There is something vaguely putrid in the scent of flowers and herbs that lingers in her nostrils as she descends into the underworld. For the first several millennia of her existence, she knew nothing else, only her mother's handiwork that always put her second—always the assistant, always the child (even when she no longer was one, when anyone but a mother who forces herself to be blind to such things would have known it) who pandered and bowed, who obeyed.
She is not these things here, in the underland, in the dark. She is dread; she is powerful; she is understood. Here, she is not the one expected to put flowers on the windowsill every morning after assisting her mother's precedence over morning worship. In her deepest heart, she does not always begrudge the duties she owes her mother when they reside together above, while the earth flourishes under their care, but it rankles, oftimes, because her body is compelled to be there, to give Gaia her due, but her mind does not forget, and she would rather see the twisted, fragile growth of the underworld by her husband's side than the flowers on a thousand hills by her mother's.
Another breath, and the earthly scent is nearly gone, passing out on the air she breathes into the surrounding atmosphere only to be replaced by coolness, by clarity. And for a while she forgets, she makes herself forget, all duties but the ones she tends to here, duties of husband and of realm. She lets the peace of right belonging flood her spirit, soaks it up for the other-months when peace will lack even in company and in gaiety, when she realizes second after tortuous second that the light of Helios that she gloried in as a child, when her skin would have burnt, if she were human, for all the time she spent in his rays—that all of those early happinesses are only shades, only presages of the joy she finds in the otherworld, in otherlight, in the dark.
She fulfills her duties on both sides of Gaia's ground, above and below, with equal adeptness (it is long since she struggled to learn the newfound ways of her birth-betrothed realm), but aboveground, she secretly counts the days till autumn falls with amber cloaks upon the earth, and beneath it, she watches the time pass with a knotted stomach of apprehension, and pretends spring won't come even though she knows it will, knows it must for the people they harbor on the earth. Earth's life stirs in her veins, pulls at her blood, and beckons her to bring forth new life.
Her days as queen are long, her nights are longer, and no matter how well she masters her time, nothing stops the inevitable wish to be the child her mother thinks she is, to dig in her heels and throw a tantrum equal to any of her father's, when her mother's power draws the first tender shoots from the newly-thawed earth. She resists the urge and goes where she should, a queen demoted to handmaiden, but something lies sick and heavy with her now, a stench among the sweetness of budding asphodel (it smells different aboveground, she's sure of it) and a plague under the smell of fresh-cut barley, and she wills its intrusion to the back of her conscience, forcing herself to smell the sweet for what it is, until she steps away from the world once more, and breathes.