🌸 Jagged Edges
L&W16: Kore has to swallow some hard, sharp truths
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
Although Kore had paused several paces off, her aura lit the space between them, radiating her warmth all over him from her face, and especially from that softest target of her breast. “Sing it for me, Ares. You know the words I long to hear.”
Under the sniggers and jibes from every direction, the God of War’s face burned. He crossed his arms in front of his chest. “I truly do not.”
Curse her, she tipped her head back and opened her arms again, baring her throat, her ribcage, her belly, and that vital, nectar-infused furnace that he wanted to ram his blade into most. Get it nice and overheated. Reforge it—only she wouldn’t fucking stop singing, and that song wouldn’t stop ramming the gates to every place where he needed to keep her out.
Another earth-goddess weapon: creeper-vine infiltration.
Ares thrust the heat of his guts down his legs, out his heels, and into the floor. It singed her feet, making her gasp and leap back on her tiptoes—made her finally shut up. He pointed at Iris this time. “Get her outta here.”
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series
Also. Nobody calls Persephone by her true name. They call her KORE, “the Maiden,” and it’s pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.”
KORE, BRINGER OF BLOSSOMTIME
✨🌸✨
It made no sense. He was nothing like how she’d thought he would be. That is, he was everything she had imagined—passionate, powerful, intoxicating, exciting—yet the way he had been with her…
He wouldn’t sing it. How many times had she heard him give voice to those words, and how many times had the Fates whispered to her heart that he had sung it just for her?
Every time.
Yet after so many centuries of waiting to sing with him face-to-face, he’d barely reacted. To her hands and the movements of her body? Certainly. To the look in her eyes and the heat of her desire? Unmistakably.
But not to that one thing that had always drawn them together. That most important thing.
And he hadn’t reacted to her.
Not really.
Every time their union had begun to coalesce, to twine and bind, he had pulled back. Every time their auras and divine essences had begun to harmonize the way their songs always had, he had sidestepped or halted. The locking down of his refusal had been as jarring as if he’d slammed a palm into her chest. And the worst of it—how could he have sent that wave of scorching consternation through the stones of his floor to singe her feet?
Ares had purposely caused her pain.
Such a small thing, really. Just a hot little flare. It hadn’t caused her immortal flesh any lasting damage. Hadn’t even injured her.
Well, it hadn’t injured her body.
She had no idea where to place that act in the storeroom of her mind. How could the god of her heart be capable of doing such a thing? Accidents happened, of course. The notion that divinity automatically equated flawless infallibility was laughable. That was nothing more than a naive fantasy mortals loved to believe in.
Not Kore. Her mother and aunts and sisters had taught her too well, and she had seen the truth with her own eyes. Had lived it herself as an imperfect deity, capable of making mistakes and growing from them.
But to purposely lash out and attempt to cause pain to the goddess whose immortal thread had been Fate-spun with hers?
She hadn’t been able to sense it—their soul-deep interweaving. Standing with their bodies coiled together, enwrapped in his embrace with their tongues performing serpentine dances and the infiltration of his essence down her throat, she had felt more separated from him than ever before. How many leagues had lain between them when they sang?
That had never mattered.
Through their watery conduit, their voices had always formed a chord like the joining of two million complicated puzzle pieces interlocking to form a resonant whole in an instant.
But not today. Now Ares refused to sing, and he refused to let the pieces interlock. His edges had remained turned about, bristly where they should have been smooth, convex where they should have softened inward to the places where she pressed into him.
And now the leagues had returned.
For she had returned home.
As Iris swept them out of the aither and into the fullness of being, Kore’s feet touched down. Bathed in the familiar scents, sounds, and the vibration of the ground on the outskirts of the Protected Grove, she blinked rapidly, as if being hauled up from her nightly reverie before she had finished. The earth here was welcoming and cool from the shade.
Nothing like the challenging bristle that pumped up from the Temple of War’s stones. In spite of the thick shadows and hazy torchlight, Ares’ floor radiated with a heat that threatened to burn bare feet at the slightest provocation.
And it had.
Because he had willed it.
Iris folded her wings shut. Her hand drew a clean line toward the bend in the forest that repulsed every human soul, and that no deity except Kore could penetrate without Demeter’s invitation. With a graceful bow, the Mistress of Rainbows said, “Home, Lady.”
Kore glanced into the thick foliage. She had no idea what the others saw when they peered into the Protected Grove. For the first time in her near-thousand years, she wasn’t certain what she was looking at either. It was her home. Her refuge. Her resting place. But after everything she had just experienced, it was now clear.
This place only held a piece of her sacred work. A vital piece, yes. But there in the Temple of War, she had received confirmation of what she had felt upon first hearing that haunting song through the depths of the spring-fed pool.
It had been that tug—that innate calling—that had lured her out to tiptoe through the aftermath of battlefields in search of the scent that had nearly driven her mad with desire. She had smelled it, tasted it, felt it in Ares’ kiss. And when she had caressed the back of Eris’ throat with her tongue as well. Even when Ares had thrown the carving knife across his temple into that poor warrior’s skull. All she’d wanted to do was comfort the poor thing as it transitioned from life into death.
There was something profound in that. Something she had never known about herself, or at least not fully understood.
Even being on his battlefields…it hadn’t been bloodlust that had drawn her there. She had witnessed that type of insatiable thirst to deliver annihilation while watching Ares and Enyo, the Goddess of War, along with their countless worshippers—passionate devotees like these armored demigoddesses Ares had assembled to barricade and guard the Bringer of Blossomtime until she was put back “where she belonged.” They stood all around her with crossed arms and glinting gazes, surveying the beauty of the Protected Grove like taking stock of threats, vantage points, and assets to pillage.
Their desires were not Kore’s. It hadn’t been Eris’ breed of salivating lust either. It hadn’t been lust at all.
Oh, she had been aroused, to be certain. Awash in Ares’ glory? How could she not be? But once she had stepped onto those bloody, gory, festering fields of death and agony, another sensation had overtaken her. It was soft and tender, as deep as Earth Her Very Self.
Love.
There was no mistaking it.
She didn’t know how to explain that any more than she could explain why she was so at home in the Temple of War, yet felt no urges to ride out on chariots with weapons brandished, and lay waste.
Everything about that temple had called to her. The vultures looming in Ares’ trees. The skull adornments on everything. The blood and bones and brownish stains on his altar. The raw, feral vitality imbuing the God of War’s court. And that scent.
That scent most of all.
It had been sharper inside the temple, and tangier. Undiluted by all the water that had carried his voice to her, unaltered by the festering of time, it had been fresh upon him, painted on his skin, sweet inside his mouth, perched there forever on the tips of his fingers and his ransacking tongue.
She longed to drink of it. To drink and drink and never be quenched! She ached for his—
Titters sounded behind her. As if her cravings had produced a scent of their own, all those snarling female warriors exchanged looks and nudged each other’s elbows. A few exchanged sniggering comments.
At the flare of affront, Kore had to jerk back upon the reins of her wrath. With the Temple of War’s pulse still racing through her ichor and the memory of Ares’ scorch still hot upon her feet, she could have obliterated them with a glance.
They were mortals, after all. Demigoddesses at most.
All but Iris and Harmonia.
Kore set her gaze upon the forest. She wasn’t ready to be back. Her mother’s divine essence hummed within everything here. It was comforting and lulling, and it made her heart glow.
Ares had made her heart race. His temple had made it pound. Ache. Yearn.
That was the most confusing thing of all. If Ares was her Fated Love, how could she feel more intimate connection to the Temple of War than she had with the god himself?
A pale, shimmering hand alighted upon her arm, smoothing immediate balm over the burn of her wounds and her shame. Startled from brooding, Kore looked up to find Harmonia standing beside her. The younger goddess’ gaze was full of so much understanding that it dredged up a wave of weeping Kore could barely hold at bay.
Only the warriors’ condescension saved her from breaking down in front of them.
Harmonia seemed to sense it, and reduced the chiming of her harp string skirt to a barely audible ring.
Kore had never known the Goddess of Harmony intimately. When they had both been young, they had each spent a great deal of time in their own mother’s temples. Then Demeter had left Olympos, so all their interactions had been distanced at formal functions and family affairs. Especially once Demeter had deemed the Goddess of Love’s entire brood as inappropriate playmates for a young, modest virgin of the Grove.
Now with that gentling hand upon her arm, Kore realized the obvious truth with a start. Harmonia was not merely Aphrodite’s daughter.
She was the daughter of Ares as well.
Upon into those gentle, brown eyes, Kore couldn’t imagine being a step-mother to this goddess who wasn’t all that much younger than she was. Only a couple centuries.
“Never doubt what you feel,” Harmonia murmured. This only produced another wave of snickers from the armor-clad princesses and bloodstained beauties behind them, so the Goddess of Harmony drew Kore a few more steps away. “No matter what anyone tries to make you believe, you know the synchronistic vibration of true harmony when you feel it. And you know the jagged edges of discord as well.”
Kore gulped and looked at the ground between their feet.
Yes. After having tasted Eris full-boar at the mouth, she most certainly did. The Goddess of Discord’s pungent scent had been everywhere in that temple. Everywhere all over Ares. Even when she kissed him, held him, especially when she had stroked him to—
Yes.
Eris was everywhere in the Temple of War, and it had been clear in Ares’ eyes whenever his gaze locked with Discord’s. That diabolical goddess wasn’t going anywhere.
In her heart and guts, in the depths of her bones, Kore knew something even worse.
Aphrodite wasn’t going anywhere either. The Goddess of Love had always been and would always be the greatest and foremost in Ares’ eyes.
Kore didn’t know how to reconcile that with what the Fates had whispered to her through the spring-fed waters, and in the vibration of every soul slain in her dearest God of War’s name.
Unfortunately, that reconciliation would have to wait, for there was a divine tornado barreling through the aither toward her. Placing soft fingertips upon Harmonia’s, Kore offered up a grateful look. That was all she had time for. She had to get inside the Grove before Demeter realized that Kore had left its borders—if she didn’t already.
Anger brewed in her mother’s essence, along with the sting of fear. When it came to Kore and these borders, that was nothing new.
With a quick dip of her head, she mumbled, “Thank you all for the escort,” and darted at the forest.
She slammed into Demeter’s repelling spell like a mortal hitting a wall nose-first.
As she cried out and stumbled back, Iris gasped. The warriors guffawed. Only Harmonia seemed unsurprised.
Kore’s brows furrowed as she took a tentative step forward. The Grove seemed to test her out. To sniff at her toes, tease about her hair in the breeze. She wasn’t truly locked out. She simply had to make her way more slowly until it fully recognized her.
It was time she could not afford.
The Queen of the Earth blasted into being with an explosion of leaves and a shockwave of golden light. “Kore!” Her arms crushed like constrictors. Her aura enveloped like a fortress as a blanket of those familiar hearth-scents and home-scents draped about them both. “Oh, my Kore! I almost didn’t recognize your vibration, it was so faint amongst all these…” She flicked a disapproving glance at Ares’ warlike daughters, then blinked in surprise to also find Harmonia and Iris there. But she turned the cool shoulder of dismissal upon them. Her arms squeezed again as she petted and kissed and crooned and cooed. “Where have you been? And what—what is all this? What are you doing out here with the likes of…them?”
Kore cringed out a grin and tried to bat innocent eyes, but she had no time to weave an elaborate explanation.
Iris stepped up to deliver it straight from her bottomless pouch.
Upon seeing what the Divine Messenger held, Demeter pulled upright with a sharp inhalation. For a long moment, she stared at that rolled scroll covered end-to-end with the marks of where it had come from.
Kore couldn’t help but blush at the cheeks and aura, for she had no doubt that those marks matched what was scrawled all over her, too.
UP NEXT: In the Temple of War, they’re not afraid to speak Kore’s true name. Bringer of Blossomtime; Bringer of Destruction…PERSEPHONE.
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