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Persephone, in spite of everything the wind wrings out of her, is not a drunkard. There is, in fact, a solid pip of blood-red bitterness working its way through her heart and mind that anyone - even the fates, especially the fates - would dare to claim as such. To mock her in such a way, to make a laughingstock of a god they once dared not name, dread queen spring and all the other epitaphs making her preen as they crossed each praying lip. But myths are hard to break. Harder still, when they are in the middle of being written, and rewritten, and rewritten again. And every year, like a clockwork, words she doesn’t quite mean tilt their way down her throat. Takes a lot of medicine to make it through the wintertime. She knows how easy it would be, to say the phrase in truth. To pass through this humiliation in a haze of wine and poppy seeds. To scoff in disgust and hatred as Hades brings another young girl into their home who hungers for a taste of something more. To pass through to the end of this latest myth with the sweetness of ambrosia on her lips and the numb indifference of a god who would simply outlive the indignity. Still. There ain’t a single creature on the great expanse of the earth that would call Persephone the god of fools. She wasn’t crowned queen of the underworld for pretty looks alone. She hasn’t remained sole queen of the underworld by virtue of being a ‘maiden pure’ married to her Hades. And so, in the strange blemishes of lucidity she finds in between the pull of the winds, the queen of the underworld considers her options. There is what the fates offer her - piss poor and paltry an option as it is. To spend however long it takes them to get bored of the poor muse’s boy wasted in a stupor of spite and fermentation. It is the easy option. The safe option. It is also far from the only option. She could try to break the myth. Fight the howling melody in her ears, turn her back on everything she’s ever known and reforge herself in the pieces left over. She could make herself anew and to hell with everything else, as she’s due as a god. But the effort involved, the pain of rebirthing her entire being and soul into a new shape… she’s walked that road and it ain’t nearly as nice an option as it sounds. So then there’s a compromise. Somewhere in between two extremes there lives at least one option that Persephone can pursue with the same wretched insistence as she once did her queendom. The fates want the muse’s boy down in the underworld, to retrieve his wife. Let him come then. Let the wind screech and jeer in victory as she lets the interlopers into her home, and let them stay until she’s well and sick of them. It can take her husband a century or two to determine whether Orpheus gets a chance to try save the girl, to get a chance to try again. There is something in between, and Persephone has always thrived in that little paradoxical space. She decides, and because time and fate conspire against her, all too soon she hears the echo of a melody bounce down the halls of her husband’s factories. you’re early she wants to tell those wretched singers trailing in the muse’s boy’s wake. But she’s already sung that line, and the wind is already stealing her words from her lips. Guiding her to moonshine and arguments and futile foolish hope that still beats in her breast like a wild bird, maybe this time… Then, like a clockwork, like a toddler’s demand- Again! Again! - the myth resets. Like the seasons, she’s heard some of the workers whisper, around and around once more in a never ending circle, a cycle, the myth begins again. She brings the summer again, swings her arms and hunches her back and dances through the heat and heady buzz of the wine. Shudders and scoffs at the sound of the train whistling up the tracks. Presses her lips thin in a scowl as if that will keep the traitorous melody from pulling the words from her tongue...
You’re early.
I missed ya.