Chapter 29 Tales and Truths #2
Danae could feel the others’ attention shifting, their eyes turning to her like flowers stretching towards daylight.
She remembered the first night she’d spent with Heracles’ crew, huddled amongst the stones of an old ruin outside Corinth.
A different girl had sat quivering before those heroes.
A stranger who shared her blood, her bones and, though she had not known it, her power.
They had travelled to the end of the world and back since then.
So much had changed, and yet here they were, the remaining few together once more, ready to undertake the greatest challenge of them all.
But now instead of Heracles, they looked to her.
The following morning, Metis shook Danae awake. She looked around the stone hut, her heart swelling at the sight of Atalanta and Telamon asleep on the floor.
‘Come,’ said Metis.
Danae rubbed the sleep from her eyes, then followed the woman out into the saffron dawn.
‘That was a brave thing you did,’ Metis said as she picked her way down the hillside.
Danae swallowed. ‘I know you want them gone, but I can’t do it alone, I –’
‘I know.’ Metis sighed. ‘They can stay.’
Danae stared at her, then beamed. ‘Thank you.’
The other woman grunted. ‘There is a reason there were always twelve Titans. Some burdens are not meant to be carried alone. Now, have you mastered your challenge?’
It took Danae a moment to remember the stick.
‘Almost.’
‘You will show me.’
A robust wind tore at their limbs as they climbed down the rocky hillside towards the lake. When they reached the vegetation, Metis foraged for a stick. Danae’s eyes travelled to the clutches of reeds, her stomach lurching at the sight of the lifeless, cracked stalks she had drained two days prior.
Metis found what she was looking for and placed it across Danae’s palm. Then she took a step back and clasped her hands behind her back.
‘Go on.’
Danae closed her eyes, took several deep breaths, then concentrated on the stick.
Gently, she extended a string of life-threads into the wood and asked it to float into the sky.
As she had done before, she entreated not with words, but by sending her longing in the form of a question down the channel of life-threads. Slowly, the stick rose into the air.
As the wood climbed higher, her pulse quickened until a burst of excitement broke through her calm and sent the stick shooting into the air, before it tumbled back to the ground.
Metis raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you know why I asked you to speak to Gaia?’
‘Because of her charming wit.’ Danae cast around for the stick.
‘If you do not learn how to listen to the Mother, you will not be able to reach Gaiasight.’
Danae spied the stick and grabbed it.
‘What’s that?’
Metis watched the wind shiver across the lake. ‘It is a state of pure communion with Gaia when the tapestry of life can be seen with the naked eye and your will is twinned with Hers.’
Danae thought of the bliss she had experienced when draining the life-threads of other creatures, the glowing threads of energy she had seen surging through the living world, the pure unadulterated power.
‘I think I have already felt it, when consuming life-threads.’
Metis was silent for a moment. ‘Remember the story I told you of Gaia and Ouranos. The Hesperides apples are a poisoned gift. It is the burden of a Titan, to carry the desire and power to consume life yet not act upon it. It is true that at the moment of draining the ichor of another living being the tapestry is visible, but this is not Gaiasight.’
‘If they feel similar then how do I know when I am in Gaiasight and when it’s the desire to consume?’
‘When you are in Gaiasight, you will know peace, not ecstasy. We walk in twilight, on the cusp of night and day, and sometimes it is hard to tell which way lies darkness and which path leads to the light.’
Danae chewed her lip.
Metis watched her for a moment, then continued, ‘On the beach, when I apprehended Telamon and Atalanta, I was in Gaiasight.’
Danae raised her eyebrows. ‘Is that why you could command such power without exhausting yourself?’
A smile twitched Metis’ lips. She nodded.
‘Teach me,’ Danae said quickly. Heracles’ words about his father’s power and strength had lodged in her mind.
‘What do you think I’m doing? It takes time to open your consciousness to the Mother.
In the old days before the false gods, it would take some Titans years to achieve Gaiasight.
’ She paused. ‘Think of life as a river, and your will is forever striding against the current of fate. That is all you have ever known. But it is not the only way to reach your destination. Imagine you cease your struggle and let the current take you – moving isn’t so hard any more, eh? ’
‘But if I go with the flow of the river, I will not be guiding the direction. How will I reach where I need to go?’
‘All rivers ultimately flow to the sea, do they not? Your destination is your destiny. Whichever path you take.’
Danae rubbed her brow, struggling to quell her frustration.
She still did not understand, but she was willing to try.
She closed her eyes as she fed her life-threads into the stick, silently asking it to float.
As the wood left her palms, she held tight to the image of the river, and pictured wading through the rushing water she and her ma used to wash their clothes in on Naxos.
In her mind, she turned and fell back, letting herself be washed downstream.
As she relaxed, her thoughts tumbled like the current.
She imagined her flesh melting from her bones and then her skeleton separating into beads of pearlescent water until she was a thousand separate teardrops and the entire body of water all at once.
The sensation of weight across her palms drew her back to reality. When she opened her eyes, the stick lay once more across her hands. Glowing threads of light crackled across her vision, flickering in and out of sight for a heartbeat before vanishing.
‘Well,’ said Metis, ‘seems you aren’t a hopeless case after all.’
‘I … I did it.’ Danae swayed, a little lightheaded. ‘But I didn’t see the tapestry, not fully.’
‘That will come.’ Metis’ mouth curled into a smile. ‘You did well.’
Danae stared at the stick, now lifeless in her hands. She still could not fathom that, only moments before, she had granted it a soul, and now it was empty once more.
‘I can’t believe this is it,’ she murmured.
‘Hm?’ said Metis, wandering into the shade of the palm tree and plucking a fallen frond from the ground.
‘Everything we are … all our memories, our wants, our dreams, just disappear when we die.’
Metis looked back at her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Hades. With no afterlife in the Underworld, he said after death there is only oblivion.’
Metis shook her head.
Danae’s heart tripped. ‘It’s not true?’
‘Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t.’
‘What does that mean?’ Her fingers tightened around the stick.
Metis cocked her head. ‘It may be true – the souls of our dead do not wander the Asphodel Meadows. But as far as I know, Hades never died and somehow came back to life. How would he know what happens to the mind when the body perishes? No one does.’
‘So, there might be an afterlife?’ Danae stared at the woman, hope expanding in her chest.
Metis shrugged. ‘I cannot say. It is better to live as the animals do. For them there is no death, only life until the end.’
In an instant Danae felt empty once more, as though she had expended a great deal of life-threads.
She could not tread this path again. Without proof either way, the agony of not knowing if she would see her sister again would consume her.
It had already nearly cost her life, her destiny.
Alea was gone. Arius was gone. She must make peace with that.
When she looked up, she caught Metis watching her intently.
‘I could tell you that those you love live on in your memories, and as long as you go on loving them they will never truly be gone. I believe that to be true, but I suspect that will bring you little comfort. So, I will tell you what I know for certain. Life-threads cannot be created or destroyed.’ Metis crouched down and touched a withered blade of grass.
A single glowing strand travelled from the woman’s hand into the plant, flushing it from tawny yellow to vivid green.
‘The ichor of those who have died is still part of Gaia. Their life-threads are merely dispersed, part of a tree, a fish, a bird, another mortal. From the earth we are born and to the earth we shall return.’
Voices wafted down from the hillside, carried by the wind.
Metis glanced up towards the hut. ‘I best check on those companions of yours. Stay here and practise communing with the Mother.’
Danae nodded slowly as Metis scampered up the hillside.
She sighed and wandered for a while beside the lake, then through the bushes surrounding it, trailing her fingers through their rich, verdant leaves. She held on to the warmth she’d felt when Atalanta and Telamon agreed to help her. She was not alone.
Take their threads, whispered the voice. You will need to be strong for what is to come.
It sounded distant somehow, as though the voice was but an echo cast from far away. She paid it no heed.
Eventually, eyes heavy with the heat of the sun, she found the enclave of bushes and saplings where Metis had hidden Telamon and Atalanta’s rowing boat.
She sank down into its belly, stretching against its sun-warmed planks.
Then she closed her lids and concentrated on the web of glowing threads circulating through her, but try as she might, without touching the omphalos shard she could not extend her consciousness to any part of the tapestry of life outside of her own body.
Her mind wandered as the heat-hazed air drifted over her skin, speckles of sunlight dappling her face through the leaves above.
Then she heard movement and opened her eyes.
Still soporific, she raised her head and peered over the lip of the boat through the foliage beyond. A pile of weapons lay on the bank of the lake, and beside them, a silver breastplate.
Danae’s breath snagged in her throat as Atalanta’s scarred legs stalked across her vision. Shifting ever so slowly, Danae moved her eye towards the gap in the foliage and stared through her leaf-framed window at the lake.
Atalanta stood on the bank, her naked body gleaming in the sunlight. Danae’s eyes ached but she did not blink, did not dare draw breath as she watched the sweat trickle down the groove of the warrior’s spine to the toned muscles beneath.
Something stirred in the base of her stomach as Atalanta waded into the lake, the water rippling across her rich brown skin.
Then she submerged, and it felt like an age before she broke the surface, whipping back her braids to spray the air with glistening beads.
The simmering within Danae became a drumbeat thumping through her chest, her gut, her thighs.
She was transfixed by each pearly droplet trailing down the soft curves of Atalanta’s breasts, and the rest of her taut, battle-hardened body.
Danae’s pulse raced faster and faster, her lungs shrinking until she struggled to breathe. Longing transformed into nausea as a chill crept up her spine and her scalp prickled. Then the ghostly imprint of bony fingers scraped through her hair.
Gasping, she hurled herself out of the boat, crawling so fast she grazed her knees. Once clear of the trees, she broke into a run.