Chapter Text
Taylor had spent most of her life wondering if it was real. Wondering if all the energy she had poured into researching, documenting, writing, was worth it.
In hindsight, she never was one to believe in destiny, in “true love.” Yet to her, that feeling always felt like the most natural thing in the world, as familiar as breathing.
She was five when she first saw her. It was her first trip to New York, and her mom had taken her to Central Park. The small girl was staring with wide-eyed wonder at the sheer amount of flowers that surrounded her. Small hands drifted over soft petals, marvelling at their feel and vibrant colours standing out against the cool earth.
Her mom knelt next to her, pointing to each and telling her their Latin names, big things that Taylor’s mouth struggled to form. She preferred their more common names, pretty words that felt sweet as she parroted them back to her mom.
But when she arrived at a certain plant, she halted, tilting her head. The plant in question was quite unassuming, more of a bush than anything, with small, delicate white flowers.
But it was the leaves that caught Taylor’s eye. Something about that particular shade of green, the way the sunlight and shadows played on the leaves’ surface made Taylor stop.
“That’s Pycnanthemum,” her mom had said, reading its sign. “Mountain mint.”
“Mountain mint,” Taylor murmured. Slowly reaching up her hand, she delicately brushed the pale leaves, as if they might break upon touch.
And as she did, a pair of piercing green eyes flashed in her head. A face with blonde hair, freckly cheeks, and eyes the same shimmery pale green as the leaves in her hand.
It was foreign and familiar all at once. Taylor knew that in all her five years, she had never seen that girl. She couldn’t even tell how old she was.
And yet, something about that image radiated peace, felt like home in a way her young mind couldn’t hope to articulate. Like moving a limb that had remained dormant your whole life, unable to be forgotten once discovered.
The image seemed to last forever and an instant, vanishing before she could fully process it.
Taylor stumbled back a few steps into her mom’s legs. Andrea looked down at her daughter, who was staring open-mouthed at the plant in front of her. She watched as Taylor stepped forward again, feeling the leaves eagerly and pouting in disappointment when whatever she was expecting didn’t happen.
“Taylor?” she asked when her daughter started stroking the leaf more insistently with both hands. “If you’d like, we can go to the plant nursery after this and find one to take back home with us? You can plant it and watch it grow in our yard.”
“It has to be mountain mint, Mom. Please?” Taylor begged, eyes wide.
“Of course sweetie,” Andrea smiled, holding out her hand. “Come on. It’s getting late and we’d best head off now if you want to find that plant of yours.”
Taylor took her mom’s hand, as Andrea gently led them out of the park. Taylor turned and stole one final glance at the green, as if the girl from her head might materialise if only she stared hard enough.
“I’ll see you soon,” she whispered. “See you real soon.”
The first dream came that night.
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She walked in a sea of gold, bathed in the light of the sun. Heads of wheat bobbed by her sides, her hands skimming lightly over the tops of the golden stalks as she drifted across the field. The sun was just beginning to meet the horizon, gilding the world in a soft warmth that bathed her face and lit her hair until it was the same colour as the field around her.
The days were getting shorter. The warm seasons were coming to an end, and with it her time on Earth with her mother and father. She smiled at the thought.
Demeter of course mourned the approaching absence of her daughter, wailing in sorrow at the thought of existing another six months with the knowledge that her only daughter, her precious child, was living with the ruler of the dead.
It seemed the Earth itself was also preparing for her departure. Leaves were browning, the grass losing its vibrancy with each passing day. Each year it happened; the life would slowly, but surely fade from the Earth as she left, as if it too was bereaving her loss.
And she could not wait to go.
She heard the whispers of course, felt the judgemental stares of the other gods that followed her as she walked the cramped halls of Mount Olympus.
“The daughter of Demeter,” they would gossip in barely-concealed tones, “the innocent maiden, stolen from her pure lands by the god of the Underworld.” Many pitied her, thinking her perpetual biannual movement to be a cruel curse, inflicted by the equally cruel monster that held her captive.
“If only they knew the truth,” she thought.
Their scrutiny was always what drove her down here, to the woods and fields of her mother’s creation and her care. Leaves crunching under her bare feet, she walked until she could no longer hear the hush of the wind in the long grasses, the sound muted as she entered the copse of trees at the end of the field.
The lands behind her were bountiful, a paradise radiating out from the foot of Mount Olympus, shaping a landscape teeming with life. She had reached the end of that paradise, the plenty of the fields behind her giving way to ancient shadowy trees and dark earth.
This here, right at the edge of her mother’s domain, was where she first entered the Underworld, where she first met the feared lord of the dead.
She was never taken, contrary to belief; she asked to go, practically begged to be given sanctuary. Far better to remain underground, away from the light, than from the lusting eyes of her father, of Zeus.
It was in the weeks after Demeter first introduced her to the god of thunder that Zeus grew increasingly lecherous when it came to his daughter. What once passed as fatherly touches began to linger, unyielding fingers drifting places that made her want to scrub her skin raw.
She of course had heard the stories. She knew what Zeus did when he desired something, he took and stole and ravaged once he set his sights on something. On someone.
And it terrified her. She felt what was coming, knew it was only a matter of time before Zeus’ violent lust finally found her. So she ran. Her feet took her to the very edge of her mother’s domain, not a single thought in her head except to flee, to escape, to run.
It was then that she blindly stumbled into the copse of trees where she now stood. It was there that in a great chariot pulled by two magnificent horses, the lord of the dead nearly ran her over.
Zeus would later begin the rumour that the evil god took her then and there, as she lay weak and defenceless on the ground. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. True, the close encounter knocked her to the ground, had winded her. But the hands that stilled the spooked horses above her, that cradled her face checking for any signs of injury were as gentle as a breeze.
For the first time, she found herself looking into the eyes of someone who listened, as though she was the single most important being in the cosmos. The lord of the dead heard her story, and upon its conclusion, wordlessly stood and helped her into the chariot, a simple “stay with me” on their lips.
She learned quickly that all the sardonic whispers of the god of the Underworld could not be further from the truth. Those rumours of his hideous face and corruption? They were all lies perpetuated by Zeus out of spite and ridicule. The true Hades, she found, was beautiful, existing only in the darkness below because of the bad hand they had been dealt. While Zeus was gifted all of Earth to rule, they were given the Underworld, and all its blood-soaked responsibilities.
It surprised her, how similar they were. She cultivated and nurtured life, yes, but the lord of the dead was nurturing in a different way, guiding lost souls and helping them find peace before they went to their final sleep or next life. Not cruel and bloodthirsty at all, but gentle and patient, listening to the story of each soul that entered the Underworld.
They were not as opposing as she was taught. Different as night and day, but still fulfilling the same role, orbiting around the same creation of life as the moon dances with the ocean.
Though she sought only a place of solace when she arrived, mutual curiosity ultimately bloomed into something more, something beautiful, and gentle, and as familiar as the ground beneath her feet. She found she was happy. She was away from her mother, her fields, everything she had ever known, but she was the happiest that she had ever been before.
It was not to last.
They spent a blissful year together until her mother found her, sending Hermes with a message raging that she return home. And she found for all of her initial longing, that she did not want to. Yes, she missed the richness of the earth, the brightness of her mother’s fields. But that was no longer her home.
The lord of the dead had woken that morning to an empty bed. Panicked and fleeing their palace, nothing could have prepared them for the feeling of frozen dread at the sight of Demeter’s daughter crumpled along the banks of the Styx, a half-eaten pomegranate clutched in her outstretched hand.
An inhuman cry found its way to Taylor’s ears as she was gathered up in warm safe arms. Soft utterances of “why” fell from trembling lips as her love comprehended what she had done.
To consume the food of the Underworld was an act of suicide in the eyes of the gods residing at Mount Olympus. To take a bite of the fruit that grew there was to remain trapped in the world below.
As much as her deed had bound them together, doing so had forever tied her to the Underworld, severing her right to call Olympus her home.
She had simply smiled. They lay together for hours, her love gently rocking her as she recovered from the sudden feeling of disconnection the fruit had elicited.
And together they wept for her loss, their future, and her new home beside the lord of the dead.
Her mother was furious. Devastated at her daughter’s choice of partner, she crossed the world above, killing crops, rendering the ground too salty to grow anything worth eating. Famine spread across her land, she had no choice but to return to the world of gods and splendour that was feeling less and less like home with each passing day.
Eventually a deal was struck. She would spend half the year on Earth and the rest of the year in the Underworld.
And the time was fast approaching when she could return at last. But that was not why she had made her way to this copse of trees today. No, she had a job to do here, something that she recently added to her routine of growth and bloom in her mother’s lands.
Entering the ring of trees, she revelled in the way the dark earth felt on her feet, approaching the centre of the clearing. There was a small divot in the middle of the ground there, only the size of her fist and barely noticeable in the rich dirt. It was before this small impression that she knelt, the fine white of her dress pooling around folded legs.
Gently, she ran her fingertips across the earth in front of her, gliding her hands into the ground. Where it looked as solid as a rock, she knew there to be a small deposit of rich soil. It was the most fertile she could find, carried it all the way from her mother’s fields to this place, the entrance to the Underworld.
Closing her eyes, she felt the energy gather in her fingers, building from within herself and the air around her. A sprout began to emerge from the ground, winding its way around her fingers and perching on her knuckles. Slowly removing her hands from the earth, she stared down with fondness at the little life curling itself around her arm.
Raising her arm, she gently stroked stem with her other hand, encouraging it to grow. That was the difference between her and her father, her love had insisted. Zeus consumed power, manipulated and pushed it to his own will. She merely redirected, using the energy around her to create not wreak havoc.
As the stem continued to wind upwards, she took a steadying breath, closing her eyes once again and redirecting the flow of energy to not only grow, but bloom. And as she opened her eyes, she saw before her a soft purple flower, petals edged with flecks of crimson and silver, a design she had only perfected in the past week.
Breathing a sigh of relief, she gently unwound the tangle from her arm and reshaped it to form a single stem. Finding the divot in the ground, she placed the flower upright in the fresh earth. And finally, she reached into the folds of her dress and pulled out a tiny scrap of parchment, painstakingly tucking it into the folds of the petals. Placing a final kiss on the petals, she wordlessly rose and retreated back to the edge of the copse.
Bracing a hand on one of the ancient trees, she turned in time to see the small divot roar into a gaping hole in the ground, her flower swallowed up beneath the earth that poured into the opened depths. Within seconds, the hole had shrunk and filled, leaving no trace but the fresh earth that marked the centre of the clearing.
She smiled to herself before facing the lands she would be leaving behind in just a few short weeks.
“Only one more moon, my love.”
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Far beneath the ground, where the air was still and cool, a black-robed woman strode through the cavernous space she called home. A far cry from the stifling, compressed labyrinth that most assumed her domain to be, this was a vaulting cavern, the space illumined not by the sun, but by the veins of luminous rock that wove its way up its walls like veins.
The chamber was enormous, large enough to fit every castle on Earth, and more. At one end of the vast area, a palace seemingly carved out of the rock rose proudly, its spires neither opulent nor humble. The rest of the cavern was divided by the river Styx that ran its way in a ring around the outskirts of the structure, leaving a vast inner ring and a more widespread outer ring. Passageways ran out from the edges of the cavern, each leading to a separate antechamber, not as vast as the main, but just as beautiful.
The glow of the rock walls webbed up the sides of the central expanse, giving way to an enormous marble ceiling, enchanted to change hue with the turn of the sun. Daylight on the surface was indicated by a pale blue stone, woven through with streaks of white, the night sky reflected as a dark almost black rock, studded with thousands of diamonds and precious stones that formed a blanket of twinkling lights just as mesmerising as the stars so far above.
She had only enchanted that ceiling a few years ago. Where stalactites once hung down like fangs, the rock had been smoothed back to create the illusion of an endless sky; a present for her love once she shyly confessed her yearning for the open air above her. How long they spent, tangled up together, staring at that ceiling, her love softly weeping tears of gratitude and quietly describing the constellations of her home world, the same configuration of stars appearing in the rock far far above them with a simple wave of the other woman’s hand.
Yes, for all the horrid tales of Hades, the brutal, bloodthirsty lord of the dead, she was a woman. As tall and as proud as the tales told, but without any of the repulsive ugliness that those stories implied. This was a woman with hair and skin as golden as the sun, eyes as green as the grass so far out of reach.
Those tales were only spread by Zeus as a mockery and retaliation for the goddess who was shouldered with the responsibility of caring for the dead. The goddess who should have ended up as twisted and jaded as the souls she worked with, but who took pride in her job, who saw its importance and valued her ability to help others find peace.
The woman in question was busy making her way back from the outer ring of the cavern. As she crossed the river Styx, a splash of colour, too iridescent for her world, caught her eye. Turning to the large plinth that rose from the middle of the river, her serene face broke out into a grin as bright as the glow of the surrounding rocks.
There on the low platform, the entrance point to the Underworld, stood a proud, purple flower, its colour a vibrant buzz against the muted, cool hues of the cavern.
One of Persephone’s gifts.
Rushing up the stone steps, she fell to her knees, taking the flower it into her hands and marvelling at its softness and life. It was beautiful. Each of Persephone’s gifts were, but this one held a sparkle, a gild she had not seen before that caused her smile to widen even more. It would seem her love had been practicing.
But she knew it wouldn’t last for long. Nothing from the world above did. But it could be preserved.
Drinking in one last sight of the rich colours, she closed her eyes and slowly slid her hands up the stem of the flower. As she did, a vein of gold crept up the surface of the plant, soon encasing the entire thing in a solid layer. The details remained intact, each curve and rise of the precious treasure kept fresh within the gold.
It was only when she opened her eyes that she noticed the tiny square of parchment wedged between two of the inner petals. Carefully prying it free, she eagerly unfolded it, heart racing. Messages were rare between the two women while they were apart.
Smoothing out the parchment, her eyes scanned the looping handwriting.
“I miss you more than words can say, my love. I am counting the days.”
Shaky hands brought the note to her lips as she kissed it gently. Refolding and securely tucking it into her robes, she rose with the golden flower now in her hand.
Walking along the central trail to the palace, she crouched at a bare patch of stone to the side of the path. With a wave of her hand, the stone melted and parted, as fluid as water, eagerly accepting the stem of the flower as she carefully positioned it in the newly formed indent.
Drawing herself up to her full height, she looked over the sea of gold that radiated from the foot of the castle, its newest addition swallowed up in an ocean of flowers sent down from the world above.
She looked out over her home; over the golden sea their love had made, the luminous rock and marbled palace, and the enchanted sky, now turning from gold to muted pinks and purples as the sun set. Soon it would be full of joy again. She would be home.
“I will see you soon love,” she whispered, staring at the ceiling overhead. “I will see you very soon.”
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That night, Taylor woke with a start, the scent of flowers still in her mind and a horrid feeling of absence in her heart.