Dirge of Hell | Greek Mythology

22 Wedding night

"Mama! Look!" Kore pointed to the little celebration happening down the hill. A beautiful woman in yellow peplos walked towards the regal man wearing a white chiton. They looked happy as an elderly man joined hands with the younger man, after which the latter joined hands with the woman. "What are they doing mama?"

"A wedding, my curious child," Demeter smiled as she explained.

"What's a wedding?"

"Hmm…it's an agreement between the father of the woman and the suitor of the woman where said woman is no longer the father's but the suitor's."

Kore nodded and tried to understand as best she could. She fell silent as she carefully observed the married couple. "Are they happy mama?"

Demeter's smile faltered for a moment. "I sure hope so, child. But it's something I hope you will never undergo because," she knelt down, placed her daughter in her lap, hugged her tightly, and sighed deep in thought, "though the woman may be smiling now, I do not think there is true happiness in marriage…"

888

When one is suddenly kidnapped, cruelly torn from everything familiar and, three hours later, prepared for marriage, one cannot help but lose touch of reality and shut down. That was Kore during the entire ceremony. She couldn't quite believe the succeeding events to be real. Not to mention, none of it seemed real in the first place.

She felt like a third person possessing a body that's not really hers and watching safely through a window. She marched blankly down that 'masquerade ball' of a hall – filled with shadow-clad immortals, their cold mask-like faces fixed with contemptuous leers, derisive sneers, and mocking or otherwise hard smiles – like it was the most natural thing in the world. She seemed unwelcomed enough.

When she was upon the pedestal of the thrones and Hades took her hand, his eyes slightly wakened her, his dark gaze too intense to be an illusion. However the visitation of the Fates brought another level of unrealism to the situation and shocked her brain back into a state of non-responsiveness again. Who would actually believe that the Great Fates, the ones not even the 'great king' Zeus could go against, stood in front of her and blessed her? The Great Weavers of the Cosmos, who was widely believed to control the destinies of all whether mortal or immortal, that only her 'great father' had seen, had been three inches away from touching her. She never thought she'd meet deities as powerful as them in her lifetime, as insignificant as she was in the hierarchy of immortals, yet she did, which quite frankly left her in a state of utter disbelief.

But what truly woke her though and shattered her self-imposed, sanity-preserving daze and told her that she wasn't dreaming was the 'merrymaking'.

She didn't hear Tartarus' version of merrymaking, thanks to Erebus, but then paid more attention to her surroundings after the silencing of the hysterical, shouting nymphs. Though even if the god of darkness didn't cover her ears, it wouldn't have mattered because she couldn't put meaning behind the words 'gore' or 'blood' or 'wails and screams of agony' that the gods and goddesses so love to repeat anyway. Except for blood, none of those words were in her vocabulary. In fact, she was so innocent she couldn't comprehend brutality, period. And for a goddess who never saw violence in her life, who has never been hit, and whose only injury were childhood falls when she tripped when she ran too fast, the gruesome images painted by the chthonic deities flew over her head (or was rather automatically censored in her mind).

It was the subsequent ones, the milder ones, the ones that she could actually imagine (the ones that the rest of the chthonic immortals jeered for being insipid) that numbed her feet and hands; that slowed her blood in its tracks; that sent her heart racing; that made her feel sick; that pooled her saliva in her mouth; that sent chills running up and down her spine one after the other and make her break out in cold sweat.