Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses violence and threats of violence against women and references graphic depictions of sex.

The second of four daughters of Demeter, Persephone is focused on surviving the machinations of upper-city Olympian power politics. She has a strong distaste for her mother’s ambitions and those of the other Thirteen, and a lifelong fascination with the myth of Hades, the mysterious and ostensibly dead ruler of the lower city. She has her mother’s hazel eyes and blonde hair and uses her good looks and family money to cultivate an image as a fashionable, carefree person. She calls this the “mask of the sweet, biddable daughter” (130). Her unwitting betrothal to Zeus, though, means that she finds herself unable to maintain the ruse. Her flight to the lower city, and acceptance of Hades’s protection, drives much of the plot.

Her unexpected meeting with the real Hades results in her confronting her assumptions not only about Olympus, but about herself and the kinds of relationships she values. She realizes that Hades is genuinely interested in her well-being, and welcomes the strong attraction between them as a chance to explore her sexuality in ways her public image in the upper city would never allow.