Hell Is An Empty Heart (Book One of The Triple Moon's Chronicles)

28 | The Den Of His Undying Demons

Persephone found felicity in leaves folded into animals' shapes.
She was ecstatic to be able to make them move and speak for them.
A simple toy, she begged her mother, Demeter, to do all day long for her.
Did she like to play with them? Or did she like to manipulate them?
Perhaps she simply wanted her mother to make her happy.

Illogical was Elysium. Its field was cosmological. This paradise was beautiful. An ice floe that drifted far apart on its own, far away from its own masters in the sky, as if darkness swaddled it in its arms. The fantasised haven of the dead, which was not to be mistaken for the heaven of the gods—was a place where honey-sweet fruits flourished from grains to feed its inhabitants. They were the souls of chosen mortal heroes who descended here after the death of their carcasses, leaving behind them their desire, despair, destruction, and delirium—all their sense of self.

Here, in this transcending state, happiness numbed and blinded them, for they became a shell of what they used to be and that was the trap from the most recoiled place of all in the underworld. A subterfuge wrapped in the brightest sun, the one thing they could no longer see—a blue lotus that sealed their destiny to never leave.

This unending delight intoxicated Persephone and Cerberus, too.

They hallucinated under this abiding daylight, not knowing tiredness and not getting bored as if the hours had stood still. Her arm flung the bait a thousand times while he brought it back to her ever since, with a broader smile each time.

A humming Cerberus jumped again onto the shattered flower crown. "Got you!" Yet before he could put the bait back in his jaw again, his eyes widened into a frightening realisation. "Oh no, she had domesticated me!" Flaring his nostrils, he rushed back to her side. "Enough with the stupid flower crown!"

Clueless, Persephone scratched her head. "Did we play for that long?"

Drawing nearer, Cerberus stared with his six eyes into her face, making her twitched in fear. "Just so you know, it was entertaining, but I only did this for Lady Artemis' female hounds."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Why are you so keen on her hounds?"

Her ignorance made his many jaws fall open with a yelp escaping one of them, and he shuffled back a step or two from her. "What sort of question is that?" He paused, rubbing one of his chins. Cerberus then raised his front paws to the sky and asked, "Isn't it obvious?" but she simply stared back at him with blank, wide eyes. "In case you didn't notice, I don't want to spend the rest of my days alone."

Persephone burst into laughter. "You will never be alone. You will always have Hades with you."

Cerberus frowned at her answer. "As much as I love Master Hades, he can't be everything in my life. Don't you ever wish to be loved by someone?"

With her lips pursed in thinking, she turned her back on him before swirling around again, a smile spreading across her face. "My mother loves me very much."

"Not that kind of love again, please!" Cerberus shouted in despair, his three heads crashing to the ground.

"Is there any other love?"

"You had to be facetious, surely?"

Persephone searched within her mind until it stopped on the image of a surge in the river, the night breeze blowing over damp hair, and the sound of friction emanating from lips. It was Demeter and Poseidon who came to her thoughts—they were her only glimpse of love from her secluded home.