Page 2 of His in the Dark

PERSEPHONE

The gods are flawed. The prophecy is wrong.

I could never be who they say I am.

A chill runs down my shoulders as I leave the grand main hall with haste. My heart pounds and as I pass the gardens; I’m reminded that they knew before I did. All the tales they tell come true and that turns my blood cold.

The roses wilt and the edges of the grass turned to a putrid brown. I stop midstep and stare back at the faded petals. It is a sign of death, when flowers shrivel and do not come alive again, no matter how rich the soil is.

My power is fading. That is the reality and I have no choice but to drown in the despair of it all.

I swallow thickly as my bare feet pad on the quartz floor, and my pale pink silk gown flutters behind me, giving away my urgency. I pass by the grand foyer and the din of talk comes and goes quickly as I move past the open doors, my presence not being required.

And why would it be?

Olympus is the home of the Gods and Goddesses. The heavens that Zeus, my father, shares with the powerful and mighty. I’ve heard that mortals can’t imagine the beauty of this place. It is beyond their depths. There are white spires like clouds, and the rich marble floors are warmed by the heat of the sun. Lush gardens grow in courtyards trimmed with gold. I’ve heard they don’t have water like we have here, every drop sparkling. Everything here is as pure as the Gods themselves.

Every presence in this grandeur is worthy of its divinity. For the servants, it’s the highest honor to be in the company of the divine and their blessings.

I was divine once, too. My birth was a celebration. Demeter’s daughter would bring fruitfulness as she does with such ease. I was once filled with powerful magic. Not anymore...and he knows. There is no hiding from Zeus. The prophets will not keep their knowledge a secret, for that is why they hear the whispers of the universe. They hear so that they can share what they know.

I fear they will all come to know what was just told to me.

After all, the prophets have been right all this time for everything that has fallen and risen.

The moment I get to my gilded carved door, I close it with my back to the gold painted etches. The thud is barely heard over my racing heart. It is not the foretelling I wanted, but it is the fate I knew I would receive. I’d still hoped that some miracle would happen in my favor, perhaps even a blessing from the Gods who still have power flowing in their veins.

“My Lady,” Beatrice calls out in surprise as she rises from her knees on the floor. The mortal has a hand on her chest as she takes in my presence and bows with respect. It only adds salt to my wound. For I do not feel worthy of such things.

She’s as graceful as anything in Olympus. Dark haired and dark eyed, she makes a calming contrast in her servant’s robes. Her Grecian blood is evident. Beatrice’s hair, plaited behind her head in a thick braid, shines in the light from the candles. She is surrounded by dozens of small tea lights and taller tapers.

It seems I’ve caught her in the middle of a ritual perhaps. She did not expect my early return.

The pure gold candle holders with white candles coated in a mixture of herbs sit in a pattern on the floor. The flames are bright and tall and in the center of the altar lies an old iron key I recognize.

My heart still beats too fast to be truly calm, but I have interrupted her and I regret that. “It wasn’t my intention to disturb your prayers.”

My father’s disappointment in knowing my own servant prays to another God is etched in my memory. Yet another failure on my part. I cannot provide for those who provide for me. I cannot give them the grace they need from me.

For so long, I thought of Olympus as my home, but now I see how little I belong here. Olympus is grand the way my father is grand. His power reaches every corner of the earth and the heavens. No one can hide from his power, and whenever they seek him, he can be found.

What am I next to that? I am nothing. I have no presence that can fill these flawless rooms. I am as small as one of the flowers in the gardens. Even the flowers have more to offer Olympus than I do.

I do not speak any of this aloud to Beatrice. She already knows the things I fear, and the things that are coming. She is my confidant and I am hers.

“What is it you ask of Hekate?” I question her, righting my gown and standing taller as I should. My heart still beats savagely from the fears that have only grown stronger.

“Only guidance,” Beatrice answers. “I long to see my sister at peace in her dying days and I struggle with my grief.”

“If you wish to go to her?—”

“I will not leave you, my Lady. I only need to hear of her peace.”

“Your sister is merely mortal. She will only be here for a short while. If you change your mind, your departure will be missed but it will be divinely guided and protected.” Before I can add that she should go to her sister before she’s gone, I catch the agony in her stare and I realize it’s for me. I too may not be here much longer. Not as a Goddess. Not in the castles. I’ll be shunned to the forests and lost forever as a garden nymph. So much of what I thought I would be seems so close to being lost forever. Beatrice will lose me as she loses her sister. The choice before her is which one of us to see for the final time.

My throat tightens as I realize her reality. I wonder if my name is in her prayers to Hekate.

“I do not need to go to her; I will see her in other lives. Death becomes us all and it is not an end, merely a crossroad,” Beatrice tells me and I rip my gaze away from her, making my way from the atrium, further back to the broad window with the daybed so I may rest. “What have they foretold?” she asks and her tone is tight with emotion. An anxiousness resides in her eyes. It’s been there far too long. I can barely remember a time in which she did not worry for me. That worry has been stronger in recent days, and there is nothing I can say to comfort her. “What did the prophecy tell you this evening?”

The last rays of sunlight outside Olympus are a deep, rich gold, as they should be in the presence of the Gods. I gaze upon it with a pain in my throat. I will not be able to look upon these sights for much longer. I try to console myself with the thought that I was able to experience them at all, but it does not bring me any comfort. Sometimes I think it might have been better if I were born mortal. If I had been born like Beatrice, I might never have known what I have lost. What is so close to slipping through my grasp.

“Nothing more than a garden nymph,” I make myself say although it’s barely a whisper. “I will not be a powerful Goddess.”

There is nothing I can say to comfort her.

There was no hesitation or question. That is my fate in Olympus, they made that very clear. I will lose my powers in Olympus. And yet they could only offer one reprieve. You will be given a choice and it is only in that moment that your fate may change. Until then it is others that control your destiny. I stare at the mere human whose sole purpose is to tend to me. She has sacrificed for my comfort in the last decades. I have been the most important work of her life, and I know she feels as if I am being taken from her.

Beatrice glances downward, but brings her eyes back to mine as she speaks again. “Have you told your mother?”

Have I told her? Have I gone to the gardens where she spends her days providing harvest and generously giving and giving to the earth realm? She raised me in those gardens, protecting me like she would protect her own heart.

My mother provides so easily. A single prayer is all she needs and abundance reigns for anyone who thinks to whisper her name, Demeter. That is power I thought I could inherit.

She has never had to fear being cast out from Olympus. The people who pray to her are right to love her, because she can give.

I hear the prayers of those who call to me for life, and I can do nothing.

“I have not gone to my mother. It is not a conversation I look forward to having with her.” What would she think of me, losing my powers? She did everything she could to protect me and guide me, so the fault must be mine.

“Your mother is a great Goddess,” Beatrice says quietly. “She may be able to offer you wisdom.” She stands in her black robe with the lights from the candle still flickering around her in the foyer of my quarters.

“Why do you press me about my mother so?” I question her. “It is not like you to be so vocal.”

The smallest pause tells me that Beatrice is choosing her words with great care. She has always spoken carefully but now she weighs every word as if it is the last time we will speak to each other.

“There was something in my cards today,” she begins. “A relationship of sorts that would ease your worries.” Tarot. The divinity that she seeks is not unlike the Fates.

“Perhaps it is you, Beatrice.” I do not need the cards to tell me that. Beatrice has always eased my worries.

She huffs a short laugh as if my interpretation is ridiculous. “I am only human, my lady.”

“Do not discredit the power of magic,” I tell her, though there is a certain irony in it, as I am the one losing my powers. I do not think magic will save me. It will not save me in time to preserve my place here. If anything does come of magic, it will come too late. The Fates have told me such.

Beatrice sighs. “If only I were of cunning descent. But alas.”

“All magic can be learned. I know.” I say this without feeling. My powers are weakening by the day, not growing stronger. If there was a cure to find in magic, certainly I would have found it.

“All magic can be learned,” Beatrice agrees, in a far more hopeful tone than mine. “You could always turn to magic, my lady. The Gods are gifted, but magic is for all of us.”

Again I scoff at her answer. “Allow the possibility of magic working,” she says. “That is all you must do. Simply allow it.”

It hurts to hear her have faith. Hope is the long way of saying goodbye.

“I used to think magic was for children. But then I learned of the Gods. You taught me anything is possible.”

My throat tightens and I’m unable to answer as I pass her candles with care and make my way to the cream silk settee. As I relax on it, attempting to ground myself, Beatrice continues.

“As long as there have been humans, there has been magic.” She asks, “Love spells were the first, weren't they?”

“Mmm.. it’s the first written, but I imagine there were others who did not write their intention,” I tell her with ease.

“I read the book from Egypt, the oldest book of magic in coptic,” she says with delight. I imagine it was offered to Hekate, the mother of witchcraft would have such delight with such things.

“And did you learn any spells?” I ask her, genuinely curious.

“There was one for love, but I do not think I crave to use it.”

I take her statement in and I do not know what possesses me to speak at the moment, but I say my thoughts with hopelessness, “I am not much different from mortals I think.”

Beatrice comes to sit beside me, the settee creaking slightly. “You are the daughter of Zeus, King of the Gods, and Demeter, Goddess of the Harvest. The divine is within you.”

The last of the day’s sunlight fades outside of Olympus as the wary seconds pass. It is no less grand in the dark. Milky shadows and gold lamplight decorate the walls in my rooms. There is endless grandeur outside my windows, the sky and the clouds paying constant tribute to my father. They even honor my mother, who uses her gifts above them and below. They do not honor me. Soon I will be like a flower in a mortal garden, alive only for a short time and offering only a pleasant thing to look at. Beauty is not enough for me to keep my place in Olympus.

“You are not like mortals,” she says so convincingly.

“Yet they pray to me to bring life,” I say, my frustration growing. “And I fail them.”

“They pray because you will bring it.” Beatrice puts a comforting hand on my arm. I wish I could take more comfort from it, but all the signs I have seen point to the forest and loneliness. There will be no other place for me. These rooms will not be mine. This place on Olympus will not be mine. “Magic takes time,” she says as if it is an answer.

“No.” I stare Beatrice in the eyes, and she looks back at me, her mouth set in a line. “They pray because the prophecy foretold my powers. We all know what is foretold does not always come true.”

“If that is so, then today is not set in stone, is it?”

It’s hard to accept her denial when I can feel it in my bones.

“You are able to bring life,” she says, her voice steady.

“Not the life they pray for.”

“Another kind, then. There are many kinds of life among the gods and mortals. Show me what you can do, my lady.”

My fingertips itch to show both her and myself that it is not all drained from me.

“Flowers,” I say, reaching for a pot at the windowsill. Even this does not come easily to me now. My fingers raise and I motion in short strokes to raise the seed up. I make a single sprout rise from the pot of earth. It does not seem to want to grow and the small flower that opens has thin petals. “Flowers like this. It is not what people get on their knees to ask for. This is not the life they want from me. Their loved ones no longer breathe, and these flowers cannot help them.”

“That is the cycle.” Beatrice folds her hands back in her lap and looks at the flower like it means something to the people who ask for my blessing. “And they are for Hekate.”

She reminds me of this of late. The cycles and that they are for the Keeper of the Keys, the other side of Hekate. She bares so many talents. The mother. The maiden. And the Crone.

“You love Hekate. She is your goddess, not me.”

“I love you.”

“Pray to someone who can bless you,” I tell her, my throat suddenly thick. Beatrice puts her arms around me in an embrace. Her strength is powerful in doing so. I have needed more of her embrace, and I do not know what I will do without Beatrice’s warmth and advice. I’m not prepared to be cast out and alone, but no one ever is.

“What is it, my lady? It is not only the prophecy. It cannot be. Did you dream again? If you did, you should have come to me. I would have lit candles for you and stayed with you in the night.”

I did dream. It was more than a dream, though. It was a night terror. I was terrified, it is true, but there is something else I do not want to admit to Beatrice. I do not want to admit that in the darkness of that dream I felt thrilling curiosity.

Chills run down my spine and legs all the way to my toes.

“Is that what it is?” She rubs soothing circles on my back, a sign of our closeness. Only the most favored servants may touch the Gods and Goddesses they serve. Or maybe it is not a sign of closeness, but of how far I have fallen. I will be less than a mortal soon. I will be wandering among the trees and no one will pray to me. If they do, their pleas will not find me. That is the most upsetting of all.

Beatrice tells me, “I will do a spell for clarity, and another for peace.”

It will not chase the dream away and...

I do not want her to remove the callings that come to me at night. There is something there.

Because I am not alone in the dream. There is a man in the shadows, with power beyond imagination, even for me. I want to know more about him. I should not have wanted to know, because curiosity like that is dangerous. My mother taught me that long ago. And still I desire to go to him. To speak to him. To look into his eyes.

There is a calling I cannot deny.

I cannot say if it is because of his power that I feel so drawn to or because I cannot see all of him in the shadows. My mother spent a great deal of time in my early years warning me away from dark thoughts and dark places. Those kinds of places have power, even in Olympus. I listened to her words and took them to heart, but when the dreams began, I could not resist.

Maybe that is why she warned me. Maybe she knew how it would feel to see those shapes in the dark and crave knowing more about them. For a short time, it gives me something to think about other than the loss of my power. It gives me a strange kind of hope. It could be that I am grasping at straws, but I have little else to grasp.

“What is your terror concerning?” Beatrice asks me.

“I don’t remember anymore,” I answer, feigning disconcert.

It is a lie. I will never forget a second of what comes to me in the night. Certainly not him.