Chapter Text
Every morning, Cerelle would venture to the small glade by the lake, sit in the shadow of her willow, and wait.
What she waited for she never quite knew. The flowers grew underneath her fingertips whether she wanted to or not, the grass turned greener with every breath she took, the animals appeared at her side whenever her voice started carrying across the water.
She waited for something. But it never seemed to appear.
Her mother found her on some days, took her hand and led her back to their palace. They sat on top of the temple’s steps and accepted the offerings by desperate farmers, the gifts by hungry mothers, the pleadings by those who had nothing left to give. Their prayers were meant to strengthen them - at least her mother always claimed so - but Cerelle had never felt their power.
Despite being a goddess, she felt so terribly normal.
Humans visiting the temple did not pray to her, they prayed to her mother - Cersei, goddess of the harvest and fertility, who could decide the fate of a nation with a single flick of the wrist.
Cerelle… Well, there was the thing with the flowers growing wherever she stepped, and animals and humans alike flocking around her whenever she sang, but what she was the actual protector of, what good fortune her powers brought to men and women that knelt at her feet, that she did not know.
She stared up at the canopy of leaves above her.
Her songs had turned sadder and sadder ever since the turn of the new century forty-four years ago. Why, she couldn’t quite say. Her words told of stories long since lost to time, the great love that always escaped oneself, the terrifying certainty that things might never change. Whenever a tear escaped her eyes, a plant inset with jewels and gold and diamonds would grow in the place it had seeped into the earth.
A cold breeze wafted through the leaves of the willow, playing with her hair and dress, and reminding her of the coming winter.
Her mother chuckled sometimes during that time, when the humans came begging to her to stop the snowstorms, make it warm again, have their food grow as it did during summer. How silly of them, she said while Cerelle sat at her feet. They think I control the weather.
She basked in their misery, in the tormented screams parents let out as their children died of the cold or a lack of food - both of which her mother could prevent. She might not be as powerful as Robert, the king of the gods, but the changing of the seasons could only happen with her permission. Were she to not give it, one day, the humans could live through an eternal summer. Or, if her mother wanted, through an eternal winter.
Both were possible. Both had happened before.
Cerelle sometimes asked her mother why she was so cruel to her subjects, but her mother only laughed.
If they forget what I am capable of, they might forget to fear me. Fear is the only thing strong enough to keep us in power. You will understand that one day, sweetheart.
She knew she never would, but kept silent anyway.
The sun was already setting upon the forest, the cool shadow of her willow turning freezing, when something changed.
Not instantaneously, no. A slow, deliberate change, one that made the hairs on the back of her neck rise, that made the butterflies flee the safety of her hair one by one, that greedily swallowed the tune of her songs.
The fox underneath her hand looked up. When she followed its gaze, she noticed a shadow.
Her mother had warned her, time and time again, not to come out here alone, that desperate men were only waiting for their opportunity to taste a maiden goddess. She had ignored her warnings, too comforting had her little glade become.
Whoever this creature was, she would not allow it to prove her mother right.
Her fingers curled, and nature stood at attention. Carefully, as to not rouse suspicion, she rose from the ground and started moving out of her hiding spot beneath the willow.
The shadow wandered, carrying with it the reek of death and despair. So terribly out of place in her home, yet still so… familiar.
It always stayed just on the edge of her vision, never quite making itself known, never allowing her to properly locate its origin. It knew she was after it now, and if she did not act quickly, it might disappear.
And so she whirled around, slammed her fist into the ground, and summoned dozens upon dozens of thorns and vines and roots, one stronger than the last, all tightening around the monster in its midst-
No, that was no monster.
That was a man.
A man that had let out a rather mundane cry of shock. A man that struggled fruitlessly against his bindings. A man that bled the golden ichor of the gods.
She stepped closer, cocking her head in confusion.
The man seemed no older than herself - if such a statement even existed between eternal beings such as them - and yet, even in captivity, he commanded a sense of prowess and poise she could only dream of achieving. He was dressed in armour of black ice, its colour swallowing the light surrounding it without scrutiny, covering his entire body up to the neck. Only his face remained free.
Oh, his face.
His face seemed to have been crafted from white marble itself - sharp and cold and without a single inconsistency. His lips were slightly parted, his deep grey eyes wide open and staring at her, his black hair softly curling around his head and framing his face in the soft evening sun.
He looked… Beautiful. Striking. Devastating.
“Who are you?”
Shadows curled around his armour, almost unnoticeably to the eye, yet she felt them trying to prod at the vines as if they were touching her bare skin.
“Release me and I shall tell you.”
His voice was deeper than she had expected; dark, husky, with a strange accent she didn't recognise, and so terribly alluring.
“You are in no position to make demands.” She let the roots tighten around his body, thorns pricking at his face and soaking up the ichor flowing from the wounds. “Tell me your name, stranger. Or I shall have you thrown into Tartarus for attempting to deflower a maiden goddess.”
“Quite a harsh punishment. I assume you have never seen who actually resides in that pit.”
She took a step forward the same time a vine wound itself around his throat. “Your name.”
His jaw tightened. “Jon. Now let me free.”
“And what were you doing here, Jon? Were you planning to kidnap me?”
“I came to collect a soul,” he hissed. “Then I heard your voice and could not leave anymore. It's like I was possessed. So it is entirely your fault I watched you.”
“No god falls underneath my spell, it is not possible. You are just trying to find an excuse for invading my lands.”
He laughed. “I can go wherever I wish. No need for excuses or permission. Now let. me. go.”
Their faces were mere inches apart. The haunting grey of his eyes shifted like an autumn fog, swirling and rippling, as if a simple gust of the wind could turn it into a tornado.
“Apologise.”
“What?”
She smiled. “Apologise for invading my peace. Then I will release you.”
“I will do no such thing.” His teeth were sharper than those of a wolf. “You will simply add another condition to my release, and another, and another, until your plants have swallowed me whole. I’d be better suited to freeing myself.”
“Then do it. If the concept of an apology seems too daunting to you, you are free to cut yourself out. They’re just plants, after all.”
She took a step back, walked around the monstrosity of vines and roots that had surrounded Jon, and headed for her willow.
“Wait, stop!” He struggled in the bindings, the shadows tearing and ripping at his bindings to no avail. She only barely suppressed a grin. “You cannot leave me here like this!”
“If you are convinced you are so powerful you have no obligation to ask for permission before entering someone’s home, I am certain you are powerful enough to free yourself from the cage they have put you in.”
Despite knowing better, she turned her head to glance at him.
Even if he did not face her, he still seemed… cute. Forcibly bent over, hands tied behind his back, hair falling almost down to his shoulders, getting disrupted every time he moved to attempt to free himself. The shadows emanated from his body, clouding the area around his armour even more. Yet despite their insistence, despite how much they tried to free their host, and despite how deep they burrowed into the roots and her own skin, they were unable to cause much of a difference.
“Can you help me here?”
She chuckled. “What was that?”
Whatever emotions might be passing over his face, they were certainly not pretty.
“I…” he said slowly. “I apologise for spying on you. Now can you please free me? There is work awaiting me.”
And not a moment later, he crashed to the ground.
She laughed as she disappeared behind the leaves of her willow.
“Do you have any idea who I am?” He had joined her in the safety of the tree, the branches shielding them from any light trying to pass through and cloaking them from any possible watchers.
“Am I supposed to?”
He furrowed his brows in disbelief. “I am the King of the Underworld. And you, a simple nymph, were able to trap me.”
The Underworld.
“I am a goddess, not a nymph. And if you truly are from the Underworld, then I suggest you quickly return. The likes of you are not permitted around here.”
Faster than she could react, her back hit the tree the same time his hands slammed into the bark beside her head. His body was pressed up against her, with nothing but their clothes separating them.
She wanted to push him away. Wanted to kick him, to punch him, to scream at him for manhandling her so. Yet something in his gaze stopped her. There was a thing lying in his eyes that she had never seen before, a strange feeling that made her heart beat faster.
“Who are you?” he whispered.
Then his eyes widened in shock as the branches of her willow wrapped around his body, ripped him away from her, and threw him in a wide arc into the lake.
Terrifyingly enough, she did not tell her mother about that encounter. No matter how much she had despised being intruded upon in her moments of eternal contemplation, she could not risk being barred from returning to her lake.
It was the only thing that felt like home.
She half expected this self-proclaimed King of the Underworld to return the next day and take his revenge for the bath she forced him to take, but he never showed. No shadow, no stink of death, no strange feeling in her gut. He stayed gone for a long, long while.
Her mother took her to visit various harvest festivals throughout the lands during that time. Standing beside her on the wagon pulled by dolphins, Cerelle wondered if she had perhaps been too harsh to Jon, if what he said had actually been true.
That her song could control gods.
Ludicrous.