The Taste Of Divinity

Τ Ρ Ι Α Ν Τ Α

Nostalgia stood beside Aidoneus as the extension of his naked body, his crown, his faithful shadow.

She caressed his scarred flesh and mocked Persephone with breaths of the past. Her avaricious fingers, coated in vile need, stroked the wide planes of his back, the sharply shaped shoulders and the narrow waist, only to dedicate their unwavering attention to his envied, muscled thighs as she spit out her poison.

She had ice in her veins and cruelty hanging onto the edge of her bitterly thin lips. It suited her, this façade. She was a destroyer of hope, after all. Ruthless, born from the same matter as war and loss.

"Are you certain you wish to stay?"

The daughter of thunders and flowers felt her lips part, a sigh stepping out of them. It was not the sound of his voice, distant and foreign, nor the sight of his naked form that averted her olive gaze. No, it was merely her wish to be rid of the gloating form that had snuck inside the room by slipping through the cracks of the wooden door with the lethal grace of a sacred serpent.

"Yes."

Hades regarded his Anassa with avid fascination through his dropping, feverish eyes of onyx and swirling liquid gold. The gold fought for its right to reign, awed by the way her breaths resembled embers as they landed onto the ever burning flesh of her chest and the diamond edged collarbones that protruded with the utmost elegance.

He craved to curl his fingers underneath her jaw and force her breaths to burn his flesh, instead. Then, perhaps, she would finally be forced to acknowledge the power she had over him.

He dared to imagine the way her head would fall back as his palm wrapped around the delicate column of her throat. Ideally, she would wear his marks proudly as though they were the finest jewellery in all the realms. Ideally, she would adore them. And he'd adore to give her new ones once they started to fade towards a hue even his beloved rubies could never imitate.

He dared to imagine that she would submit to him, in the only way a Queen would ever be able to, that she would part her lips and speak his name in a language only flowers and lovers understood.

If he'd dared to steal the images from the war zone that ruled his being and paint them onto her flesh of silk with the ichor that flowed through his royal veins, the Fates might have been kind for once and allowed him to listen that secret language.

But he did not.

He could not.

Not just yet.

Abandoning her and his fantasies on his bed with a nod, the King strolled to the tub to empty the rest of the hydriai. Nostalgia accompanied him, supporting his slow, practiced steps. Still, the reluctance of his muscles couldn't be concealed. One step placed a frown on his harsh profile--all he had allowed her to see when he'd cast his gaze away. The next forced the lines around his eyes to deepen. And then, a few steps later, while holding one of the hydriai, he staggered to his feet and almost fell.

It wasn't Nostalgia who kept him upright, not this time.

"Stop."

His eyes drifted to her--bleak, black, cloudy like the sky after the eruption in Thera--a question lighting up his charcoal irises when her hands closed in on the hydria and lowered it to the ground.

"Let me do it." He ignored her command, pushing the hand she'd used to steady him away, and took another hydria in his hands. His forearm burned from where she'd touched him. Yet, he soundlessly ordered himself not to acknowledge the existence of the tremors that had awoken inside him. Earthquakes, they were. Earthquakes underneath golden flesh. Nothing terribly important.