Stories

Chapter 3.3 - Summer Festivals

“Welcome back, daughter,” her mother greeted her, all smiles, at the mouth of the cave.
Persephone felt a little stiff from sleeping on the ground and still a little turned around after traveling back and forth twice between worlds within the boundaries of one night.
“I take it you had a pleasant journey home,” Demeter continued, way too cheerful so early in the morning. “How is your husband?”
“He’s well, thank you,” Persephone mumbled, squinting from the crude light.
“I take it your followers are still looking for you,” her mother pointed to the group, which meandered through the forest and valleys carrying torches in the middle of the day.
“I wouldn’t deprive them of the excitement of finding me, eventually. Let’s give them a few hours. I have a few things to tend to in the meantime.”
“Your husband gave you homework, dear?”
“No. It’s a favor I promised a friend. In fact, I was wondering if you’d be able to help. It’s a plant.”
“For Proteus.”
When you spend so much time switching between realities, whether it’s from death to life or from sleep to consciousness, you are bound to cross paths with the shapeshifting god of the unconscious, whose gift of prophecy and ability to alter the properties of matter were unmatched, even among the gods.

Chapter 3.2 - The Eleusinian Mysteries

The communicants started their descent into the depths of the earth, with nothing to light their way other than the high priestess’s torch.
The latter was tall, and her pallid members stood in stark contrast with her long hair, black as night, which flowed freely and draped around her shoulders like a mantle, and the black chiton, tied around her waist three times with a thin golden girdle.
She wore a tri-faced mask, which wrapped around her head, hiding her identity, and on her temples, the silver horns of the crescent moon: the symbol of Hecate.
As they continued their descent, the trail became narrower, sweeping between large boulders, overgrown with tree roots in places, its quietude disrupted by the sounds of an underground river flowing nearby.
The supplicants’ faces looked carved in stone, they all look the same, as if their spirits have left them. 
They seemed unaware of each other’s presence, their fixated stare darting into the darkness before them, as if something powerful inside it pulled them into its unknown depths, a ghostly army of the dead whose footsteps were muffled by the soft silt on the path.
All of them had partaken in the ceremonial drink, a hot wine mixed with herbs and spices which felt like liquid fire running through their blood, a paradoxically still fire, bringing peace beyond understanding. 
Their spirits turned inward, leaving their earthly shells vacant and making them look as if they were sleepwalking down the path.

Chapter 2.3 - The Moirae

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home.
Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric.
Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to harmonize with it, an exquisite mirage, poised to fool the senses.
It looks solid and permanent enough, but it’s not, and if you touch it, it shrivels under your fingers like a mimosa plant, contracting into itself and letting you hold on to thin air.
Reality is made of nothing, just like dreams; it comes from nothing and has to return to it eventually, it just does it so much slower than the latter.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 3.1 The Dionysia

Persephone used the pretext she had to oversee the progress in the barley fields to take her leave from the city, which was bursting at the seams with crafting festival paraphernalia, cooking, and the stress people always experience on the eve of major holidays.
The city’s noise and bustle gradually disappeared as the goddess ventured into the fields, which had already been plowed and sown, and whose fresh shoots were starting to emerge, green and slender like grass.
The clearings and meadows overflowed with daffodils, and though the air was still cool, Persephone felt Gaia’s vibrant return to life.
The honeybees, her underworld messengers, emerged from crevices and hollows, to greet their mistress with the latest news from home.
She watched them dance their messages, smiling to old memories, intoxicated with the scent of daffodils and caressing the tiny shoots of wheat as if they were her little children, gathered round to bask in her presence.
Such blessed peace she felt in the fields, whose bounty filled her heart more than any offerings left on the steps of her altars.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Chapter 2.3 The Moirae

The world is surface, a shimmery veil of illusion, woven from gossamer and dreams by the Moirae to give the unbound consciousness a home.
Behind this elusive veil, the fundamental action principles of existence, known only to the gods, continuously transform reality, sometimes unseen, sometimes picking at its back and putting waves through its diaphanous fabric.
Its visible side glistens like a mirror, reflecting any consciousness that is there to see it, its ever changing imagery shifting to harmonize with it, an exquisite mirage, poised to fool the senses.
It looks solid and permanent enough, but it’s not, and if you touch it, it shrivels under your fingers like a mimosa plant, contracting into itself and letting you hold on to thin air.
Reality is made of nothing, just like dreams; it comes from nothing and has to return to it eventually, it just does it so much slower than the latter.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.2 Charming Dionysus

“Good morning, princess!”
Dionysus entered the room, surrounded, as always, by a large posse of obviously impaired maenads and satyrs. 
He never went anywhere without them, and sometimes Persephone wondered if he’d ever been alone.
Huge Etruscan amphorae filled with wine had been brought to the room for his visit, a welcome escape from the white on white decor, even though the god himself barely partook, since he drank nectar like the rest of them, to restore his beauty and youth.
Persephone admired his graceful demeanor as he approached her, a vaguely androgynous countenance, with long flowing hair, braided with wild vines, a beautiful figure who looked deceptively young, his gait as light and carefree as the spirit which shone, childlike, in his eyes.
He smiled at the goddess, who was close kin, and with whom he shared the gift of walking between worlds.
‘How did he keep so fit?’ Persephone couldn’t help but be amazed, ‘when he was constantly engaged in this self-indulgent lifestyle!’ 
It obviously took its toll on his entourage, the satyrs who, she assumed, had never experienced sobriety, and the maenads who roamed the forests drunk and out of control, acquiring the strength and ferocity of wild beasts from the substances they consumed.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 2.1 The Healings of Epidaurus

It was almost midnight when the goddesses and their suite reached the temple, where they were welcomed in complete silence by the priests, who took them to the Thollos and retreated respectfully, content with the privilege of watching the ceremony.
Persephone parted the veil between worlds, allowing the denizens of her kingdom safe passage to the land of the living.
“Merry meet, Asclepius,” she welcomed the famed doctor with a smile.
“I carry glad tidings from your husband, mistress, and all his love. I will be happy to return and reassure him you are well.”
“What dreams you bring, my friend? Will the afflicted receive welcome news?”
“I bring healing for some, and comfort for others, and news from the ones they have loved in this world. The portal between worlds is open and we await your command, my queen.”
With that, he bowed deeply and moved to her side, to control the flow of healing dreams to the patients, who were fast asleep, curled up on the stone floors of the temple.
“Who is coming forth to seek guidance?” She uttered the first words of the ritual.
“It’s Attalus, goddess, son of Cassander.”
“And what is your need?”
The sleeping soul gave her the full measure of his ailments, while Asclepius listened keenly, occasionally nodding.
When the patient was done talking, the doctor thought deeply, then scribbled a recipe for medicine in light, on a parchment made of air, and handed it to the sleeping soul, to remember upon awakening.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.3 The Haunted Caves

They saw it from afar, as they were traveling among the clouds in Helios’s chariot, the strange city of caves, carved in the soapstone of a cluster of spiky cliffs, sometimes by nature, sometimes by man, displayed amid the arid landscape like a giant sculpture, maybe an artifact the titans left behind, before his love of humankind landed Prometheus his penance.
A huge human beehive it seemed to be, where the diligent workers moved about through hundreds of holes in the stone cliffs towards the innards of the place, dug deep into the earth: the huge underground metropolis that marked the beating heart of Anatolia.
A large delegation welcomed the goddesses, with the traditional sheaves of grain and prolonged orations, and when it was done prostrating, the group surrounded them like living water and carried them down stairs and ramps through large subterranean chambers and hallways, past people carrying on their mundane activities, past carved galleries and alleys and arcades, public spaces and ventilation shafts, temples, tombs, and sanitation systems, stables and wells and water reservoirs, all the parts of a flawlessly functioning city, miles beneath the earth’s surface, illuminated only by Prometheus’s gift.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.2 Praise Olympus!

The sun woke her up the next morning, the memory of her dream still fresh. She was picnicking in her orchard, eating pomegranate seeds at dusk, while Hades, who sat beside her, watching, brought each seed to life with a light of its own as her lips touched it, just to amuse her.
A group of nymphs burst into the room, giggling and shoving each other, and suddenly grew quiet when they found themselves in the presence of the goddess.
A prolonged monotonous droning of odes and praise ensued, a spectacle Persephone listened to with patience and appreciation, like a good immortal would, secretly relieved when it finally ended and it was proper for her to get out of bed.
The darn thing was massive, placed atop of a stepped marble platform to loom over the also enormous room, which would have been a better fit for a ballroom than a bedroom, and whose glistening white portico opened out to the sights above the clouds.
Far into the distance, the peak of Mount Olympus poked through them, a vision in rose and lavender, halfway between dream and reality.

The Gates of Horn and Ivory - 1.1 Spring

Persephone had a secret, one she could never tell her mother.
She had never enjoyed the gossip, the pointless aggravation, and the churning of vanities and ambitions that surrounded her life in the living world, the daily rehashed dramas of the nymphs’ latest trysts, the self-centered empty dalliances of the male gods, the petty envies of the spurned minor goddesses, the closed-minded expectations of the powers that be, the gaudy, useless pomp, the empty rhetoric.
When tall, dark, and handsome walked her way, she had rolled her eyes at first, in exasperation of having to endure yet another episode of the over-inflated male ego, and was determined to evade his attention as soon as feasible and with as little damage to her eardrums as possible, but he turned out to be nothing she expected.
He didn’t tell her who he was, of course, out of fear he’d be rejected before he had a chance to speak his woo, and by the time they got closer, he had even more reason to keep his identity quiet, grateful for the miracle of her and worried not to lose her love.