The Taste Of Divinity

Δ Ε Κ Α Ε Ν Ν Ε Α

Several days had passed since that night in the dining room.

And time had gone by fast; faster than she would have expected, given the circumstances. Persephone had spent her days in her room, pacing, mumbling, reading, rearranging the chitons and the himations left for her in the large golden chests and playing with the jewels and the gemstones Hades had left for her.

Some days, when she grew desperate and claustrophobic, she went to the garden and pressed her hands onto the earth, waiting for the first blossoms to tickle the flesh of her palms as they rose, shyly at first.

Of course, nothing happened.

Nature refused to obey her commands.

As for Hades, she didn't see him during the day, most times. He made no attempt to approach her, no attempt to send for her. He knew she would decline the invitation. She enjoyed lying to herself, and he knew. He knew that after that night she'd weaved a thousand and one lies to keep her mind from succumbing to what her heart already acknowledged.

And yet, each morning, when the Elysian Fields bathed in light, she found a gemstone laid on her palm, a different one. Bright as the sun or dark as the sea, the stones differed in colour and shape but never in magnificence.

That morning, the morning when she had finally grown frustrated at her inability to grow roses paler than milk and had torn a bed worth of asphodels from the earth in retaliation, she'd found a ruby warm as blood. 

She wouldn't speak of it when she saw him, she never did.

And neither did he.

❁❁

That morning Persephone decided to wander, unable to contain the wave of unwanted excitement that flowed in her veins, unable to contain the curiosity she'd kept locked deep inside her all those days. Unfortunately for her, her curiosity was rather resourceful, it had liberated itself from its cage and now there was no possibility of forcing the chains back over its immaterial body.

She walked around the palace for a while, stepping into countless rooms before growing bored of the ever changing faces of the Karyatids and the chandeliers with the melting candles whose hot wax fell on her skin once or twice and painted small, red circles that were vaguely reminiscent of the ruby he'd left her, the ruby she was still holding onto.

Her lungs ached for oxygen.

Even when she walked through the front door, they ached.

No one followed her when she walked through the gate, no one uttered a word. All passing shadows and souls kept their heads lowered in respect and became one with the wall so as to leave her undisturbed. It felt.  .  . strange.

She didn't wander far, far too reluctant to step foot in the fields that carried a smell similar to that of her home, reluctant to taste the sun on her tongue and feel her skin burn, reluctant to remember. It almost felt predictable when she stumbled across a familiar scenery, one that carried poplar trees and weeping willows, one that was adorned with flowers identical to the ones she'd torn from the earth earlier that morning.

It was different to the private garden, she noted absently; the silence was not quite as violent. There was life there, as much as was allowed in the kingdom of the dead. Forms came and went, walking into their homes and closing the doors behind them, cutting asphodels from their roots and eating their flowers. And Persephone watched it all with fascination seated on the ground, with her back against a tree.

She watched silently as a couple stepped carefully into the clearing. They did not walk together, as though afraid to be seen sharing steps. One of them, the male, walked behind the female who had lowered her head in order to conceal her saddened state.