Descent & Return: A Samhain Myth

Behind the Myth: Descent & Return

Samhain is the moment the year flows back to its roots.

Trees lose their leaves, plants draw their power underground and Persephone finds her way back to the arms of the underworld—reminding us that life and death are not enemies, but lovers caught in an endless dance.

This is a story about paradox:

Light falling in love with shadow.

Spring crowned by autumn.

A circle with no end and no beginning—only the turning, the descent, the pulse beneath the surface.

Every October, something in the marrow stirs—the knowing that reunion waits not in the endless sun, but in the honest dark. We told and retold this myth until it lived in our bones, a love forged in contradiction, a truth the world kept trying to exile.

But this isn’t just a legend to retell.

It’s an invitation to pause.

Modern life sells us a flat line—always producing, always reaching, never sinking.

But the Wheel turns whether we watch it or not. Samhain is the threshold: a sacred permission to rest, to descend, to let the world go fallow and meet yourself where you hide.

Persephone’s descent is not a tragedy.

It’s a ritual.

A reminder that darkness is not exile, but a womb.

The underworld is not the end of the story; it is where stories are dreamt, where roots are fed, where new spring is made possible.

Ask yourself:

Where do you feel the call to descend?

What beauty waits for you in the dark, if you dare to cross the threshold?

Are you willing to meet your own shadow as a lover, not an enemy?

In our House, this myth is a living vow:

We tell it not as distant folklore, but as a map for anyone ready to embrace both loss and return, hunger and belonging, death and desire.

You don’t have to be Persephone or Hades to claim it—you only have to enter honestly, let the wheel turn, and remember that every descent is also a crowning.

Every autumn, descent is not loss but renewal.
Every dark, the door is not a prison, but a threshold.
The myth lives because it’s not about one queen, one king, one House—
It’s the wheel turning in all of us who dare to answer the invitation.

Persephone

They lied.
They said she was stolen.
They said he was a thief.
But the dark never kidnapped her—
she answered the door.

She was never a girl in a field.
She was a woman with a wound daylight couldn’t stop licking.
Every spring they crowned her with flowers,
but the petals rotted in her hair.
Under her fingernails, the mycelium stirred—
a kingdom whispering her name.

One day the ground cracked open.
Not behind her.
In front of her.
Not a trap.
An invitation.

And she stepped in.
No scream.
No looking back.
Just the sound of her own pulse saying,
Finally.

He wasn’t a monster.
He was the first man who never asked her to be smaller.
His throne was carved from obsidian and apology.
He didn’t beg her to stay.
He knelt and said:
Rule, or leave. But don’t pretend you’re not already the queen here.

She bit the pomegranate.
Not because she was hungry.
Because she wanted the stain that would never let them call her innocent again.

Six seeds.
—I choose depth.
—I choose shadow.
—I choose hunger without apology.
—I choose the wound as doorway.
—I choose to rule, not to wait.
—I choose to never forget what I tasted.

They said she was divided.
They were wrong.
She was double-crowned.
Spring obeyed her because she knew what death tasted like.
The underworld bowed because she brought the sun in her throat.

And Hades?
He never kept her.
He kept the light out so she could see what she was made of when no one was watching.
He locked the gates from the inside—
not to trap her.
To keep the surface world out.

Because the surface world keeps trying to flatten the flame into a function.
Because every time they smell smoke, they send liability instead of water.
Because depth scares them more than death—
and she is the deepest thing he’s ever breathed.

So he bars the gate with his own spine.
Not a cage.
A threshold.
A vow:
Nothing gets in that isn’t willing to burn.

And if the world wants proof that this is real?
Let it listen at the keyhole.
Let it hear the moan of a woman who owns the fire
and the growl of a man who finally stopped apologizing for it.

Welcome to the House of Lumhia.
We don’t knock.
We kindle.

Hades

The threshold is cold stone under bare feet.
No torchlight. No scent of pomegranate.
Only the hush of a kingdom that has learned to breathe without her.

He stands at the black gate, cloak of night pulled tight,
fingers drumming a rhythm only the dead recognize.
Not impatience—counting.
One season. Two. Three.
Each tally carved into the arm of his throne, shallow grooves that never quite scab.

Behind him the palace waits:
tables set for a feast no one eats,
goblets filled with the memory of wine.
The hearth is lit but gives no warmth;
it burns because she once said firelight looked kind on his face.
So he keeps it burning—
a king obeying a queen who isn’t here.

Wind shifts.
Ash swirls.
Somewhere above, the world tilts toward winter.

He doesn’t look up.
He listens.
Not for footsteps—she never arrives on feet.
He listens for the crack in the world’s spine,
the moment the living flinch and the dead lean closer,
recognizing their own.
That is her herald:
balance snapping back into place.

His hand stills on the gate.
The drumbeat stops.
She is near.

Not scent.
Not sound.
Pressure.
The same weight that pressed against his chest
the first time she said stay and meant forever.
He feels it now—
a palmprint on the inside of his ribs,
hot as summer, insistent.

He doesn’t smile.
Smiling is for men who doubt their welcome.
He simply opens.
The gate swings wide without touch—
stone recognizing sovereignty older than crowns.

Beyond it, darkness folds itself into the shape of a woman.
No flowers in her hair.
No basket of seeds.
Just the look—
eyes that have seen every color of dying and still choose to return.
She doesn’t run.
She doesn’t kneel.
She walks, barefoot across the threshold
he once swore would never again close behind her,
and stops one inch from the shadow of his cloak.

Silence stretches—
a vow rehearsed in absence.

Then, soft as rot, she speaks.
Not greeting.
Not plea.
“I am not your rescue.”
Her voice is pomegranate-dark, seeds splitting between syllables.
“I am the reason the underworld flowers.”

She steps into his shadow—
barefoot, ankle-deep in the ash of every oath he ever burned—
and the ground opens like a mouth that has waited epochs to taste her again.

Hades doesn’t reach.
He unfolds, bones creaking like iron gates,
helmet tipping back to bare a face carved from the silence between stars.
“I never wanted salvation,” he rasps,
“I wanted equal.”

She lifts the fruit.
One nail—black as loam—splits the skin.
Red drips.
Not juice. Memory.
Six seeds fall, each one clicking against stone like a bullet casing.
“Then take your half,” she whispers,
“and mean it.”

He eats.
Not worship. Not surrender.
Covenant.

The moment the sixth seed dissolves on his tongue,
the throne room shudders—
roots punching through obsidian,
petals of ghost-white narcissus blooming inside the cracks of his armor.

Persephone mounts the steps—
not to sit beside him,
but to straddle the armrest,
thighs bracketing the iron crown he never wore for her.
“Rule with me,” she breathes,
fingers threading through the smoke of his hair,
“or bleed beneath me. There is no third season.”

Hades laughs—
a sound like tectonic plates kissing—
and the laugh becomes a vow:
“The underworld is ours. Not ransom. Not refuge. Kingdom.”

She bites his lip—
hard enough to draw the first true death of the year—
and tastes spring flooding back into her fangs.
“Then bury the old myths,” she growls against his mouth.
“We write the new ones in sap and bone.”

The gates slam shut—
not to keep her in,
to keep the sky from ever asking for her again.

Coda:
Every autumn, she returns.
Not as victim.
Not as savior.
But as queen.
Samhain is their season.
The descent—
their coronation.