OUROBOROS

He came out of the green mist of the wilds beyond the topside Ironworks, roses trailing along behind him trying to push through the ragged cracks in the broken pavement. No one told him that he had no power beyond the edges of his mother's Vale. No one told this prince, this child of summer and lordling of spring, that his magic would curl away and shrivel and die surrounded by the death-saturated smog where winter always ruled.

Because no one told him, he did not believe it. And belief was a powerful magic in its own right. One that could never be stripped from him.

She watched him from the shadows cast by the jutting iron spires, pretending to ratchet the gears and tighten the mechanisms that filled her free time. The iron glinted cold in the sick sunlight that managed to break through the heavy clouds overhead. Clouds nearly black as the fresh, rich earth still clinging to his bare feet. She was only a darker shadow amidst the tenebrous iron ghosts.

Erebus, they called her when they thought she could not hear. Darkness. Nyx, Queen of Night and Stygian Iron, Mistress of Rot and Maggots. So they named her in the world beneath the Ironworks, the steel and granite labyrinth below. Hers was a name even specters feared to murmur when dark fell on the world.

But here above, in the steam-silvered kingdom of noon-forged metal, she was just another woman. One who could bend the iron bones of the earth to her will, who could sing steel into argent lace as delicate as a spider's web…but still just another woman among the humans who found their love or their livelihoods in the Ironworks. Death was her dominion, but so was the earth and all its riches. And here she could revel in them without though to the carcasses waiting underground to be judged by Hades, Queen of the Dead.

Here she could watch the one thing she wanted most and could never have without fear the summer witch would see her. It had been centuries upon centuries since she'd ventured above in search of any sort of comfort or warmth without the warding guise of winter chill and humanity and metal. Every time she tried to set foot in this world without hiding, summer turned her back again with a scorching slap across her death-cold cheek and that blasting, withering blight against her own wintry power.

No, the sun roared with a burning silence that deafened. You will not take what history tried to surrender to you. You will not steal what is mine.

Hers. Demeter, Queen of Summer, terrible as fire and beautiful as dawn light after the longest night of the year.

But he didn't belong to her, anymore than he belonged to Hades, or to anyone. He, the one she watched, was all his own. He walked in his own strength.

Legends said she'd taken him away long ago. That their love had set the seasons to turning, sent the Lady of Summer scurrying back to her Vale in fear of the combined might of the Queen of the Underworld and her consort.

But those were only legends. It had been centuries, and she could only dare to dream in rare moments when he slipped from that witch's clutching grasp of smothering, choking mother love to wander close to the Ironworks.

Humans had once believed the earth turned and seasons came and went because of love. Now they thought it was science. Well, she was liable to believe it was because Demeter was playing a game with her. Taunting her with what she could never have.

After all, mothers never believed anyone could be good enough for their sons.

Despite the boiling heat of the Ironworks' forges, the ground crackled with otherworldly frost that rarely melted. Steam drifted through the air like fog but the wintry air leached away the heat. Yet where he walked, his steps melted ice and breathed warmth back into the air. Hades watched him, all powerful movement and dancing grace, all dark eyes filled with sadness and soft smile edged with pain.

He came, touching the walls of twisted, rusting iron and glittering steel. Through gaps in the portcullis that shielded the Queen of the Dead, eyes like rich warm earth met eyes empty and black. He pressed his palm to the cold steel. She lifted a hand to lay her palm to his, iron bars separating them by a mere breath.

She could rend iron, burst steel asunder. She could shatter the foundations of the earth if she chose. But there were rules to play by. She had followed these rules for centuries upon centuries upon centuries. And the rules laid down by her brothers forbade the breaking of the world. Even for him.

"She'll see you," she whispered. Where her breath touched, a blanket of hoarfrost crept across the metal. "You shouldn't have come."

"It's still early spring." His voice rustled soft as a zephyr in the grass. "She is weak now. For now, you are the stronger." He paused, teeth worrying at his lip. She had kissed those lips a thousand times in a thousand dreams but never in the waking world. His voice came soft as a lover's caress when he whispered, "I had to see you."

"Persis." She shaped his name like a prayer, like a song. His eyes drank her in, hungry as a starving ghost. "Persis."

"How much longer do we have to wait, Hades?" Anguish turned the words sharp and brittle; desperation whetted their edges. "I can't bear this. She watches me almost constantly. She sends away my friends if they so much as mention anything beyond the Vale." Persis pressed his forehead against the cold steel. His voice came ragged and rough when he confessed, "Hades, I can't live like this."

"There are rules—"

"Damn the rules," he cried, grasping the icy bars. "Hades, you have lived by Zeus's rules for thousands of years, and for what? They cast you into darkness and call it Fate. They shun you, belittle you up there in their precious palaces on Olympus, and call it jesting. You are always fair, never cruel, never vengeful, and you refuse to ever bend or break their precious rules. For what?"

A tear spilled down her cheek. Straining, Persis pushed two fingers through a gap in the bars and brushed it away. Where the teardrop fell, a small green shoot burst through a crack in the pavement and uncurled a tiny, soft leaf. Even that small touch gave life to that which came from death.

"She won't let me use my powers, Hades," Persis whispered. He shuddered. "She keeps throwing out these little bits of magic and I can feel her power crushing me. She keeps pushing at me with her power. Trying to stifle me, to stop me from growing up. She won't let me breathe. I can't breathe in there anymore. It's been centuries since I could leave the Vale without having to sneak like some thief…"

Hades knew what it was, not to be able to catch your breath, crushed beneath the weight of expectation and demand. Of course she did. She was Hades. She was Queen of the Dead. She knew well the weight of what others would have of you before they were done and life was ended. It was the last thing she'd wanted for someone like Persis.

Honor had bound her since she and her brothers and sisters had cast the Titans down into Tartarus. Honor had compelled her to yearn for, but never seek out, the one she wanted most as centuries passed—Bronze Age and Iron Age, ages of legends and superstition, Dark Ages and Industrial Ages and on and on towards the ending of all things. Obedience to the laws she and her brothers had agreed on so long ago. Faithfulness to her oaths.

But had she not sworn him an oath once too? That though they could never be together, she would be his always, and he hers? An oath more precious than any other.

Obedience to Zeus, and for what?

She met his gaze, those dark eyes glistening with unshed tears and hope and hurt. He strained until the tips of his fingers touched her cheek. His callused touch was rough velvet, and so warm it burned her.

"Hades…"

"Give me six months, Persis." She couldn't work faster than that and still obey duty to the Land of the Dead. But if she were to have the strength to do something, she would need to see to the working first. "Six months to do what I must. And then I promise you…it will all be over. Everything will be well."

After a small eternity, he nodded. He would trust her. He had always trusted her. And now she would prove worthy of that trust.

A splash of gold caught her eye. She turned her head the smallest fraction and bared her teeth at a little sunflower just opening its petals some dozen paces away. She nodded to the pestilent weed. Persis didn't look; he didn't need to. He didn't even bother to sigh. Simply pulled away from the portcullis dividing him from her and drifted away, back toward the Vale. The flowers bursting from the earth in his wake began to droop after only a few seconds. The despair of a trapped wild thing withered them before they'd even fully bloomed. Hades watched him go, clutching the steel slats so hard they threatened to break through her skin and taste immortal blood.

In what perverse world, she wondered, did sunflowers represent the threat of imprisonment? And for who?

This world, cruel as it was, and only for the son of Demeter.

Well. It was still day, though the sun shone weak. Spring still carried a bite of winter's chill; night would be here soon, but not yet. For now, Hades thought, hefting a hammer, she had work to do. She was no Hephaestus, but the precious things of the earth were hers to command. And she knew exactly what she would need if she was to rescue Persis.

Because he was right: the rules be damned.

#

Sweat sizzled, dripping down Hades' face. She'd never worked so hard in all her long life as she did then at the forges, while spring's chill surrendered to summer's brutality. Her forge there in the hidden heart of the Ironworks, where winter and death still held sway every day of the year and the furnaces burned like funeral pyres—this forge tried to be willful. Tried to rage to be unleashed, to shape black steel and corpse-bronze and Stygian iron as it would. But she was Hades, Queen of the Underworld. Queen of the Earth. And the funerary fires that blasted through the Ironworks furnaces would obey her.

The heat blasted through her, hot enough to make her icy blood boil. She'd cut herself on pieces of metal, on jagged rock, on the edges of hammer and anvil; the drops had left ice crystals clinging to iron struts and cracked asphalt. Exhaustion beat at her, strong enough to wear down even a goddess. Even death.

But she thought of Persis, trapped in Demeter's Vale. Thought of the legends that whispered cruelly of forlorn hope. Myths that told of a Lord Hades—and where had the idea of Lord Hades ever come from?—and how he'd saved the trapped maiden Persephone from the clutching obsessive love of her mother.

Persis was no maiden, Hades no lord, but she would save him nonetheless.

Summer's brutal rage battered the earth, parching fields and drinking up rivers. The sun wheeled overhead and every day at dawn, Hades was at work at her forge. Boiling water flooded through steaming copper pipes to quench the heat in every rod and band she shaped in her fire. The screech of steam whistling overhead never managed to drown out the echoing silence where Persis' steps should have sounded. But it was high summer, the witch mother's time, and so Persis could not come to her, even for a simple look heavy and sweet with yearning.

Yet autumn was coming. And when the equinox came, and summer's power began to wane all the faster…Hades would see Persis again.

As her blood dripped into the fire, as the flames of her forge blazed white hot, she didn't care that her blood boiled and the cinders scorched her skin and her muscles screamed. She thought only of Persis, of shattering the bonds of his prison. Shattering the very foundations of the earth if needs be.

Her shoulders burned with fatigue. She'd pounded metal long into the night. She hadn't slept in days. Her hands were blistered, the flesh cracked and raw and red because this was no mere mortal flame, but Tartaran fire—fueled by the blood of Hephaestus mingling with the cold, burning ichor of distant stars—and even a goddess was not immune to it. Soot smeared her scorched back; her face was dark with coal dust and char. Blood blisters purpled under her fingernails. Whenever she blinked, grit stung her eyes. Her chest burned from breathing in the smoke.

When she pulled the pieces from the fire, they shimmered like air wavering above a furnace. Iridescent sheen like rainbows, like light, like diamonds and breath, against the tenebrous void she loved so well. A gleam like oil in the winter sun.

Hades pulled the last piece from the fire, set it in the black water that bubbled up from cracks in the stone at her command. She listened to the steam hiss, watched steel rods and bronze wheels coming together with snaps like breaking bones, groaning and cracking like the breaking of glaciers.

When it was done, when her work stood before her shining dark and terrible, she smiled. Let this strike fear into Demeter's heart. Let this be a declaration to Zeus.

She was done being the obedient little sister. For herself, she would have accepted it, as she had these many centuries, but not now. Not when it held the power to hurt the one she loved.

No one would keep her from fulfilling her oath to Persis.

#

Persis dashed the sweat from his face, struggling to push his way through the thickening barriers surrounding the Vale. Summer rains had turned the earth to thick mud that sucked at his feet and ankles, dragging him back from the edge. Rough vines sticky with sap yanked on his arms.

Enough of this. He wouldn't be a prisoner in his own home. He wanted to see Hades. He needed to see her. The last time had been that day when she'd promised him…Six months, she'd said, the day before the spring equinox. Six months. Well, it had been six months and a day, and Persis wasn't waiting any longer. If Hades hadn't come, it was because she couldn't come. Because summer's power was still too strong here in the Vale. Because Demeter's power was too strong without its opposite to give it balance.

Everything needed balance. Persis had known this since he was a boy racing after his mother, before the earth had begun to quicken at his step. Before fresh, green life had begun to creep up out of the soil when he drew near. Everything needed balance—autumn to spring, summer to winter, death to life. It was all a cycle, like a serpent devouring its own tail. Even Demeter knew that, in some ways.

When it came to the seasons, Demeter thought herself Hades' opposite, her equal. But she wasn't. Summer wasn't new life. Summer was life in the living. It was a mother with her child, crops ripening in the field, the honey-sweet moons after a wedding. Autumn was the journey toward death, but it wasn't life, either. It was transitory. A time of harvest, summer clinging to the world while winter rose up in all its deathly and chill beauty. Summer and autumn were the transition from that first breath of life to the final gasp before death, from spring to winter. Nothing more.

But spring…that was Persis' domain. Spring was new life. The quickening womb, the seed bursting with fresh green, a newborn babe, the first blush of love. He'd learned that from the Queen of the Dead. Demeter wasn't her opposite or her equal.

Persis was.

But his mother wanted to stifle that. She wanted to remain the mother with her child, but he wasn't a child anymore. She had to let him grow, even just a little. He'd lived centuries. He'd learned to call forth his power. If Demeter had her way, he would never have known he even had any power. It was chance that he'd cut himself on his hunting knife one day and his blood had watered the earth, calling up tender green shoots trembling in the gentle breeze. Chance that Hades had seen what he'd done, what he could do, and realized it had nothing to do with Demeter's magic and everything to do with Persis himself.

Hades. Demeter had set wards around the Vale to stop Persis from leaving without her knowledge, and she didn't even know about all the times he'd snuck out to be with Hades. If the Lady of Summer ever learned what her son shared with the Queen of the Underworld…

Give me six months, Persis. Six months to do what I must. And then I promise you…it will all be over. Everything will be well.

If Demeter ever found out, Persis would be no match for her. Not at her full strength, in the grips of her rage. Would Hades?

He pushed with his power, and the scent of fresh-tilled earth and gentle rains flooded his nostrils. He caught at his magic, the sheer power of spring flooding the world with growing things. There was more strength in the ability to sleep through the gripping deathly cold of winter and wake again than most people believed, especially Demeter. More to pushing away the seduction of that chill embrace than simply popping daisies out of the ground. The earth shuddered a little as Persis flexed his power against Demeter's shield. Soil poured into the watery mud, thickening it until it no longer sucked at him like a giant, hungry mouth. The scratching vines jolted back from him when his power leapt into them, sizzling through them like a wildfire. But though his mother's traps retreated from him, the warding around the edge of the Vale didn't give an inch.

"Persis!"

He whirled, nearly fell to the ground as panic bubbled hot in his blood.

Demeter stormed up the pathway leading back toward their villa. Her gown flared, the same golden-red as ripe wheat in a bloody sunset. Her stride devoured the distance between them. He'd never seen such rage in her eyes as he did now, when they darkened to the tempestuous gray of summer monsoons.

She wasn't supposed to be here. She couldn't know what he was doing or she would stop him. She would wrap him up like a fragile porcelain doll and tuck him away on a shelf in the dark, stifled, and he would never be allowed to wander the Vale again, never be allowed to escape the lovely trap of it. Never be allowed to relish his power again…

Never see Hades again.

"Mother—"

"What are you doing?" Beneath Demeter's words a mother's fury shrilled like a cyclone. Zeus was king of storms, Persis thought, but his mother was mistress of summer and autumn, commander of rains to nourish fields or drown them. He could see it in her now. Feel it as the ground shook with every slap of her sandals upon the path. "Where are you going? You know it's too dangerous to step beyond the Vale!"

"Mother…" He trailed away. What were words? How often could you spill them into the air, offer them up like gifts, before they lost all meaning? How many times could he try to explain that she couldn't keep him prisoner anymore? "I…"

The earth still shuddered and Persis saw, as if in a dream, the first tendrils of diamond frost creeping across the summery vale. Frost spilled over the stones, crackled across the grass and the vines. Ice swept along the little streams and rivers.

Autumn had come to the Vale. And fast on its heels…

Now Persis glimpsed the fear behind the fury in his mother's eyes. She had known even before he had what was coming. Who was coming.

Six months had been her promise. Give her six months' time. And when six months and half a day had passed, here she was.

Demeter reached for him, but Persis twitched away and darted back, putting as much distance as possible between them. There was nothing to fear from winter. Nothing to fear as the earth where he'd been standing split. Dark earth geysered up from the fissure. Persis raised an arm to shield his face but he would not cower. Not from her.

When he looked again, the Queen of the Underworld stood before him.

Skeletal, black iron horses snorted and stamped the earth with razored hooves; their eyes glowed with winter fire as blue as the flames of corpse candles. They were harnessed to a chariot bristling with spikes. The wheel caps bore the image of a snarling, three-headed beast. And standing so at ease she looked nearly bored, clad in chitinous black armor that seemed to drink up every drop of light, stood Hades. She held the chariot reins loose in one hand; the other hand, she braced against her hip. Her hair cascaded out from beneath a grisly helm, the metal carved like a fanged, open-mouthed skull, to flow around her body like a dark cloak.

She didn’t even glance at Demeter. She had eyes only for Persis. Without a word, she held out her hand to him.

Somehow he found his tongue. "You did all of this in six months?"

The chariot that is fiercer and crueler than the one he'd seen her race centuries ago when their kind still played such games? The horses of black iron bones and Tartarus fire, forged in the blazing heart of the Ironworks where she'd hid from Demeter for decade upon decade? The armor, all shadow and spines and bite, to recast her image once again as the terrible warrior goddess that had long ago slain Titan and Earth-born alike when they rose up to wage war on Olympus?

A smile flitted across her face, there and gone like a star snuffed out. She doffed her helmet, setting it on a chariot post, and canted her head. "You'd be surprised what I can accomplish when I put my mind to it." Only then did she spare a single look for a speechless Demeter before focusing on Persis again. "Come with me, and I swear she'll never cage you again."

Demeter sputtered. "Cage him? I've never caged him! I've been protecting him from you, you foul-tongued—"

"And who will protect me from you, Mother?" Persis wondered how these words had sat so long in his heart, but never found the strength to fly from his lips. Wondered how he'd lived with the weight of them for so long. "I've done everything—begged, bargained, explained. But you wouldn't heed. You made the Vale a cage. For centuries you tried to protect me from the world, but you can protect nothing forever. If you try to keep a sapling in a pot, it will have no room to grow and it will die."

"You're not a sapling!" Demeter cried. "You're my son—"

"You are the Lady of Summer, queen of the harvest, mother goddess of all things that grow," Hades said. Her voice came soft as a sigh, but it was heavy with the weight of years upon years, and cold. "You are mistress of the transition from birth unto death. You know the cycle. This you have always known. It is your mastery, and you have maintained that cycle in all your doings but this one. How can you willfully ignore what you are doing to him?"

"Silence, you child-stealing bitch!"

Persis flinched, though his mother's rage had been flung at Hades with a sharpness like knives. Centuries upon centuries he had tried. When did you stop trying? When did you at last give up justifying and simply do what needed to be done?

Hades still stretched out her hand to him.

In the myths humans told, Persis knew that Lord Hades had snatched up Persephone from a field of narcissus amidst a grove of cypress trees and carried her to the Underworld with only her scream and the bugling of his chariot horses to mark their passing. And Demeter had flooded and scorched the world by turns in order to bring her daughter back.

But this wasn’t a myth, and there was no Persephone and no Lord of the Underworld. There would be no screams. There was only Persis and Hades. And while Demeter was strong, she was no equal to the Queen of Winter or her chosen consort. Hades would never let her do what the legends foretold she would. All she could do was grieve as her son took that outstretched hand and pulled himself into the chariot in silence.

He met Hades' eyes, and for one of those rare times they held warmth, but also sorrow. Hades turned to a stricken Demeter.

"Let us go without raising a hand to us," she said softly, "and he will return to you in the spring in six months' time—if he chooses. I will not stop him."

Demeter spat at her. "Lying whore. Queen of Rot and Maggots, I will never let you steal my son from me."

"It seems to me you have very little choice in the matter. And the only who does has made his decision."

Persis closed his eyes. Gripped the lip of the chariot with one hand so tightly his knuckles turned white as bones. His other hand he settled at Hades' waist. She covered the hand that rested on the chariot with her own. Her touch was cool, but not cold. Queen of Death and Winter she might be, but she loved him.

He turned his head and for the first time pressed his lips to her temple. The softness of her skin and the silken brush of midnight hair shocked him, cool against his face and sweet with the scent of narcissus.

"I'm sorry, Mother," he whispered.

He couldn't look at Demeter as a long, low cry welled up in her throat. He could only clutch tight to Hades as the ground split anew and chariot leapt down and down into the dark earth and billows of heat and silver steam. Demeter's wail of anguish followed them long after the earth had closed above their heads.

THE END