The Goddess of Blessed Death

To Be Born Wrong

Panthenaic Way goes through the city, taking its travelers to and from the sea and the Acropolis. It carries them through the green bushes, through red and off-white houses and the temples, one long and the round tholos, and into the agora, where shops are set up and Athenians haggle with the local and traveling merchants.

Mors and Macaria walk along Panthenaic Way towards the city and away from the rocky hill. From up high, the village is a small body of red-brown and white and thatched rooves. Green bushes, yellow and sage grasses, beige sand and tawny dirt, and white stones wash over the hill and are spotted throughout the city. The homes and temples and bathhouses grow as Macaria and Mors walk towards the market.

"Do you often walk?" Mors asks. It doesn't go over Macaria's head that even in asking about her past or her habits, he'd careful not to bring up Calydon after the week she's had.

"Yes, I walked a lot with my mother or one of my brothers," she says. "Sometimes even with my father, if he was home." She adds under her breath, "which was rare."

"Really?" he asks in pseudo surprise.

Macaria casts him a suspicious glance as they walk along, nearing the city. "Yes," she murmurs. The few rows of homes nearest to the Acropolis are two-story, many with their own temples. "Men flaunt whatever they can. It's how they cement their status among one another, but they need us to get there. Without marriages, where would they be? Without my mother, would my father still have become a god?"

"My sister is strong as a fleet of men, in my opinion. She's a thousand in one. Man fear her."

Macaria suppresses a smile. He could just be another who knows pretty words, especially as pretty as he is—but they were very pretty words.

"No man truly fears women," she says bitterly. "Just loss of power."

Mors is quiet. He gazes down the path, where tents and wagons are set up for bartering in the distance. "Do you want to go around?" he asks.

"No," Macaria says. "I enjoy markets." Reading between his lines, she adds, "I can take care of myself. My father made sure of that."

Mors's gaze lingers on the shapes ahead as the tents and villagers and merchants slowly grow in size. As they walk along towards the market, the homes steadily grow smaller but not so small as the ones on the outskirts which Macaria can only see from a vantage point on the Acropolis where there are yards and space for animals and crops.

A man walks buy, looking Macaria up and down. She glares at him openly, but it's not until the man's eyes land on Mors that he is sent scuttling off like a beaten dog.

"What about your father?" she asks, irked but hoping to catch Mors off guard. "Who was he?"

"Parents are their children's foundations. My parents were no different, except that it was much more literal. They were powerful, even necessary, but their village was small before I was born. They helped to build it from nothing after a war had threatened to destroy it. Some were ostracized, my family and I were among them."

"Why?"

"We were different. Our leaders, too, feared their own loss of power."

"It's sounds as though there were quite a few of you who were cast out. You didn't band together and fight?"

"We've found that making our own community is better than being stuck in one that cannot see our strengths."

"You rebuilt an entire village, then? But then, how did you end up in Sparta? How are you related to King Demophon?" Once again, trumpets and horns sound off in the back of her mind. Something isn't lining up.