The Gift of the Lethe

A Shattered Heart

Athena steps through the locked door adjacent to the weaving room, the one that is often hidden in shadows and blocked by supplies. Tapestries line the walls, layered over each other. Each and every one of them brims with darkness, with wounds that have long since bled. They're the tapestries that hurt but she can't bring herself to burn them, so she locks them away instead.

Athena knows she should have gone to find Hermes first, rather than stopping here. But . . . she needed to think, for a moment. She needs to remember her reasons for choosing this path. Pallas was right, she had been forgetting who her lover was. She had been so focused on who Pallas was to her, that she forgot who Pallas was to others, who she is in her very soul.

Just as she was forgetting Pallas' entirety, so too was she beginning to forget how everything began. And she needs to remember it. She walks across the floor to stand in front of the central tapestry, the newest addition. It's the one Pallas made, the memory of their fatal sparring match.

She runs her fingertip along one of the sharp, angular lines of the piece, the jagged edges of the aegis. She follows the edges up to look at her father's face, his eyes shining in a cold, cruel light. She sighs and looks down to her own face, expression preserved in the cloth. She hadn't let herself look the first time she saw the piece, too afraid of what she would find.

But she makes herself look now, at how her face is the only softness in the entire piece as an indication of how Pallas has never blamed herr, to remind herself of how it all began. She's always found that returning to the beginning helps her to make a plan, and she doesn't think it will be any different now. Athena was getting lost in the rage she felt towards her father for each action he took, each time he toed or crossed her line.

She thought it had started recently, only after Pallas returned. But here, looking at this tapestry, she finds evidence of the opposite. The expression on Zeus' face isn't one that would come about just in pride, or his attempt to make Athena win. It's too dark. He knew what could happen, and he did it anyways.

He did it without a thought for Pallas, or for even Athena, though he said she was the reason why he did it. Instead, he shattered their lives to raise himself up. Under a mask of Athena's own glory, yes, but still resulting in Zeus' benefit. She has always been an extension of his power, so to speak, and that's what he wanted of her.

But she isn't letting him control her anymore, and her father knows it. That's why he feels threatened by Pallas, because he sees her as the reason for his loss of power. He's afraid of losing it, and she can allow him his emotions. But she can't allow him to lash out and harm others because of them.

Athena shakes her head, admonishing herself. If she had seen this spiral earlier, if she had seen her father begin to grab at power and desperately try to hold it in the same way she knows his own father did, perhaps she could have prevented this. Stopped all this pain before it began. And it will be painful.

Zeus may be a tyrant now, like his father before him, but he is still her father and she loves him even still. A love that burns and tears, trying to break her, but love nevertheless. And she has to let it go. It isn't healthy to keep it any longer. She reaches out to touch Zeus's woven face once again.

With a whisper, she rips into her heart to tear out a tiny piece of it. "Goodbye, Father."

She twists away from the tapestry and crosses to the door, feeling the shackles drop from her heart. Her spine straightens and her mind clears, no longer burdened by what she is to do. For the first moment in a very long time, she truly feels like the warrior goddess the world sees her as. No more will she carry the weight of the wounds her love for Zeus gave her.

No longer will she let him chain her to his will like a hound. She is her own, and she won't go back. So she steps from his shadow into her own light, glowing with an ember of Pallas' flaming heart. The lock of the door clicks just as she emerges fully into that light, and she stops in shock at the sight that greets her on the other side.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What did you think of this? Was Athena right to let her father go? What do you think was waiting for her outside the room? Tell me your thoughts!

Happy reading and I'll see you next chapter!

~ Goddess of Fate, signing out