Gods lived before the world, though after, as always, was still unknown. Mortals breathed and died, empires rose and fell, and old worships faded.
But fading is tangled in memory, and even faded memories last long-

-especially when there is more than one world, at more than one time.

i.
"Don't you love it here?"

It was a country cottage. It was beautiful, if not at all like New York was beautiful. It was green and hazy all around. One could hear - almost feel - the low hum of life and growing. There was a gravel drive, with needle-thin blades of grass climbing through. Everything was seeking freedom here, but in a content, self-satisfied sort of way, as though freedom was very near indeed. Persephone stared at the clouds and wondered if they belonged to the earth. After all, if she wanted to, her mother could draw back the curtains of time and they wouldn't see the mortal world anymore. They would see Olympus, see sky and sea, existing untethered to this careening little globe.

Her mother never wanted to.

It is safer here, Persephone. Safer where there is time. Safer where we look like them.

The Greeks were not the first to know them-they were only the first to name them. But they were mortal, and they could not last. Psyche, Io, Theseus, Jason. Prometheus, who took something and lost everything. All of them were gone.

Persephone did not remember them. How could she?

She was born in this world; when Demeter fled to the safety of time, the strange security of the twenty-first century (even if it existed only for gods), she let herself love a mortal.

Persephone opened the door to the cottage. It was nothing like New York.

"How long will we stay here?"

Demeter's shoulders rolled back, as if the wind in her hair needed her to brace against it. "As long as it takes for them to leave you alone."

Persephone slipped her phone into her back pocket. "Again, I thought you wanted me to learn who I was. Who we are."

Demeter thinned her lips. "They don't want you for that."

It was an old argument. "I'm going to take a nap," Persephone said. "There'd better be wifi here." She didn't stomp upstairs. She was half a goddess. They weren't supposed to stomp.

Demeter never used the same summer home twice. Nonetheless, the room Persephone found at the top of the stairs was familiar enough. Her mother had sent all of her books, and they were wreathed comfortingly around the room. She lifted up Jane Eyre, read the first page, and tossed it down again.

Sleep - crafty Hypnos - shouldn't have found her. But as she stared up at the ceiling, painted with delicate flowers, she felt her eyes drifting shut.

And gods could reach through dreams.

Persephone saw her father. He looked the same, and that wasn't right at all, because it had been well more than a decade since she'd seen him last. He opened his hands, and sand flowed between them. Black sand.

"What are you doing?" her voice asked, without opening her lips.

"Reminding you."

"Of what?"

"Time."

A shadow passed behind, swift as a breeze. She turned; she turned back and her father was gone. "Who is it?"

"You." The word shook its way out of the depths.

She woke. It was still sunny out; still day. The curtains were blowing around the window like billows of smoke.

Over dinner, her mother brooded.

Persephone missed her friends, but she knew better than to say so aloud. Miss mortals? Care for mortals? No, it was her lot to live in a lonely oblivion, fleeing the gods and the destiny her mother kept secret-but never making ties to this world. Enjoy what was golden, and leave behind anything that smacked too much of pain and permanence.

This is no life, she told herself. But that was the trouble with immortality.

ii.

The underworld was no place of rest-not if you were the one running it.

Hades spent his time there only if he could paint dark rivers into being, filtering through shades of souls until he had floated out towards silence.

With an ever-growing population, the opportunity was rare.

It was much easier to be a lawyer. Much simpler to drink two scotches on evening, scratch the latest incarnation of Cerberus between the ears, and forget.

"You're just stalling," said Hecate, shimmering in the mirror.

"This is 2017," Hades said flatly, not looking up. "You could text."

"I'd rather see you."

"It's been two thousand years since that mattered."

Her eyes would darken that, black wells of danger. He knew how this story played out.

"Zeus will destroy you," she hissed. The lights flickered. Cerberus whined.

Hades raised his eyes and turned his gaze to the mirror. It shattered.

That problem was solved, for the moment. He stood up, hands in his pockets, squaring his shoulders so that the Italian wool of his suit jacket pulled taut. This was a world that set up its own clay idols; it would not welcome back the clashes of deities.

That was why he'd chosen it. Wasn't it simpler, to retreat into obscurity? Responsibility lasted much longer than power. He had claimed no prize; he had existed, and done each and every fickle world a valuable service.

They ruled themselves, now. Zeus would never understand.

The modern day equivalent of marble halls - chrome and modern floor plans - seemed too sterile and heavy, all of a sudden. He snapped his fingers and Cerberus followed him obediently out.

In the Maserati - all black, every damn inch of it - he could breathe. He drove, and drove until the city was gone behind him and the traffic had died down to a few pinpoints of yellow light swirling by.

It was night - his night - and the world did not know him. Not anymore.

When you had lived an eternity, memory was a curse. He shut off the incessant stream that spanned all the way from painted vases to the 24-hour news cycle and thought of rivers. The road might as well be one; sinuous and smooth. He only slowed to a halt when it turned to gravel, and a small cottage loomed ahead like a beacon, or a crossroads-

or a threat.