Persephone's Pomegranate

The pomegranate was already on her plate when Persephone sat down.

The table was carved from a single slab of black stone, polished smooth by centuries of use. It reflected everything dimly, like water at night. Her plate held the usual offerings: grey bread dusted with ash, a glass of clear wine that smelled faintly metallic, and slices of fruit so pale they looked bleached by grief.

And then the pomegranate.

It sat at the centre of the plate, dark, taut and impossibly red, as if someone had dropped a living heart into a room of bones.

She didn’t reach for it straight away. The air around it felt different. Warmer. Like it was still carrying the sun. “That’s not from here.”

Her voice sounded too loud in the vastness of the hall. The ceiling arched high above her, lost in shadow. Somewhere beyond the columns, water dripped steadily into an unseen cavern, each drop echoing like a slow heartbeat.

Hades stood near one of the pillars, his shape half dissolved into darkness. The light in the underworld never landed on him properly. It bent, as though the world itself was reluctant to look at him for too long. “No,” he said.

She leaned forward and brushed the fruit with one finger. The skin was cool and firm. It didn’t give the way underworld fruit did. It resisted her touch, solid and real, like it expected to be held. “It’s bright.”

“Yes.”

Nothing here stayed bright. Even gemstones dulled after a while, their colours draining slowly into softer versions of themselves, until everything matched the same muted palette of stone and shadow.

She lifted the pomegranate.

It was heavier than it looked. The weight tugged at her wrist, unfamiliar and grounding. It made her suddenly aware of her own body, the way gravity still claimed her in a place that belonged to the dead. “Where did you get it?”

“Above.”

Her mouth curved. “You mean my mother’s garden.”

“I mean the upper world,” he said, but his gaze slid away from hers, fixing on the far wall where the darkness thickened.

She turned the fruit slowly, watching the dim light skim across its surface. “Is this allowed?”

The dripping water filled the silence. Hades finally spoke. “That depends on what you do with it.”

She set it back down and reached for the bread instead. It broke between her fingers, dry and powdery. When she bit into it, it collapsed into nothing on her tongue, flavourless, like chewing fog. “I don’t think I’ve tasted anything in weeks.”

“You’ve eaten.”

“Yes. But I haven’t eaten.” She swallowed, throat tight. “Everything here feels like pretending. Like food that remembers what it used to be.”

“The dead don’t require pleasure.”

“I’m not dead.”

“No,” he said quietly. “You’re not.”

The room seemed to expand around that truth. The hall felt too large, the shadows too deep, the silence too patient.

She reached for the pomegranate again. “Is there a rule about this?”

“There isn’t a written one.”

“And an unwritten one?”

He stepped closer. His footsteps made no sound on the stone, but she felt his presence like a shift in pressure, the air subtly reordering itself around him. “Things that belong to the living tend to complicate matters.”

“That sounds like a warning.”

“It is.”

Her thumbs pressed into the skin. The pomegranate opened obediently, its interior glistening. Seeds spilled into her palm, slick and shining, each one catching the dim light like a fragment of something holy.

The smell hit her immediately.

Sharp. Sweet. Green and bright and impossible. Her stomach clenched so suddenly it hurt. Her mouth flooded with saliva. Her hands began to shake. “Oh,” she whispered. “That’s cruel.”

Hades took a step toward her. “Persephone...”

“I just want one.”

“One becomes more than one very easily.”

She lifted a seed. It pulsed faintly with light, or maybe that was just her eyes adjusting to colour again. “Will something happen if I eat it?”

His jaw tightened. “Yes.”

“What?”

He didn’t answer.

She put it in her mouth.

The taste was violent. Sweetness burst across her tongue, real and acidic and alive. It felt like biting into sunlight, like swallowing summer. Her breath caught painfully in her chest.

She laughed, a short, broken sound that surprised even her. “I forgot it could be like that.”

She swallowed.

Another seed followed immediately.

“Stop,” Hades said.

“Why?”

“Because this place makes claims.”

“On what?”

“On people.”

She looked down at her palm, then back at him. “I already belong to this place,” she said. “That was decided for me when you took me.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to let it take everything.”

She ate another seed. And another. Juice ran down her fingers, staining her skin red. The colour looked obscene against the grey of the room. Hades reached for her wrist, but she had already tipped the last seeds into her mouth.

Her hand closed on emptiness.

“How many was that?” he asked.

She stared at her palm, suddenly unsure. Her heartbeat felt loud in her ears. “I don’t know. A few.”

“A few is not a number.”

She frowned, trying to reconstruct the moment. “Six, maybe.”

The underworld shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough. The air tightened as if something invisible had clicked into alignment.

Later, Demeter stood in the throne room, grief radiating off her in waves so cold the stone beneath Persephone’s feet had begun to frost.

“Six seeds,” one of the Fates murmured, fingers gliding along the glowing thread. “That gives us something to work with.”

“Six months,” Demeter said, voice shaking. “That’s what you’re telling me?”

“It’s tidy,” the Fate replied.

Persephone stood between them, arms folded, the taste of sweetness still lingering stubbornly at the back of her tongue. “No one asked me how many I ate.”

“We’re asking now,” said another Fate.

“I already answered.”

The Fates smiled. “Then that’s the version we’ll keep.”

That night, Persephone sat on the edge of Hades’ throne, her bare feet dangling over darkness that never quite reached the bottom. "Did you know what would happen?" she asked.

Hades sighed. "Not truly," he muttered. "But now we know. And they're saying I tricked you into eating it."

“You could have stopped me,” she said. "I didn't know that tasting food down here could bind me to the underworld."

He stood beside her, hands clasped behind his back, staring out over his silent kingdom. The underworld hummed faintly, like a machine waiting for instructions.

“I didn’t know how to stop you,” he said.

She nodded. “Neither did I.”

Silence settled around them.

“I wasn’t trying to choose anything,” she said finally.

“I know.”

“I was just hungry.”

Above them, the world had already begun rearranging itself around six.