Below the Garden - Chapter One

She was taught to fear him. But she recognized a kindred soul.

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The soil kept calling to Kore. The longing was familiar to her now, but she ignored the ground whispering against her feet. She sat cross-legged in the grass of the meadow, her chiton pooled around her knees, one hand trailing through a patch of crocuses she’d coaxed up an hour ago. Pollen dusted her forearms, golden against umber skin already streaked with soil. The delicate purple and yellow heads bobbed, releasing their perfume. She inhaled. Held it. Waiting for that rush of kinship with growing things, the tender ache of the world waking up. She’d heard Demeter talk about it her whole life. But the crocuses smelled like crocuses and nothing more.

The sun pressed against Kore’s skin as Kalligeneia laughed along with Hercyna, the sound bright as it floated in the wind. She focused on the crocuses again, but the soil persisted, low and certain. Finally relenting to the siren call, she placed her palm deep into the earth. Kore’s awareness sank past the flowers, past the topsoil, down into the tangle of fungal threads stitching through the dark. Mycorrhizal networks, pale and branching, swapped phosphorus for sugar. Microbes dismantled last autumn’s leaves into soft black loam six inches below her knee. Her eyes closed, comforted by all the life she found. Here is where she found the ancient power her mother often spoke of. If she were being honest, Kore knew this was not what her mother hoped she would find in the meadow outside Pylos. As she pulled her hands back, she ached as she lost connection to the world below. Automatically, Kore smiled. She knew the nymphs were watching. The pressure to radiate joy as the goddess of spring gripped her lungs like a fist.

“Kore, do you think the irises should go nearer to the road?” Hercyna crouched a few yards away, tucking a vine back behind her ear where it had slipped loose. The leaves woven through her golden hair were starting to wilt in the heat, though she didn’t seem to notice.

“Mm. Yes. The road would be lovely.” Kore heard her own voice as if from a great distance. Every iris bulb they created today would die by winter. They needed well-drained soil, and the ground along the road was dense clay that held water until it stagnated. But her mother wanted irises, along the road where the villagers would see them, and so irises it would be.

Mother, shouldn’t we plant crops here? Native grasses? Or feverfew, along the road, so villagers could pick it easily when their children were sick? The memory surfaced unbidden. Demeter’s villa, three days ago, morning light pouring through the open colonnade while her mother arranged peony blossoms in a kylix. Kore stood in the doorway with her hands clasped.

Darling, nobody wants to walk past a road full of weeds. Pylos needs beauty, not your dreary practicality. These flowers will show them the goddess’s favor. Her mother hadn’t even paused or looked up as she dismissed Kore.

Kore’s fists tightened around the grass. Acid crawled up her sternum before she could swallow it back down, hot and useless. She glanced at her hands; the grass in her fist was crushed, leaking green against her palm. As she placed her hands in the soil, it already reached toward the dying plant with eagerness. Dying things still had so much life to give.

“Oh, Kore, have you heard?” Minthe appeared at her side, dropping to the grass in a flurry of lavender hair and breathless energy. Minthe’s pale skin was flushed pink across the nose from the sun.

“Your mother is apparently considering marriage proposals for you.”

Kore caught fragments over the past few months, half-heard conversations that quieted when she entered a room. Minthe, who collected gossip the way other nymphs collected wildflowers, would never have uttered a word unless she considered it common knowledge. Which meant everyone knew. The attendants, the nymphs, and probably half of Olympus. Everyone except the woman being bartered. Heat rushed to Kore’s face.

“Is she?”

“Kalligeneia heard it from one of Demeter’s attendants. Multiple gods are lining up.”

Kalligeneia drifted over, the small white flowers in her dark hair catching the light as she settled onto the grass. Sweat glistened on her ebony skin.

“The perfect spring bride. You’re the embodiment of it, you know. The suitors won’t know what to do with themselves.”

Kore held her smile. If it slipped, and a hint of her displeasure got back to Demeter, there would be consequences. Better to scream in private than face one of her mother’s punishments.

“Kore?” Kalligeneia’s voice broke through. “You look tired. Should we leave? Would you like that?”

As if Kore had ever had a say in when they arrived or departed. Kore didn’t doubt Kalligenia’s kindness, but the offer rang hollow.

“Yes,” Kore said. “You go.”

Three lovely faces turned toward her at once, puzzled, and the old familiar work of assembling herself began. Shoulders back, chin up, and that little smile with her teeth tucked away. Her mother called it her bright face and had often praised her for it. Every so often, Kore wondered how her mother would react if she discovered she named a mask.

“Go ahead, tell Mother that I want to look at our work over the meadow. You know it must be perfect. I’ll be home before the second hour.”

Kalligeneia hesitated, and Hercyna opened her mouth.

“Go, I’m not a child. I can walk across a meadow by myself.” Kore laughed. Using the right sing-song lilt she had practiced. After some additional assurances that Kore would be fine and on her way soon, they relented. She watched them cross the field in a little chattering cluster, Kalligeneia’s hair catching the sun, Hercyna turning once to wave, Minthe already describing something with her hands. Kore raised her own hand in answer and held the smile until they crested the low rise and disappeared.

Then she let it drop. Her jaw ached along with the small muscles around her eyes. She put her hand on her cheek to stave off the tears that threatened to fall. She turned east, toward the tangled edge of the meadow, toward the wild wood she had been watching out of the corner of her eye.

At the tree line, she paused. She could still turn around, run after the nymphs, catch them at the lower field, and say, I changed my mind, wait for me. The afternoon would still unfold along its pretty, predictable course, and she would go to bed tonight in her clean room in the villa, and she would be, by every visible measure, the most fortunate young goddess.

Her sandals sank into the leaf litter of the wood, the soft, layered mulch of seasons’ worth of fallen things breaking down into soil. Kore walked without any real destination, letting the woods decide her path, which was, in itself, a novelty. Her days were so carefully cultivated, shepherded from task to task. Whenever an opportunity to be alone presented itself. She would claw at it with both hands. She knew a good daughter or friend would not desire to be away from those who loved her. But today her desperation burned stronger than her shame.

The wild woods welcomed her, no manicured gardens or carefully tended groves like at her mother’s villa, just raw nature following its own chaotic rules. Ancient trees stretched overhead, their canopy so thick it filtered the sunlight into green twilight. As Kore passed a tree, she ran her fingers along the rough bark.

Hello.

It hummed against her palm. Beneath her feet, the taproots were pulling water up from a spring far below the surface. In the loam, a field mouse began its transition into sustenance that would feed the new grass by the next new moon. None of the nymphs could feel any of this. She was certain of that. As a child, Kore had asked Kalligeneia whether she had ever heard the dead things in the soil singing, and Kalligeneia had gone pale and made a sign against ill luck and kissed Kore’s forehead. She had not asked the question since.

As she leaned against the tree, the forest quieted around her. The hair lifted on the back of her neck. She was being watched. She scanned the tree line, the dense tangle of scrub oak and wild laurel, the shadows pooling between the trunks where the canopy blocked the last of the afternoon light. Movement flickered at the edge of her vision. Kore turned just as a massive shape crashed through a stand of young trees, snapping saplings like winter kindling. Bull-shouldered, a head taller than any mortal, shaggy with a coarse black pelt, and horns the length of her forearm curving up from a heavy skull. Its eyes, a yolk yellow and fixed on hers with a predatory hunger.

Her powerful legs propelled her forward, thighs burning as her sandals slipped on fallen leaves, branches whipping at her face and arms as she escaped through the forest. Behind her, the creature’s hooves thundered against the earth. She could hear its ragged panting, getting closer. The sound filled her skull. Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it pulsed in her teeth. Sweat stung her eyes. Her foot snagged on a root, and she pitched forward, palms slamming against rough bark that scraped her skin. Underneath her panic, the part of her that had always lived in the soil simply reached out and pulled. Vines came up out of the ground like they had been waiting. Bramble, first, whole ropes of it, whip-fast, flinging themselves across the space between her and the creature in a snarled green web of inch-long thorns. The ease of it shocked her. She hadn’t concentrated the way Demeter taught, palms flat, breathing measured, an intention offered. She had just wanted, and the earth had answered as if it had been listening all along. Ivy followed, thick old ropes of it coming out of the oaks, and, bizarrely, a length of wild grape, and the whole mass of it boiled up behind her and laid itself across the bull’s path in a hedge as tall as her chin. The bull tore through it. Thorns raked red lines across its flank, and it did not slow down at all. She flung out both hands, and roots heaved up out of the soil like black serpents. They snarled around the bull’s ankles. She saw the creature go down, hard, onto its knees.

Good.

She turned and ran again. Because she had never done this before, Kore did not think about whether she could; she reached deeper. The dead wood answered her. Half-rotted husks of oaks heaved up out of the ground. Gray, spongy and shot through with pale fungus, soft as wet bread in places and hard as bone in others, rose and twisted and caught the bull at the shoulder just as it lunged again. The creature staggered, and the power that Kore had been told her whole life to keep hidden went singing up her spine like a struck string.

I can do that?

She would think about that later if she had a later. She shoved down the unfairness of discovering these new powers while running for her life.

The bull tore free. The dead roots shattered in soft black pieces, dust and mushroom spores fogging the air where they had been, and it was coming again, faster now, enraged, horns lowered. A head of her was a beech, smooth-barked, with one low branch at just the right height. As Kore launched herself, her muscles unknotted all at once, her next breath came out ragged, like a sob. Her fingers scrambled for purchase on the bark. She hauled herself up, powerful shoulders and thick legs working together to drive her higher. She climbed two more branches before her strength gave out, and then she wrapped herself around the trunk and held on.

The bull crashed into the trunk below her, and the whole tree shuddered. A shower of green leaves came down around her head, and a finch shrieked out of its nest. The bull reared and slammed its shoulder into the trunk again. The tree cracked. Her eyes searched in a last desperate calculation, scanning the canopy for another branch, some other tree. There was nothing close enough. The trunk trembled under her palms, and she laid her cheek against the bark and squeezed her eyes shut. Please, if anyone can hear, please help me. The prayer drifted into the air, and she did not know who would hear her out here.

As she held on, a shadow moved across the forest. The darkness parted like fabric, revealing a figure that materialized from the emptiness between trees, as if he’d stepped through a doorway. The figure moved with predatory silence toward the raging minotaur, darkness clinging to him like a living thing. Tall and broad-shouldered, he wielded a black blade that swallowed light whole. No metal she’d ever seen held such depth, such absolute absence of reflection. Staring at it, understanding sparked in her mind. The blade had been forged from pure void.

As he crossed the distance toward the minotaur, a tingling started in the centers of her palms and marched up her arms. A sudden, acute awareness of her own skin, as if every nerve ending had turned itself outward to face him, the way flowers turn toward light. She had no name for it. Only that her grip on the bark loosened a fraction without her permission, her body making some wordless decision.

The minotaur swung toward him then, all that bulk and fury finally registering the new presence. It bellowed, and the sound cracked through the trees like split timber. Kore’s stomach dropped, a sickening plunge. The minotaur lowered its horns and charged, and the god stepped to the left. He moved with practiced precision, each step calculated. Unfortunately, the minotaur’s talons found their mark, raking across his chest and arm, drawing golden blood that shimmered as it fell to the ground. But his blade came up, and the god drove his attack until his sword pierced the beast’s heart. The creature’s legs crumbled to the forest floor, the blade buried to the hilt, and a sound came out of it that was less a roar than a long, wet exhalation.

The body began to dissolve. The flesh darkened and thinned, turning to shadow, then smoke, pulling apart and sinking downward, drawn into the earth as if the ground itself were inhaling. In the space of a few breaths, the minotaur was gone. Only a patch of scorched earth remained, the leaf litter burned away in a rough circle, the soil beneath it blackened.

She became aware of several things in rapid, ungraceful succession. Her arms were shaking, the fine continuous tremor of muscles held past their limit. And her eyes had not moved from him since he’d stepped out of the dark.

He turned, looking up at her. She’d never seen eyes with such a velvety richness. Her scalp prickled all at once, heat moving from her hairline down the back of her neck in an unfamiliar wave. She blinked first, glancing away to climb down. Her legs were unsteady against the bark, dropping the last few inches in front of her rescuer.

She knew Hades by reputation, rumors, and countless warnings from her mother, with words like “dangerous” and “brute.” She had pictured something monstrous, but the god before her looked nothing like the nightmares that spoke of him. Instead, he quietly rearranged his features; she almost missed the subtle hardening around the mouth and the careful steadying of his gaze to somewhere off in the middle distance. She recognized the exhausting invisible work of arranging yourself to someone’s expectations. How many times had she done exactly that in front of Demeter, holding still while her mother searched her expression for the daughter she wanted to find?

Now she stood in front of him, discovering that what she’d been told might not be true. The wariness bled out of her so fast she felt lightheaded. Whatever fear her mother meant to instill, Kore could not stand here and watch him wear it. She didn’t have it in her. The cruelty of it sat too close to what she carried every single day, and she rejected it with a fierceness that surprised her.

“Thank you,” she said, looking him in the eyes.

The fight left his dark hair wild, sticking to his temples and curling at his neck, while his violet eyes pinned her in place with razor focus. Golden ichor seeped through the tears in his black chiton, the fabric clinging to wounds that stood out starkly against his grey skin.

“You’re hurt.” She approached him, already reaching for the gashes that painted his chest.

He stepped back. “I’m fine.” He winced when his injured arm moved, sending fresh ichor trickling down to his wrist.

“No, you’re bleeding.”

The whispers on Olympus painted him as unfeeling, but pain flickered across his features before he could mask it.

“It will heal.”

“Sit…please.”

For a moment, she thought he might say no. His jaw clenched shut, pride holding every muscle taut. Kore placed her palm gently against his uninjured shoulder, applying just enough pressure to guide him backward. His skin was warmer than she expected, and a strange, low hum traveled through her like the first breath of autumn cutting through the end of summer. With that slight pressure, his knees buckled slightly, allowing her to push him down onto a fallen log. He looked down at her hand on his shoulder as though he were not entirely sure what it was.

“This isn’t necessary,” he said quietly.

“Hush.” She did not know where the strong voice came from inside her, but Hades, God of the Underworld, Receiver of the Dead, feared up and down the length of Hellas hushed. Something flickered across his face. Not anger exactly, but something adjacent, a subtle contraction around his eyes, the micro-expression of a man unaccustomed to being told what to do by anyone, let alone a goddess half his size with dirt under her fingernails.

She knelt beside him, calling into the earth. Power answered, rising through her like a second heartbeat. Comfrey, willow bark, lavender, and a mushroom, its cap dark and furred and smelling of wet copper. She crushed everything together into a paste that was fragrant and strange, green-brown and flecked with threads of mycelium that caught the light. Her hands moved with a sureness she hadn’t felt in months. This, at least, she could do. As she worked, her gaze kept drifting sideways. Hades was difficult to ignore. Tall and angular, grey skin catching the filtered light through the canopy, and nothing about him matched the gods she’d grown up watching parade through Olympus. Kore could not figure out why that pulled at her harder than any of the beauty she’d been taught to admire.

“Thank you again for helping me.”

When he finally spoke, his voice rumbled deep in his chest. “Pylos is under my protection. I heard your prayer. What does all of that do?” he asked. The blunt directness caught her off guard.

She didn’t look up as she spoke. “Comfrey knits tissue, willow bark pulls the heat out of a wound so the body doesn’t fight itself trying to heal, lavender cleans, and this,” she picked up the mushroom and turned it between her fingers, “stops infection. The dark ones are always best.” She went on about the difference between mushrooms and fungi, how all mushrooms were fungi but not all fungi were mushrooms, how most people used the terms interchangeably, and it drove her half mad.

“It’s like calling every nymph a dryad. You’d have an ocean naiad trying to live in a tree.” She snorted, a graceless little sound that had no business coming out of a goddess, and clamped her mouth shut with her teeth sinking into her lower lip. Warmth spread in a slow flood that settled across her back. Her shoulders climbed toward her ears before she could stop them. His face would have that familiar topography, the slight narrowing of the eyes, and the pinch at the corners of the mouth that meant, why are you like this?

When she finally looked up, his eyes were already on her. But Kore didn’t see disgust or the careful blankness of the nymphs when she talked too long about root rot or the lifecycle of decomposing wood. Instead, one corner of his mouth turned up, small and lopsided, pulling at that full lower lip. He looked, and she could not believe she was thinking this, like he wanted her to keep going. She could see it in his shoulders, in the slight forward angle of his frame, dark hair falling across his forehead, all of it tilted toward her with a sharpness of attention she couldn’t categorize because she had nothing to compare it against.

Then she watched him catch himself. He leaned back, and his jaw tightened a fraction, his expression pulling back toward neutral the way a hand pulls back from a flame, but the recovery came a half-second too late. She was surprised that both of those things had happened on the face of a god who, she was increasingly certain, did not do this.

Kore dropped her gaze and remembered, with a start, that she was supposed to be doing something with the paste cooling in her hands. She cleared her throat. “I’m going to put this on the cuts on your arm. It will sting at first.”

He gave a single nod, and she touched her fingers to the edge of the wound on his upper arm. The hard swell of muscle gave way to the softer skin at the crease of his inner elbow, and her mouth went dry. He turned his head in the opposite direction. She slowly smoothed the paste along the full length of the cut on his forearm, thumbs brushing the uninjured skin as Kore tried very hard not to think about the fact that she needed two hands to wrap around his forearm.

“Your tunic, I need to see the wound,” she told him.

He turned around but didn’t answer. Again, the seconds passed, but Kore remained patient. Waiting had never been difficult for her. She rarely had the same courtesy extended to her, so she offered it to others at every chance.

“Yes.” He reached for the tattered fabric, elegant fingers closed around the torn edge, and pulled. But before he even made it halfway, his body betrayed him. The muscles across his shoulder seized, his breath locked mid-inhale. Pain, naked and unguarded, skittered across his face before it turned to frustration, his brow contracting.

Her hand closed around his wrist. She didn’t ask for permission, because asking would have given him a chance to refuse.

“Stop,” she said.

His hand stilled under hers. Hades’ wrist was thick, his pulse rapid and hammering against her palm in a way that contradicted everything his face was trying to tell her.

She uncurled his fingers from the fabric, one at a time, the way she untangled roots from soil when she didn’t want to damage them. Kore knew the moment he gave in to her ministrations. The sudden softening of tendons as his hand went slack, as if he had simply run out of the energy required to fight with her. He lowered his hands back to his thighs, palms up.

His skin held the luminescence of a pearl and granite. Broad shoulders gave way to a chest carved with lean muscle. Nothing exaggerated or overdone, just strength earned through use. Her eyes followed the golden ichor seeping from the wound across his chest, and beneath the blood she could see the lean, ridged plane of his stomach, the way his body narrowed at the waist.

In moments of stress, Kore recited formal plant names to calm her mind. As she focused on cleaning, chillea millefolium, artemisia absinthium, and calendula officinalis echoed in her mind. It half worked. The words kept her hands steady and her mind occupied, but his proximity kept interrupting the catalog, the warmth of him, the cool-earth smell of his skin, the way she could feel the slow rhythm of his breathing beneath her palms.

“What were you doing out here alone?”

“Growing flowers for the villagers. The nymphs and I were helping restore what the drought damaged.” The familiar lie formed on her lips, the same excuse she’d given countless times. “I wanted to stay behind and—”

But his expression held no judgment. She stopped mid-sentence, offering the truth instead of practiced deception.

“Actually,” she said quietly, “The nymphs were talking about suitors. My mother has been entertaining them for months now, and Kalligeneia wanted to discuss it. I couldn’t sit there and smile through it anymore. I just wanted a moment where nobody was planning my life for me.”

She waited for the gentle correction. The reminder that marriage was a blessing, that she should be grateful, that most goddesses would love to have her options. Demeter’s version came with a warm hand on her cheek. The nymphs’ version came with confused glances. Hades said nothing. He’d heard her and apparently found her answer sufficient. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Her attentions sharpened on him; he really wasn’t like anything she’d heard or encountered before.

“There.” She smoothed the last compress into place, with a small jolt beneath her sternum, “That should help with the healing.”

Kore settled back on her heels. She wiped her hands on her chiton slowly, buying time, and felt the absence of the task between them. He reminded her of the dark, fertile quiet that existed before seeds split open, and the recognition unsettled her because she had no reason to find comfort in a god of death. And yet her hands wanted to learn the geography of him the way her fingers learned root systems, pressing slow and deliberate into unfamiliar ground, following the path down.

“The poultices need changing every twenty-four hours for best results,” she said, in a steady instructional tone. “I can prepare more for you to take—”

“Anything I bring from this realm into the Underworld dies. The transition is not kind to living things.”

“Oh.” She never considered how his realm might affect the healing plants. “I don’t mind returning tomorrow at the same time. To change the poultices, I mean. If you’d like.”

Kore noticed a flicker behind his eyes, a quick calculation. She watched him search her face. She held still and let him look. Whatever confirmation he needed, he must have found it as he echoed, “Tomorrow.”

He moved to stand. She rose quickly, gripping his uninjured arm to brace him, and felt the dense swell of muscle beneath her fingers. As he stood, the full height of him poured over her like a shadow. He turned his face down toward hers. She became aware of how close they were, close enough to feel his warmth and see the individual striations in his amethyst irises. At that, her body did something involuntary and absurd. Her toes curled inside her sandals. Every single one of them, gripping the leather as if the ground had shifted beneath her and she needed to hold on.

“Thank you.” His voice came out rough. His eyes were closed, and when he opened them again, whatever had been trying to surface was gone, folded back behind the composure.

Neither of them moved. She should leave. The distance between them felt both too much and not nearly enough.

“Tomorrow then,” she said softly and forced herself to step back. She turned before she could change her mind, before her mouth offered up something her pride wouldn’t survive. When she finally glanced over her shoulder at the clearing’s edge, he was still there, watching her, a dark silhouette against deepening shadows.

Her pulse throbbed at her throat. She lifted one hand in a small wave, then slipped into the light. The forest thinned around her, and the last of the canopy gave way to open sky, and Kore realized she was already counting the hours until she could walk back into the dark.

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Thank you for reading Chapter One. Below the Garden will be released the second full week (Mon - Sun) of every month. See you in July for Chapter 2!

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Words not capturing your feelings? Try one of these:

- ❤️ “I liked/loved it!”

- 📖 “Lurker”

- 👀 “Not my usual genre…..but you’ve made me curious”

- 🥹 “First of all, how dare you (affectionate)”

- 🫴 “You have more, give?”

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