PROLOGUE

CONSTANTINOPLE, 351 AD

Light hurt her eyes. Heat pawed her skin heavily. Sounds exploded, then slipped away. Shapes flashed by, but she couldn’t focus enough to discern what they were. Persephone leaned back against the rough carved stone wall and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. It had been so long since she had been in a place like this, none of it seemed real. Nothing penetrated, except for the smells. The stench of living mortal flesh, and all the odors they used to cover it up with. She opened her eyes and let flashes of color resolve into mortals running about on their endless errands on a narrow, dusty street.

Many centuries had passed since she stood in a crowd of living mortals. A thousand years. The thousand years since being abducted and married to the King of the Dead. Mortals were an unruly enough lot in death, she was shocked by how much more so they were in life. They walked heavily in their fleshy forms, and they treated one another with so little respect that she was surprised the air didn’t smell more of free-running blood. One particularly pinched looking man passed, with a train of malnourished slaves shuffling behind him. A burly pair wrestled a wooden box twice their size down the street, fighting to save its disintegrating wheels. Women walked about trailing sickly clouds of perfume. They covered so much of their bodies with cloth that she thought perhaps the false scents were all they had left to feel attractive with. Then one woman passed by wearing almost nothing, but covered with bells and swinging her hips with exaggerated seduction. That one smelled even stronger than the rest, of both perfume and sex.

Persephone turned and faded into the shadow of the building. She wished the others would hurry up and arrive. During her time in the Underworld as the Queen of the Dead, she had developed her husband Hades’ distaste for the messiness of the living world. Even before that, she never really spent time with mortals like most other gods. Her mother Demeter was a goddess of the natural world, and shunned cities. As wife of the God of the Dead she spent plenty of time out amongst their subjects, but crowds of shades were insubstantial and often listless. She enjoyed the seasons she spent in the fresh air with her mother more than those passed in the washed-out stuffiness of the Underworld, but over the centuries her mind grew to resemble that lightless place more than the living plains where these stinking fleshy mortals built their cities.

A clanging snapped her attention back. The almost musical noise was accompanied by throaty chanting, and the familiar smell of Frankincense. The crowd parted with surprising reverence and let through a long faced group of men dressed in oversized robes and gold chased hats. This group of priests—she assumed they were priests—strained under the weight of large wooden planks mitered together in a cross. At the head of the procession, a young boy swung the smoky metal censor that was the source of the divine fragrance.

There it is, Persephone thought: a group of priests turn a traditional form of execution into a religious rite, and a random sweaty crowd is pacified while they pass. If she needed more proof that the Olympian gods’ time was past, this was it.

After the solemn procession passed, the crush of mortals returned to their chaotic swirl, and in the chaos she heard familiar voices arguing. Family voices.

“Look at them. They haven’t changed at all—traded us in for a glorified version of Zeus in a vengeful mood is all. No more.” That was Artemis, Goddess of the Hunt and by all accounts a virgin.

“Exactly.” That was Hermes, the God of liars, thieves, cheats, messenger of the gods and guide of souls to the afterlife.

“Yes, hopeless.” Artemis snorted.

Hermes waved his hands in the air in a cascade, “I like to think of them as moldable. Malleable, if you will.”

Artemis crossed her arms, “Well I say they’re worthless.”

“Worthless?” Hermes guffawed, “Think of the endless amusement we’ll have masqueraded among them. That’s worth something.”

“Amusement?” Artemis exploded, “Is that all you care about? Our world is in ruins all around us and all you can think of is amusement with mortals? You’re out of your mind!” She swept her arm to include the rumpled Dionysos. The God of Ecstasy stood slightly to one side, lips twitching between delight and horror. Artemis continued, “All of you. All you care about is fun, and all you do is mettle with mortals.”

Hermes and Dionysos exchanged glances, then shrugged.

Artemis snorted, “No, I was wrong. They’re not the hopeless ones, you are. You want amusement? You can take all the amusement you want with them. They turned their backs on us and I hate them, and I hate their cities.”

With that she turned and shouldered her way through the crowd, knocking over a cart stacked with cages of chickens. In an instant the crowded street turned into a chaos of poultry and people, noise and thunder, and two laughing deities.

When the scene returned to relative normality, and Hermes was able to contain his guffaws, the Messenger God turned towards Persephone. “You can come out of the shadows, dear girl.”

Persephone stepped out from her shaded spot and blinked.

Dionysos suddenly leapt up and snapped his fingers excitedly, “Hey look, there’s one of those new outdoor wine taverns. First round’s on me.”

The god who introduced man to fermentation of the grape threw his arms around his fellow fallen Olympians and herded them to one of the tables set snug against the tavern’s wide entrance. Once there he ordered two rounds of the house’s strongest refreshment and proceeded to push a celebratory mood, “A toast: the past is gone, the sun is shining, and the future is waiting. Here’s to embracing whatever awaits just beyond that next moment.”

Hermes lifted his mug to meet Dionysos’, and wine slopped over onto the table. The two presented their mugs to Persephone cheerfully, and she raised hers in a dream.

After downing what remained in his mug, Hermes leaned into his chair and narrowed his eyes at Dionysos. “So, my ecstatic brother, it appears the time is come to choose our future. No hiding our heads in the irretrievable past like Hades, and I don’t think you’re one to run off after Artemis. What are your plans, gentle sir?”

Dionysos stared thoughtfully at the burgundy liquid in his second mug before raising his eyes to follow the progress of an attractive mortal girl. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “I’m not ready to give up the theatre, although I have no desire to participate in these new passion plays. Perhaps I’ll go east. Walk, take a caravan, see the world. There’s an empire to rival Rome—or what Rome used to be—at the end of the Silk Route. The Han. Sounds nice, doesn’t it? The Han Empire. I’d like to go see them. Drink their wine, enjoy their women, take in their theatre, music and so on and on. Then maybe come back and foment a revolution or two.” He flashed a sloppy grin and thrust a mug towards Hermes before downing it in one gulp. “You?”

Hermes pursed his lips, “World domination. I shall conspire with the best and the brightest—or the worst and the dumbest if I must—but I shall be the puppet master of human history. I will rule the mortal world from behind the scenes. No one will know my true name, but everyone will feel my influence.”

“Ah,” Dionysos nodded, “Then it shall be you I overthrow with my revolution!”

Both gods turned towards Persephone and spoke phrases beginning with “You—” over each other.

The young looking goddess raised her eyes from her almost untouched wine, “A thousand years.”

“What?” Her companions spoke in unison again.

“I can’t stay among these beings.” She spoke slowly, and in measured tones, “I can’t stay here. People. Mortals. Hades, Demeter, you. You. All of you. I—” She drew a deep breath to steady herself as her voice heated up. “Living here, living with, this is not okay. No, no more. It’s a thousand years. A thousand times sent down into Hell to be the bride of that—” she spit into the dust, “A thousand times belched back out again to be Mommy’s good little girl. Now I’m going away. Away from Hades, Demeter, from this crowded joke mortals call a city. I don’t know where. East, maybe north, just away.”

She stood up with a sudden movement that tipped her chair on end. “Don’t come looking for me for a thousand years. Tell everyone that.” With that, Persephone walked off through the oblivious crowd.

The God of Ecstasy and the God of Thieves watched the hustle along the street for a moment after she was gone, then each lifted one of the mugs she had left behind.

“Let the games begin.”

—
And the games begin with Chapter 1 here, dear reader.