"It is not she. We were mistaken."

            "How could we be mistaken? It has been so long…and she is one of them, she is Ceres's child, the ones the stories spoke of."

            "It doesn't matter now. He cannot live much longer."

            "I cannot believe this is the end."

            I woke up stiff all over and cold, and found myself slumped in the windowseat of the great grey prison-room Aidon had brought me to. The voices had let me go, before, when I had left him alone and in pain in his black room, and I had had considerable difficulty finding my way back here, but had made it at last; I didn't remember going to sleep in the windowseat, nor yet crying, but my eyes were puffed and scratchy and the salt of tears was dry on my cheeks.

            I wondered if he was dead yet, and if I would know if he died. More than ever I wanted my mother and our warm rough little house, wanted to be embraced and comforted and told that yes, all this was a horrid dream, and it was over now. But the bandages on my hands and the tearstains on my cheeks precluded that, and the empty gnawing in my stomach made me realize I'd have to eat soon, or I would be ill.

            It's funny how when you're hungry you have really heightened senses of smell and of taste. The whole room was redolent of pomegranates, that strange sweet acidic smell that seemed to fill my head all the time now, and I couldn't help sucking on my fingers as I thought of the red juice, the jewel-clear flesh of the fruit, the rich vault of seeds studding the inside of its leathery skin…

            I slid off the windowseat and nearly fell, dizzy and lightheaded as if I'd lost blood. I couldn't help it; the pomegranate was a great deal more powerful than I was, and damned be all the mental thunderclaps and the whispering voices in the world. I had never wanted anything in my whole life as badly as I wanted that fruit, and I would have it.

            My hands were trembling as I peeled away the cerise skin, exposing the seeds; I fell to my knees and buried my face in the eviscerated fruit, gobbling, totally bestial, unable to control myself. The taste of pomegranates filled the world, and all the stories I'd ever heard about ambrosia and nectar fell away like ashes under the onslaught of that magnificent, baroque, scarlet flavor. There was nothing besides me and the fruit, and when it was gone, flesh sucked away from every seed, leaving just the dry husk of the skin behind, I curled up and began to cry.

            Aidon lay like alabaster in his high black bed, eyes shut, face and throat sheened with sweat. The pillows were spotted with his strange dark blood. Only twice had he roused since Kore had left him, muttering things about bright gold and summer days and tawny ears of wheat, and the gusts of wind that flickered the lamps and stirred the curtains of his bedchamber moved slowly now, sadly,  as he fell farther away from them. Even the rain outside the windows had ceased to fall now. Parts of the palace were beginning to crumble; the balustrade on the terrace below had all but rotted to dust. Rain pattered in the corridors.

            "What will become of us?"

            "We will join the others. We will be nothing, as he is nothing, as his realm decays."

            "Is there no hope, then?"

            In the bed, the dying god gave a strange half-strangled gasp, and both of the servants returned to his side. "What is it? What's happened?"

            "Can't you feel it? How the air has changed? She has eaten of the fruit of Hades. She is his now."

            "It is too late."

            "No," said the other voice. "She has condemned herself to remain here. Whether or not she saves him is up to her, but there may still be a chance."

            Aidon suddenly began to cough again, a dreadful choking sound. "Go and get her. Perhaps she may ease him."

            And then there was only the gentle ripple of air in the chamber as the remaining servant hurried to fetch the black medicine.

            I cried for a long time, I think; long enough for my tears to run almost dry. I had no idea how long I'd been there, curled on the floor with the husk of the pomegranate empty and crumpled in my hand, when I slowly became aware of someone prodding me.

            I rolled over: there was no one in the room but me, yet someone's fingers were prodding my shoulder, ungently, urgently.  I'd been in Aidon's grey hall long enough to know that things like this weren't particularly out of the ordinary; rather than shrieking and gibbering in fright, I wiped the drying salt from my cheeks and scowled into the empty air of the room. "What is it?" I demanded.

            "He needs you," said a disembodied voice. I recognized it as one of Aidon's invisible servants. "He needs you, Persephone."

            "My name is Kore," I said, but wearily: I had the idea this was not an argument I could win. The dream of Mother's house in its rough warmth was receding; it was only with some effort that I could remember how it had been there, what it had smelled like in the low kitchen, with its drying herbs above the ancient iron range.

            "Kore, then," said the voice. "Whatever you want to be called, he needs you, girl. Can you truly be selfish enough to leave him dying now? He has given his all for you. All that he is."

            "I didn't ask for it," I said, beginning to be angry again. "I didn't want him to, what, fall in love with me? Become obsessed with me? I didn't want any of this, can't you understand that, I didn't want this!"

            "I know," said the voice. "I do know, Kore. But you are his only hope. If not for him, then for his realm, for all of us....come to him."

            I sighed and got up. The disembodied voice had a point: it wasn't just him that suffered now, but his entire kingdom. Some part of me—the part that could remember Mother's house, and the taste of the water from our garden pump, and the feel of rough linen sheets rather than dove-grey silk—said What kingdom, what realm, this is all a horrid nightmare, he's not a god...there are no gods...

            And if there are not, said the rest of me, so what? It won't hurt me to help him.

            Already, with the flesh of the pomegranate, my strength was returning; the shivering and the lightheadedness were fading, and I was beginning to feel like a human again, rather than a frail and sickly collection of bones. I followed the wisp of wind that was the disembodied voice down Aidon's hallways and through Aidon's staterooms, aware of the crumbling of the walls and the drip of rainwater from the damaged ceilings, of the slow and certain disintegration of the palaces.

            The voice led me down the one hallway where the lamps did not light themselves at my approach, and the dark door swung open on a room lit only by the grey light from two great windows. In the dimness I could just make out a high, dark bed, hung with charcoal velvet, and a pale form lying in it, very still.

            The wind fluttered around me and away, and the two great candelabrae on the bedside tables sprang into life. The flames burned with a blue edge, as if the air was bad; they flickered, then grew stronger, and I was left alone with Aidon.

            I sighed, licking the last of the pomegranate's juice from my fingers, and went over to the bed. He was lying propped up on pillows, and I noticed with distant alarm that the pale silk was spotted with what must have been blood—it looked like dark wine. I reached out for his wrist, for a moment frightened that the voice had waited too long before bringing me; but I felt a faint thready pulse beneath my fingers, and as I watched his great black eyes opened, and met mine.

            "Kore," he rasped. "You.....you came to me."

            "Your servants brought me," I said, and wondered what the hell else I could say. His hand, too hot, curled around mine.

            "Kore....I can't keep you here." He struggled to suppress a cough. "I...was wrong to steal you, I know that. And I know that...that you hate me, and that you can never be happy here..."

            "I—" I began,  but he cut me off, tightening his hand on mine.

            "I will take you home," he said. "I just...need some strength, Kore. I will...." He broke off, gasping in a deep breath, and doubled over in another hideous coughing fit; more of the dark blood spattered over the sheets. I cursed and snatched a handkerchief from the table, held it for him, my arm around his shoulders; as soon as my fingers touched him, the coughing seemed to ease, as if my touch itself had some sort of power for him. Slowly the fit eased to gasping, and I wiped away the blood from his mouth.

            "I'm sorry," he choked. "I'm disgusting."

            "You're not disgusting," I snapped, letting him lie back against the pillows. "You're just stupid. Here." I handed him a glass of the black medicine that seemed to help him; he sighed and sipped it. "You've made yourself ill over me, and while I find it quite incomprehensible that anyone should make themselves even slightly headachy over me, I feel sort of responsible." I swallowed, hardly aware of what I was about to say, or why I was about to say it. "And I...oh, hell, I hate seeing anyone like this, let alone someone like you..."

            It was true, I knew, as I said it, and I let my hair fall forward to hide my face. He was beautiful. I had been denying it since I woke up in his big grey-silk bed; at the time, I'd hated him enough not to care what he looked like, although I had been aware of his beauty nevertheless. There was something undeniably effective about the combination of his black eyes and snowy hair, and his voice...always slightly rasping...had silver tones deep within it, like the song of dark bells beyond a veil of rain.

            He was staring at me. I could feel his gaze through the fall of my hair;  a moment later pale fingers crept up and pulled the hair aside, gently, and he looked up into my face. A little colour had come back to him; he wasn't grey so much as white now, and the black eyes seemed less shadowed. "Kore," he said, in a whisper.

            "No," I said. "Stop it. I don't want you to say anything." I wiped silvery sweat from his forehead. His eyes closed slowly, reopened, and he nodded against my hand.

            I did for him what I could, what I remembered from Mother's teaching; the invisible servants brought me whatever I asked for, and I managed not to think too hard about what I was doing. That night, and the next, and the next, I spend in his chambers, sleeping on the couch in fits and starts, waking whenever one of the dreadful coughing fits seized him, lying beside him on the bed until he could drift off again. Slowly he regained some strength, and after four days he was able to get out of bed for a few hours.

            We sat on the grey balcony outside his room, he wrapped in blankets against the faint chill, me in a long silvery gown I'd found in the wardrobe of my room; my own clothes seemed...wrong, here, rough, indelicate. I was standing against the balustrade, fingering the grey stone. There were veins of silver in it that gleamed dully as the clouds passed over his pale sun.

            "Kore," he said. "Why are you doing this?"

            "What do you mean?" I looked over my shoulder; he was plucking fretfully at his blankets, not meeting my gaze.

            "Why are you here with me? Why have you stayed with me and dealt with my thoroughly unpleasant indisposition? You could just as well have stayed away, Kore. Stayed in your rooms and waited for it to be over."

            I sighed and turned around, lifted myself to perch on the parapet. "What would have happened to me if I did? If you...died? Would I have managed to escape your kingdom before it completely disintegrated?"

            He coughed a little, muffling it in his handkerchief. "I don't know. Probably."

            "And even if I had," I said, "what then? How would I get home? Your realm doesn't seem to have a lot to do with my world." I paused. "And...hells, do you really think I'm that heartless? Yeah, fine, you kidnapped me, you stole me from my own world, my life, my mother...but you could've done a lot worse, Aidon."

            He looked up at me, his black eyes unreadable. "I expected you to rape me," I resumed, and then cursed as he started to cough; it passed quickly, though, and his handkerchief remained free of blood. "I...well, you didn't do me any harm, besides stealing me. And you seem to have been punished fairly effectively." I remembered the last few nights, the desperate struggle to breathe, the terrible choking cough, the fever that had risen, and risen, and finally broken. "Think of it this way; once you get well, you can take me home."

            Aidon didn't meet my gaze. "You..." he began, and cleared his throat. "You've eaten of my food, Kore."

            "Of course I have," I said. "I'm human, or at least I jolly feel human, and I can't subsist on air and vapours." I'd eaten fairly well the past few days, actually; the mental thunderclaps seemed to have given up, and my hunger superseded my trepidation.

            "Yes," he said, and looked away.

            "What is it?"

            "I...I'm sorry," he muttered. "The food of my realm...it..."

            "What are you talking about?" I demanded.

            "You can't leave, now," he said, in a rush. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

            "What do you mean I can't leave?" I got off the parapet and stalked over to him. "What the hells do you mean?"

            Aidon coughed, looking away. "You're....bound to Hades, now. It is part of you."

            Crazy images flickered through my mind---could I throw it up? Could I rid myself of the contamination?—but I knew better. "So," I said, dully. "I'm stuck here."

            Aidon rubbed at the bridge of his long and patrician nose. "I'm sorry," he said again, sounding choked; I glanced at him, and cursed as he began to cough again, deep retching coughs that sounded as if they were tearing him apart.

            Later, when I'd got him back to bed and had rubbed his chest with my mother's astringent salve, he looked up at me with unfocused, brilliant eyes. "I'm sorry," he said, again. "Kore...I wish I'd never done this. Never done any of this."

            "Hush," I told him. "Aidon, you have to rest."

            "I've hurt you," he insisted. "I've....I've done unthinkable things.....and Gaea help me, Kore...I do love you, so much..."

            Something inside me seemed to snap, with a sick little percussion like the breaking of an abscess.  Those astonishing eyes—huge, black eyes, fringed with dark lashes, set in a face the translucent white of alabaster—suddenly seemed to become the center of the world, for a moment: there was nothing else but Aidon, pale and lovely and astonishing Aidon; and without thinking too hard about what I was doing, I leaned down and kissed him, once, on the forehead.

            He gasped, as if my lips burned him; and indeed, there was a mark on his forehead, a pink spot where blood seemed to have come back to his white skin. As I watched,  the colour spread, lit his whole face with something like the bloom of health; he raised a wondering hand to his face, and then reached up and touched my cheek, and I let him draw me down to him, and our lips met.

            You must understand that I had never been kissed before, not really kissed,  not as a lover kisses his beloved; it was astonishing and frightening and brilliantly wonderful all at once. His lips were cold—cold enough to burn—and the shock of them touching me seemed to radiate outwards, spreading through my cheeks, through my scalp, making my hair try to stand on end despite its weight. His pale fingers slid into my hair; I found my own hands creeping around his shoulders, pulling him close to me as he pulled me close to him. The world shrank and dwindled to the brilliant candle-point of the contact between us, and I shut my eyes, and let that flame bear me away.