A goddess is taken to the underworld as the king's bride; her father knew everything and her mother knew nothing. In this retelling of the Hymn of Demeter, mother and daughter will do whatever it takes to free themselves, no matter the cost.
Book I...
I let you have the child, but don't you ever dare to show her to me again. Zeus
That was his excuse—a silence that grew roots between herself and their daughter. The pair of eyes that reminded her of how much Zeus took from her. The memory of Persephone's conception wasn't a pleasant one. They were images that Demeter had learned to swallow down her throat—a trauma that she had trapped in her mind.
That was how she got lost between flowers, trees, and the sky. A young Demeter would suddenly dance with her round tummy all by herself. At Mount Olympus, the words spread quickly. Demeter was a goddess but not a virgin like her sister Hestia, who took the sacred oath to preserve herself, and she was neither married like her other sister Hera, who had two sons.
There were myths and legends of gods born by themselves, but Demeter would let them believe whatever they wanted to and keep her secret to herself. A pregnancy that gradually developed into loneliness, or perhaps contentment.
The sweet child of her alone, The Empress of her upcoming days, The one she had raised to be beyond her. The reflection of her she had vowed to save. Was she happy to serve her mother's life sentence? Was Persephone a prisoner of Demeter's secluded heart?
Demeter took no prisoners. After Athena and Artemis' departure, a maddened mother ran through her home without respite. She walked over and over again through the same paths and shook every tree branch, hoping to find her child, while mumbling bits of disjointed words to herself. At last, she resigned and sobbed in contemplation at the emptiness of her world.
The insects starved to death, the small rodents jumped out of the island and the horses grasped onto the verdant to only savour the taste of the air. Her world was crashing down, and Demeter wouldn't rescue it.
She yelled out all her frustration. Demeter would end everything all by herself and her cries were louder than the loudest thunder from Zeus. She engulfed her entire island in heavy fire; the inferno provoked by the sole wrath of her voice.
The violent wind of the blaze surrounded her, wreaking bloody havoc on everything in its path. Her daughter's rodents were set on fire and the splendid trees—where Persephone used to play—turned to ashes. Even her treasured horses went up in flames and she neither showed mercy to her own house in the rhododendron tree, which became smoke.
Nothing remained.
Her rage spared nought. All now rested, incinerated, and forever gone. If Persephone no longer lived there, all those things were as good as gone, too. Demeter became the only living soul among the wildfire of her insanity. Her feverish eyes stared at the destruction of her creation with no more tears in them but a bag full of seeds at her waist and a bright torch in her hand.
A torch that had been burning for nine divine days—the time since she had descended on earth-born territory. Her once-bright white dress was now grey and ripped and her face used her dried tears as make-up. She didn't eat, drink, or bathe since her most valuable possession had vanished.
She drew strength from her deepest fear, keeping her feet up to search for her missing child. Demeter, with darting gazes and spasmodic steps, was breathing in the eerie thought of her daughter being lost, alone and in tears.
The goddess of Harvest was motherhood in all its splendour.
Hugging on her shoulders with her chin rested on her chest, her body hung itself in the air. She ventured on her own to the highest and to the lowest places on earth where no man had ever set foot. No one was there, though, no one with the sweet smile of her little girl.
Exhaustion, hunger, and mirages made her hear Persephone's callings, but they were all just whispers in the wind. Her feet led her to an abandoned cave where a young, freshly killed body was lying on the ground. She left her torch aside and ran to the girl. She tried to wake her up, but it wasn't Persephone. It was just somebody else's daughter.
Demeter let out a scream. Tears filled her eyes once again, then she bit her fingers to soothe the raging sorrow inside of her. Unfortunately, the deceased girl was also the meal of the cave's inhabitant. A towering reptile that possessed the lengthy body of a gigantic snake. A creature entirely covered in scales, from their sturdy legs to their short arms while fleshed wings—stolen from the smaller bats—endowed its back. The monster's face was as dreadful as its might, with its long, diabolical beak joined by razor-sharp fangs to hideous horns on its skull.
Demeter had encountered her first-ever dragon.
Gaia created this human predator at the image of the many children born out of Echidna and those fire-spitting beings never showed respect to any of the gods.
Demeter saw its shadow on the cave's wall. The animal was probably waking up by her horrendous cries. It looked at her as if it was going to prey on her, but she planted herself in front of it with her shoulders now drew back and her eyes ready to commit murder. Her child was in danger. She would have killed her opponent and opened its guts to find Persephone if she had to, but somehow it lowered its head before her instead. "My lady, it is not her, is it?"
With a bleeding hand and baring teeth, Demeter responded, "No, it's not."
"Believe me, the one you're after is not among us."
It walked around Demeter, inspecting her radiant body. Yet its eyes missed the veins from her wounded arm leaking out of her flesh and into the ground. They rooted into three branching bodies that abruptly burst onto the other side and they grabbed the beast by its legs to seize its entire being.
Demeter pinned the untrustworthy animal to the ground, its beak gasping at her feet. She then threatened her victim's head with her other arm, a limb that was now a cudgel of thorns. Demeter was the embodiment of all the plants growing on the land of Mother Gaia and she made them beautiful like her daughter, or poisonous like a deadly dragon.
Her face tightened and her lips flattened when she challenged the fire-spitting beast at her mercy. "How do you know?"
"Words had been shared among us," begged the now-domesticated dragon. Despite their sturdiness, they were no immortals, and it showed concern for its own life. Demeter's brows drew closer, and it insisted again tendons standing out of its neck, "No Deity can fall out of the heavenly sky like this."
She released the creature from her tentacles after spotting its well-hidden nest of eggs at the back of its den. Demeter left the cave, yelling out her daughter's name elsewhere. By sparing its life, she had earned the respect of the indomitable brute and they would forever serve her.
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