How Psyche was able to descend from the palace to the valley floor, she didn’t know. Her mind was clouded when it came to how she managed to make it back to her father’s palace. The mere days that she had been back since she had driven Eros from her side felt like eons. There seemed to be heavy emptiness where her stomach should have been, and her eyes were constantly dry from tears. She stayed in her room and saw no one, not even her sisters, for a full three days. When she finally let her sisters inside the bedchamber, she sobbed for an hour before she could recount the events of that dreadful night.
“Father will find you a good husband,” they assured her once they heard her tale in its entirety.
She could only nod and insist that she wanted to be left alone again. Minutes did not pass without her thinking of Eros and how she should have listened to him and not lit the candle to see his face. Only her mother’s orders to tend the shrines on behalf of her father and his household drew her out of the bedchamber. The Queen oversaw that she be made presentable to the gods while she tended their statues. And when she was not at the shrines, she hid away in her tears and her memories of all the nights Eros had come to visit her.
It took her a full week to get to the shrine dedicated to the goddess Demeter. Her lip trembled and more tears dripped down the sides of her face to the base of the goddess’s statue. Behind her, she heard footsteps but she ignored them to continue her work as she did every day as the people came to the shrines to make offerings. Her body ached, from her head to her toes from all the work. She knew she should take small breaks to stretch her arms and legs, but the sooner she got her chores done, the sooner she could retreat to her bedchamber and think about how she had lost Eros. One day she would make the journey down to the Underworld but Eros would live on forever. The thought made her cry again.
“What ails you, my child?” a woman’s voice from behind her asked.
Psyche came to her feet and turned around. Her eyes widened at the glow that surrounded this woman. This was no mortal, her mind told her. This was the goddess Demeter, it had to be. No other god would come so near another god’s shrine. Demeter smiled and bid Psyche to sit next to her.
“I heard your cries all the way on Olympus,” the goddess said. “Tell me what ails you.”
Psyche nodded and recounted her time in the palace with Eros. She did not miss any detail, not one, of her time in the palace, and Demeter said nothing. The goddess only smiled and nodded once or twice. Psyche felt the hollowness in her stomach subside after she finished her tale; not ever when she recounted her sorrows to her sisters did it seem to lessen the weight on her body; somehow, she had felt worse, but not at this moment. There must be something the goddess could do to help her, that had to be the reason the emptiness had faded ever so slightly.
“Is there something that you might do to help me, my lady?” Psyche asked.
Demeter embraced her for a moment. “I wish very much that I could help you. But this is something that you need to take to Aphrodite, and there is no way that I can go against one of my fellow gods. You need to go to Aphrodite’s temple.”
Psyche nodded. “Thank you, my lady. I will make an offering to you the next time I get the chance for the kindness you have shown me today.”
