Hades took me from where I slept, in the field that day, and... that was it.

Three months later, he was still waltzing around me. He'd visit, every day, and just... talk. Three months of him just talking to me. Then my father came to get me. Hades agreed to give me back, but only if I could resist the temptation of food.

I hadn't eaten for any of those three months of course. I knew the rules. The minute I ate food here I was trapped. I was starving, but I wanted home. I wanted my mother to nag at me and be overly protective. I wanted the stifling garden at home. Everything planted in rows, instead of growing wild in fields. I wanted to go back to the life I had hated three months ago.

He paraded the food before me. Every denizen of the underworld, it seemed like, was carrying a tray. I'd never seen or heard of some foods - some I didn't want to know about, some still make my mouth water when I think about them. Endless tray after endless tray, for three days. And at the end of the third day, there he was, Hades himself, holding a tray of pomegranate seeds for me, the last in line.

He knelt before me, holding the tray out like a slave - like he, the King of the Underworld, was less than me - and offered me the seeds. He stared at me as he did, wordless, but that gaze spoke more to me than anything he had said for three months. More than the so-called garden he had built for me. More than my desire to go home, more than my father's presence, more even than the knowledge that the world above was freezing to death with me here.

"Please." He was saying, though silent. "Please, I am so lonely. Don't go."

I took the seeds.

Some years I say I took three seeds.

Those are the years like when I first left him. I swore I would never go back, no matter what deal Hades had made about me eating those seeds. I went home to my mother, to my life, to the world. I was so happy to be back. I dreaded going back to the dreary underworld in nine months, but I was determined to enjoy the time I had at home.

Instead I hated being home.

I had thought Mother was stifling and overly protective before. She had chased away all my suitors before Hades stole me from the field. Now, she kept me at her side at all times. She slept in my room when I refused to sleep in hers. At first it was a comfort, a relief even, to have her there at night. But as the first week turned into the first month, I began to feel as I had before Hades took me.

I was trapped in a golden cage of my mother's making.

One night, nearly two months after I returned home, I crept from my bed while Mother was sleeping, and returned to the field where Hades had stolen me. It had always been my refuge when I was feeling restless. I refused to let him change that for me. I had played there as a small child. I had practiced my powers there. I had grown up there. The field was home, more even than my mother's house and hearth, and not even what Hades had done would change that.

Of course, he was waiting there for me.