Madeleine Bonello '26
When I was born, my mother hid me away from Olympus. She hid us both away, from the prying eyes of gods, from the wrath of Hera, and the god-king’s cruelty to his kin. I do not blame her for this. I never did.
Sometimes I wish she didn’t. I listen as Artemis retells the story of how she crawled onto our father’s lap and whispered into his ear, “I want the hunt. I want the beasts of the forest. I want as many epithets as my brother and I want the moon. I want to be called Light-bringer and I want to have an entourage of nymphs always by my side. I want everything cruel and grimy, and I want blood under my nails.”
I listen with the same intensity as I always do, and I imagine myself in that position. I imagine what I’d say. Would I still ask – no, I decide I will demand like Artemis had – to be the goddess of spring? Or would I choose the laboring of man, the rotting of fruit, the fire of volcanoes? And then Artemis would smile at me, and Styx would braid my hair, and I would try not to think about it too much because then the tears would start to flow, and I’d end up flooding another city.
I could not seek comfort in my mother for this kind of want. While typically, she would hold me in her arms, weave flowers into my hair, and tell me of all the beautiful things she saw mortals do that day, I could not get her comfort on this subject. No, instead she would look down, seethe, and yell, “Do you know what I have sacrificed to keep you away from him?” And I would nod and bite my tongue till it bled, and I would whisper apologies till she calmed.
I do not blame my mother. But sometimes I wish things were different. I don’t hate the life I lead. My mother teaches me what the goddesses who came before had taught her. She taught me how to make life grow from nothing and how to take life too.
“Do you see that bird over there, Kore? It relies on the seeds we spread out to survive. What do you think would happen if we stopped giving it seeds?”
“Don’t say that, that’d be mean.”
“You’re right, it would be mean because the bird would die. You know what else would happen?”
“No plants would grow.”
“Mhm. But what about the animals that eat the bird? They would die too. And the animals that eat the plants which grow from the seeds would starve as well.”
“Which is why we would never do that!”
“Yes, you’re right. But it also gives us control, control that no other god has. Do you hear me, Kore? You are as much a goddess of death as you are a goddess of life. You are as much slaughter as you are nurture.” She kneels beside me and looks at me with those eyes that are so serious it scares me. “Don’t let anyone think otherwise.”
My mother told tales of my great-grandmother, the earth through which we spread the harvest, Gaia. How she nurtured her hatred until it grew into patience, and how that patience paid off. She told me of her mother, who satiates hunger, Rhea. She told me of how Rhea broke free from the title of just nurturer but became an avenger of her children. She never told me any of her own tales. I was so enraptured by tales of my ancestors I did not think to ask about her story. I don’t think she ever wanted to tell it anyway. Maybe I should’ve asked. I don’t know.
It wasn’t just my ancestry she told me of. She told me of the primordial mothers who breathed the earth into creation. Of Chaos, a force both infinitely cruel and infinitely just that came before everything, who ruled before Zeus and who will rule long after his reign expires. She told me of Nyx, who weaved stars into her hair and collapsed whole galaxies with her laugh. She told me of Eurynome, who gave rise to the universe out of an eternal dance she had with the stars. I would repeat these stories to my Olympic friends, and it was then I realized how truly different our upbringings were.
“I never heard of Eurynome, is what you say true?” Styx tilts her head curiously, perhaps in doubt.
“Have your tutors not taught you this?”
“They taught me about Zeus’s war with Chronos and the other titans, nothing before that.”
It was times like this that I was most thankful to be raised away from Olympus, just in the secluded meadows of Sicily with my mother and her nymphs.
“Has she taught you about the Titanomachy too?”
“Of course, she’s told me all about it.”
“And what about us?” Artemis grins, more than interested to hear what Demeter has to say about her child’s friends.
I would never tell them the whole truth about what she had said. Truth be told, she didn’t want me to associate myself with “those kinds of divinities,” whatever that meant. I think I got an idea of what she was trying to say. Both of them reeked of death, with Artemis always clad in the skin of the animals she had slain herself, and with Styx’s river flowing through Hades. She was an outcast from the other Oceanids. I found this very hypocritical of her. How could she tell me I was a bringer of death and then shame me for surrounding myself with goddesses of a similar likeness?
“She tells me of your great strength, Artemis. And she tells me of how the gods swear their oaths by your waters, Styx.”
After a few centuries, she would grow more fond of them, especially after I would make it known to her how much they meant to me, time and time again. And yet, as much as I loved them and held them dear to my heart, there was always a certain goddess I wished to be acquainted with. My mother pushed me to talk to her as well, and said she would be a good influence on me. I was always too afraid to approach her, and I could not ask my friends to join me as they did not seem to care about gaining her friendship. I managed to build up the courage to speak with her once. She was visiting Sicily and, knowing I would never be able to go and find her on Olympus, I sat down next to her as she lay on the rocky shores of the coast of my mother’s island. She already knew who I was.
“Kore, was it? Your mother wouldn’t be pleased if she found out you were asking me for a lover.”
“Oh, no, that’s not what I’m here for. I hope that’s okay.”
And so we sat there for a while, and we exchanged stories. She told me of how she rose from the ichor of a primordial, crawled onto the shores of Cyprus as the Nereids sang her name like a war cry, and how the Cypriots saw this beautiful and cruel birth and ignored it because they could not imagine love and war in the same sentence.
“They should’ve seen me and called me justice, vengeful, a promise kept. Instead, they called me ‘lovely Aphrodite.’ I may be a patroness of Cyprus, but they got me wrong. But of course, the Spartans got me wrong as well.”
“Don’t they worship you as a war goddess there too?”
“Yes, but they forget to worship me for love as well. Rarely is it the case where you can have one and not the other. If your love is not bloody, if your love is not raw and dangerous, it is not true.”
I would go home that day and tell my mother of my encounter with her, and the wisdom she shared with me. And she looked… disappointed. Perhaps she had wished she would have shown me a softer, more graceful side of what love is. A love that my mother never knew. But instead, I was faced with the truth.
Upon telling my friends of this encounter, Artemis wrinkled her nose.
“She’s a deceitful goddess, I wouldn’t take her word on it. Last I checked, her mother was an ocean nymph. Yes, she rose out of the sea, but not from the ichor of Ouranus.”
“What would she gain from lying to me?”
“Another deity who’s utterly enraptured with her, that’s what.” Styx laughed, finishing tying my hair into a braid and moving in front of me so I could braid hers.
“I don’t blame them, the ones who have fallen in love with her I mean. She speaks like… I can’t describe it. It’s what I imagine alcohol to be like, intoxicating. And she’s beautiful, so cruelly beautiful. I felt hideous next to her.” I pause, enraptured just by the memory of Aphrodite alone.
“Who cares for beauty if it’s going to cause you so many issues? Do you know how many mortals she’s cursed and maimed for claiming they were more beautiful than her?”
“And who cares for love if it’ll only cause you pain? Let’s swear by my waters to never take someone’s hand in marriage.”
“I swear it,” Artemis replied without hesitation.
“I swear it.” I wish I had Artemis’s confidence, but my thoughts raced. What if I fell in love? What if I found someone I would want to lay beside for the rest of eternity? Still, I made the pact.
“Obviously, I swear it too.”
The three of us didn’t know it, or perhaps we knew it but didn’t understand it, but we had already been in love. The way we smiled at each other with a certain tenderness, the way we would lay with each other on the banks of the river in the summer heat, the way we would fall asleep on each other’s laps, this was a love that transcended the binds of “platonic” and “romantic.” We could’ve all sat there forever, braiding each other’s hair, exchanging stories, even ones we had already heard.
But time still passed, and our oath was slowly undone. Styx was first, her hand in marriage being taken by Pallas. Teary-eyed, as she told us the news, she said she loved him. We weren’t sure if she was speaking truthfully. From then on, she spent more time in the Underworld, tending to her river and her husband. My mother would never let me visit her, so it was Artemis who told me stories of Styx’s life in the Chthonic realm. I wouldn’t see Styx’s face for millennia afterward. Our friendship was deeply strained by the distance. That would be the last time she had known me as Kore.
Artemis followed not long after. After Styx’s departure, she would only visit me to tell me how Styx was doing. She spent more time away from Olympus, in the deepest parts of the forest where even I would not follow. She fell in love with a nymph from her entourage. Artemis never told me, I would only find out from my mother centuries later upon commenting on a bear-shaped constellation in the night sky. It seems romantic, immortalizing your lover in the inky canvas of the night. But I could tell, Callisto burned with heartache, that’s how she shined. And I knew Artemis felt that ache too.
I remembered Aphrodite’s words, how love and war were the same. It shouldn’t have surprised me that such a human emotion would pull apart even the greatest of gods. I shouldn’t have wasted centuries mourning Artemis and Styx as if they died. I shouldn’t have thought I would be an exception to love’s pain.
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