They will tell you that it was love, a love that drove him mad. That he gazed upon her by chance and struck by the beautiful of her in the sunlight, the sort of beauty that will burn you away if you look to closely, a beauty whose intricacies are not meant to be understood—she was labyrinthine without meaning it, a hedgemaze that wound endlessly around her heart; her simplicity was her riddle, and she wore a crown of daises before she wore a crown of gems. They will tell his lost himself in her, in the burn of her, that all his rational thoughts were ashes and the only way to piece himself back together was to steal her light, drag her down to his murky kingdom of corpses. They will tell you this story.

They will tell you wrong.

At first, she is nothing more than a pawn, a chess piece to be sacrificed for a greater play. He stole her, came upon her astride a great black beast while she sang a summer hymn in the summer sun, her fingers tangled in the fleshy veins of a weeping willow tree, because stealing her would be a blow. The immaculate king of immortals upon his gilded throne of white marble and sunshine would take it as an insult, that one of his flowers could be plucked from beneath his nose. The king of the dead thought only to take this daughter of the spring, this dawn child, and bury her so far beneath the earth she wilted and waned like the death of the moon.

They will not tell you, either, how the naked feet of the spring goddess sunk into the ground, how she knew the sensation of mud between her toes, slopping and thick. They will not tell you that the weight of womanhood already bore her downward. She had never meant for men, anyway, or gods in their lofty castle. Something that burned as bright, light the first burst of dawn over the horizon, could only ever accept the darkness as her match.

a aurora x killian hades/persephone au