When Persephone Stopped Waiting

My husband Hades gave another woman my birthday celebration.

Then he gave her my mother’s brooch.

Then he let our son call her home.

Nympha was the flower spirit who had grown up beside him. The healers said a curse was killing her, and she had only six months left before she disappeared forever.

Hades said he only wanted her final days to be free of regret.

So I was expected to be generous.

Even when our five-year-old son, Eren, curled up beside her at the hearth and whispered that she felt more like home than I did, I still told myself he was only a child.

Then one night, I heard him say to Hades, “Nympha is so gentle. So beautiful. I wish Mother could be more like her.”

Hades only smiled.

“Your mother is strict because she wants what is best for you,” he said. “But if you like Nympha so much, I can let her stand beside you at the family altar. She can bless you like a second mother.”

That was when I finally understood.

My husband had already given her my place.

And my son had accepted her there.

So the next morning, I placed a marriage dissolution agreement before Hades.

He signed it without reading, because Nympha had collapsed again and he was desperate to reach her.By the time he realized what he had signed, I was already gone.

If they wanted Nympha to be the lady of the Underworld, I would grant them their wish.

But why, after I left, did Hades tear the Underworld apart looking for me?

Why did my son cry himself sick, begging for the mother he once pushed away?

And why did the dying woman they protected so carefully suddenly stop looking so fragile?

Before dusk, my husband Hades and our son Eren appeared on the social feed.

By nightfall, the post had spread through every hall of Olympus and every shadow of the Underworld.

The post claimed that Hades, lord of the dead, had taken a flower spirit as his lover, and that they were raising a five-year-old son together.

The picture under the headline showed Hades standing beside Eren. A woman leaned close to them, smiling softly as she smoothed my son’s hair.

The boy was Eren, the child I had nearly given up half my life force to bring into the world.

The woman was not me.

I was Persephone, goddess of spring, queen of the Underworld, and Hades’s wife under every sacred law.

Not long after, Nympha posted her own update on the social feed.

In the illustration, my mother’s pomegranate brooch lay beside a small charm of laurel and asphodel, clumsily woven by a child’s hands. Beneath it, she wrote:

Thank you, Lord Hades and sweet Eren, for the blessing gift after my return from the Temple of Asclepius. Eren made the charm himself.

A small card lay beside the charm, written in Eren’s uneven handwriting:
For my gentle mother, Nympha. Get well