The Destroyer

Sing! Muse, of a woman who is no woman! Sing to me of a girl who was lost in song and language, whom no one truly knows. Tell me how she - wait, I forget what I meant to say.

The golden daughters of Zeus will not tell this story. They cannot, because they could never know the whole of it, and what poet could tell half a story?

Lucky that I am no poet. I am a river. I am a border. I am an escape and I am a sentencing. Don’t ask me my name, I couldn’t tell you.

But this woman-who-is-no-woman? This girl who was lost in song and language whom no one truly knows? I do know her name. I know all of her names. I know what she is and I know what she used to be. I am the only one who does.

So, lovely Muse, daughter of Zeus, the light in every poet’s eyes, perhaps it is you who will finally listen to me. You never had before; why would you, when I lose everything? I am your worst enemy.

Well, the script of this play was written upon my banks, you see. What I didn’t see for myself she told me, when she used to sit at my edge and speak as if she thought no one was listening. And all the lives that swim within me, all those mortal memories forfeited to my grasp, I have those too. It is a shame my fingers are made of water; if they were not, perhaps fewer things would slip between them.

***

“So, how does it begin? This story.”

I blink. “What?”

“You were going to tell me her story,” says the golden woman. “Since I apparently cannot.”

“Oh, right, yes, you cannot,” I say. “How could you? You live up there and she lives down here. I live down here. What are you doing down here?”

“You wanted to tell me a story,” she says. “So go on. How does it begin?”

I sigh, thinking, sifting. My hands are made of water. “It starts when she was a girl.”

***

When she was a girl she loved the earth. She ran through field after field of bobbing flowers, the yellow of the narcissus reflecting on her skin, the hyacinth scent in her nose. She wore baby’s breath in her long hair and rolled in the bright green grasses. She broke the surface with her nails and buried her fingers in the cool soft dirt. She was, perhaps, everything she should have been.

Her mother had much enjoyed her when she was this young. She was all laughter and smiles. She asked her about unfamiliar flowers and picked all the ones she thought pretty, though her mother told her to stop.

“The flowers live, my dear,” she would say. “Just as we do. When you pluck them like that, they die.”

“They will die anyway,” she would respond, and continue picking. “Nothing you love lasts.”

Her mother bade her spend time with the nymphs, the ones with trees for their hearts and growing things at their fingertips. They walked her through many a god’s garden, and she stared up at the twisting, scored trees with wide eyes. She watched their leaves drift to the ground, she ran her small hands along the roots that snaked deep into the dirt. This way, her mother thought, she could raise a flower, and not a weed.

She didn’t raise a weed. But she didn’t raise a flower either.

The first time the girl was angry was in the dappled shade of one of these sacred gardens. She hadn’t spied the bit of root surfacing from the earth, so lost was she in the mosaic green above her head. It caught under her small foot and she fell to the ground, the skin of her knee broken on a sharp rock.

She was young and so she cried. She cried out as she fell and she cried tears when she felt the pain, the first in her flower-field life, and she cried harder when she saw the curious liquid that leaked around the scraped skin, running down her leg. It was gold; not like the bright gold of the Sun’s eyes, but an amber-gold, richly dark in its core.

It was her first meeting of vulnerability, and she flinched at shaking its hand.

In a fit of anger and fear, she grabbed the rock and threw it at the tree whose root had tripped her. The bark was cut. Someone screamed.

Her mother was there when she blinked, towering over her like the trees all around them, only without peace in her eyes. She was wroth, she was shocked, she was ashamed that her own child had harmed a sacred tree; a tree that was the beating heart of whatever nymph had wailed.

The girl hadn’t been thinking when she threw the rock. She hadn’t thought it would injure the great tree, she hadn’t thought it would hurt someone. She looked up at the goddess that loomed over her, the deity that was not her mother in the way she’d known her. The mother of things that lived, who held wrath for those who hurt them, stared down at her now.

The girl was very afraid now. She cried even more at the look on her mother’s face. The goddess leaned down swiftly and took her daughter’s face in one hand, the girl squinting through her tears.

“Did you enjoy that?” her mother murmured.

The girl sobbed too hard to respond.

“Did it bring you satisfaction, to harm something in the wake of your own injustice?” she went on. “To make someone else suffer as you did?”

The girl shook her head. Her mother’s eyes bore into hers with the heat of the Sun’s. “You won’t do it again.”

The girl nodded, sniffing. Her mother rose to her great height and stalked out of the garden, the unencumbered sunlight spilling onto her, alighting her like a golden flame. The girl watched until she was a flickering star in the distant fields before she began to cry in her fullest earnest.

***

“It is a hard thing,” the golden woman says, “To be a child and a god.”

“Do you think so?” I ask. “I’ve never been a child.”

“Do you not hold memories of those who were?” she asks.

“I do,” I say. “Though they are mortal. They seem much the same.”

“How old was she,” asks the Muse, “When she was taken?”

I shake my head a little. “Not much older.”

***

She was, perhaps, seventeen years old. Maybe she was eighteen, or nineteen. She is a god; they are all the same number. She grew to forget the day she struck a tree, but not the lesson she learned. And grow she had: her mother and the nymphs were joyed to see it, how she had grown in their image. Her hair was long and curled from her head. Her eyes were dark as deep earth, the substance beneath her mother’s grass eyes. She was never without that reminder, that everywhere she went there was life. Under her foot, at her back, above her head. She felt no peace at the thought.

She grew to the nymphs’ design in appearance, but not in her heart. She wasn’t quiet or grateful. She sang loud songs. She picked the flowers instead of planting them. She did not laugh, not unless she was playing in dirt.

Her favorite thing to do was make herself crowns. She learned to weave flower stems as mortals would thread, and made chains of daisies and dandelions. She found she liked the white peonies with their dark leaves, and that she could secure twigs in her flower-stem braids to add intrigue. She wove together roses and berries and ferns. Her mother was horrified to happen upon her adorning one such crown with moth wings.

“They were dead already,” she told her affrighted mother. “I did nothing.”

She wore the crowns until they browned and withered, at which point she would dig a hole in a sacred garden and bury them in the earth. This was something her mother never saw.

There was a day when she sought to make a crown of narcissus flowers, the yellow star-shaped bells that opened to the Sun. She set about gathering them, and her fingertips closed around the stem of the first.

The earth opened up beneath her, and she was swallowed whole. The nymphs glanced up at the sound of a cut-off scream, but they saw nothing, and so continued with their work.

***

“I witnessed with my own eyes perhaps everything that happened after that,” I say. “But I lose images more than I lose words, it seems, and it helped that she told me everything again.”

The golden woman looks at me with discomfort, with pity. “Was she scared?”

“Was she not supposed to be?” I ask, my voice running over rocks. “Of course she was scared. But she was also angry.”

“I find,” says the Muse, “That they are not always separate from each other.”

I blink at her. “Which one are you again?”

***

She found herself in a place carved from darkness. Walls of earth and floors of stone, fingers of roots breaking through the ceiling. It was unsettlingly quiet, like the whole realm was silently lamenting a song it realized it would never hear.

That’s how she described it to me.

She caught her first glimpse of her husband as he spoke from a particularly dark corner, unmoving as the world around him.

“That yellow flower in your hand,” he said, “Is as my heart: caught by you.”

She turned fully to him, for she had no doubt in her mind who he was. She said, “You have daring, for a man who claims such weakness. You will regret this. My mother will not let this be.”

He was silent for a moment; she could barely see him in his shadows. He said, “Are you hungry?”

She said, “I am decidedly not.”

***

“Her mother did not find her,” I say to the Muse. “It was a long time before she learned what had become of her child.”

“I watched her search,” she says. “I watched the world grieve with her. I can only imagine what grief her daughter felt.”

I tilt my head. “Actually, not much.”

***

She quite took to the place. The world below, the cavernous dark realm of stone and souls. She could sing as loudly as she wanted. There were flowers; the asphodels with their red veins that she wore upon her head, and they did not wilt. Nothing was golden. Nothing really lived. And there was dirt everywhere.

She avoided her husband, Aidoneus, Hades, Receiver of the Dead. She sat at his table and accepted his gifts, but she did not often suffer the sound of his voice. She didn’t eat. She waited for her mother to come for her, and hoped she wouldn’t.

“I hated myself for it,” she told me. “I hated that I liked being away from her, that I wished she would somehow never find me. But I knew she would, and that when she did, I would go with her. I owed her that much.”

“But she did come,” I said. “She found you. And here you are.”

“Yes,” she said. “I ate the pomegranate.”

She had been quite hungry by then, and her mother hadn’t come. She’d discovered the tree in one of the many realms within the dark under-place, the house of the dead. It was something else to make a crown from, and so she wore pomegranates on her brow with the asphodel flowers, with the finger bones.

She found seven bead-red seeds in her palm, and her hollowed-out stomach had intensified the song she was trying to silence in her mind: Stay. Stay. Stay.

“Do you regret it?” I asked her.

She said, “No.”

She ate the pomegranate seeds, and she was tied irrevocably to the underworld.

***

“What gave her her name?” the golden woman asks. “The Destroyer.”

I smile, slightly. “Everything, I suppose.”

***

There was a woman in the bed of her husband before her, a nymph who had not taken well to her new queen. She claimed aloud to be more beautiful than she, and that the god-king should shun her in favor of the nymph. She turned the woman into mint and crushed her beneath her foot.

“Do you regret it?” I asked her.

She said, “Yes. I care not that she had lain with my husband. But she claimed herself better than me. A true nymph, she was, and so I made her what they all are in their hearts: fragile. I do not regret turning her into a leaf. But I regret stepping on her. You don’t break something because it’s fragile.”

“You were raised by nymphs,” I said to her. “Are you fragile like them?”

Her dark gaze met mine, and I could understand why no mortal could look her in the eyes. “Have I yet broken?”

The house of the dead was now her home and she was its queen, but she was also the child of Demeter. She had misliked growing up around so many breathing things, and down here nothing breathed. But she was inclined, eventually, to want something that made her feel like her mother’s daughter again.

She gathered pearly bones from the earth above her head, raiding mortal graves from below. With an unfinished blade she cut her skin, drawing that dark amber substance from her veins for the first time since she’d tripped on the root of a tree.

She mixed her blood with the dirt and fixed the bones together. She made a vase in the shape of a body and filled it with water from the Styx. Into its mouth she put a leaf from the mint plant she’d trampled.

Its eyes opened gray as silt.

***

“She named her Melinoë,” I say. “Dark-minded.”

“The Destroyer is also Creator,” the Muse says meditatively.

“In a manner of speaking,” I say. “Melinoë became goddess of ghosts and propitiation; a figure of nightmares among men.”

The Muse narrows her godly eyes at me. “You remember much, for someone who claims to remember little.”

“It is no claim, it is fact,” I say. “And as I said, I hold words better than memories. Why do you think mortals drink my water to forget their lives?”

“Where do their memories go, when they give them to you?” the golden goddess asks.

“I don’t remember,” I say.

“A convenient answer for you, isn’t it?”

I stare at her from under lowered brows. “The Destroyer is the goddess of spring as well as Underworld Queen.”

***

And so she returned to the world above, to her mother’s lands, every year. She didn’t like it.

The nymphs avoided her, but that was nothing new. They feared her now. Her mother did the opposite, never leaving her side, and so she spent the lengths of spring and summer among the grasses and the nymph-trees and the golden Sun.

She was able to steal one moment away, and she used it to visit the tree she had harmed as a child. It had been, perhaps, a millennium.

It was dead.

Slightly curled in on itself, its branches bare of leaf and bark grayed of color. A bed of wildflowers sat between its protruding roots. Where they laid the nymph, she realized.

Her first thought was that she had never been able to apologize. Her second was whether or not she actually would have.

She regretted it. She wished she hadn’t done it for the wrath, for the pain. But would she have apologized?

No one had ever apologized to her. Not her husband for abducting her. Not her mother for taking so long to find her. Not the river for listening to her story and saying nothing. She didn’t know how to pronounce the words that asked for forgiveness.

When she returned to the underworld she found the shade of the nymph and brought her to Elysium.

***

“Lethe,” the Muse says.

I look up. “That is my name.”

She smiles wryly. “Do you think I’ve never met her before?”

I frown. “Met who?”

“You are good at this,” she says. “But you can stop pretending now.”

I stare at her.

“I’ve met the forgetful river,” the Muse says. “She barely speaks but for singing funeral songs. Why did you want to tell me all of this?”

I press my lips together. What is the game now? I never think anything all the way through, do I?

“Persephone.”

“You are as truth to the poets,” I say. “And this is my truth to you.”

“You want me to be your messenger?” she says. “You want me to give your story to the mortals?”

“I want their worship,” I say. “I want to be their shrine. I don’t want them to be afraid.”

“You want me to make you a cult?”

“I can make the cult. I just need you to tell them my story,” I say. “I can do for them what I did for the nymph; give them an afterlife of peace in a blessed realm. They need only be my handmaidens.”

The golden Muse sits back, her arms crossed. The look on her face does not say no.

“Dear Destroyer,” she says. “Are you trying to atone for what you’ve become?”

I laugh, because her question is funny.

“I’ll keep giving small blessings like this,” I say, “But I can never stop destroying.”