Read Online Destroyer of Light by Rachel Alexander - Free Book Online

Persephone, worry etched across his face, then followed his mother and brother into the fog.
    Persephone turned to the others, her heart sinking under the weight of Nyx’s words, and saw her husband staring at the ground, his brow furrowed, his mouth set in a thin line. She walked over to him and laid her head against his chest. He brought an arm around her shoulders.
    She looked up at him. “Has this—”
    “No; never before.”
    “How did this happen?”
    “I don’t know,” he said under his breath, looking out across the Cocytus and the shades weeping at its shores.
    Persephone leaned into him. The pathways leading toward the palace from the marshlands of Acheron teemed with shades waiting to be judged. The emaciated, spectral forms desperately tore the asphodel roots from the gray earth and bit into them, heedless of the fact that whatever hunger they still felt was an illusion— a shadow of the manner in which they died. Their bellies were distended by starvation. Another boatload disembarked with Charon’s guidance and walked solemnly toward the Trivium. She remembered what Kronos told her in the Pit and shuddered. Again, his terrible prophecy played out in her mind in all its vivid detail. Destruction, violation, rape, the end of all things…
    Rules that bound the cosmos were bending, twisting, and disintegrating. The world above was breaking apart— and with it, she realized as ice poured down her back, the world below.
    ***
    “Merope.”
    The nymph startled awake. She sat up in bed, looking around her small room for the voice. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and shadows cast by the single oil lamp burning low beside her bed. Ever since Queen Persephone had given her this room she’d kept it lit to hold back the encompassing dark. Merope looked to the door, then the plainly decorated walls, and lastly to the small ochre vases arranged on a table opposite the bed. The chair in the corner was empty but for a soft fleece thrown over its surface. She turned and glanced at the dark curtains draped across the window. A flash of light caught her eye.
    The oil lamp’s flame glinted again before she saw the shape of a man crouched on the window ledge, a face staring out from under a black hood. Her heart leapt into her throat, choking back her ability to scream. Merope backed up on her bed in fear, pulling the sheets up to her neck.
    “It never ceases to amaze me,” the shadow said, hopping down from her window and examining the flashing sickle that terrified her, “how this instills fear even in those already dead. Perhaps because it’s the last thing they see before coming here.”
    “Th-Thanatos?” she said, trying to calm her racing heart. “Gods above, you scared me!”
    “Seeing as how the gods above despise me, it’s best not to swear to them in my presence. I am, after all, the antithesis of every prayer ever offered up to them,” Death said, pulling back the hood of the himation with which he’d cloaked himself for the journey to the world above. Thanatos gave Merope a familiar and comforting smirk.
    “Apologies, milord, but what are you doing here? And why do you have… that ?”
    Thanatos sat back in the corner chair and spun the sickle’s handle in his fingers. “Well, this was given to me at the end of the war. It was the only thing I asked for, much to their surprise… no realm or palace of my own, no special honors… especially given the despicable thing I did to help win the Olympians’ cause— something no one else seemed willing to do.”
    Merope shuddered, knowing full well what Thanatos meant. In the early days of the war against the Titans, the entire race of the Golden Men had been wiped off the face of the earth in the course of an afternoon by Death himself. Many of those who benefitted the most from what he did still hated him for having done it.
    “Justice exacted on the ones who nearly destroyed my family was enough reward for me. To this day, they’re baffled as