her. Distantly, she heard a splash as it tumbled into one of the rivers behind her.
She slumped back onto her ankles, waiting. Several souls meandered by, wishing to wet their lips with the libations and hare’s blood. Persephone hardly had to shake her head to discourage them, one look at their Queen, and they left her alone.
When Pelops finally ambled his way toward her, her heart lurched. He looked just like the others, a grey so pale he was translucent. With blank eyes he looked through her, then to the hole in front of her.
His hands dipped into the liquid and he drank deeply from his cupped hands, staining them and his mouth a dark red that dripped down his chin and neck.
Persephone watched as he went from staring blankly at his cupped hands to whipping his gaze up to her, his green eyes full of confusion and fear. He rushed toward her, reaching to grab her, but his hands sunk through her with an icy chill.
She scrambled backward, the cold of his touch burning her skin.
“I can’t touch you,” he said quietly, looking down at his bloody hands again.
“No, you cannot.”
Slowly, he dragged his eyes back up to look into her own. She watched as realization dawned on him, as he quietly said, “I’m dead.”
Persephone’s eyes shuttered as she held back her tears. She could not allow herself to cry, she had to be strong if she was going to get the answers she needed from him. The truth.
“Why are you here?”
“I had to see you.”
“Persephone,” he cooed, raising a hand to caress her cheek, and dropping it as he remembered he could not touch her. “You should not be here, my darling. You should not be this close to the Underworld, you’re practically in the Underworld! You have to leave.” His voice broke with worry, and his hands tensed into fists at his sides.
“I had to see you, Pelops.” A tear fell down her cheek, but she swallowed her sobs. “I am so sorry. I will find a way to resurrect you, I promise I will.” She rocked forward onto her knees, and though they could not feel each other, she pressed her hand onto his, ignoring the burn that flickered along her palm as she did. “This is all my fault, and I’ll fix it. I am sorry.”
Wrenching his hand away, Pelops stood and stepped back, his eyes burning as they narrowed at her. “You have done enough,” he said, sneering.
“What do you mean?” She shook her head, blinking hard at the sudden change in his demeanor. “No—no, I need you. I love you, I—I—no.” Her heart shattered in her chest again, the shards stabbing into the delicate skin of her insides, blood pooling in her stomach next to the dread that had been sitting there for hours. “I cannot love anyone as much as I love you, Pelops, and—and nobody,” the word was gargled, barely audible, but she didn’t care, “will ever love me like you do,” she took a tentative step toward him, “or touch me how you do.” Memories of Hades, and the way her body reacted to his touch flooded her mind at her words, but she shoved them down. “I love you, Pelops!”
“I do not love you,” he spat. “I was never going to love you, and I never intended to marry you.”
“You—what?”
“You were never going to be good enough for me to marry. You weren’t even good enough to tell me to stop when I fucked you on the beach; what kind of wife could you have ever been?”
“I—” Persephone choked. She shook her head again, unable to stop the words from tumbling out of her mouth. “I can help you, I can bring you back.”
“Don’t bother. It does not matter anymore. Poseidon will have already grieved and forgotten me – if anyone could help me, it would be him.”
Persephone’s chest deflated. “So, it’s true. Hades said you were in love with someone else.”
“Of course I am in love with someone else!” Pelops screamed, throwing his hands up. “Why do you think I was so hesitant when you said we should get married? Why I stopped touching you, or spending time with you? Nobody hunts daily for years, Persephone, use your head.”
Persephone was silent as his words sank in, then she said, “But you said that you loved me.”
“Maybe I did, in the same way that you love your friends. I was mostly just using you to cover up my relationship with Poseidon, and as practice for when I would inevitably have to hide him from my wife.”
The ground was wobbly beneath her feet, and she sunk back onto the ground. Looking up at Pelops towering over her, she said, “You were using me. You never loved me, not really. Not the way I loved you.”
Pelops narrowed his eyes and bent over to face her, and said, “I needed a queen. You were never going to be one.” He straightened again, standing tall and intimidating before her. “You are weak, in both body and will,” he sneered, looking her up and down. “You have no spirit, no drive. You were always talking about your friends and your mother, becoming a mother yourself. But what kind of mother could you have been, Persephone? You probably would have raised my children to be kind and gentle. You would have destroyed my heirs.”
Persephone stared up at him, the soul standing before her was not the man she had fallen in love with. He was, but he was not. She had ignored everything wrong that he had done and said to her, misconstrued every detail of their relationship. Hades was right, Pelops would never have been good enough for her, had never loved her. And she had been more than willing to let him drag her down with him.
“I would have made a great queen,” she said, getting to her feet in one fluid motion. “Your people needed someone kind and gentle,” she spat his words back at him. “They were helpless against your father. You were going to be the same kind of man as him, and it would have destroyed your kingdom. They would have revolted, and murdered you. So be glad Hades did it for them.”
