The Taste Of Divinity

Τ Ρ Ι Α Ν Τ Α Τ Ρ Ι Α

T W O     D A Y S     L A T E R

The air was warm that day, dry and suffocating.

The mournful cypress trees provided no comfort, only a whisper of heat. No gentle breeze passed through the leaves of the weeping willows. The pomegranates fell ingloriously from the trees onto the hard, athirst ground; rotten, their seeds spilled onto the thin blades of grass, bleeding on them.

The soil resembled a battlefield.

There was no solace to be sought.

Persephone laid her weary head against the starving earth, her long hair forming a halo of liquid gold as she placed her wrists over the edge of the sleeping river, a ruby dangling lazily from her fingertips.

Traces of perspiration formed on her stomach as the long hours passed, colliding with the drops of river water she'd pour down her neck ever so often. They danced across her flesh with each breath, as though commanded by the melodic song of a lyre. But soon, even they grew tired, surrendering to oblivion as they became imprisoned between her flesh and a finely woven chiton of Phoenician red.

Below her, she could hear the soil beg for a taste to quench its thirst, as it spoke in a dialect similar to the one used by the flowers and her golden blood.

It ought to have been ominous and strident, the plea, dragged from the abysmal pits of Tartarus but oddly enough, it resembled satin and drowned her in longing as it traced the shell of her ear. Such longing, in fact, that for a moment--as her eyelids gently kissed--she found herself lost in dreams of Eleusis.

And they were dreams of olive trees and the restless sea, of her mother's fingers carving paths in her hair as she recounted tales of a past long lost, of her friends laughing and running carefree in the sun-stroked fields, of secrets and ilicit fantasies created by the moonlight, of her fingertips prodding and seeking the Nocturnal one.

But even those memories, hazy and inconsistent as they were, were soon erased by another.

One that tasted sweeter.

One that left an aftertaste of sin.

It was the memory of his command, suggestive and worshipful, as it had crawled out of his throat two nights ago, the memory of his body engulfing hers in sleep while inhaling her breaths as though they were his own, the memory of waking up just after dawn had broken in the world above only to find him standing by the bed, dressed in the opulent colours of the bottom of the sea and the darkest storm, watching as she tossed and turned restlessly under the pomegranate seeds he'd poured down her body the night before, her fingers crawling under the covers, seeking, always seeking.

And it was him she'd sought, of course, the memory of him that had not yet manifested.

It was the memory of the way he'd taken her hand in his the moment he'd noticed she'd woken, the way he'd drawn circles on the skin of her inner palm as he laid another jewel on the centre, the way he'd laid a warm, starved kiss on her forehead before he'd stepped out of the room.

"Dream of me" he'd commanded, and he'd rewarded her as though he'd known she'd obeyed.

"Dream of me." Persephone whispered as the ruby he'd given her traced her lips. She imagined him holding it in his hands, caging it inside his palms whenever he felt agitated, caressing it whenever he lost his mind. She imagined him using it to trace the long column of his throat, passing it over his stubborn chin before placing it on his lips, using it as the echo of a kiss. "As if I haven't always."