Harvest Moon by Mercedes Lackey

would be willing to let Persephone go and lavish her attentions on this mortal Prince. But her hopes were soon dashed; Demeter did not return to her duties, and Olympia continued to fail. For once, all the other gods were working together to keep the realm alive, but it was clear that what was needed was for Demeter to return to her duties.
    But then something changed. Demeter was doing more than merely playing nursemaid; Hecate got very tight-lipped about it when Hades probed. From what Hecate did not say, Persephone suspected she was pouring something else into him, too.
    Immortality.
    Of all the gods, only Demeter knew the secret of how to give a mortal true immortality. Aphrodite had tried, and failed, with more than one of her lovers. Many of the others had done likewise. Demeter held the transformation as a closely guarded secret, and if her new charge was supposed to be a substitute for Persephone, it would make sense that she would make him immortal. And again, that seemed a cause for hope.
    But once again, that hope failed.
    The child’s mother interrupted whatever it was that Demeter was doing, and although Hecate did not elaborate, it was clear that any hope Persephone had that the little Prince Demophoon would take her place were gone forever. Demeter forgave the king and his family because they immediately turned one of their palaces into a temple dedicated to her, but she did not return to them. Instead, she blessed his fields so that his land, at least, would still bear fruit, but she withdrew entirely into her new temple and did not even appear to her new priestesses.
    And conditions were still dreadful in Olympia; from being one of the most lush lands in all the world, it had now become a wasteland. The climate was not as harsh as it was farther north—all around Olympia, the season of “winter” only meant that one needed a fire and a cloak to keep warm, and change the usual sandals for boots or shoes. But the last grain and vegetables had dried up without ever producing much in the way of seed, nothing that had been sown since had even come up. Fruit and vegetables that had been half-ripe when Demeter abandoned her post had rotted or withered on the branch or in the ground. Grass had stopped growing; the only things that would grow were weeds that not even goats would eat. All the flocks had been moved elsewhere; even the wildlife had abandoned the forests and meadows and fled over the border to territory where, if they did not live as well as they had before, at least they would not starve to death. Olympia was a realm of rock and dust, withered trees and rank weeds. Even the mortals were starting to abandon the realm.
    If it had not been for the warrior-woman’s mate, and Hecate, who had foreseen the disaster that Demeter’s defection would mean, things would have been much worse than they were—but they were bad enough. Yes, food was coming in, but for how much longer? As mortals left, their belief in their gods waned, and the gods themselves lost power. Of course, they still had their inherent magics that they had as half-Fae, but they were losing the great powers they possessed as gods. It wasn’t bad yet, but it could become very dangerous indeed. As the gods lost power, their old enemies could rise to challenge them anew. Fortunately, the Titans and their king, Kronos, had been cast into Tartarus, and so far, it seemed, the one god who was not losing even a little of his powers was Hades. People still believed fervently in the Underworld and its king, it seemed, even when their belief in Zeus and the rest faded. So Hades was able to keep the worst of the gods’ enemies safely bound here. And he was reinforcing that by sending the barbarian woman down into the pit to remind them that he still had the power to hold them.
    But the rest would not be content to reign over a desert with no more power left to them than a common mortal wizard. It could not be too much