The Good Counselor Chapter 5
Here it is! The long-awaited Hera/Zeus chapter!
I know I took an absence last week and sadly that was unplanned due to illness. However, I do have to take another absence, this time planned, because I will be recovering from surgery. The next chapter debuts on MARCH 13 at the regular time.
Thank you so much for following The Good Counselor with as much fervor as you followed Receiver of Many when I initially posted it!
See you on the 13th.
Free previews published weekly every Wednesday night at Midnight, Pacific Standard Time.
The Good CounselorSeventy years have passed since Elysion was created, and Persephone’s efforts to conceive a child with Hades have been in vain. But a secret rite on Samothrace might bend the Fates and give her all that they have dreamed of, or pave a path of untold suffering.
Chapter 5Her chest heaved, her throat burned. But she refused to let tears fall. Hera wondered yet again, like so many other times in her long life, if this was the way mortals felt when their hearts broke and ceased to beat, and they passed from the living world.
Whores were one thing. That impulse that came not from his heart, but from that other part between his legs that relentlessly craved the embrace of new flesh. It happened, it ended, and she had deadened herself to that hurt long, long ago. Love was different. After their nuptials, after their hieros gamos, Hera had been blessed and cursed by their inextricable link. She could feel deep within her when he loved another. It was a pit in her heart— a hollow, like the well of the clay cup she gripped in her hand. The clay turned warm against her angry palm.
Tears fell onto its unvarnished surface.
This was betrayal more potent than anything she’d ever felt— more than even the early days, when he had deeply loved and lain with Leto and begat the twins on her. She had been furious, their marriage still so new and fragile, and his duplicity and denial so deep.
That hardly compared.
Everyone knew but her. Demeter; Hermes, who had told Poseidon, and likely others; and of course Apollo. How many had been laughing and pointing at her back all this time?
Zeus had promised Aidoneus and Persephone the only thing that should never, could never, be given away: their children’s birthright. It was the lowest mockery of their marriage and the one untouchable truth that set her apart from all others— that her children were legitimate, and the rest of his spawn were bastards.
Emoji spoilers with no context:
