Persephone Incarnate [Wattpad Prize 2014] | ✔️

{8} Sophie

Hades – no, Morgan – sometimes, when I would look at him, I would not be able to tell who he really was – took me back to my room. He’d given me a tour of the palace after we had finished playing, instead of making me go straight back to the room I had been confined in, and would continue to be my prison until this unknown trial came to pass.

“I don’t really know this place – I feel like I’m seeing this for the first time, like you,” he admitted to me, when we’d found our way back to the throne room. “I’ve only really seen this place in my memories.”

“It’s really gorgeous and grand, in a dark way,” I’d said to him while we were standing at the opening of the large cavern, just looking around. He pointed out a few things that I hadn’t noticed before, like the case where the Helm of Darkness, Hades’ weapon of power, was usually kept. It had been sealed away when he had gone into his deep slumber, and supposedly only one person knew where it was, but no one knew how or who it was.

He then led me into a room that had been hidden by a dark curtain beside the dais, took me up the stairs, and showed me the balcony that hung on the opposite side of the room from the thrones. It was like a box seat at an opera, with its own private curtains, but instead of rich red and gold, it was of dark velvet and a frayed yellow (almost goldenrod) rope that held the curtains back and away from the view of the room below. There were only ten seats, and the two grandest ones were closest to the balcony. They were none other than the thrones of Hades and Persephone, though Morgan told me that they had rarely sat on them.

Persephone agreed. Hades never held any kind of event or social function here, so there wasn’t any need to really use this balcony. I almost wish he had – if he had, I wouldn’t have gotten so lonely here. But even if did hold one, who would even come? The other gods wouldn’t – very few of the Olympians liked to set foot here. Too much suffering, too much pain. I almost pity Hades – no wonder he became so sullen and moody.

It was the first that I’d heard Persephone had some kind of sympathy or kindness for Hades. Before, she had always seemed to hate and resent him for her fate. I wonder what had caused her to change her opinion slightly – but it could have also been just a one-time thing.

We used another staircase to descend from the balcony, and Morgan then took me out into the hallways that led to my room. I dreaded going back there – it was so lonely, and I had far too much time to think.

I’m here too, you know. I may not be a physical presence, but I am very much another person.

Thanks, Persephone.

I did feel grateful to her for actually talking to me so much, and answering all my questions and even when I hadn’t needed her, talked to me anyway. If she had been another person in my class instead of a thousands-year old goddess residing in my mind, I would’ve liked to think we could’ve been friends.

But instead of going to my room, he opened another door that was a bit farther away from the hallway I had come from to get into the Throne Room.

Instruments of every variety and even some that I didn’t know, were placed in translucent cases, not unlike the material the glass in the Glass Garden (which is what I had come to call the indoor garden) were made of. Stradivarius, Steinways, organs, violins, harps – whatever instrument I could imagine was in there. From the outside, it was impossible to judge how large any room was, but this room seemed to defy anything I could imagine. The ceiling was larger than even the Throne Room, it seemed, and the glass cases rose all the way up toward the ceiling. There was no clear organization to the room, and most of the instruments were placed in random bunches around the room, but it was clear that the instruments were loved. Not a single one was placed precariously and the cases and the instruments inside them still shone like they had just been polished.