Psyche (The Olympus Cycle) by Ioakim Ioakim

Psyche has always been worshipped. The problem is that worship and love are not the same thing - and in twenty years of being treated as a shrine, no one has ever come close to knowing who she actually is. When the Oracle speaks, it says she is not meant for a mortal husband. She is to be left on a high rock for something that comes from the air, something the gods themselves fear. She goes - not because she has no choice, but because the life she has been living is not a life worth saving. What she finds is not a monster. It is a voice in the dark, a palace built entirely for her, and someone who wants - for the first time in her existence - to know her rather than to worship her. She learns to love what she cannot see. She builds something real in the dark. And then she lights the lamp. What follows is one of the oldest stories ever told, rendered here with complete interior depth: the tasks Aphrodite sets - each one designed to be impossible, each one requiring a specific quality of trust and endurance - the descent into the underworld, the box that she is told not to open, and the box that she opens anyway. Because she is, she has always been, and she will always be, a person who looks. Read more