Hades’ Soliloquy

It wasn’t Zeus who taught me to hate.
I can see why you’d think so – after all, he took a place rightfully mine. Tricked me into a fool’s hell and a task that long ago withered the retiring shadow of my former self.
You might be surprised to learn that hate, true, deep, eviscerating fire that directs itself towards a single person in life, mind and purpose, came to me through my daughter.
Her mother was a child of the sky. Not nature, like you may have heard. Not even love, as you might believe from our moments caught together.
No, she was freedom itself. Bursting, uncontainable, incandescent with it. Gorged on it. And as she birthed and raised and moulded my daughter into a wild, untamable thing, I watched a father’s chains – a heavy weight of responsibility and shadow. Of duty and silence, weigh on my precious girl. This bird, with a burden too heavy to carry.
When my vixen daughter, at twelve, span in her silks and told me she rue the day we bore the light of her life…I knew. I knew then, that the ruby spark in her eye that rose, shone and speared into my chest, was a force I had never reckoned with. A taste I would find scrubbed deep into my tongue until a long day after it was dust.
Hate.
For myself. For this place – this shackled, bone-white place whose only spears of laughter were of devils roped with glee. Made worse by the fading tinges of hope. The temptation of my wife, her mother, the whisper of air and freedom that sung promises into our ears and curdled our skin. Made it beg for a breeze. Made it sting and shrink and ache from the little the less than it was born to have.

Hate was more than just a moment in my daughter’s life. It was her second skin – the velvet beneath her speckled frame and swinging raven cloak.
She walked in hate. She ate, drank, sang and loved in its deep and crimson edges. Its purple ribbons.
I didn’t know what I had held until she tasted it. Until it wore white into her hair and wove ravines into her too-young skin.
My daughter was born half to air and half to hell itself. Strung up between sky and God’s deep dirt.
My girl was sculpted from us both and she is burning from her centre.
With hate, richly deserved.
Fervently seized.
And held tight, forever.

My daughter taught me to hate. And we have loved in its shadow, in its spite, for many years since.