༺༄•°彡❝ i'd give you the sun if you asked me
you could have all of time ❞彡°•༄༺
mortals are so very used to loving gods thanklessly, it seems almost cruel for their love to dwindle in the presence of divinity - so divinity ch...
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𝑰. 𝑨 𝑻𝑯𝑶𝑼𝑺𝑨𝑵𝑫 𝑳𝑰𝑭𝑬𝑻𝑰𝑴𝑬𝑺.
Smooth marble slabs met the goddess' trembling knees, holding her up as she fought with her pain. Circe knew a millennium-worth of magic, of Pharmaka, of herbs and plants and the draughts and poisons they could create. She knew of gods and titans, of furies and sea monsters, of love and jealousy and guilt. But childbirth was unknown to her, as was the mortal pain that clung to it.
Circe's nymphs had fled at her first gasp of pain. By the time she had struggled in from her garden, contractions seizing her body, her nymphs had slipped beneath the waves, returning to their uncaring fathers — it was no matter. Circe did not need them. They were just nymphs. If she had needed someone to shriek over the sight of blood and splitting skin, perhaps she would've asked them to stay. Perhaps they would've left anyway, once the threat of being turned into a worm and thrown into the ocean was obsolete.
The wooden table, still stained with wine that Odysseus' men had forgotten to clean up all those months ago, toppled. Circe hadn't realised that she had overturned it in her pain, she didn't quite care — her hand was on her swollen stomach, the other uncapping willow-draught and pouring it down her throat, though the agony did not subside and the child did not come peacefully. Instead, she sat hunched against the marble of the kitchen floor, screaming and pushing as hours passed, one endless moment of pain that crushed her. If she did not get the child out quickly enough, he would die.
Circe tore the room apart in her agony, mind swarmed by a thousand terrors — was the baby dead already? Or am I like my sister, growing some bull-monster within me? If the baby were whole and natural, wouldn't he come?
Eileithya, goddess of childbirth, did not aid her. She remained deaf to her prayers, held back by Wisdom.
She did not need Eileithya. Circe's reeling mind carried her to her sister, Pasiphäe, the Minotaur stuck in her womb. Circe had carved the monster out of Pasiphäe's stomach then, she could do it now for her child. She bared her teeth at the darkness that had crept into her house, seizing a knife and dragging a great bronze mirror to face her — the replacement for Daedalus' once-helping hands. She lent herself against the marble wall, pressing the blade to her stomach. The child was no Minotaur, but a mortal; she could not risk cutting too deep.
Her flesh parted under the knife. She bled red, as she had always done, as nymphs often did. When she had been new to the world, a millennium ago, she had longed to bleed the same gold as her siblings, as her father. Circe didn't care so much now — it was better, she thought often, not to share her family's blood. She dug the knife deeper.
She moved skin aside, yellow eyes finally settling on him; Telegonus, for his name already sat in her mind, lay curled in her split womb, tiny hands fisted as if he wished to fight.
