Thread the Needle
Prologue - Ancient Greece Approx. 1000 BCE
Shadows lean in to eavesdrop, soaking the ominous night like dark signs.
Gooseflesh prickles across my skin. During my final death, my soul fractured and reforged in an instant, but I feel a single shard’s absence. The bitter breath of afterlife tastes of salt, parching me.
“Stay.” I scrape out the declaration like a board torn loose.
“I am unable to remain in dreams as you now can,” Selene murmurs, jasmine faint on her breath. Her fingers lift to my jaw, their warmth combating the divine chill. “You were released from your shepherd life yet rejected Hades.”
“You refused to let me pass!” Violent waves churn the sea like a stomach gone sour. The cliff sways beneath my unsteady feet, as though the earth itself recoils from her decree. “Why did you trap a piece of my soul within my mortal vessel? Why did you keep me from Elysium?”
“This is the only way for you to find me in flesh again. Your mortal vessel will anchor your soul to Earth.” The moon goddess shivers, clinging to me for one last heartbeat.
Her lips taste of nectar stolen from Olympus.
A single tear slips down her cheek, suspended for an instant before dissolving into metallic dust. “You shall find enlightenment through my love in countless lives, I swear to you, my youth.”
Silvery beams descend from the heavens, bleaching the night as it wraps her in a living veil.
In a blaze of pastel fire, pulled by a pair of horses sculpted from moonlit frost, her chariot emerges.
She climbs in and cracks her whip, splitting the night.
A sharp breeze rushes past as she surges upward; it tastes different, emptier, as if her absence has stripped the night of its sweetness.
I fall to my knees, knowing better than to trust the whims of gods, even her.
Half-shrouded in shadow, Hypnos appears a few paces away. His draping wings fold behind him with a wisp of feathers. My lids grow heavy as he approaches, even as my heart races.
It is he who led us into the dream-realm, offering sanctuary when Zeus turned hostile. The lightning god gave Selene a gift of my eternal rest, and she manipulated it into a soul neither living nor dead. Though I have been claimed by Hades, nonetheless.
“I made an oath to the goddess to protect you, against the wishes of most other deities.” Hypnos’s sigh carries like a gale. “There is much to learn if we are to remain safe from the Underworld’s clutches.”
A spiteful laugh escapes me. My limbs are weighed down, as if grief has seeped into my frame. He regards me with skewed pity, black eyes flecked with motes of gold and silver that pulse like distant stars.
“Come,” he commands, his voice low and resonant, vibrating through me like a lullaby.
I push myself to my feet as though lifted by puppet strings. My fingers sting with fresh scrapes, grounding me in a reality I no longer wish to inhabit.
Hypnos extends a hand. The thin skin has a faint luminosity, as though lit from within by some quiet celestial fire. I take it, and we unravel like thread from a dropped spool.
The sea scent fades, replaced by cloying sweetbriar and resin.
Silky violet mist whirls around my ankles.
Rivers flow upward like curving paths to the heavens.
Spongy ground sinks beneath me with each uncertain step as if the realm tests my weight.
Distant, snow-capped mountains dissolve into stars that levitate like a tapestry, trailing shimmers of light across the sky.
“Oneiroi’s Veil shall be your home.” Hypnos drops my hold and turns to me, silver curls glinting. “Or at least most of you.”
My fingers brush my bare chest, the hollow where the sliver of my soul once rested. Now, it is up there, forever trapped in my mortal body. A muted chime grows louder, stirring an unnamed ache within me.
Hypnos lifts a hand, and the mist parts before us. The god of sleep looks onward, the glittering mist shifting beneath his wings like rippling satin. He points to a hair-thin line of crimson drifting beyond the blackened void.
“Follow the thread.”