“Weaving,” I said pleasantly. “Hades came to see me, but your wards are in the way. I am simply helping him along.” My fingers never ceased their intricate dance. “He owes me a dance, and the music was so romantic.” I frowned theatrically. “When did it stop? Professor Kingsley, be a dear and tell the musicians to resume. I’m a sucker for romance after my years as a mortal.”
“Dumb bitch!” Poseidon barked. “We are under siege! His army of demons and the dead is at our gates!”
“Do not forget the creatures, Professor,” I added sweetly. “My husband commands those as well. Diversity is important in any modern force.”
He glared at me with pure loathing. I answered with a sugary smile. I’d never sink as low as he.
I kept weaving like a busy bee.
“What are you weaving, Persephone?” Aphrodite demanded from behind Zeus, her beautiful face tight with confusion and fear.
“Destruction, lovely,” I said. “I am in the mood for some serious damage, since I want to be a good wife by inviting my husband in. Think of me as the Trojan horse.” I flashed a bright, terrible smile at Zeus and Demeter. “You never realized what you welcomed back, did you? I am unraveling your wards from the inside. This golden fortress, so carefully warded against Hades and his legions. You all treated him badly, and none of you treated me nicely either just because I’m his beloved queen. Well, I look forward to our reunion.”
Zeus bellowed, “Stop her!”
His lightning shot toward me, the bolt thick as an ancient oak, charged with enough power to vaporize mountains.
I could hear Hades’s roar of rage in the distance, feel his terror through our bond.
“No worries!” I shouted.
I’d prepared. My woven light caught Zeus’s strike effortlessly. It absorbed the energy and fed it into my own working.
“No one can stop me, bitches,” I said, sweeping my gaze over the gods and goddesses glaring at me in disgust and shock. “The Fates can no longer bind me. I torched their cave. Consider that your memo.”
“Eons of their work—gone?” a voice asked, aghast.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” I confirmed with a smile. “Reduced to cinders.”
Then they all threw their power at me, desperate to shatter the blood-forged shield I’d woven around myself.
Lightning from Zeus. Crushing water from Poseidon. Forged metal from Hephaestus. A piercing arrow from Artemis. Even Aphrodite’s love magic, twisted into something sharp and cruel.
All of it scattered against my wards. The entire elite pantheon, led by Zeus himself, could not get through to me.
Shock hardened their flawless features.
“Impossible!” Even Mother stood stunned. She alone had not joined the attack, though she had done nothing to halt it. She wasn’t the one who called the shots anyway. She never had been.
“Impossible?” I laughed. “Because I was supposed to remain the quiet minor goddess who never raised her voice? Who never objected?” I scoffed. “You all expected me to stay a doormat. Some of you even wagered Hades would tire of me within months of our marriage. But he never did. Because he was the only one who ever truly saw me, who stripped away my every pretense and forced me to face my fierce self buried beneath the ashes. And he still sees me.”
My hands moved faster now, spinning new patterns into being. Threads of darkness, light, and death spiraled from my fingertips.
Black threads that drank the light. Golden threads blazing like captured stars. Crimson threads of blood magic, pulsing with raw life. All woven into patterns too complex, too terrible to look upon directly.
The threads spread like a web across the sky, reaching for every corner of the city, seeking each anchored point of the wards.
“Whatabominationis this?” Poseidon demanded, his voice trembling with rage or fear; I could not tell.
I had always been treated as lesser. The weak goddess. The stolen maiden. The eternal, tragic victim.
But now I’d left those days behind.
My power had grown vast during my confinement. Unleashed after an eon, fed by the accumulated wrath of ninety-nine brutal deaths, it had become monstrous.
“Tell you a secret,” I said with a sardonic smile. “The Fates—your allies—held back the truth. You worked together to curse me and Hades, believing the goal was to break the King of the Underworld.” I let the pause hang, sharp as an ice spike. “But the sisters’ true target was always me. You were never in their confidence. While you thought me your pawn and sport, you were merely pieces in their long game.”
“No one but the Fates can weave fate,” Hephaestus murmured, not in accusation but in awe. He understood craftsmanship, magic, weapons—he recognized what he was seeing.
