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

50 | Hope Quickly Died In Her Mind

Her wrath shivered the earth. Demeter made the soil swallow back its greenery, for nothing was any longer colourful—not even the grey sky or the charcoal ground like those in hell. There, she floated above them, the Queen of Destruction, over her ashes of dead souls.

The ghosts and the living were now the same entity. With smoke hanging in a haze, they roamed the sacrificed land through the smell of burnt flesh. Echoes of voices searching for other lucky ones haunted the horizon, and yet no one came to the rescue of this newborn, still alive in the arms of his dead mother.

Only vultures ventured to soar into the air, content to find those easy meals to feed on. As they devoured the helpless infant, she watched them in complete heartlessness. Demeter had only replicated her sufferings on them, and like hers, their bodies had grown cold. And like what the gods did to her, the mortals could not think and instead became trapped in their pain, and this dead child was nothing but an imitation of her daughter, given too early to the underworld.

Have any gods heard of her raging scream for justice?
Have any gods wanted to save those lesser ones?
Have no gods cared for her daughter?

When Demeter thought she had buried all life, a glimmer of hope broke through the blood-red sky, and like a shooting star, Hermes' chariot appeared before landing on the mortals ground.

As they came out, a hand reached out and grasped Persephone's frail ankle. With his eyes raised to meet hers, the half-dead man's voice broke, "Please help my lady; have mercy."

Persephone's chin trembled in fear when the man wouldn't let go of her. Just as he opened his jaws to bite her foot off, Hermes kicked his head out of his body. Hermes' brutal act caused Persephone's mouth to slacken, but she couldn't let anything stop her from being with her mother and ending her mourning.

Fluttering feelings rising under her chest, warmth enveloping her shaking body, Persephone darted her head in every direction, not knowing where to find Demeter. Only one thing, though, could have gotten them reunited, and it was with a loud yell that Persephone called her mother.

Her cry travelled through all the corpses up to Demeter's ears.

In the distant shadow of Persephone, Demeter melted down from her tall, sickening tree body to the dry ground. They both stood there for a moment, staring at each other with only a long, unbearable distance separating them, and Persephone seized the moment and ran to her mother.

When the two queens became one again in an embrace, the dead world bloomed into green fireworks. Grass suddenly covered the bare earth, and soon leafy trees sprang into the sky. The abandoned houses and palaces were all swallowed—nature might conquer all the ravages left behind by the mortals.

Green foliage would always rule in the sacred kingdom of Mother Gaia.

Tears of joy,
Tears of sadness,
For tearing them apart,
For tearing the Spring off the Harvest.

All the tears that were in Demeter's and Persephone's eyes were shed. Fondling on her daughter and holding on to her mother, they were, for now and forever inseparable.

A brisk breeze arrived to caress Demeter's back as joy bounded all around them. "Tell me, Persephone, did you not taste any food while you were gone?"

With her chin up and her shoulders back, Persephone put on a forced grin over her face. "No, of course not." It was a lie, and for the first time in her life, Persephone concealed the truth.

No one had suspected something.

No one apart from Hermes and his eyes froze over her exposed round bosoms in that revealing velvet dress with her fire-red hair tucked into a bun had gone—the locks were now coiffed in a new way, perhaps to the taste of her lover. Her trimmed but covered ankles also escaped his attention until now. The moment he realised that the new woman standing in front of her mother drowned among the light laughters was no longer that one innocent woman he used to love.