Destroyer of Light by Rachel Alexander

they return. It would be a dangerous thing to give mortals all their memories back; they would go mad. I’ve only allowed rare souls the privilege. Iasion had more to do, more to teach to his kind… but another part of me…”
    She held his hand, tracing the lines on his palm.
    “…I had hoped that when his soul returned it would find Demeter, somehow. Give her some happiness, be it as a friend or lover.”
    “Aidon, why didn’t you ever tell my mother this?”
    He clenched his teeth together. “Hermes was not yet born. Without the Messenger of the Gods, I had no way to tell her, short of rising out of the earth myself, which our pact forbade me to do. I later learned my efforts were for naught. Demeter had long since made her home in Nysa, where mortals cannot go. The shade returned across the Styx after a full life. She had been a mother of six, a grandmother of twenty. She milled wheat, baked bread with her husband, and bartered it at market. Her whole village mourned her death and buried simple, tender gifts for her to carry here with her. I was glad for it, but didn’t interfere with Iasion’s soul again.”
    Persephone shifted and sat across from him, holding his hands. “This is why I wish there was something we could do for souls such as Iasion’s. A way for them to keep their memories, to rest, to be rewarded for a life well lived.”
    “Sweet one, I only have what I was given when I came here, and this order existed well before you and I, before the current race of mortals even came into being. There is Asphodel, and there is Tartarus. It would be a torment for shades to walk the Fields with memories of their lives— imagine when they meet those they knew and loved, stripped of everything that made them alive. That fate serves as a temporary punishment for the shades that stand at the Cocytus, and eternal agony for those in Tartarus.”
    Persephone bit the inside of her lip while she digested his rebuttal, helplessly sympathizing with those noble souls trapped by aeons of tradition. She lifted her feet onto the divan. “Will Thanatos be all right?”
    “He already left to hunt down Sisyphus.”
    “But he was seriously injured! Why did you send him?”
    “I didn’t,” Aidon said, pulling away. “Hypnos told me this morning that his brother left in the middle of the night.”
    “I didn’t mean to sound accusatory, Aidon,” she said. “How did they capture Sisyphus in the first place?”
    “He was in Chios, and they snared him in the Chains while he was—” Hades stopped cold and stood up, his mind turning. He paced across the floor of their antechamber. “Gods…”
    “Aidon?”
    “That… gios enos kakodaimonos suagroi… ” he snarled, cursing in the common tongue.
    “Aidon!” she said incredulously, scrunching her nose in surprise at his profanity.
    “I don’t know how I didn’t see it before!” He turned to her, eyes alight with new understanding. “Everything happening in the world above… it largely rests at your mother’s feet, but he’s been exploiting and worsening it! That’s why he was going from city to city, priestess to priestess… I knew this couldn’t be all Demeter’s doing…”
    “What do you mean?”
    “The earth has ways of restoring itself, with or without Demeter. She is not the only one watching over the earth. There’s Gaia, Rhea… It could not have become this bad unless there was something else at work. And the something else is Sisyphus! He’s been using the wise women who’ve been trying to restore the earth to sap its vitality even faster.”
    “How?”
    “The hieros gamos ,” he said, sitting down again. “The mortals’ version of it, at least. What Hecate and others have taught the nymphs and mortals is that they are surrendering themselves to creation, distilling the primordial energy of the earth and returning it to their fields and villages. Sisyphus was using them to steal that for himself! With all he’d amassed before coming