#perspehone

Edit: POV: Achilles watched over Nico and Bianca because Persephone and Hades were too busy

Persephone: Now, you behave for Achilles, you understand? You do as he says.

Nico and Bianca, nodding: mhm

Persephone: Good. Achilles, do not let them out of your sight.

Achilles: You have my word, your majesty. Come along, little ones.

---

Achilles, still holding their hands: There's someone very special I want you to meet.

Achilles: Patroclus

Patroclus: Hello, my darling. This is a surprise.

Achilles: There's someone I would like you to meet. *shows Nico and Bianca* Nico, Bianca, this is Patroclus, my philtatos.

Patroclus: Hello :)

Nico, recognizes his armor and is immediately dazzled: Wah! *goes up to him and crawls onto his lap and plays with his armor*

Bianca: Your philtatos is a boy?

Achilles: Yes

Bianca: Why?

Achilles: ...Because...

Patroclus: Because we didn't know how else to explain what we feel for each other. Because what we feel for each other goes beyond words that could describe.

Bianca: So, you love him?

Patroclus: *looks at Achilles*

Achilles: *looks back*

Patroclus: With all my soul.

Nico: COOL! Does that mean my philtatos can also be a boy?

Patroclus: Of course it does!

Bianca: You're too little to have a philtatos. Papa said you need to be 500 years old before you get a philtatos

Nico: Aww! But I'll be old and wrinkly like him by then!

---BONUS---

Zagreus, on a quest: Achilles! Didn't expect to see you here.

Achilles: Hello, your highness. Yes, I thought it would be nice for a visit

Zagreus: Where's Patroclus? *looks over*

Patroclus, with Bianca and Nico on his lap as he tells them stories: Hello, stranger

Bianca: Hi, Zagreus

Nico: Hi, Zaggy

Louise Glück

In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behaviour,

that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:

we may call this negative creation.

Persephone's initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin:

did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls.

As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone

returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne—

I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth "home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself: where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness, of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?

She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—

“The older lady harrumphed. "I warned you, daughter. This scoundrel Hades is no good. You could've married the god of doctors or the god of lawyers, but noooo. You had to eat the pomegranate." "Mother-" "And get stuck in the Underworld!" "Mother, please-" "And here it is August, and do you come home like you're supposed to? Do you ever think about your poor lonely mother?" "DEMETER!" Hades shouted. "That is enough. You are a guest in my house." "Oh, a house is it?" she said. "You call this dump a house? Make my daughter live in this dark, damp-" "I told you," Hades said, grinding his teeth, "there's a war in the world above. You and Persephone are better off here with me." "Excuse me," I broke in. "But if you're going to kill me, could you just get on with it?”

- Rick Riordan, The Last Olympian

In the Greek myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades, lord of the underworld, the pomegranate represents life, regeneration, and marriage. One day while out gathering flowers, Persephone noticed a narcissus of exquisite beauty. As she bent down to pick it, the earth opened and Hades seized her and dragged her down to his kingdom.

Persephone missed her mother and the bright world above ground. But her new status as Queen of the underworld and her love for Hades gave her reason to stay with him. She believed that she had important work to do deep under the ground.

Persephone knew that if she ate or drank anything in the underworld, she would have to stay there forever. Even though Hades begged her too have just a sip, or one bite of food, she didn’t.

Demeter, the corn goddess, had finally learned where Persephone was. She insisted that she be returned to her or she would prevent the earth from bearing fruit unless she saw her daughter again. Hades sadly hitched his horses to his chariot and prepared to take Persephone back under Zeus’s urgings. But before they left, he offered Persephone one last thing to eat – a ripe, blood red pomegranate. Looking him in the eye, Persephone took six seeds and ate them.

They went back above ground, up through a crack in the earth. Persephone threw herself into her mothers arms, joyous to be reunited. The earth again grew rich with flowers and the sun shone once more.

But, because Persephone had eaten six pomegranate seeds, it was decided that for six months of each year, she must return to the underworld with Hades, on Mabon, and winter would come to the world. In spring she would once again return to her mother, allowing the earth to bloom.

By eating a few pomegranate seeds, Persephone tied herself to Hades - the pomegranate being a symbol of the indissolubility of marriage. 

Growing up in India and Pakistan, I was taught by cultured friends that Persian soothsayers held a different vision of the tart fruit's purpose in life. Above all the unfortunate connotations of death and winter, the pomegranate was, and always would be, the fruit of hope for the Persians, Afghans, and Indians. The flower of fertility, of new things and old seasons to be cradled.

In a way it chimes in the way the pomegranagte has been portrayed as a symbol of resurrection and life everlasting in Christian art. Here the pomegranate is often found in devotional statues and paintings of the Virgin and Child. In medieval representations the pomegranate tree, a fertility symbol, is associated with the end of a unicorn hunt. The captured unicorn appears to be bleeding from wounds inflicted on him by the hunters. The “wounds” are actually pomegranate seeds dripping their blood red juices on his milk white body. Wild and uncontrollable by nature, unicorns can be tamed only by virgins. Once tamed, the unicorn was held in an enclosed garden and chained to a pomegranate tree, symbolising the impending incarnation of Christ.

Even within English history the pomegranate has featured heavily as a symbol. The pomegranate was part of Catherine of Aragon's coat of arms and was accepted into English heraldry when she married King Henry VIII in 1509. The Royal College of Physicians of London had adopted it in their coat of arms by the middle of the sixteenth century.