Hell Is An Empty Heart (Book One of The Triple Moon's Chronicles)

01 | Arrow-Headed Deity

    When all the rest of the Olympians dwelled at Mount Olympus, this single mother goddess, Demeter, only used her temple as a facade and chose instead to live in her own territory when not required. Demeter spent all of her days on an island she lifted out of the seas and above the clouds, stealing it from the mortal worlds of Gaia for her own pleasure.

The Goddess of Harvest preserved all the wildlife from her paradise, including the beautiful birds, the little rodents, and invited only the horses to join them. They were an invention by Poseidon himself for her heart.

Perhaps she loved him back, for rivers cracked through her realm before evaporating into the thin air to condense and rain over her many flourishing gardens. His water fed her tall trees, green grass, and a profusion of colourful flowers, from the rarest to the most exotic. Those for whom Demeter would dedicate hours and hours of her day to caring for.

Persephone often caught her whispering to the plants, praising them to grow nice vegetables and fruits, but simply just to grow for themselves because without love and care, even the plants would also have no reason to live. This represented the pinnacle of her domain as a deity, a motto that she pinned into the world's largest rhododendron tree, whose huge roots supported the entire island.

Demeter didn't build her house on dismantled rectangular pieces of wood. She didn't even carve her house into the timber's heart. The old tree created an opened door through its flowery head to welcome the small family of his mistress. Its branches aligned and shaped themselves into a staircase for an upstairs bedroom. There, she tied canvas all around its veins to make two hammocks, a special bed for her daughter and another one for herself.

They needed nothing else but the two of them and the warm embrace of nature. It wasn't rare either to see her chase Hermes with a wooden staff all over Mount Olympus as she forbade him—Persephone's closest friend—from entering the island.

The only exception were the two daughters of Zeus, with one of them being Athena, the Goddess of War, Wisdom, and Weave. She was the image of an one-edged Makhaira that only knew how to cut, not thrust—a blade with no forward curve—like a goddess who wore a golden chest plate over her inexistent bounded breasts. Yet Athena was that one sharp ashen-flesh sword that possessed the distinction of being the tallest members of its iron-sharp family—a height translated into the morphology of a goddess that only their male warriors could reach.

Although Athena, who turned swords into ploughshares, was the one that only fell into her sword, the sword of justice that wasn't devoid of darkness, a ghastly pool of black war paint always engulfed her ocean-blue eyes.

And she drew nearer, her long blond locks trailing behind her, flowing into an even longer white gown. Her floating dress rested high around her waist, revealing what one could shame her with, and yet it became a strength that she used to accentuate her stature even further.

Then there was Artemis, the twin sister of Apollo and the Goddess of Hunt was an auburn-fetched arrow, a jungle-haired female that wielded a bow as potent as herself, and whose straightforward words might hurt those ignorant of her wild character.

A stubborn arrow-headed deity always pointed to her right—the right to only protect her self-desire. Artemis was an impatient woman, a compass lady who lived by her own ways in the likeness of the old rag bandages covering her shaft's body.

Indeed, she wore no armour—nothing to protect her neck, chest, arms, sturdy legs, or even her stomach—as she prided herself on being the embodiment of honesty. A wise being clothed in her naked truth who was incapable of lying, a coward in a mute missile that had nothing to conceal.

Just then, the mother saw them from afar through the pink leaves of her treehouse. "Persephone, Athena, and Artemis are here!" she shouted from her high swing while hand-sewing a new dress for her daughter.