Persephone's Choice: The Darkness & the Light | A novel of Ancient Greece

Chapter 4: The Stag

"Hey!" Kora shrieked in delight, dodging a splash from a water nymph and running up the river bank as she shook out her short chiton.

The three nymphs in the river laughed, pushing wet, silvery hair from their faces as they splashed anyone within range. Thyamis, Eurotas and Miritsa kept up their water fight while Kora retreated to a safe distance, sinking down into the lush grass and turning her face to the sun. She paid little attention to the three nymphs. Their water fight would go on for some time yet, before the laughter turned to bickering as it always did. The three sisters would argue for a while, then sulk for a bit, before reconciling over a swim.

It was a pattern that repeated itself daily. Kora did not need to watch to know what would happen, or to listen to know what would be said.

She sighed gently, spreading her fingers in the grass, feeling content and unfulfilled all at once. Closing her eyes, she focused on drawing power to her centre and pushing it out through her fingertips. A sunflower took root beneath her fingertips, deep within the earth. She felt it pulsing in the darkness, tendrils spreading deeper into the soil as the flower stretched for the surface, searching for the light. As the stem pushed its way above ground and reached up for the sun, petals began to unfurl from the bud, shades of warm yellow and amber painting each one, at once uniform and unique.

Kora smiled, looking up at her work, the broad, beautiful flower in stark relief against the azure sky. It seemed to pulse with her power, thanking her for giving it life. She withdrew her fingertips from the earth and lay back, breathing deeply and closing her eyes as the feeling of purpose ebbed away, leaving her feeling empty again.

She couldn't put a finger on it. There was joy when she gave life, creating growth and beauty for her friends to enjoy, but that feeling never lasted. There was no sense of purpose, no sense that she was making a positive contribution to the world. Her mother was goddess of the harvest – tending all the important crops; without her, the mortals would suffer and starve. They depended on Demeter for life.

Kora just made the flowers grow, no better than the nymphs who kept her company during her mother's long absence every day.

The days were one endless, repetitious pattern, each new dawn exactly like the last. It had been this way for over two centuries. Kora and Demeter would rise with the sun as it poured through the windows of their little stone cottage. Kora's bedroom was hidden away at the back of the house – she had to pass through her mother's room to get to it.

When she was woken by the rose-pink light of Helios's dawn, she would dress quickly and wake her mother so that they could have breakfast in their vast private walled garden. It was here that Kora practised her skills, growing all kinds of different flowers in every imaginable colour and hue in beautiful arrangements to delight her mother. They would eat a breakfast of fruit, grains, nuts and olives under the shade of the trees together before her mother would stand up and kiss her on the forehead, caressing her daughter's hair before departing for yet another day of supervising the mortals' crops, tending their harvests and visiting her temples to receive the sacrifices and adulation of her worshippers.

Kora was left in the care of the river and flower nymphs. They were pleasant, congenial company, but had the depth of puddles, rather than the rivers that bore their names. Try as she might, she could get no stimulating conversation out of them. She was more than two hundred years old, and still they treated her like a child. She knew nothing of other gods, of mortal life, of death... or of anything outside of the carefully constructed world her mother had built for them.

Occasionally she would overhear a snatch of conversation between nymphs that would inflame her curiosity: a choice piece of gossip about another deity, stories from the mortal world, or the disappearance of yet another nymph whose belly had mysteriously begun to swell, becoming rounded before Demeter noticed and summarily dismissed her. But if she ever asked directly about what she'd heard, they would deflect the question, change the subject or play innocent.