Destroyer of Light Read Free Page B

put to death? That is where our guiding star leads. The hieros gamos that night on Olympus was bound to the decision of the Fates. Your tyrant father threw the cosmos into peril, and you were one of the instruments by which the balance could be restored. You knew your duties and knew how the Fates had called upon you.”
    “I chose the man I loved! The right man to rule the gods.”
    “Bad planting, bad fruits. I say now as then, you chose poorly. Ruled only by passion. And see where you lie now. Hmm? Is he yours still?”
    “So you disowned me, abandoned me, because I chose differently? I did everything you asked of me! Your words to me that night were to ‘listen to my heart and let it make my choice for me.’”
    “Would that I could have spoken more carefully.”
    “You once called me daughter and yet you left me alone in this world— wholly reliant on Zeus while I grew with child. You would not speak with me, Gaia would not help me, what would you have had me do?!”
    “If you had made the choice I laid out for you…”
    Demeter looked away in disgust.
    “…You would be Queen of Heaven even now. And he, according to his birthright—”
    “I could just as soon have fallen in love with a stone!” Demeter yelled over the wind. It howled past them, the sea shimmering with new ice.
    “Love was not my request. I offered you a way to sway the will of the Fates, asked you to do that for all of us. Love would have come in time.”
    “Why him? Why has he been your obsession all these aeons?” Tears clouded her eyes and for a moment she was back on Olympus the morning after the hieros gamos . Hecate’s voice filled Demeter with guilt; the new and pleasant ache between her legs turning painful, shameful at her words. “What is your sick fascination with him, Hecate? Aidon was always, always your favorite! I sacrificed everything to be your acolyte and you still loved him more! I wonder sometimes, priestess , why you never broke your vows of chastity to have him for yourself!”
    “Because he is my son.” Hecate glared at her, her voice trembling. “We share no blood, certainly, but our spirits are true kin.”
    Demeter rolled her eyes. “Why did you even take a vow of chastity to begin with? You have tried in vain your whole life to create your own twisted version of a real family. To mother children you can’t possibly have…”
    She ignored the slight. It was a different time at the beginning of Kronos’s reign: take the vow or be forced into a marriage— or worse— to one of the Titans. “Though you see Aidoneus as a crude and ugly statue, your daughter has found warmth behind his stony visage.” Demeter looked up at this, her eyes wide. Hecate smiled knowingly. “Is it impossible for you to believe that she has fallen in love with him?”
    “You lie,” Demeter said quietly. “I know my own daughter. In all the cosmos there is no one more opposite her than Hades.”
    “Perhaps that is their greatest strength.” Hecate smiled for a moment. “I told you I would show her to you, did I not?”
    Demeter clenched her jaw shut. “Where is she?”
    Hecate pulled a single bead of selenite from her hair and held it up. It shone in the light of the waxing moon, taking on a glow of its own as Hecate took her hand away. The bead sat suspended in mid air, then flattened and expanded. A perfect reflection of the two goddesses appeared on either side of it before their visages faded in ripples of silver and crimson. A window through the ether was created in their wake. A scrying mirror.
    “Ask of it,” Hecate said. “In the way I taught you. Tell it what you desire to see, so you may have no doubt of what it has to show you. So you know this is not one of my witch’s tricks.”
    Demeter closed her eyes and thought about her lost daughter. When she opened them, she saw her Kore’s face up close, a large male hand covering her eyes. Kore’s lips were parted. She hadn’t seen her daughter in almost two