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

32 | To Separate Ignorance From Knowledge

With an immaculate white short dress wrapped around her body, she was there in her infantile superstition. Her bare feet and her legs tightened together to separate ignorance from knowledge as she raised her chin up in a symbol of her virtue. A virgin and angel, ravished from the heavens of her mother's arms to the darkest pit of hell, and Persephone sat there, fingers twisted into Hades' golden harp.

Her imagination played out loud irresistible sounds, those which held the key to warm the cold, wounded hearts.

It didn't take long for the owner of the chamber to fall under her spell.

Hades went to sit beside her right away. His icy breath stroked her naked neck, and his eyes devoured her beauty with his hands now holding her close to him.

Persephone suddenly became the ideal goddess from his sickening mind.

"May I?" he whispered.

She didn't answer, like she had never consented to tie the knot of their marriage and yet, she let his long fingers joined hers through the musical instrument's cords. He played the lowest, bottom-hidden, saddest notes, leaving her to shine above him in contrast with the highest ones.

Persephone knew exactly how to play that demon.

Slowly, she moved from melody to melancholy, her eyes dissolving into a golden sea of Noctiluca scintillans—the flood of tears that weakened the man. The irrational act of soothing one heart in order to conquer another.

They both instantly ceased playing, Hades succumbing to the appeal of her distress, while Persephone abandoned herself into his arms. He then seized her body and together, they walked out of his shelter.

From the thin water droplets suspended in the grey clouded atmosphere of his hallway, a rain of golden coins fell upon them at their arrival into this new chamber at the centre of the highest floor of his tower. It was a storage room for each obol ever brought from a dead person to their ferryman Charon to take them to the underworld—a ritual levy that only mattered where money had value.

Mortals would kill to breathe in this place, their thirst would have been satisfied to beyond between those four roofless, windowless walls. The blood between them would have perhaps ceased to be shed, if they were only made aware of Hades' treasure room.

Persephone, however, wasn't allowed to observe this new surroundings. Setting her down, Hades went through the priceless possessions and took a bag to fill it with gemstones. He then carried her right away again, placing the same bag over her stomach.

As they walked out and back into the hallway, she called out his names but he wouldn't listen to her until one of her fist hit on his chest. "You don't have to carry me for such a small distance."

His steps ceased at her touch, and Hades struck her down with his blue eyes, causing her heart to tighten. "I won't let you walk barefoot on a lava floor."

At his words, one of her eyebrows lifted, and sure enough, smoke was coming straight up to her nose. As Persephone leaned over Hades' arms, she realised he was right—his once-black sabatons were now embers sinking into a molten liquid.

"What is this place, Hades?" Her chin quivered, worry constricting her throat, and her hands clutched tight to the bag. But he wouldn't answer. Hades only pursed further, his stitched blue lips making silence become a clock with lead balls cascading into a copper platter. Its noise increased louder and louder as time passed—it was their own hidden, fast beating hearts.

Persephone was so near the key to the underworld; Hades was so near her; and yet they couldn't be any further apart.

He snapped out of their stare and gestured for her to look in front of them with his chin. They were at the back end of his tower's highest floor, standing over an unfinished tiled ground running alongside an erupting volcano.