THE WORLD SHATTERED INTO A MILLION FRAGMENTS OF CHAOS.

A cloud of rolling darkness swept the forest like a wave of blood rolling across stained marble tiles, relentless and yearning in its pursuit.

Around the forest, faces paled - eyes going wider than plates as the darkness curled and roiled and wisped like a living thing, waiting for me to give it direction. The Gates were nothing but a great, yawning hole, a rip in the seams of the world tearing wide open to fling its horrors onto the rest of them.

There was comfort in that darkness. There was peace in it. There was a safety in the certainty of its great, great terribleness - knowing it could never be worse than what it appeared to be. Knowing that it would never betray me.

Knowing that death and destruction was its only nature.

There was only red.

I could see only red.

Red, and red, and more red.

Screams erupted around us like wildfire, setting the forest ablaze with the screeches of a million tormented souls. The voices that ripped from them were a dying, dead thing - long gone from the world, waiting eons and eons to be set free.

And I did not hesitate to give that freedom to them.

That shimmering, glittering cloud of death was a beautiful thing.

Beautiful, like the heart of the god she took from me.

Wicked, like the lies about the god she stole from me.

And heartless, like the nature of the mother who ripped him from this world.

Around me, each of the hundred copies of Demophon drew out a hundred copies of that same damned sword, twisted runes of bright silver etched onto the pommel - ready to give fair fight.

But they were nothing. Nothing against the death, the destruction that answered at my beck and call.

"All of them," I whispered to the shades. "I want every last one of them gone."

Because it went without saying that the only one of them breathing at the end of this was to be Demeter.

The voice that barked at those monstrosities was not my own. That terrible, terrible voice was not my own - something else entirely, as it slipped from my lips and poured out into the world. It was a creation of death, of loss, of suffering, of watching the man I loved bleed out at my feet.

Thanatos's spear flashed around the forest in silver arcs, men dropping like flies. Hecate's voice crashed and fell like a wave at her behest, incantations murmured louder and louder with every passing second. Cerberus was a swirling whir as he snapped and tore apart men with disturbingly surprising ease - his canines stained the angry colour of crimson.

"No - stop!" the mighty voice of Zeus boomed from somewhere around us, "Stop, Persephone!"

But I would not. Because I could not. Because she took him from me. Because she hurt him to hurt me. Because... at my feet, his bloodstained ivory hand writhed like a flower withering in the last cycles of its life. Because he - he was dying. Because she killed him.

Demeter was lost in the chaos, the sudden surprise of it - the sheer intensity of the storm of destruction rocking her off her heels as she fought tooth and nail, sycthe in one hand, blocking Hecate's hellfire with the other.

"Perse," Hades gasped, blood bubbling at the edges of his marble lips, "Perse."

"No," I whispered, falling to my knees - "You do not get to leave me!"

Red stained my hands and my heart, redder than the blood that flowed in our veins - deep, dark red, the very sight of it snapping something inside me. There was so much blood - so much blood - was it even possible for one person to bleed so much?

"Make it stop, Persephone!" Zeus screamed, his hands on my shoulders shaking so hard that I felt my bones rattle.

I would not. I would not until every last one of them was gone.

"Don't-" his voice was impossibly hoarse, "don't become a monster... like me-"

"You are not dying!" my hands were on his cheeks, staining them the color of his life blood. "Don't you fucking dare die on me, Hades!"

"Lock the damn gates, Persephone! It's over - they're gone! LOCK THE GATES!"

It was then that I noticed the eerie silence.

The forest was a tomb of dead silence.

A hundred bodies lay littered on the mud, tangled in leaves and dirt and blood - swords lying cold on the ground. A screeching wail erupted from Demeter's lips as she wrestled to get out of Charon and Minos's grip.

"Let me go - you freak!" she hissed at the ferryman's ghastly face, and then drew back - to spit on him.

The momentary leash on my temper snapped - boiling into something even bigger and hotter than before.

"Take her... take her - take her away," his voice rasped into the silence behind me, slick with the blood choking up his throat.

It was all I could do to stare into the night as they dragged her away into the mansion - her screams and curses hurling along all the way.

"The Gates... Perse -" the way his voice tugged and strained at the edges broke my heart. "Perse..." he breathed, "please."

I could see the light leaving his eyes. Could feel it melt away, leaching off bit by bit - see the paleness settling into his skin like a permanent rot. I was so afraid - so afraid to leave him - so afraid that he would vanish away, melt away in front of my own eyes if I even turned my back.

Dying - he was dying -

And soon - and soon - soon he'd... he'd be motionless on that ground like all those lifeless bodies scattered about like playthings - his eyes empty and void of anything, of the Hades I knew.

Horror gripped me - gripped me so hard that I struggled to breathe like the ocean of crushing truth was drowning me. I was going to lose him - I was going to lock him in a box and lower him into the ground -

No, a devious little voice whispered into my head. No.

No.

Bring him back. I could bring him back. I was going to bring him back.

I did this, lords, I did this. He was dying, and that was on me. And those hundred bodies lying on the ground, their deaths were on me too. I looked for the regret. And it was not there. There was nothing there but a dying hollowness - void of even a shred of regret.

Never - never had I taken a life. And now that I had, there was no sorrow to be found. Only a sickeningly sweet, viciously bitter victory. I did this. I killed them.

There was someone shaking me - several someones, screaming into my ears, begging, pleading for mercy. Zeus's bright blue eyes right up my face - wide with anger or distraught with fear. Someone trying to wrestle me back, even as coils of darkness swept from me.

"Perse..."

I did not know when I moved to the open Gates.

I did not know when Zeus, a shocked Poseidon, and my dying husband - put the weight of their strength into the power flowing from my palms.

All I knew was that the screaming - it had stopped at last. The gates clicked shut. And then the forest was so quiet that I could hear the blood dripping from his torn chest onto the ground.

In a trance, I looked at my bloodstained hands - at the dried crimson buried under my fingernails, darkening to a near black. His blood. It was his blood - and it was all over my hands. His blood was on my hands.

"Perse - sephone..."

He rocked on his knees, swaying slightly in the wind at my feet. Hecate was sobbing, frantically tearing open the heavy silks under which he was buried. And there it was - that dreadful, dreadful wound. It sliced across his chest in a shooting star of black death, slowly eating away at the beating heart under his skin.

I dropped to the ground, next to the goddess of witchcraft who was beside herself with misery - being pulled away by a devastated Thanatos who had gone dreadfully pale with fright.

"You don't die," Hecate choked, "you can't die-"

"Every... thing. Is - going to..." Hades coughed, more blood brimming on his lips. "Be... fine-" he smiled a star flecked smile, a planet dying in the darkness. "Ah," his eyes clouded over as if he were in a dream. "Blood," he exclaimed softly, watching his red stained fingers come away from the grotesque injury over his heart.

My heart was sinking slowly, ever so slowly in my chest - watching him break bit by bit, his pieces scattering to the winds.

And it was then that I knew what had to be done.

"Move."

Hecate wordlessly shifted, a visibly shaken Zeus pulling her off him, frightened citizens watching us with eyes wider than plates.

"Fuck. That - that hurts." His faint voice trailed along the wind in the barest whisper as his empty eyes lingered on the ceiling above - widening a bit as I came into view. It was Thanatos and Zeus who helped him off his knees and lay him on his back - both too shocked to even speak.

"Don't you dare leave me Polydegmon, or I swear I'll kill you myself."

Hades jolted awake into a sleepy whisper, his eyes distant, so far away I could not tell.

"Kiss - me," he groaned softly. "And let... me. Go."

I gently placed a finger on his blood flecked lips, pressing my mouth to his in a touch softer than a rose petal.

"I. Love - you."

And then...

...the weakly fluttering heart beneath my hands - it stopped.

Stopped moving. Stopped beating.

It was then that I placed my quiet palms flat on his chest - right over his wound.

I had revived mortals and immortals, beasts and babes, yes - but never a son of the gods as old as time itself. But how hard could it even be?

I willed the force of nature curled up inside me to come out, coaxing it into being with half whispered prayers and half sung threats, willing those vessels - that heart - to start pumping again.

Nothing happened.

Hecate's face went wide beside Thanatos, who looked like he was about to pass out. Zeus's fervent eyes fixed themselves on mine, heavy with nothing but fear. It was only then that I noticed the others slowly trailing behind him - a frozen Poseidon, Athena and Artemis, Hestia, whose hand flew to cover her muffled gasp.

And the truth sunk in -

Hades was dead.

And if even I couldn't bring him back...

Desperation gripped me like a noose.

And I could feel the fear slowly lacing my veins, sinking in deeper and deeper with every passing second - terror coursing through my spine like a web of ice. No - no.

My palms sunk deeper into his chest, heavy moisture rolling down my chin and over my fingers. I willed the power to give him back to me - my husband, my king, my love. My soul. Because the possibility - of me failing, of the chance that he would never move again, or speak again, or breathe again - that crushing possibility was not an option.

And yet, nothing happened.

There was a part inside me - a sleeping, long dormant monster... that awoke the moment the light went out of his eyes. Something inside of me that I didn't even know existed - something twisted and wrecked and vicious, something so lividly caustic, so hateful - something that wanted nothing but to hurt the one who did this to him. To hurt her. To crush her between my brittle little fingers and shatter her to pieces. To reduce her to nothing. To no one. To open up her soul and fill it up with the poisonous hatred flowing in me. To make her feel what I was feeling until the intensity of it made her so numb she could feel no more.

I could feel that gift of mine slowly sucking out the death which had settled into his pores. Feel it move, inch by inch, bit by bit. But it was slow. It was too slow. And it was not enough.

I threw all I had into it.

There was the rage.

And then, there was the bitterness.

And I did not know if it was the rage, the bitterness, or the love - but it was something so heavy, so slowly trudging through my blood, which had become thicker than molten lead. I could feel the deliberate, slow movement of every cell inside my body... inching along slow, slow, slow. So painfully slow.

And yet - and yet... he was stiller than death.

No. I would not let this happen. I would not let everything I had, everything I loved crumble away into nothing. Not when I had a say. Not when this man had given his heart and soul to give me back the love I had been missing since the day I was born.

Something in the air shifted.

Like it had gone stale. As if it had stopped moving - as if it were frozen in time. And then -

- an explosion of brightness washed out my vision, bleaching out all colour from the world. As if the ground were slipping from beneath my feet. Burning nausea rippled up my throat, threatening to throw up the morning's breakfast.

The colour breathed itself back into the world around me.

And nothing had changed.

That was when I noticed the ends of my hair.

Gone was the rich brown, now replaced with brittle split ends the shade of ash, a bone white grey that had decided it wasn't going anywhere. Minutes passed as I waited for it to turn back the original shade of mahogany it always was - until I realised it was permanent.

Something flitted beneath my fingers.

A hoarse cry emerged from Zeus as the body at my feet jolted once, twice. And then I was sobbing.

He was paler than before, as if death had taken something more than just his blood - judging from the heavy, glittering darkness simmering in his eyes. They glittered like rhinestones, but he was still there - my Hades was still there. The colour slowly began to return to the tips of his slender white fingers, and relief wracked me into sobs as I saw his chest rise and fall with the steady rhythm of his breathing.

His gaze fell on me - going wide. Love swam in that gaze. Moisture spilled over his cheeks and ran down his collarbone as he held me. There was nothing but desperation stuck in my throat as I cupped his cold cheeks. I could feel the salt on his lips as he kissed me back, blood and rust and iron on his tongue.

"I love you," he whispered hoarsely, shaking. "I love you, Perse."

"I was so afraid," I whispered into his neck, arms tight around him. "I was so - so afraid. Don't ever do that to me again."

He drew back, fingers trailing lightly over my warm cheek - and the quiet relief in his gaze turned first to heartbreak... and then into something that resembled a picture of horror.

"Persephone," his words were desperate, heavy with something I could not place.

"What is it?"

"Persephone - my love. Oh lord," he sobbed. "Persephone."

I followed the trail of his miserable gaze to where it landed on the floor. The floor which was now stained a carpet of red. The red staining my legs. The red soaking up in the hem of my robes. The warmth of it pooling under me. My blood ran cold as it finally dawned on me.

Hestia screamed.

It was my blood.

canwill