Love in the underworld.

I had finally found her, the love of my life. After 100 years I had found her once again. I would have spent an eternity more searching for her if it need be.

I can see her ahead, she is laying down and looking at the grass, twirling the long pieces around her finger. She looks lost and maybe even dazed. She doesn't belong here, she was taken before her time and I was here to rescue her. Carpo, my wife had died, she had been struck by lightning which had been my punishment from Zeus because I refused to bind Prometheus to a rock with my unbreakable chains. When I saw Thanatos, the god of death reach down and cut a lock of her hair I knew where she was heading, the underworld.

Carpo had been lead to the river Styx and on the bank of the river she had encountered Cerberus, a three headed dog that took mercy on her and let her cross the river and into the Asphodel Fields where people forget everything that makes them who they are. They forget their stories and adventures, their life and all of their memories and even those who love them. She doesn't know me, she doesn't know that she is the love of my life and that I am hers.

I haven't stopped searching for her for a century. The Asphodel Fields were vast and went on forever and I had spent most of the century searching the fields for her. Here I had seen such beauty and such tragedy, countless types of flowers and shades of green and I had seen an abundance of death. My death had been quick, a suicide and I had begged Eleos, sibling to Thanatos to lead me to Carpo and hold onto me via a tether throughout my search. Eleos gave me a warning about staying here too long and that I too may loose myself before I found my love but even if I did forget who I was I knew that being here in the fields that I would eventually find her again and we would fall in love time and time again because that is what soulmates did.

The journey and the years spent had been worth it because there she was, as beautiful as the day I met her. Youth radiating from her, red hair flowing down her back and into the grass, her pale skin acting as a beacon for me to find her. She had always been my opposite. I was hard and dark, a goddess of violence, force, bodily strength and power and she was everything beautiful, fruitful and soft and she had loved me. I walked towards her, my steps were silent so she didn't look to me until I cast her body under a shadow. She looked up at me and for a fleeting moment I swear she knew me.

"I feel like I know you" Her voice was the same in death as it had been in life, like music to my ears. I sat down in the grass and stroked the short fiery lock of hair that had been cut. It had grown longer but was still shorter than the rest. Looking at it and touching it made me angry, it made me furious. When Carpo and I left this place I was going to hunt Atropos, the goddess of fate who had cut Carpo's thread of life before her time and hunt her to the ends of the cosmos and cut her head from her shoulders. A quick death was more than she deserved but I didn't want to spend too long away from my love after just getting her back. I wanted Zeus' head as well and despite my methods of getting into the underworld I was not actually suicidal. I would surely be met with death if I was to fight Zeus.

"You do know me, I am here for you" I spoke to her softly, it was the only way to speak to someone like her. Not because she was fragile or weak but because it was what she deserved.

"For me? why have you come for me?" she asked, her hand leaving the grass and touching the centre of her chest where her heart used to sit, as if she could feel how it used to beat just for me. I wanted to tell her everything all at once and drag her out of the underworld like it was on fire but first I had to selfishly know that our love transcended the power and or magic of the Asphodel Fields and that even on some level she knew who I was, that her soul recognised mine.

"Look at me, truly look at me and you will know why I have come" I told her. She pushed herself up from the grass, looking deep into my eyes with hers, they were moving over every single eyelash, every fleck of colour inside my eyes. Her eyes were kind but that was how she looked at everyone, she had looked at me differently when she had been alive. We sat there for what felt like another century but also like a second just looking into each others eyes, me longing for her to remember me and her looking at me with hurt because she must have known this was important to me but she couldn't remember me. Carpo broke contact first and looked down to my scarred hands reaching for the left, the one where my chain wrapped around the bottom half of my arm and around my finger. The chain grew and snaked out to lengthen and bind who ever I swung it at. I let it unwind from my arm like a large python as if was moving on its own. It wrapped around Carpo's hand and wrist and when it locked into place her head shot up, her eyes finding mine and she whispered my name

"Bia!" She said softly.

"I am here my love!" It was a statement that bought me immense joy. I pulled on the chain to bring her close to me. She fell into me, our foreheads touching. "and you know who I am" I wept. Carpo didn't say anything, she didn't speak. "Has my devotion to our love robbed you of words?" I asked her

"Bia our love for each other is higher than words so I have decided to fall silent" she grabbed onto either side of my face and kissed me and our souls were joined again.