Stories

Hades always felt empty after Persephone saw the returning souls off into the world. To allay her sadness, she went to the Hall of Scrolls, to reread what the Moirae had in store for them. Hades’s palace was vast, and not many people knew that, because very few had been allowed past the sumptuous rooms at the front, which were intended for receiving visitors. It had libraries and vaults, salons an...

Life doesn’t change. Sure the technologies advance and the day-to-day gets easier, but people aren’t fundamentally different from how they were centuries ago. The same emotions and drives push them on their paths, and the same disappointments sour their spirits. Persephone tended to her souls like a gardener tends to his or her plants, watching them get born, live and die, forget their experiences...

Every four years in the middle of summer, the mortals gathered to celebrate the muses in a gentle valley at the feet of Mount Helicon. The nine daughters of Mnemosyne, they weren’t your usual goddesses; they were a gift to humankind. Nobody talked about them as such, out of fear these wonders that fired the human mind to create masterpieces might be taken away, to leave mankind only the toiling an...

Those blessed with the gift of prophecy form a small but very special community. They instinctively seek each other’s presence, they are drawn to those who are similarly blessed. If they are mortal, they become oracles and seers whose wisdom is sought and revered, and people travel from far away to seek their counsel. They are the living vessels of the gods, who speak through them in cryptic messa...

On the westernmost edge of the Oceanus, which spans the vast distance between the world of the living and the underworld, there is a splendid garden, constantly bathed in the glow of the sunset. The garden belongs to Hera, a wedding gift from her grandmother, and wonderful apple trees with golden fruit grow there, under the jealous guard of the dragon Ladon, an offspring of the Typhon, and the rat...

Persephone stood tall on the bow of the ship, against the breeze.  Behind her, the fortune’s chosen, the ones who managed to navigate its treacherous waters through three lifetimes in a row, without reproach, were gazing towards the islands in the distance with apprehension and awe, not yet able to believe their luck, eyes moist for what they left behind.  Lost for words, they feared the promise o...

There was much sound and fury in Hades’ chambers the next morning, the clamor of many people speaking in anger, and above them all Persephone recognized the voice of Zeus. She got dressed in a hurry and sneaked into the anteroom of the large conference hall where Hades was involved in some very heated negotiations with an entire delegation of Olympians, which, as an extraordinary circumstance, inc...

When she wanted to take a break from her daily activities, Persephone wandered along the banks of the Lethe, under the slender branches of the willows, which arched to touch its waters, and walked all the way to the cave of Hypnos. She went there mostly to pick poppies, whose flowers surrounded the quiet realm of the god of sleep. The bright red blooms glowed from afar in the perpetual sunset, a b...

She rushed home, crossing the bridge over the Acheron, past the elm of false dreams, through the mucky banks of the Vale of Mourning and the orchard to get home faster, so she had to stop and shake the pumice dust off her sandals before she entered the palace. Hermes was waiting in the loggia overlooking the gardens, impatient, as always. “Great! You’re here.” “Good morning to you too, cousin.” “A...

Hades is a water realm. Surrounded by Oceanus, it’s crisscrossed by rivers and streams whose rash and unsettled currents can be heard in the background almost everywhere. From the quiet Lethe meandering between boulders in Hypnos’s cave, careful not to awaken him, to the echoes of the Styx, muffled as it flows through underground caves, the sights and sounds of water are everywhere, sometimes soot...

Persephone sneaked out into the gardens the next morning, grateful to have a few quiet moments to reconnect with her plant companions. Everything had spirit in the Underworld, even the rocks and the streams, and her beloved trees were the goddess’s most trusted friends. The poplars flittered in the twilight, their gold leaves shimmering in ways which would have gratified Demeter, who always though...

She said goodbye to her mother at the mouth of the cave of Taenarum, crumbling under the weight of her sorrow and tears, and harboring guilt over feeling relieved when she finally stepped into its dark depths and its silence. Hecate was supposed to meet her and lead the way, but Persephone had walked that path so many times she really didn’t need the dark goddess to guide her.  She grabbed a lit t...

To say that everybody woke up the next day nursing a headache would be an understatement. The wine and the herbs left a parting gift - a vicious nausea, amplified to epic levels by the main part of the ceremony. The Antleriai, the wailers, descended into the Megara pits, specially outfitted with snakes for the occasion, to retrieve decomposed pieces of the pig sacrifices, which were then placed on...

A mournful song and the unmistakable scent of winter filled the mist the next morning, when the festival attendants woke up to an eerie landscape. The meadow grasses were covered in a thin dusting of ice, and their dried flower heads, which the freezing rain had pounded relentlessly overnight, were encased in transparent globes of ice that acted like magnifying glass to enhance every detail of the...

“Have you prepared yourself, daughter? You have to set an example for all the married women: fast for nine days, refrain from the pleasures of the flesh and purify yourself to be worthy of the Goddess’s blessing.” “Yes, mother. Although I find it a bit ironic that I need to prepare myself so I’d be worthy of my own blessing.” “You are a role model, daughter. Everyone is looking to you for guidance...

“Mother, aren’t we going the wrong way?” she asked Demeter when the ship left the shore and started following the sun due west instead of sailing towards the sunrise. Demeter smiled, but said nothing. “Where are we going?” “Sicily.” “Why?” “You’ll see, the latter smiled in anticipation.” Anthesphoria was a festival of flowers, and as such, dedicated to Persephone, or, more precisely, to her incarn...

The delegation left early in the morning, poised to reach the shores of Magna Graecia at sunrise. Everywhere else Persephone was just another goddess of the Pantheon, but in Locri, she was the goddess. Two majestic temples were raised for her worship, and the city had bestowed upon her the additional honor of being the protector of childbirth, thus managing to intrude upon the attributions of both...

“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...

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 wo...

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 mi...

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 wh...

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 mi...

“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 p...

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 we...

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...