Chapter 3 Before
3
Before
Our first decades banished on Scopuli are gorged with elaborate designs for liberation. Raidne is the first to attempt to escape. Other lands are visible from our cliffs, and she’s certain she has the strength to reach one. The sky is an infinite and blazing blue, so deep it’s hard to discern on the horizon where the heavens end and the sea begins. Pisinoe and I sit atop Castle’s middle turret and watch her fly west. She rises and falls on the currents of wind, a dancer, farther and farther away, closer and closer to salvation. I reach for Pisinoe’s hand to give it a squeeze, confident in our imminent victory.
We’re foolish to think we can best the gods so easily, but we’re still young, each equivalent to less than eighteen mortal years. We hold the arrogance of youth to prove it.
Pisinoe stands, unfurling her wings to follow Raidne’s lead. She’s no more than a dark speck on the horizon, but then she shoots upward as her body slams into a wall of wind. Our necks crane as she ascends toward the zenith until we need to fall onto our backs to keep her in sight. When she’s nearly overhead, she drops like a boulder straight into the choppy ocean below.
We launch toward the spot where Raidne hit, but the water churns like Charybdis, vicious and punishing. I’m certain Raidne is dead, lost to us forever.
We spend the remaining daylight hours gliding around the island, low above the water, buzzard-like, searching for any sign of her. We don’t return to the beach until the sun sinks beneath the sea and twilight envelops us in a half-hearted embrace.
What were you thinking? the island seems to ask with each murmur of waves, but we don’t have an answer. We’re silent and heartbroken.
Our own self-importance clouds our judgment: We never consider that a quick death could be a kindness. Raidne washes ashore under the rising moon, choking on the water in her lungs and badly beaten, but alive. And so we try again.
And again.
And again.
The day, the time, or the season—none of the innumerable variables we tweak changes the outcome. Whichever direction we venture, there’s always a point where the wind blows us right back to Scopuli and discards us fiercely into the ocean. So we try sailing away, hopeful that we might glide across the surface of the water unnoticed. But as soon as our rafts leave our little archipelago, a wave either crashes us into the reefs or swallows the vessel entirely. All our attempts end the same way: with us struggling beneath the surface, tortured for hours as the water steals our breath, as the current pummels our bodies. Only when we’re certain that we’ll die do the waves release us.
We’re too distraught by our confinement to accept our prison’s feral beauty—how Scopuli is a land of extremes, withher unscalable cliffs and towering trees, bathed in soft-spoken sunrises and violent, bruised sunsets. Instead, we spend our time in the sky, frantically circling, and along the beach, desperately hoping for a sign from the gods. But neither the heavens nor the depths hold the path to our salvation, and as the decades roll into centuries, our designs for freedom dissolve into sea-foam.
All the while, I speak to Proserpina. Not in prayer, nor in hope of forgiveness, but as a companion in imprisonment. I whisper my treason into Scopuli’s soil and water it with my tears. Whenever the checkered adder that resides in the birch grove crosses my path, I beg it to carry her messages below.
I hope that you’re safe.
Please stay strong.
I miss you.
I miss you.
I miss you.
I don’t expect an answer, but when we wake one morning to discover Scopuli ablaze with lilies, I know she’s heard me. Lilies were Proserpina’s favorite flower. When we were children, we’d lie beneath them in the fields surrounding the palace. They were so regal, both the flowers and my princess, silhouetted against the sky. It was the perfect backdrop for sharing feverishly whispered secrets and girlhood imaginations. Later, when we were older, we stole our first kiss beneath their shadows, their elegant stalks arching over us like graceful protectors. Proserpina’s lips were as soft as petals each time she found mine, and I’ll never forget the feeling of our fingers curling into each other’s, the black waves of her hair engulfing the light strawberry of mine.
Lilies were planted around the palace grounds in her wake, but they died in the earth as if her radiance was what they had thrived on; without it, they rotted in the fields. I understood their refusal to take root in a world without Proserpina.
Raidne and Pisinoe marvel at the curiosity, how all the other plants bow down to the lilies, ceding their own claims to sunlight. But when I tell them who’s responsible, they only smile sadly. My sisters know what she meant to me; though skepticism is written into each of their faces, they love me too much to take away this last little piece of her.
But regardless of their origin, that’s how we learn: The ships appear when the lilies bloom.
The first time a ship materializes on the horizon, the sailors aren’t drawn by our song. We haven’t discovered its magic yet. No, it’s curiosity, for a new land perhaps, that lures them close. We are desperate for a chance to escape, so when they sail inside our curse’s bounds, we fly to meet them. We’re still young and na?ve, so we lead them through the rocky waters to our beach. They happily disembark to share our food and drink our wine, entranced by our forms. They regale us with tales of their travels. Some flirt. We don’t realize that they see us as beasts to slay, their own Gorgon heads to claim, until night falls. When we’re drunk and unsuspecting, they overpower us.
There are too many of them, on us all at once. What silent call alerted them to begin their attack in unison? How did they know to switch from jovial to vicious? Did some god whisper the truth of us into their ears? They bind our hands and feet and drag us into a sea cave, its chambers too shallow to allow our wings to spread. And then they discuss what to do with us.
Not about our lives—no one disagrees that we must die. After years at war, though, they’re curious if the slit between our legs would feel the same as a human woman’s. If taking us offends the gods. Taking, they say, as if they speak simply of plucking fruit from its vine.
“No,” one argues. Our form already speaks to divine punishment. No creatures so hideous could exist unless they were guilty of an atrocious crime. He isn’t wrong. “Any further degradation would only please the gods more.”
He isn’t wrong about this, either.
In the blackness of the cave, Raidne’s stare hardens as she steels herself for what’s coming. If only we were Gorgons, able to freeze our attackers in stone. But Medusa wasn’t born with such incredible power; she was cursed with it, just as weare.
No, our stare does not hold our salvation. Our mouths do.
Sing.
The sound of that voice— her voice—makes every part of me thrum, like I’m a lyre and she’s just run her delicate fingers across my strings.
It’s Proserpina.
My back straightens, and I search for my sisters’ faces inthe darkling cave, expecting to find their eyes alight with thesame joy that now sparks in mine. But Pisinoe’s body is slumped forward, her face hidden beneath a curtain of blond curls. And though Raidne’s stare is locked on the cave’s mouth, it holds nothing but fear. I remember those sad smiles on their lips this morning, and my epiphany disintegrates into ash.
What if that voice is nothing more than a hallucination produced by a terrified mind? But Proserpina doesn’t abandon me as I abandoned her.
Sing, Thelia, she urges once more, and I swear that I feel the warmth of my name whispered against the back of my neck. It undoes my resolve, and my mouth falls open, letting the same notes that once comforted us as children fill the cave until they eventually spill onto the beach.
Pisinoe and Raidne join, and before long, the song takes on a shape of its own, a plea for release with the knowledge one won’t be coming. Except, inexplicably, the sailors listen. With clouded eyes and slackened jaws, they untie our bonds, then fall back on swaying legs. We scurry from the cave and take to the sky, circling overhead. The melody still tumbles from our lips. Our voices have always held power, to coax out smiles or tears, but these men aren’t temporarily entranced in the face of art. No, this song contains something new: the promise of their futures, courtesy of either Ceres’s curse or Scopuli itself. We don’t know which, but they’re bewitched by it. The sailors reach for us again, this time in exultation, but it’s too late. All our truths are laid bare, and there’s no taking them back. The terror passes, leaving fury in its wake.
They make us into monsters.
Are all human men like this? Vessels for profound violence that simmers just barely beneath the surface, ready to overflow when they believe no one watches? In the safety of Ceres’s palace, there was little need to think of them at all. But now, staring into those clouded, stupefied gazes, we’re presented with our own tantalizing promise: bloody, painful vengeance.
Together, as one, we take it. Pisinoe, with her keen attention to detail, becomes the eyes. Raidne, the quickest, is our hands. And me? My rage has only one outlet.
I am the mouth.
We stop wearing clothes; we let our hair go wild. Scopuli’s game, once abundant, begins to dwindle. Her deer become ghosts that haunt the twilight, dissolving into the night before we can hunt them; her fish, slippery shadows beneath the waves. Even her beach plums and hickories yield less and less fruit.
And so we purposefully lure a ship to shore, hypnotizing the sailors with our song, and we gift the worthy ones to Ceres in feral, offensive displays. Her curse is what locks the chains around our wrists, and her growing apathy is what keeps the animals from our traps and withers our fruit on its vines. It’s her we must appease.
We follow the old rites, the ones we’ve seen priests and priestesses perform countless times before, though their gifts were bulls, sheep, and pigs. But our offense was great, and so too must be our offerings.
We purify ourselves in the sea. We lead our victims to our altar. We pour libations over their heads. The first sailors know the rules of sacrifice: They’ve seen the same trick pulled on livestock to make them bow their heads, to make them consent. But observing is different from experiencing, and each man drops his gaze to keep the wine from trickling into his eyes, and in doing so, agrees to his fate. We slit their throats, and Raidne reads their entrails for signs of forgiveness. Then we burn them on a pyre, and the smoke delivers our gifts to Ceres.
Our hatred for Dis, for those first sailors, transfers onto each man who wrecks here. We make them suffer. We bleed them slowly, paint our bodies with the gore, and revel in the pain our power brings. Their bodies belong to Ceres, but their suffering is ours alone.
Compassion never squirms its way into our hearts, but even if it did, we wouldn’t stop. We can’t. Ceres promised our lives would be defined by death and darkness, and in the smoldering light of that first pyre, we watch as our time collected here melts from our skin. She cursed us with unending life, but not eternal youth, and yet…
Their souls make us ageless.