Persephone Incarnate [Wattpad Prize 2014] | ✔️

{25} Sophie

The sun was hot and blinding – I didn’t need to open my eyes to know it. I felt it in every pore, every hair, every bit of me. Sweat was beading on my forehead, and my hair was sticking uncomfortably to my face and my neck. It was like an Arizona summer. I should’ve been used to it, but the heat is never something you can quite get used to. You can learn to expect it, to anticipate the hazy wall of heat that’ll hit you the moment you walk out of an air-conditioned building, into the morning or afternoon glare. You can anticipate the strokes of heat that will burn into your skin and your head – it’ll cause headaches and sunburns and all you ever want is the coolness of water on your skin, water that’s not salty sweat and lukewarm, purified, bottled up water.

A breeze swept past my exposed arm and hand, as if trying to bring me what I craved for then, but it just pushed more hot air my way. I squirmed uncomfortably, but stopped when I just felt even worse. I was burning up – why was it so hot? It just seemed to get hotter…

I opened my mouth. I needed water now. Immediately. I needed it more than I needed life or music. My lips were so dry, it was so unbearably dry, my tongue felt swollen, there was no moisture in me. I struggled to find air, to suck in some cool, crisp goodness into me, but even my lungs felt dry. Every breath hurt. It grazed against throat, like I was rubbing sandpaper up and down and right and left and all around it.

And then that innate goddess knowledge suddenly kicked in, and I just knew that I wasn’t under some hot desert sun. I wasn’t even anywhere close to home, or anywhere relatively warm. I was being cocooned in a healing bubble – the pale, golden streaks of light that would miraculously mend my body, repair every cut, every wound, and every fracture. The stuff of dreams, a mystical power that scientists could only wish for in their wildest fantasies.

And it would have to remain there. If they even tried to find this, make it happen in a lab somewhere, they would burn – every single atom of them would dissolve away slowly, painfully, until they were no more. It wasn’t something as wild as a punishment or even a safeguard – the energy was just too much for any mortal to even see, much less comprehend.

 It was something that I wasn’t supposed to have experienced. And now, I was burning, inside the skin of an immortal goddess.

****

“Persephone!”

“Persephone!”

Voices, they sounded so far away.

“Persephone, open your eyes!”

It felt like someone had glued my eyelids shut. I tried to open them a few times until they finally came flying open. I saw the blue sky above me, and the sun already climbing its way up.

I shot up, panic streaming from my mind into every nerve of my body. I had been burning up, or something like that. And it was really uncomfortable; there’d been sweat and hair clinging to me and…

I couldn’t finish my train of thought. It all seemed to fading away from me, like a vivid dream that dissipates in the morning, as soon as you wake up. Maybe that’s all it had been.

But that didn’t change the fact that I had been dreaming in the first place. I had been sleeping the morning away, and now it looked near noon. That meant that I had only a few hours left – four, to be very exact. And that wasn’t much time.

“Persephone!”

The voice was clearer now. I turned around to find myself face to face with Rhodeia. “You’re finally awake!” She grinned widely and scooted over to me so we were sitting side by side. “You should’ve told us if you were tired – you just collapsed on Admete the moment you saw her!”