I wanted pomegranates, I wanted darkness; spyndle, any

[perse]

i wanted pomegranates-- (“Tell me again,” she begs, because she knows He is preparing to leave (His stays are always much too short) and she wants to keep Him, “tell me how I got my name.” “No one believes Persephone ate the pomegranate willingly,” He says. It is a half story, he begins in the middle, “but I think she savored the flesh of it. I think she savored every moment of it. Giving in that way is special, isn’t it?”) Here is Persephone, grown. The filly who walked spindly-legged in the company of a dark god while her mother wailed and gnashed her teeth behind her is gone, replaced is a woman grown. Silver (like her mother), a burnished metallic color that reflects and tosses light like confetti. She squints, unused to the sun (she grew up in His lairs, in shadow and secrecy, just like her mother). She is the dead spit of Cordis, but here is the difference: where Cordis ran, hellhounds at her heels, Perse walks. It is not quite a saunter, but it is confident, smooth. Here is the difference: where Cordis begged for death as He flayed the skin from her bones, Perse begged for more. She didn’t know she would love it – didn’t know she would love Him – but she does, she does. She does not miss her mother. (Her mothers.) She misses Elecktrum, sometimes, the way they would tumble through space together like comets. But mostly she loves Him, her dark god, and she drinks his poison thirstily. i wanted darkness-- Go, He had said as He tore into her flesh, wrote His name on her chest, go, and see where you came from. Where she came from is boring. Where she came from is two mares entirely too caught up in themselves, from a meadow with rivers and hazel that’s entirely too bright. Here there are no gods hungry to dissemble her and remake her. Here they do not know the pleasure of submitting to the gods, to being theirs, to being broken and remade and tasted and burned. (She loves it all. God help her, she loves it all.) But He had said this to her so of course she obeyed. He walked out of the pits with her, led the way through the labyrinths, and brought her to the wasteland. From there, He branded her skin (He always remakes her fresh and untouched) with His name, a mark along her crest, half hidden by the silvery tumble of mane. (She knows, though. She feels it, warm, like a kiss.) Find your mother, He had said, but he had specified nothing else (not even which mother), so she does not even know where to begin. i wanted him-- p e r s e ------------------------------cordis x spyndle