The Taste Of Divinity

Τ Ρ Ι Α Ν Τ Α Τ Ε Σ Σ Ε Ρ Α

G A R D E N   O F   A S H P H O D E L S,   U N D E R W O R L D.

Persephone was on her knees.

Her broken palms lay flat on the barren earth, caressing the old leaves that had fallen onto the ground, dead but peaceful while the lungs of the older trees struggled, rising and falling painfully as they stole oxygen from those who deserved it the most and died slowly, ingloriously in their silence.

There ought to be peace in death, a sense of wild, untamed longing.

Not greed.

Never greed.

Greed brought suffering, a price not even the land of wealth and death could pay.

Her nails had filled with soil and the remnants of dreams that lay discarded after the years of abuse had forced them to shutter. She dug them deeper into the earth, burying them as one ought to and did so without breathing a single word.

Above her, the moonlight danced.

She looked wretched, she looked like she was praying to a deity far too devious to have its name caressed by the winds.

She looked like she was praying to him.

Her clothing lay pooled around her curled form, becoming one with the mud and the dry soil, as though on purpose, a ploy to enrage the voice that roamed free in her mind. One voice. Her mother, that eternal figure with the golden hair that resembled the blood of the Gods while it was fresh, barely out of the wound.

She always spoke sweetly to her, in a voice that even honey envied.

The commands spoken were left to be dismembered by the silence. There was no truth in them, after all. They did not matter.

She wasn't her mother and she wasn't her daughter. Not any longer. She was not simply her daughter, the daughter born from the strange union of thunders and flowers. She was not simply another product of the perpetually dreary memory of the past.

She had become a wife, a Queen, a stranger.

And he, always there to remind her, like the crickets in the summer, like the doves in the spring. And he, always there, beside her or hidden in the dark background, to gaze at her, to celebrate his victory silently, to fall deeper and deeper into the mouth of the beast that hid inside him, frightened that it would be found and killed. Guilt, was the name of the beast but like the Minotaur that would eventually roam Crete, its name held no meaning.

And he, always there, selfish and boastful, arrogant.

"How cruel can you be?"

And he, always there, peaceful, loving, comforting.

"Cruel, my soul?" His dark eyebrows lowered in deep thought, concealing his eyes. "How am I being cruel?"

A few tears fed the starving earth.

"Yes, cruel." The dirt stained pads of her fingers traced the outline of her eyes, wiping away the weak drops that were unwilling to abandon her and meet their end away from her. At least then, they met the comfort of her touch. After all, there ought to be peace in death. "Gifts are meant to bring joy, are they not?"

Her melancholy came in the form of a white dove that sank its claws in her chest, leaving it gaping when the Narcissus--that perfect imitation of his first gift which had the audacity to have been masterfully placed on the very ground that used to house those lifeless asphodels of his--opened its petals to greet its Queen.