Chapter 1
The announcement of the midday hour rang from below and reverberated through the large, open hall. Tethys stifled a yawn and shrugged lower into her chair. At the desk opposing hers, Euda, the primordials’ selected copyist and historian, drawled on about the proper order of utensils.
Her lessons with Euda began when she reached adolescence, just before her aging slowed. They consisted of etiquette, speech, customs of the court, and everything necessary to tame a young goddess with a knack for breaking the rules.
Euda herself was an ancient thing, her skin so wrinkled that most times Tethys wasn’t sure if her eyes were even open under those thick, black-framed glasses resting on the tip of her nose.
As the selected copyist, the primordials granted her a life just shy of immortality.
Tethys had lost count of the years they’d been together.
Tethys grumbled, watching a brown mole at the corner of Euda’s lip stretch as she spoke.
“And what is the proper usage of the outermost spoon? Tethys! Pay attention!” Euda snapped her skeletal fingers and pushed her glasses up before they could slip off.
She was always fidgeting with those broken spectacles.
One day, Tethys promised she’d give her a new pair just to keep from watching Euda push them up the bridge of her nose over and over again.
“Daydream elsewhere. Not in my classroom.”
“Ugh, Euda, why does it matter which spoon I choose to eat my soup with? They’re all the same in carrying out their use.” Tethys let out a long, drawn-out sigh.
“It is tradition, and upholding traditions is—”
“Is important, yes, I know. You’ve told me nearly a thousand times already in the decades I’ve suffered through the same dusty lectures. Euda, please, it’s a beautiful day. Can we mark our lesson as complete?”
The pink light of dawn peeked over the horizon and caught in the rotunda’s stained glass windows. In gemstone shades, Euda eyed the goddess with a raised brow. The old scholar’s scrutiny was like the sharp blade of Tethys’s outermost dinner knife.
The goddess pouted her lower lip in response. She knew the ancient woman would be a pushover today. Just like the guards who’d let her stroll the temple gardens before the last bit of starlight dimmed, or the cook that snuck her an extra scone with morning tea.
Today was special.
“Fine. But only because it’s your wedding day. Go frolic through the fields or whatever it is you do in your spare time, Spring Princess.” Euda smiled slightly, her dimples etched under at least five hundred years of frowns.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” Tethys flashed her a dazzling grin.
“But, Goddess, before you fly out that door, hear this…” Euda bit her lip and continued, “Remember this union must hold strong. Venia depends on it.” She eyed Tethys, a pang of sadness flashing in her spectacles.
Tethys nodded, her fingers twitching to feel the sunlit warmth awaiting her outside the hall’s doors.
“I know, Euda. I’ll see you at the wedding.” Before the old copyist could reply, she raced through the doors.
Tethys smiled as she passed the lower square and its various window shops, crossing a narrow stone bridge and through the marketplace.
Venia was always the busiest in the mornings, with merchants coming into port during the early hours of dawn.
She watched two highborn children picking periwinkle forget-me-nots along the riverbed and couldn’t help but smile at their youthful curiosity.
Were they, just as she and her sister used to do when they lived in their familial home, picking flowers to surprise their mother with breakfast served in bed? Her heart lurched at the memory.
“Mother will love these,” an adolescent Polaris cried as she plucked a wild lily.
It was easy then. The world was still glamoured in youthful, golden wonder.
When she first made her arrival in Venia, just as each of her siblings had in their respective realms, she often sought out those same innocent curiosities and the blissful ignorance that came with an undeveloped mind.
She hadn’t yet tasted the toxins of the world, but over the years that golden vision tarnished slowly.
She sighed and swallowed the upwelling sadness of revisited memories.
Soft sunlight glistened on the Eastern River’s rapid surface.
She stopped to listen to the rush of the water gliding over smooth pebbles and stones.
A fish leapt from the river’s depths and disappeared a moment later, back beneath the surface.
It fought the raging rapids as it traveled upstream, and Tethys couldn’t help but chuckle sadly.
At least she wasn’t the only being with a full-forced current to push against.
She continued up the cobblestone road, past the city arboretum, and up to her family’s manor. A city gardener dipped his chin as she traveled the gravel pathway, passing uniformly landscaped shrubs and the manicured, emerald front lawn.
The gardens on her family estate felt more like home than the manor itself.
Before the mortal dark ages, Astraeus built this manor as a gift for his lover, Eos.
He sculpted the gardens and fountainheads in perfect harmony with the rising sun.
And just as Eos probably did, Tethys often found escape between rows of full, royal blue hydrangea blooms or at the edge of a rushing, pillared fountain, throwing pebbles into its shallow pool.
Wishing for another life. Maybe one far, far from here.
But today was her wedding day. Everything would change.
Or so she hoped.
Tethys raced through the open front doors and climbed the stairs, passing dusty portraits of Venian mortal nobility, each portrait more mind-numbingly stiff than the last. At the top of the steps, just before her bedchamber door, hung her portrait.
She’d hated having to sit so still while the artist painted each stroke with painstaking accuracy.
What was only supposed to take a few hours turned into days.
Days of pin straight posture and leg-numbing stillness, posed and pretty, atop that stupid clamshell throne her father loved so much.
“Lady Tethys, you’re back early from your lesson!” Jaide, her lady-in-waiting, said, rising from her seat by the window in the main study. She had been invested in the book that lay open next to her seat, and by the flush about her cheeks, Tethys could tell it was not the tasteful kind of tale.
“Jaide…what are you reading?” Tethys smirked, plopping into the wingback leather chair beside her. Jaide returned to her seat, her mouth cautiously thinning at the sides.
“Nothing of interest,” she said, snapping the book shut. “Euda let you out of jail early?”
“Yes, I told her I’d much rather spend the morning of my wedding drinking wine than learning about the glass in which it’s served in.” Tethys scoffed.
“Well, good. I have a surprise in your bedchambers. Your sister dropped it off only an hour or two ago,” Jaide said.
“My sister was here?” Tethys hadn’t seen Polaris since she’d arrived in Venia. Polaris, older by a few years, had already left their family palace to rule over the northern kingdom, Ursae, by the time Tethys matured into womanhood and her aging slowed.
Although inseparable as children, Polaris was a mystery now.
They’d grown up together, yes, but she’d always been one step ahead in life.
So, when the time came to put away the dolls and toys and put on a new type of face, Polaris said her swift goodbyes to her younger sister and focused on the duty to her people over the duty to her flesh and blood.
When each of her siblings turned eighteen, they entered their realms, never returning to their home in the far southern sea. In history books, these were called their godly arrivals. With the crossing of the threshold on to the mortal continent, the gods and goddesses would come into their power.
Tethys, however, had taken those first steps, then second steps, then third, with no manifestation. Her mother, Phosphora, suggested she’d simply be a late bloomer, but their father, Obscuros, took it as a defect.
A permanent deficiency that rendered her useless, and so, unlike her siblings, her father required a consort before Tethys inherited the Venian throne. Her reign would never be hers alone, not without a king to strengthen their bloodline.
She still awaited the day magic might flow through her veins.
However, with each passing sunrise, that hope faded into mist. Now the occasional abrupt sensation or shock threatened to reignite her spark of wishful thinking.
But having been burned too many times by the flames of disappointment, Tethys forced herself to ignore them.
She was a sick contradiction to the natural world—a god of immortal standing, as helpless as the weakest of her worshippers.
The two retired to Tethys’s bedchambers. Jaide, motioning to the tea table by the corner balcony, closed the door behind them in hopes of speaking more freely.
“Ah, here it is,” she said, pointing to a small violet box wrapped in silky satin ribbon.
Tethys opened the gift, revealing a mother-of-pearl necklace. Its elegance was truly in the simplicity of the basic silver fitting encapsulating the pearl. She smiled and beckoned Jaide to help her place it around her neck.
“I believe she’ll be in attendance at the wedding, though,” Jaide said, hinting a soft, sympathetic smile toward her friend.
“Good, good,” Tethys said, shaking the mention of her sister from her mind.
Some memories weren’t allowed to replant themselves in her chest, and the ones of Polaris she plucked like a weed before given an opportunity to sprout.
“And what of my future husband? Do you think he’ll be present as well? ”
Jaide chuckled and lightly shoved her friend’s shoulder. “Don’t be facetious. Let’s focus on the celebration.”
And so they did.