Written by Priscilla Wong

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The prince of the Underworld wore a face the color of golden brown with eyes of blue that cut through a man's pretenses as easily as silk. He stood watching Apollo's gift come apart in his hands—the fine chariot reduced to splinters and bent metal, its linch pins surrendered to time and the weight of promises that couldn't hold. As Persephone held Apollo's child crying, "Momma!" in her arms, Hades could only plot the end of the boy with golden apples.

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The winged horses, a gift from Ares, tore free from their traces, moved like ghosts across the dark plain, and their hoofbeats drummed out his sorrow, like wine being wrung from the strings of a broken lyre. Her flawed citrus father tore out his red hair for Persephone. Out came the war cry of an army of ten thousand centaurs, stampeding blindly into the dark abyss. Standing still to watch his enchanted net fall apart to pieces, Hephaestus wept. It was a libation of sorts, this destruction, letting go of what was meant to bind. All wedding gifts for the Underworld.

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Hades felt the salt of his own tears stain his smiling face and wondered at the heaviness that settled in his chest—the accumulated weight of all the small betrayals that make up a life. The hickory smoke drifted between them, between him and the place where she had stood, and he breathed it in like a man trying to forget the scent of someone who has already gone before the wedding could begin.

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There was poison in him now, coiled and ready. No one escapes death, not even Silvery Persephone. He had become the thing with a stinger and six legs, that strikes at who runs from it. The pomegranate seeds lay scattered where she had dropped them, their red hearts split open and worthless. She had always been like that—reaching for the next thing before the present one had time to settle in her hands.

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With her submission, the final linch pin awaited, saved just for her face.​ She will die justly, the prince decreed. Her death penalty for meeting him at all. It will be a peach riot.

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