Hecate sighed, for a moment sounding very ordinary, and very much like Grial in her less raucous moments. “And now—I cannot spend more time here, for I must return within the city and protect that which is most precious from Persephone,” she said, looking around them from her center of calm. And then her impossible dark eyes attained a spark of living energy.
“Not all is lost, mortals!” said the dark Goddess with sudden inspiration. “For even though we do not have spring, summer, or autumn, we can use winter against itself!”
And with those strange words she turned to Claere and Vlau and she smiled at them. “It is time,” she said. “Time to make things right, at least in a very small way. . . .”
Hecate beckoned the nearest garrison soldier to her, having to literally pull him into the sphere of calm, as he was clutching the parapet wall to keep himself upright.
“Now, my good man, have you a sharp knife on you? Any small blade will do.”
The soldier, a musketeer, stared at the goddess in awe and started digging through the inner sewn pockets of his hauberk, and then finding nothing in a hurry, offered her the sharp slim bayonet from the end of his gun barrel.
Hecate took the sharp blade and pricked her index finger, so that a small droplet of blood welled on the tip. “Come to me, Claere . . .” she said.
And when the girl complied, Hecate lovingly placed the blood upon Claere’s pale lips, turning them for the first time in days a living shade of rose.
“Breathe, child! Breathe!” the Goddess said, and then struck the maiden in the chest, directly over her dead heart.
While Claere was gasping in terror and wonder, suddenly doubled over, suddenly feeling a strange impossibility begin inside her, Hecate pricked the index finger on her other hand and turned to Vlau. “And now, you, young man, come!”
Vlau took a step toward her in utter disbelief, and felt the taste of divine ambrosia on his lips. In the next instant, the Goddess whispered, “Breathe!” and struck him in the chest also, and he grunted, and then spasmed, and the next few seconds were vertigo and agony and intensity. . . .
Lightning struck twice, up on the battlements. The world was suddenly brought into razor-focus and perfect contrast of light and dark. Claere felt a jolt of electricity enter her and she was filled with a river of white fire that blasted through her every point and cell, pulling her inside-out and then back again—or so it seemed for a split second. Next to her, Vlau was now doubled over from the same shock, and the two of them were incandescent, luminous, radiant with white light, while inside them the world was turning. . . .
Two hearts pumped, strong and hale and perfect, as they had never been in life. Two sets of lungs inhaled air and allowed its life-giving oxygen to enter the bloodstream—for yes, there was living joyous blood again, new fiery liquid in their veins, pulled in and gathered from the air and the sky and the white snow, and transformed into the burning wine of life. . . . Frozen organs came to life, and all wounds closed up, especially the wound in her heart that had been made by him.
Claere exhaled a shuddering fierce sigh, and she could feel every smallest tingle in her body, every extremity, every tiny hair rise along her skin. . . . Her ears, that had seemed to be full of thick cotton for days, deadening all sound, remote and distant, could suddenly hear and separate the different sounds of the storm around them in minute detail, every harmonic whistle of snow crystal against stone, every particle striking another in its frenzied dance. . . .
She blinked, and her eyes focused differently, with infinite perfect sharpness, so that not only could she now see every facet of each tiny snowflake whirling in the storm beyond, but she could also see for leagues forward . . . and she could see around the curvature of the earth, see the chiseled rune lines upon the face of the sleeping moon that had not risen yet and hung far below the horizon . . . and she could see the radiant glory of the sun in full force, through the overcast.
Claere blinked again, turning her eyes away from the occluded sun’s unreal brightness that seared her now-immortal eyes. And then she laughed!
Next to her, Vlau was staring around him in equal wonder, listening to the song of the snowflakes striking each other like tiny bells, and observing the dust motes in the distant layer of clouds.
As Claere looked at him, she realized that he was no longer swarthy dark and olive-skinned, but now his darkness had turned to silken gloss of bluish silver, and his skin now reflected like snow and metal, while his hair, still ebony like a raven’s wing, was also like black diamonds . . . or like ice encrusting stark branches silhouetted against the pale forest wilderness.
Vlau’s simple jacket and trousers were now resplendent white brocade embroidered with silver and pale blue thread and trimmed with white fur, with similar white boots, and a rakishly angled hat of fur and silver sat over his shimmering locks of twilight.
But oh, Vlau’s eyes were still the same soulful darkness and complexity—warm like living breath upon a wintry day, and yet cold and eternal like the heart of winter.
And he was looking at her. . . . Oh, how he was looking at her!
Claere looked down at herself then, first at her own fingers, examining their elegant Dresden porcelain delicacy and their slim shimmering surfaces. And if she could only observe herself through Vlau’s eyes, then she would have seen a glorious vision of crystalline perfection in female form.
She was a maiden of dream pallor—her skin like the first frost upon which a rainbow had capsized and crumbled into shards; her delicate brows and flowing hair of an immortal hue that changed constantly from silver to lavender to blue, and then to white.
Her eyes were great smoke-colored jewels of introspective innocence. Her lips, a winter rose.
She wore a long dress of white brocade and silver thread to match that of her love, and a fur-trimmed ethereal cape flowed from her sloping shoulders. Tiny perfect white boots warmed her feet, and a hat with a coronet of ice diamonds sat upon her hair, far more splendid than the Imperial Crown of the Realm that she had left behind at Silver Court.
“Oh!” Claere exclaimed, then turned around and spun in place, and her dress and cape and glorious hair spun around her like a flurry of snowflakes.
Vlau looked at her with a hungry gaze of intensity and amazement, and he whispered, “Claere . . . you are alive! You are exactly as I have seen you in my impossible dream. . . .”
“And you!” she cried, laughing, weeping with joy. “Oh, you are alive also!”
Hecate watched them with a look of amusement and compassion and wisdom. And the King and all the soldiers on the parapets, and the storm itself, witnessed them thus.
“Yes, yes, enough with the maudlin foolery! You are both alive!” Hecate exclaimed, her hands outstretched in an embrace to both. “Blessed be my immortal children! Welcome to the world, immortal Jack Frost! Welcome, thou most beloved Snow Maiden!”
Duke Ian Chidair, who was once Hoarfrost, and now had become Old Man Winter, stood at the gates of Letheburg.
Persephone, the dark, glorious, utterly insane Goddess of the Underworld, had just given him life and immortality—the two things he could never have imagined, yet the two things of which he secretly dreamed.
He stood, still a barrel-chested giant, but now also pristine white and deadly cold and perfect, as the storm he himself had called forth, raged about him.
“Go into the city,” Persephone had told him. “Go inside and make them cower, until they open the gates of their own accord.”
Do what you must, drive them to insanity, drive them to turn on each other and to open themselves to you. . . .
“Gladly!” Winter replied, with a deep rumbling laugh of crackling ice—for though his lungs were no longer lifeless bags collecting an inner rime of frost, he enjoyed the terrible sound they made as he crushed ice crystals on purpose with the immense force of his own innards. “I will thrust them into madness of freezing wind and snow and ice! And once their fragile mortal flesh dies, they will come fort
h as undead and open the gates and weaken the wards of sorcery, for it will matter no longer!”
“Good!” she replied. “Let them all die, and let the world fill with the animated dead. For life gives one that unfortunate tedious thing called ‘purpose,’ while the dead are made docile and ultimately indifferent by their loss of fullness of being. In the end they will surrender most of their free will in order to exist and serve me. And I will take them all unto me, their energy and the immortal power that lies within their souls. For these new creatures are my domain.”
“I will lay waste to Letheburg, to its puny King and all the mortals!” he roared, and the wind started to gather and thicken, and the fallen snow began to rise from the earth.
“Do it swiftly, Old Man, for now I must be gone, and I leave you to it. . . . But take not too long in your pleasure. For I will return shortly, and when I do, my Trovadii army must be ready to enter the gates.”
She stood before him, her form perfection, an animate statue of silver and mercury, flowing in place like an eternal fountain fixed in supernatural motion.
“Where will you go now, dark Goddess?” Old Man Winter asked, adjusting his glorious fur cape, as the aerial turbulence increased. “Must you go and miss all the sporting delights, the fun of it?”
“Ah . . .” the Goddess of the Underworld said. “But I go to see my love! It is what awaits me now, what I’ve been waiting for, and what must be done, first! Thus, I go to him!”
“Persephone! Do not go, my daughter!” Demeter’s voice, like a strange unseasonable breath of summer, sounded from beyond. The golden form of the harvest goddess stood just behind them, relentless in her persistence.
But now Demeter was like a faintly glowing weak candle in the dark maelstrom.
“Begone, Mother of mine!” Persephone said, pointing her hand at Demeter.
And the golden Goddess winked out of existence, cast out elsewhere.
A few feet behind them, Lady Ignacia Chitain cowered, finding herself surrounded by the dead, their bodies suspended motionless and their limbs creaking while they stood at attention in ranks and formation, Trovadii army divisions next to the original Hoarfrost’s men.
“Your Brilliance!” Ignacia cried, in sudden terror. “What of me? You promised me Eternity for my service!”
Persephone’s laughter sounded like a rolling spring brook, and she glanced at Ignacia once, briefly, with her impossible blue eyes. “Why, of course, my dear girl—only, I’ve decided to give you instead an Eternity of Service, for you ‘weasel’ a bit too much—”
Persephone clapped her hands, and Lady Ignacia found herself suddenly squeezed for breath, and then shrinking and transforming. Seconds later, a small furry creature crawled out of a fallen sage green cape—the only thing that remained of Lady Ignacia Chitain of Balmue.
The little beast—a polecat—made a small angry sound, and then it scampered away, narrowly avoiding the legs and other dangerous limbs of the dead soldiers and headed in the general direction of the city of Letheburg.
Persephone laughed again, and then she disappeared.
Old Man Winter remained at the city gates, and he raised his hands eagerly, calling the winds to him, and directing the clouds above to thicken into deep grey darkness.
Ah, the winter party was long overdue!
Chapter 12
She had so many names.
Dark Goddess . . . Lady of the Underworld . . . Bringer of Spring . . . the Sovereign of the Domain . . . Her Brilliance . . . beloved charming queen . . . occult seductress . . . savior . . . Rumanar Avalais . . . Kore . . . Despoina . . . Praxidike . . . Proserpina . . . Melinoë—no!
Dark lover . . . Black Wife.
Persephone.
The Hall of shadows and bones stood in silence. Not a whisper here, only somnolent repose and softly wafting cobwebs.
She emerged from the fabric of shadows, forming out of a single sigh of emptiness—a sigh that air itself made as it let go to make room for her, displacing nothing else. As she arrived, dust barely shifted on the granite stones underfoot.
Here she stood, perfect and fully formed, her skin a shimmer of achromatic grey and iridescent ebony and mother-of-pearl.
Perfect, and yet broken.
The soles of her metal sandals alighted upon the stone floor of the Hall in material silence, which however sent forth a psychic resonance that echoed through Death’s Hall.
Hades, Lord Death, watched her coming from a great distance, attuned to her every movement, every temperature, even to the faint cobweb shadow cast by her thought.
For the thoughts of gods cast shadows. So much existential weight do they bear that they mark the ether . . . and this otherwise intangible gravitas is felt metaphysically by other gods in the form of a fine gossamer trail, like cobwebs. . . .
No mortals can detect this shadow-thought trail. But sometimes, cobwebs are left behind as tangible proof in the physical world.
Cobwebs.
There was an infinity of them in this Hall, and hence, so many ancient thoughts solidified. Was it Death himself who had thought them, over the ages?
Hades, Lord Death, the shadowed one, sat on the Throne of Bones, waiting.
He heard her every footfall, felt the rustle of the fabric of her chiton against her smooth legs and thighs . . . how it slithered against the curving pear lobes of her hips . . . how it flowed with every loose, gentle swing of her arrow-tipped protruding breasts.
His skin immediately went several degrees darker, deepened into a rich hue, was now pitch-black. . . . His powerful sculpted fingers clenched, sharp nails dug into the armrests of the throne, leaving deep marks in the hard ivory.
Otherwise, he did not move a muscle. Neither did he raise or turn his head.
Another breath, and she was before him.
Persephone.
Then, her voice sounded.
“My love. . . . I am here at last.”
He did not answer; did not look.
Moments flowed or fell or flashed—it was impossible to know what manner of discreteness happened to time.
“My sweet Lord. . . . Hades, my deep, coal-dark, pitch-black, shadow lover. . . . Oh, how I’ve needed you, my one profound love. . . .”
No answer.
“My Black Husband.”
Her words were thought soft, yet came out hard, violent, each one a thrown anvil.
And he could not resist any longer, could not hold himself from looking.
Hades shuddered and lifted his beautiful immortal face, and the long flowing locks of his midnight hair were now true snakes come to life, stirring.
Persephone—demoness, seductress, goddess, soulless broken one—stood before him, beautiful as hell and smiling at him.
Her eyes . . . her beloved blue eyes were vacant, empty as the winter skies of the mortal realm. And yet, the simmering need was there, something was there, corresponding to his own.
Hades looked at her, allowed the gaze of his eyes to lock with hers. And one instant was sufficient. He was incapacitated, struck with sacred rage and sweet weakness, falling in his mind. . . .
And so was she.
Desire flared. Not shadow, not darkness, but true abysmal pitch-black. It struck, it leached, it sucked the air out of the Hall, and the cobwebs and the dust motes and the fragments of bone crumpled and contorted with infernal dissolution of their fundamental structure.
All matter collapsed for one infinite moment, then spasmed back into being in an involuntary precursor of divine orgasm. . . .
No!
Hades closed his eyelids and exhaled, as control returned to him, a mere flimsy illusion, yes, but still it held him.
She in turn blinked also, and her succulent lips parted in a silent exhalation that transformed into a gentle moan—
No!
“Persephone, we may not—it must not be!” His voice rang in his own Hall, crumpling stone and sending ancient bones to warping, and making the shadows convulse.
“Ah!
My sweet Hades! My lover speaks!”
Her breathy laughter issued forth, its sonorous sound caressing him along every point on his flesh, vibrating in his immortal bones. The snakes at the tips of his silken locks opened their jaws and hissed, sharp fangs protruding, lascivious. . . .
And again, a flare of infernal sacred desire.
With a hard snap he cast it off, and it simmered wickedly nearby, just nearby, just under the surface of thought.
Hades looked at her with a blank unreadable countenance, and he said, “Why have you come to torment me? Do you not know that I will not allow you to enter Below, no matter what you do, no matter what is done in this shadowed Hall?”
“Oh, my beautiful dark one,” she said, coming a step closer, sauntering toward the dais of the throne, with her body trained toward him. “Of course I know! Just as well as I know that this is not real—none of it, nothing here is real—and that you are not really here. But oh, what sweet torment indeed, to tease and caress your poor shadow-self, your mortal aspect here Above. Poor, poor Lord Death! Ah, how much you need me, admit it my love!”
“It is self-evident that I need you, as much as you need me, Persephone,” the dark God replied in a voice of perfect control, never averting his gaze, never blinking. “So what will we achieve in this stalemate, except for undue pain?”
She took the first step upon the dais. The cobwebs near the throne parted before her of their own accord. “Ah, but deep, bone-deep pain of this kind is such sweetness, like the scent of the narcissus and the asphodel, and the bitter taste of crushed pomegranate seeds upon the tongue. . . . Besides, why must it be a stalemate? You are growing weaker with every moment that we do not consummate our Longest Night. While I—I am now able to take unto me the life force of the dead mortals who cannot pass on. . . . This life force, it gives me strength, just enough to blunt the edge of my need for you. . . . If I persist, you will fall before me, and you will flee back down Below, and I promise you, My Lord Hades, you will vacate this Throne. And the moment you do, I will come to you, and it will be over. Why resist the inevitable?”