Except he was more than Death, he was not the monster in my story like he was to everyone else. He was not a villain or prideful, nor was he greedy, he wasn’t full of lust or envy, he was painted to be a glutton but he was never one to take, he harbored his wrath and sloth and was the best he could be. No matter if he fell from heaven or was banished, he was an angel nonetheless. Even God couldn’t strip his back of the white and gold feathered wings. He was nothing but an angel and he always treated me as I was one as well. He burned his world for me, he caused destruction and a blazing rage of fire to reach me but no matter how close I could get to him the gates would never open to me. He said it was because my heart was too pure for that prison; his burning world. He said I was too pure for Hell. No matter the wrong I did, no matter the thoughts I created, I could never undo the gold in my veins or undo my title of a goddess. I wanted nothing more than to be with him, he might have been Death but I was Life, and the prophecy said that every bad has a good. I knew I was his good, I would just have to get in the gates. He called me a rebel without a cause, but he was my cause. He was my cause for everything, every morning, every night, he was mine, and I would never stop trying for him.

I am the goddess of Life, yet all I want to do is have a life with Pluto. Renamed Hades when he was banished and forced away by his father. He is known as the god of the underworld. He went by many names but he was always my Pluto, he was called the Devil, Lucifer, or Satan, or that awful name of Hades. I was young when I first heard of the great story of his life. Young and eager sitting on my mother’s lap as we watched my pegasus jump through the clouds. She told me of a God in heaven and how he banished his child from his golden kingdom because he rebelled against the plan's reliance on agency and suggested an alternative strategy that did not rely on it. He was my new hero. He was a rebel with a cause. Brave and strong. My mother said that everything bad landed on his shoulders and how he heard all the darkest thoughts of the world. The evil that leaked throughout the mortals on Mount Olympus. She told me not to be afraid because he could never get into the mind of a goddess, for our golden blood prevented any harm to us. What she must not have remembered was that he too was a god and an angel all wrapped in one. He did not have bad intentions or want any harm upon the gods, which is why he could hear all of our thoughts. Because he wanted nothing more than to get out of his eternal damnation. 

The thing about growing up as a god, is you never age. Mortal years are far too short for you so you never celebrate birthdays or care about how old you are because you truly will not die by age. Age can’t be described as a number but still, I grew. I gained knowledge for thousands of years. My job as a goddess was Life. Life to the trees and the sun, life to the animals and the mortals. Life for all, all men and all women were to be handmade by mine and mine alone. I created a beginning for the world, one with beauty and grace. One of bright green grass that swayed as I blew a hearty breath on it. A life full of color and wonder. My mind reached the horizon with the possibility of the Earth, yet the older I grew the more I saw the mortals ruin the Life that I created for them. I grew sad and when I was sad I could only make so many good people and only so much good was never enough to balance for the bad. I was slowly killing my world with sadness and bad. My good was running out and my bad was taking over. I couldn’t be stopped, so I locked myself away in the highest tower and threw away the key. I left myself there and life ceased to exist. Until one day a raven so black the night made it seem like a black hole in the sky appeared. That raven perched upon the window and dropped a gift off to me. That was the start and the beginning of all my good and all my best work to the Earth and to Pluto. 

A note that made my heart quake and my tears stop, my mind go blank and my soul finds its purpose. They say that gods and goddesses are made for one another but I was made for one half-angel, one of a broken world, and one of the brightest wings and soul ever seen.

My dear Azraelle, goddess of all Life. From the biggest tree to the smallest child. You are who I look up to each night, when you rest I think of you and all you have given to me. I stay broken in the underworld, lost of connection, lacking free, but I see you. I hear your laughs at the world in joy and the smile that spreads to each side of your face as it does to each end of the world. I am lonely now. Just as sad and alone as I was before you created Adam and Eve. From rib to rib you made the world and you gave me company. I am no longer alone, but a king. You made me a king, and you made yourself an empire. You’re a goddess by blood, but a lover by heart. So my dear, why have you stopped? Why have you broken the world into destruction and fear? Why have you caved in and stopped sending me gifts? For a thousand years you sent me company, you sent me an army of broken and rebellion, but now you have stopped? I never wanted you to stop, cease the opposite, I want you to give more. I want my gifts from you and your hands alone. Those same hands that shaped the world into a perfect circle. I want all you have to offer. I will never cease to love all you have given to me and I will hold each gift as the purest form of love and gold. I hope this note found you well. The world needs you. They need your steady hands and your balanced mind to give them life. They need you to create all the good that you have in your heart and head. I need you.

With the world in your capable hands, I trust you do well.

All my hope,

Your Pluto

I wrote back with such clarity I felt the touch of our connection. I felt the heat of his body next to mine and hands so strong I felt justified and rectified all in one fell swoop. 

My dearest Pluto, I have grown sad of my world. So broken and angry, I fear I went wrong somewhere. I am as lost as you are found. I am scared I will create more destruction with the touch of my single finger. I fear my job is in incapable hands that shake at the sight of danger. I cannot send you more gifts when all they are is broken and rebellious. I want to give; give the strong and hardy, the right and willful. But I cannot seem to make it how I once did. I now wilt flowers by a single thought and create thunderous storms by a single tear. I am too past helping for your kind words of appreciation or gratitude.  I will send you one last gift with my note, from then on you must rule by what I have given you. 

The goddess of Life yet only finds death,

Your Azraelle

I created a feather from a speck of dust. So white and clean, so pure as I blew life to the feather and a white dove with a golden beak was made. Eyes so focused my little dove would be my last good to the world my hands would create. My last Life to the world. I was too far to help, but I could at least deliver closure to my dear Pluto. I sent my dove off with a whisper of hope it had a safe journey down to the underworld. 

Two days passed, locked in my tower, away from the world of life that I have created from my bare hands. I was laying on the floor as a mortal would, feeling broken as one would. I felt weighed down by my decision and all the choices I have made. I questioned my creations of all the Life I bestowed upon the Earth. My mind was in a whorl as a golden tear fell past my long eyelashes to my high cheekbones. My silver hair stuck to my face as my tears melted to my hair. I sighed at my newfound future when a squawk sent me to my guard. I stood at the window faced with the dark night of a raven. The raven looked at me, past my features of beauty and to my soul, and dropped its head in vow. Leaving the note on the ground, it flew away from me to read in peace. 

Two days and no creation? I am disappointed. You might be young but I was told not to take you for a fool? You are killing the good by not producing the people. You say you are saddened by the bad of Earth yet you are only creating more. I am now not receiving gifts from you and am forced to take mortals now to the underworld. You are leaving them in agony and pain, and I will not stand for it. You left them to die and by that choice, you have given me a burden by taking them the only way I can, by death. I am no killer yet you insist on making me one. I am forced to rectify your awful choice by not doing your duty. My dear, I understand why you may be sad, but you are making me sad with these choices of yours. You created a dove for me, yet you cannot create anything else for anyone? Why must you make yourself more in pain by your choices? You are good and good you must create. Stop the storms and save your Earth. You are the goddess of all Life and you must take a liking to it,  for everyone else already has. Now, break out of your tower and come to the gates of Hell. I have something to show you. And dear? Be prepared of your poor actions because you will now see the consequences of them. 

My world is what you have made, now you will see what you have made my world into being.

-Your Pluto

I broke free of my tower in haste, I've been afraid to ever go down to the underworld. To see the gates of broken and ruin, to see Hell in the worst form. I was always told it would be bad and dangerous. That's why I sent some of the best people I created there. I knew deep down that Hell was no place to be taken lightly, so I would give gifts of good people to Pluto. I made it to the underworld as fast as I ever could but only before I was forced back by the gates. I tried to grasp the gates in my hands but they seared my flesh. Before I knew Hades appeared. Not my Pluto, not a broken angel who has been banished away but Hades. The man that all the stories have been told, a look of evil in his eyes, his wings dragging behind him like a broken limb, his face was wordlessly the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed. I dream to make a creation like that yet he wielded it as if it was something normal. He was dressed in black as the stories stated yet the black was not burnt flesh of people as they made it out to be, but a rich leather that draped over his body of glowing skin. He was not pale as the folklore said he would be but he was kissed with the sun of golden skin. He was broadening and dark but not the dark that you feared but the dark you could understand or dream to grasp. He was simply there, on the other side of the gates that were only made for the dead. He looked at me with fascination as if I broke his equilibrium and made his earth tilt on an axis. He stared at me and silently complimented me, not needing to share his words. As I stood there waiting for my dear Pluto to speak to me. I was waiting as one would wait for the sun to appear in the morning or the stars to appear at night. 

Without speaking he hastily made a retreat. I feared not that he wouldn’t return because I was somehow tethered to him like a string and knew he would forever come back to me. He appeared again with the first beauty I have ever made. Adam, a strong boy with a boyish grin that broke his face into joy, and brown shaggy curls that kissed his forehead and eyes. His freckles are an exact replica of my first constellation ever created. He beamed at me as if he had been waiting for all his afterlife to see me. “Life!” He exclaimed and rushed to the gates and held out his hand for me to take. I was reunited with my first child at this moment and tears sprung to my eyes like a title wave of emotion breaking free. “My Adam. I have missed you so much, my son. I think of you every day; how have you been my child?” He looked at me with utter fixation. “Oh Life, my goddess of all, I have been blessed. I am well, I hear you have not been though?” He peered up to me with worry coaxing his eyes and eyebrows. “I have been lost, that is all.” He looked behind his shoulder to the mammoth of a god bracing his weight on a walking stick with a raven perching at the top. Then the deep velvet sound of broken whispers and yells spoke. “Azraelle. I have granted you a viewing of your first creation. He beams so brightly it blinds most down here. I show you him as a reminder of your good and great power. I will now show you what you are doing to the world and what you are forcing me to do.” He looked at Adam as one might scolding their child for a wrong that was not their fault but still they must take the punishment for. Adam slowly walked back to the abyss of the darkness past the gates. “Hey! Wait! Adam, come back. Pluto let me in. Why can’t I come in, I want to see my boy again, I want to see all of them again! Bring him back! Let me in, please Pluto let me in.” I broke into a silent sob. My heart pounding like a hummingbird without a place to land. He looked at me, not through broken eyes but eyes with a heart-tinted glow. “My dear, you are too pure for my world. I am hereby force and you gave me gifts by gratitude and grace. You can speak to anyone you want but know I have kept them all. Every last one of your gifts. Bound by honor to you I will keep them forever loved and protected. These gates keep them safe. Locked away from evil, I protect them with every best I possess. I cannot break the gates, or undo their intent, no power can. I can retrieve anyone you would like but they can never pass the gates. No one can. That is why you must stay out. You are too good and no other god or goddess can enter.” 

I cried a river as he left me at the gates. Left to my misery of unspoken brokenness. I cried until he returned with a man of anger in his soul radiating off his mortal being like a toxic shockwave of acid. Pluto looked at him with sad eyes and hummed slowly when the man peered up at him through a broken soul. “This, this is what you have left the world to be. He was taken by me to the underworld. Forcefully and nothing of grace as you have given others. You made him sick with your anger and you failed him. You left him, you left a child that was supposed to be cradled in your arms yet you let him suffer. I had to take him from the evil world you left it to be. Look at him Azraelle, look him in the eye for you have cheated the man and now he is stuck in here just as lost and broken as the 327,796 good souls I was forced to take.” 

I laid at the gates of Hell, crying and speaking to Pluto. He gave me wisdom and direction and in return, I gave him a promise. I promise to make the world good again. That I would hold strong and create new Life. With intent and purpose. That I would forever cradle all my children and love them. That I would send my beautiful Pluto all my best works, I would give him gifts of beauty and love. I would grant him company. I would send him flowers of great colors and fragrances. I promised I would forever send him gifts of my admiration and apparition. I would never stop and nor let him down ever again. I also made a promise to rewrite his story, for he was not the Devil that everyone pictured him to be, but he was an angel, beautiful, brave, rebellious, and utterly breathtaking. 

Eons passed when I gifted him the most beautiful gift I have ever created. I gave him Persephone. He would always be my Pluto, my first and only love, but he deserved more than a love that could never pass the gates of his world. he deserved a love that would bloom in the fire that once started for me from anger into a burning love of passion and force. He deserved to have so much more than an eternal damnation so I gave him eternal salvation, love.