Before the earth split and Hades claimed her, Persephone had another secret.
A lover.
One no poet dared to name.
He came from the woods beyond Eleusis — a wild god of no temples, no hymns, only the scent of rain and broken thorns in his wake. The villagers whispered of him — the Stranger, the Dark-Eyed One — who wore no crown but whose gaze could bend beasts and mortals alike.
She met him under a bleeding sunset, in a clearing where the poppies grew thick and drunk. Persephone, still Kore then — maiden, daughter, untouchable — should have turned away.
But she was already too much a creature of longing.
"You are spring," he said, voice rough as bark, soft as moss. "But spring was made to be touched."
No one had ever spoken to her like that.
Not Hermes with his clever words, nor Apollo with his golden songs.
No one had ever seen her not as a prize, a future queen, a jewel to be locked away.
With trembling fingers, she reached for him.
Their first kiss was not gentle. It was teeth and breath, the frantic hunger of something forbidden and doomed. He lifted her as if she weighed no more than a fallen petal, pressing her back against the trunk of an ancient tree. Its bark bit into her skin, grounding her as his mouth traced every hollow, every curve.
Her robes tangled around her thighs. Her hair spilled wild and black down her shoulders. When he entered her, it was slow and brutal, an offering, a theft, a sacrifice.
Above them, the poppies nodded like silent witnesses.
Persephone clung to him, gasping his secret name — a name the winds themselves would not carry — as her body shattered and remade itself in his arms.
When they lay together after, slick with sweat and dust and sacred sin, she whispered, "Will you steal me away?"
He kissed her closed eyelids.
"No. But another will."
And so he left her, just before the earth cracked and the King of the Dead rose to claim his bride.
But even in the Underworld, even as Hades crowned her Queen, Persephone sometimes dreamed of rough bark, of poppies swaying, of a nameless god whose touch still bloomed between her thighs like spring that could never die.