Persephone Unbound.
I'm participating in the fall Switch Witch on BPAL.org, which is a really neat swap, I have to say. The idea is mostly that you get this person and spend two months spoiling them--ecards, real cards, packages, whatever you feel like. And I bargained with another member: in exchange for me writing about Persephone and possibly doing some artwork as well (she's making a book, hand-bound and all!) for her witchee, she'd make a hand-bound journal for MY witchee.
So I sat down to spend some time with Persephone tonight...
I.
The palace is cold. It is always cold. The coldness leaks from the very stones with which it is built, the way fragrance permeates a room from a burning oil. My abductor sees me shiver and calls for a fire. It roars up from the hearth, a blaze Hestia would be proud of.
Still I am cold.
The palace is black and without color. The stones shine like the finest mirrors. I can see my reflection in every wall. I am pale and without color. I ask the soft-handed creature who bathes me and pins up my hair if colors are dead here too. My abductor hears of this and calls for the great artists who roam the fields of the dead to come forth to his palace and fill it with every color.
Still I am pale and without color.
The gardens are dead. Nothing is growing there. Once upon a time a tear sliding down my cheek or a laugh bubbling from my lips would cause crocuses and daffodils to spring forth from a salted and barren ground, to wave in the breeze and dance their quiet flower dances with me. He watches me from the window, and as I wander the cold empty grounds, he comes to me, carrying a silvery-pale asphodel blossom from the faraway field. He is taller than I, but he shortens his strides to match mine. "I want you to be happy, Persephone," he murmurs.
Still no flowers will spring up in my wake.
"I will never be happy here," I whisper. I have no breath for words anymore. My heart is frozen as February and it has spread to my lungs, fine ice crystals that will eventually take over my entire being.
Every evening, when Helios would be driving his great chariot into the west, my abductor comes to me in his finest robes and asks me if I will sit by his side as he judges the dead.
I cannot think. I cannot speak. I turn my back, curling up on my side like a shattered child. I am desperate for the light.
II.
I awaken in the silent hush to the smell of jasmine too real to be a perfume. In the pale half-light of this dead kingdom, my handmaiden comes to my side. Her feet make no sound on stone or on carpet, and her fingers are cool as she dresses me in the ruined robes still dirty from the day he took me--I will not wear the fine silks he brings me. Her pale mouth is curved, and at first I wonder if she is in pain. I have forgotten what a smile looks like. She opens my balcony doors, and the gray light spills in on a wave of perfume.
There is a wall of flowers. Jasmine shining like starlight against waxy green leaves. Lilies lush and full like a bride wildly in love. They are alive in this lifeless world, they are full of light in this dark place.
"May I speak, my queen?" my spectral handmaiden asks. I glance over my shoulder at her. She has crept closer, her honey-colored eyes bright as she gazes at the flowers.
"Go ahead," I say.
"They say he went to the surface," she whispers. "They say he was afraid that he would get the wrong kind of flowers, so he went out into the fields and found gardeners from the great palaces and took them up on his great dark steed. They brought back everything they could."
"They'll die if they don't have light," I say, my words barely a breath. My handmaiden nods silently. I sink to my knees before the nearest vase, skimming my cold fingers over the details on it before filling my hands with lush, bewitching jasmine flowers.
Within an hour, the gardens are filled with glowing bulbs of fire, fine things like spun glass that float in the air. My abductor stands below my balcony, looking up at me. His eyes reflect the golden light of the fire, and his somber mouth is curved, almost as if with hope.
I do not speak. I run my fingers over a bruised orchid petal and it shimmers to health beneath my touch, as joyful as a purring cat.
III.
My abductor often comes to watch me in the gardens he has given me. He rarely speaks. He is a quiet shadow in his dark gray robes. He does not stand too close to me; rather, he trails behind me, half-hidden underneath an arbor dripping with grapevines, or lifting a glass of ambrosia to his lips as he sits in a stone chair in the shade of an apple-bejeweled tree. His spectral servants do not follow him when he comes to the garden. Nor do mine.
I wonder whether he is waiting for me to speak, or if he is content with the silence. I do not know what to say to him.
The gardens are expanding daily. Flowers do not spring up in my wake as they did on earth, but I have retained some of my mother's magic. The ground is not as dead as I thought. My abductor's gifts grow: tidy lines of fruitful apple trees, pomegranates ripening tart and colorful, trellises with thriving torrents of thorny sweet roses. Lily of the valley, tender as a young maiden on her wedding day, seem almost to sing as they rise out of the black underworld earth.
I walk a narrow curving path dividing a lake of crocuses and daffodils. My abductor trails behind me. I glance over my shoulder just once, and he starts, taking a step backward. His heel comes down on a delicate crocus. He looks down, that austere face stricken.
I step closer, and he freezes. I am close enough to reach out and touch him. His eyes are not pure black as I thought. They are the dark, dark blue of the Aegean at night. He watches me, the tightness of his jaw the only indication that my abductor feels anything, anything at all.
I crouch and skim my fingers over the bruised crocus. The song of life, of spring, hums through my veins. The bruising fades, the crocus is restoring, once more lifting its beautiful face toward the endless dark sky. Then I straighten, and look up at my abductor.
"I don't know anything about flowers," he says after a long moment.
"It's a crocus," I say.
He nods, but says nothing. I turn to walk back toward the pomegranate trees.
"I was lonely," he says. His voice is barely a murmur. I glance back at him, and see that he is gazing at me. His austerity has cracked like glass, and the longing of a world is written on his face. "I was so lonely."
Something in me cracks as well.
IV.
My abductor has become a student of the flowers. He kneels beside me when my hands are deep in the cool Elysian soil, and he reaches out a long, graceful finger to carefully touch the water-soft petal of an orchid. "What is this?" he asks me. His hands are strong and capable as they slip beneath leaves to mold soil at the bases of tender young stems. He likes best the glowing white lilies, with their delicate perfume, and the daffodils, those heralds of spring. Of the trees, it is the pomegranates that he likes best. When I make my daily patrol of the gardens, I save the pomegranate orchard for last, and linger there longest. There are tiny lights in the trees, glinting like the sun on water on a bright summer day.
He walks at my side now. He shortens his strides to match mine--my abductor is taller than I. He smells like cool spring earth and pine trees in the morning after a rain.
His fingers are warmer than I expect when he intertwines them with my own. Warm, and gritty still with earth from tending my flowers with me. I do not protest. We are silent as we walk beneath the trees.
In the palace my handmaiden draws a bath for me in a golden tub. She washes my hair, and combs it with a golden comb, and binds it with silk ribbons. She lifts my dirty robe to dress me, and I shake my head. If the dead could weep, she would. The violet silk is as soft as water upon my skin, the golden chains delicate as she wraps them around my waist. When my abductor comes to my door to ask me to sit upon his throne with him, I think perhaps he will weep. But he does not.
I sit at his side on blackest polished onyx when he sits in judgment of the dead. My abductor, great and mighty king, is a just ruler. He is stern, but not unkind. He does not suffer fools, but he does not strike them down. He tends their souls as I tend my flowers. And as I guide his hands through the lavender and the ivy, so too does he guide me in sharing the weight of judgment. We are father and mother of many, both living and dead.
I do not shrink from his gaze when he turns those midnight eyes upon me and asks for my judgment on a soul. I lift my chin and gaze back. Pride blooms in me like a sweet flower. Something else, something warm and tender, is blooming too.
When I smile, he smiles back uncertainly, as if he is not quite sure he is doing it correctly.
V.
The pomegranates are ripe now, their tangy fertile fragrance permeating the air as my lover and I lie beneath the bejeweled trees in the orchard. Though Helios is far and away from this quiet magical place, the Elysian fields have a honeyed warmth of their own, a small sun that glows between us. He likes it when my hair is spilling loose and wavy down my back like a maiden, and he can comb his fingers through it as quietly and gently as a feather falling to earth. I like it when I push him flat on his back in the grass and he laughs--my somber god of the dead, his mouth still curved when I press my lips to his.
His hands are tender when he unties the ribbons at my shoulders, but his mouth is as hot as the fires of Tartarus on my skin. I do not, I will not lie passively as my lover seduces me beneath the slender trees. I kiss, I caress, I whisper tender words.
I love.
The messenger comes when we are still tangled and drowsy with bliss. His winged feet are impatient and abrupt as they trod upon our daydreams and our love. "She must come back with me," he insists. My lover roars and shouts, but the messenger god will not budge.
At last my lover looks at me, and his shattered heart is written all over his face. My stony, stern god of the underworld. "Leave us," I tell Hermes quietly. "I will come, but you must give us a moment." Hermes hesitates, but his golden wings carry him away from us.
I wrap my arms around my lover, and he buries his face in my shoulder. He is almost like a child now, seeking comfort from the frightening world. How odd, that something like love could bring down this fierce king. He holds me so tightly I can scarcely breathe, but I do not protest. I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of him.
When he speaks, his words are muffled against my skin. "If you eat food of this realm, you'll be tied here forever," he says. I lean back to look into those haunted eyes. "Do you understand?" he asks. He is vulnerable now. Loving me has brought him so low, humbled him before Demeter's daughter. "You could come back. You could be with--you could come back, Persephone." He presses his lips together.
I cannot speak. I cannot move. This idea, this choice, it is a tremendous one, an entire world of glory and of fear. I could walk away from this prison, this land of the dead. I could walk away from this god, this king, who has given me the world. I could once again sit at my mother's feet and be Demeter's Persephone, to be the most adored and cherished daughter in all the world. I could walk in the light of Helios's bright chariot. Or I could stay, and be loved with the intensity of Poseidon's vast kingdom.
"I will love you," Hades says to me, "till the day I die."
I see a flash of movement. Hermes is coming back. We have had our time, too much time--not nearly enough.
I stand, and I am naked before my lover. He is kneeling at my feet. I reach up into the tree above me, and wrap my fingers around one of the fruits that hangs like a jewel from the branch. I pluck it freely.
The tears spill down my lover's face as the pomegranate juice spills from my lips. It is tart, it is tangy, but all I can taste is sweetness.
So I sat down to spend some time with Persephone tonight...
I.
The palace is cold. It is always cold. The coldness leaks from the very stones with which it is built, the way fragrance permeates a room from a burning oil. My abductor sees me shiver and calls for a fire. It roars up from the hearth, a blaze Hestia would be proud of.
Still I am cold.
The palace is black and without color. The stones shine like the finest mirrors. I can see my reflection in every wall. I am pale and without color. I ask the soft-handed creature who bathes me and pins up my hair if colors are dead here too. My abductor hears of this and calls for the great artists who roam the fields of the dead to come forth to his palace and fill it with every color.
Still I am pale and without color.
The gardens are dead. Nothing is growing there. Once upon a time a tear sliding down my cheek or a laugh bubbling from my lips would cause crocuses and daffodils to spring forth from a salted and barren ground, to wave in the breeze and dance their quiet flower dances with me. He watches me from the window, and as I wander the cold empty grounds, he comes to me, carrying a silvery-pale asphodel blossom from the faraway field. He is taller than I, but he shortens his strides to match mine. "I want you to be happy, Persephone," he murmurs.
Still no flowers will spring up in my wake.
"I will never be happy here," I whisper. I have no breath for words anymore. My heart is frozen as February and it has spread to my lungs, fine ice crystals that will eventually take over my entire being.
Every evening, when Helios would be driving his great chariot into the west, my abductor comes to me in his finest robes and asks me if I will sit by his side as he judges the dead.
I cannot think. I cannot speak. I turn my back, curling up on my side like a shattered child. I am desperate for the light.
II.
I awaken in the silent hush to the smell of jasmine too real to be a perfume. In the pale half-light of this dead kingdom, my handmaiden comes to my side. Her feet make no sound on stone or on carpet, and her fingers are cool as she dresses me in the ruined robes still dirty from the day he took me--I will not wear the fine silks he brings me. Her pale mouth is curved, and at first I wonder if she is in pain. I have forgotten what a smile looks like. She opens my balcony doors, and the gray light spills in on a wave of perfume.
There is a wall of flowers. Jasmine shining like starlight against waxy green leaves. Lilies lush and full like a bride wildly in love. They are alive in this lifeless world, they are full of light in this dark place.
"May I speak, my queen?" my spectral handmaiden asks. I glance over my shoulder at her. She has crept closer, her honey-colored eyes bright as she gazes at the flowers.
"Go ahead," I say.
"They say he went to the surface," she whispers. "They say he was afraid that he would get the wrong kind of flowers, so he went out into the fields and found gardeners from the great palaces and took them up on his great dark steed. They brought back everything they could."
"They'll die if they don't have light," I say, my words barely a breath. My handmaiden nods silently. I sink to my knees before the nearest vase, skimming my cold fingers over the details on it before filling my hands with lush, bewitching jasmine flowers.
Within an hour, the gardens are filled with glowing bulbs of fire, fine things like spun glass that float in the air. My abductor stands below my balcony, looking up at me. His eyes reflect the golden light of the fire, and his somber mouth is curved, almost as if with hope.
I do not speak. I run my fingers over a bruised orchid petal and it shimmers to health beneath my touch, as joyful as a purring cat.
III.
My abductor often comes to watch me in the gardens he has given me. He rarely speaks. He is a quiet shadow in his dark gray robes. He does not stand too close to me; rather, he trails behind me, half-hidden underneath an arbor dripping with grapevines, or lifting a glass of ambrosia to his lips as he sits in a stone chair in the shade of an apple-bejeweled tree. His spectral servants do not follow him when he comes to the garden. Nor do mine.
I wonder whether he is waiting for me to speak, or if he is content with the silence. I do not know what to say to him.
The gardens are expanding daily. Flowers do not spring up in my wake as they did on earth, but I have retained some of my mother's magic. The ground is not as dead as I thought. My abductor's gifts grow: tidy lines of fruitful apple trees, pomegranates ripening tart and colorful, trellises with thriving torrents of thorny sweet roses. Lily of the valley, tender as a young maiden on her wedding day, seem almost to sing as they rise out of the black underworld earth.
I walk a narrow curving path dividing a lake of crocuses and daffodils. My abductor trails behind me. I glance over my shoulder just once, and he starts, taking a step backward. His heel comes down on a delicate crocus. He looks down, that austere face stricken.
I step closer, and he freezes. I am close enough to reach out and touch him. His eyes are not pure black as I thought. They are the dark, dark blue of the Aegean at night. He watches me, the tightness of his jaw the only indication that my abductor feels anything, anything at all.
I crouch and skim my fingers over the bruised crocus. The song of life, of spring, hums through my veins. The bruising fades, the crocus is restoring, once more lifting its beautiful face toward the endless dark sky. Then I straighten, and look up at my abductor.
"I don't know anything about flowers," he says after a long moment.
"It's a crocus," I say.
He nods, but says nothing. I turn to walk back toward the pomegranate trees.
"I was lonely," he says. His voice is barely a murmur. I glance back at him, and see that he is gazing at me. His austerity has cracked like glass, and the longing of a world is written on his face. "I was so lonely."
Something in me cracks as well.
IV.
My abductor has become a student of the flowers. He kneels beside me when my hands are deep in the cool Elysian soil, and he reaches out a long, graceful finger to carefully touch the water-soft petal of an orchid. "What is this?" he asks me. His hands are strong and capable as they slip beneath leaves to mold soil at the bases of tender young stems. He likes best the glowing white lilies, with their delicate perfume, and the daffodils, those heralds of spring. Of the trees, it is the pomegranates that he likes best. When I make my daily patrol of the gardens, I save the pomegranate orchard for last, and linger there longest. There are tiny lights in the trees, glinting like the sun on water on a bright summer day.
He walks at my side now. He shortens his strides to match mine--my abductor is taller than I. He smells like cool spring earth and pine trees in the morning after a rain.
His fingers are warmer than I expect when he intertwines them with my own. Warm, and gritty still with earth from tending my flowers with me. I do not protest. We are silent as we walk beneath the trees.
In the palace my handmaiden draws a bath for me in a golden tub. She washes my hair, and combs it with a golden comb, and binds it with silk ribbons. She lifts my dirty robe to dress me, and I shake my head. If the dead could weep, she would. The violet silk is as soft as water upon my skin, the golden chains delicate as she wraps them around my waist. When my abductor comes to my door to ask me to sit upon his throne with him, I think perhaps he will weep. But he does not.
I sit at his side on blackest polished onyx when he sits in judgment of the dead. My abductor, great and mighty king, is a just ruler. He is stern, but not unkind. He does not suffer fools, but he does not strike them down. He tends their souls as I tend my flowers. And as I guide his hands through the lavender and the ivy, so too does he guide me in sharing the weight of judgment. We are father and mother of many, both living and dead.
I do not shrink from his gaze when he turns those midnight eyes upon me and asks for my judgment on a soul. I lift my chin and gaze back. Pride blooms in me like a sweet flower. Something else, something warm and tender, is blooming too.
When I smile, he smiles back uncertainly, as if he is not quite sure he is doing it correctly.
V.
The pomegranates are ripe now, their tangy fertile fragrance permeating the air as my lover and I lie beneath the bejeweled trees in the orchard. Though Helios is far and away from this quiet magical place, the Elysian fields have a honeyed warmth of their own, a small sun that glows between us. He likes it when my hair is spilling loose and wavy down my back like a maiden, and he can comb his fingers through it as quietly and gently as a feather falling to earth. I like it when I push him flat on his back in the grass and he laughs--my somber god of the dead, his mouth still curved when I press my lips to his.
His hands are tender when he unties the ribbons at my shoulders, but his mouth is as hot as the fires of Tartarus on my skin. I do not, I will not lie passively as my lover seduces me beneath the slender trees. I kiss, I caress, I whisper tender words.
I love.
The messenger comes when we are still tangled and drowsy with bliss. His winged feet are impatient and abrupt as they trod upon our daydreams and our love. "She must come back with me," he insists. My lover roars and shouts, but the messenger god will not budge.
At last my lover looks at me, and his shattered heart is written all over his face. My stony, stern god of the underworld. "Leave us," I tell Hermes quietly. "I will come, but you must give us a moment." Hermes hesitates, but his golden wings carry him away from us.
I wrap my arms around my lover, and he buries his face in my shoulder. He is almost like a child now, seeking comfort from the frightening world. How odd, that something like love could bring down this fierce king. He holds me so tightly I can scarcely breathe, but I do not protest. I close my eyes and breathe in the smell of him.
When he speaks, his words are muffled against my skin. "If you eat food of this realm, you'll be tied here forever," he says. I lean back to look into those haunted eyes. "Do you understand?" he asks. He is vulnerable now. Loving me has brought him so low, humbled him before Demeter's daughter. "You could come back. You could be with--you could come back, Persephone." He presses his lips together.
I cannot speak. I cannot move. This idea, this choice, it is a tremendous one, an entire world of glory and of fear. I could walk away from this prison, this land of the dead. I could walk away from this god, this king, who has given me the world. I could once again sit at my mother's feet and be Demeter's Persephone, to be the most adored and cherished daughter in all the world. I could walk in the light of Helios's bright chariot. Or I could stay, and be loved with the intensity of Poseidon's vast kingdom.
"I will love you," Hades says to me, "till the day I die."
I see a flash of movement. Hermes is coming back. We have had our time, too much time--not nearly enough.
I stand, and I am naked before my lover. He is kneeling at my feet. I reach up into the tree above me, and wrap my fingers around one of the fruits that hangs like a jewel from the branch. I pluck it freely.
The tears spill down my lover's face as the pomegranate juice spills from my lips. It is tart, it is tangy, but all I can taste is sweetness.