Persephone's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Hermes lifted his staff, and the three roads blurred. When the world settled, Persephone stood at the witch's crossroads shrine in the underworld. Hermes was already gone. Above the low altar, a wheel of runes turned in the air. Orange light cut through deep red shadow. The marks burned like banked coals, slow and certain. This was the witch's seat. Her dominion. Lost souls were drawn here the way iron is drawn to a stone. But the cold had come too. Persephone saw it on the gates beyond the shrine. Frost climbed the bronze and obsidian in white veins. A whole frozen city sat layered into the rock above the arch, towers of ice rising where no towers had been. Her mother's winter had taken ground inside Hades itself. Persephone pulled the pomegranate from her cloak. Its shine had gone dull. The skin was soft under her thumb. A thin frost crept across the crown of it, and the glow inside flickered like a candle near an open window. The sorrow she had poured into it was leaking out into the cold air. "Quickly," she said to the empty shrine. "Please." The runes above the altar slowed. A tall figure stepped from the red light, many-armed, two torches burning in her upper hands. Hecate did not speak. She looked at the fruit, then at Persephone's face, then at the frost climbing the gates. She lowered one hand. Persephone placed the pomegranate in her palm. The frost on its skin melted at once. The glow steadied, then brightened, held inside the witch's grip like a coal cupped against wind. "I will carry it to her," Hecate said. "She will open the door for me, or she will answer for closing it." The torches flared. The runes spun once and stilled. Persephone's hands were empty now, and the gift was saved, but the ice on the gates had not pulled back. It had only stopped climbing.