She was startled when he came out from the arching shadows. Persephone had basked in beautiful things her entire existence, but she had never seen anything quite like him. “I wasn’t frightened.” She said, when she could not find better words. Winter was a lovely thing, wasn’t it? She wondered why she’d not noticed it clearly before. Persephone blinked. Her flowers? Ah, her flowers. He<i>had</i>noticed them then. A bright smile, because she knew the praise of gods and mortals but she had not known Hades or his voice before. It felt like music, an old sort of song she might have heard once; the sensation was familiar even if the sound was new.<br/><br/>“Oh, you like them?” she laughed. “I’m glad.” She twirled on her bare feet, and wildflowers burst up around her. Perhaps it was a vain thing to do. Persephone took a step toward him, and shivered as she drew nearer. The air was colder in his presence. “You’ve been watching me for a while, right?” a bold goddess, that way, because she’d never had a reason not to be. There was no reason to question it, when she'd always been loved. “Why didn’t you ever come out before?” she was staring at him hard, like she was still trying to make sense of his ethereal chill. “Why haven’t I ever seen you before?” Because she could not possibly have understood his existence or the vast space between them. "Why aren't there many flowers where you're from?"<br/><br/>Persephone was young by the standards of gods, but she had still lived longer than humanity’s history. It wasn’t an unreasonable thing to be curious about how<i>foreign</i>he was to her. She didn't even have a name to guess at. She squinted at him. “Your eyes are like Zeus’s…” she said, more questions hanging in between the syllables. After a breath, even she could see she might be behaving too precociously.<br/><br/>She shook her head, waving off her own discourteous behavior, and curtsied neatly. “I’m sorry, that was rude of me. I'm getting ahead of myself. My name is Persephone. It’s nice to finally meet you.” She said it like she had been waiting for him a long time. She supposed, maybe she had. If she thought about it hard, she wasn’t even sure how long she’d been leaving flowers by the trees anymore. She held her hand out to him, a small offer set in the space between them.<br/><br/>Her mother had been so adamant that she stop looking for this pale, moonlit man. Persephone’s lips parted. She couldn’t really understand why. There was nothing about this person that frightened her. There was nothing that seemed dangerous. Rather, she felt a little like he was a secret that had been kept from her unfairly.