Elysian Fields

CHAPTER 3

Isolation may bring out an individual's true nature, but for Kore, it brought out her worst fears and an endless cycle of reliving memories from her childhood. The second or third week in isolation (she lost count after the first few days), she kept remembering the last time she saw her father.

She hardly knew her father, Dyeus, a man more myth than reality. Those who knew him told her often that he wasn't much to worry over and that in the end, it was better she never knew him. People who grew up with him said he was a cruel man, taken by rage easily and an oppressive attitude. He liked control and made sure that he always maintained it. She'd seen pictures growing up, and was filled with dread when she could see herself reflected in those gray-green eyes. Her nose that crinkled when she smiled, just like him. She even had his auburn hair and crooked smile. She wanted to be one of those girls that adored her father, but instead she found herself dreading the reflection of her father that stared back at her in the mirror.

Her mother, Demi, gave up her life for Kore's father. Part of his controlling nature led him to believe that a woman should have no voice. Emotionally manipulative and verbally abusive, daggers would fall from his mouth, scarring Kore's mother for years to come. Even to the day that Kore was taken, her mother carried the burden of her father's opinions on her shoulders.

When Kore was the age of three, her father looked into her gray-green eyes with his cold, icy eyes of the same color and decided he'd had enough. Her free spirit made it hard for him to control her and when he would hit her, the hamlet would shun him for his actions, reminding him that she was only a girl. He looked into her eyes, then turned and left, striding over to his horse and mounting the beast that would carry him far from his home. Kore ran after him, feet bare and hair flying behind her, screaming "Papa!" at the top of her little lungs, forcing more volume than her tiny body could handle, practically quaking from the force of begging him to return. All of Elv watched as a young girl had her first taste of abandonment, her experience of being thrown away like trash. Jetsam adrift on a river of pain and disappointment. She remembered her feet burning from the cold, stinging and then turning numb. Frigid air shot daggers through her lungs, tearing her throat and making it hoarse.

Her very last memory of the man she called her father is one of hesitation. Her screams of "Papa!" must have reached something in his empty soul, because he stopped for a fragment of a second to look back at his daughter. Eyes that matched her own locked onto her face, a mask of apathy holding her father's face hostage.

"Beloved, I can't be what you need. I need to be free. You will forget me and I will. Please go home to Mama. I don't want you here."

Then he vanished.

Perhaps he did not vanish. Perhaps he ran away on horseback, galloping through the forest as fast as his horse could carry him. Perhaps Kore continued to run after him, screaming that she wanted him here, even if he did not want her there. Perhaps she was devoured by wolves and born again without a father to tie her to this world, only her mother. Whatever happened next, Kore had it blocked from the cage of her mind, steel bars holding out pain and disappointment that threatened to breach the walls. Even in isolation, alone where none could see or hear her, Kore would not allow herself to remember anything beyond falling ill with a fever and her mother sitting vigil at her bedside, whispering to her "He can't go and take you, too. Please, my daughter, don't leave me, too."

Don't leave me. Don't leave me, too.

The weight of realizing that she had done just that, even against her will, broke Kore. Burying her face in the filthy slab of fodder she called a bed, she began to sob. How was her mother? What did she think was happening? She hoped they'd left her mother to live. She hoped that Aydon was taking care of her.

Tears pouring from her eyes, she prayed that her mother was safe, and then she prayed that she would die in her cell before the end of the Reckoning came. There was no shame in death, but there would be in finding herself the servant of Lord Hades.