Page 20 of Aïdes the Unseen
The stillness that bloomed even underground.
Then, with a breath like the hush before twilight, he vanished.
My world felt colder for his absence.
I turned toward the path home.
Mother would be waiting.
There was no escaping the ineffable truth. Spring had already begun to shift.
Part of me—part ofMother—knew it.
The path to her temple wound upward through the green hills, still damp from rain.
I walked slowly.
The hem of my dress clung to my ankles, streaked with mud and crushed petals. Every step was gentle, careful, as if I could somehow keep what had just happened inside me. I was about as successful as carrying water cupped between trembling hands.
The wind had changed, and so had I. The grove thinned as I climbed. Cypress gave way to olive, then to the wide-boughed fig trees my mother favored. Their roots ran deep—through time, through soil, through the memory of every harvest that had ever fed a mortal mouth.
I passed under their shade and felt a hum beneath the ground.
Not that I needed the warning, I’d recognized another truth. Mother was already waiting.
The clearing opened ahead, wide and sun-dappled, though the sky still hung heavy with cloud. My mother stood in the center, her back to me. A thyrsus of ripe barley rested across her shoulders, and her golden hair was braided with early wheat.
She did not turn.
“Kore,” she said softly, though the wind should have stolen the word.
I stopped at the edge of the clearing. The grass shivered beneath my feet, unsure whether to grow or shrink back.
“Mother,” I said, voice even.
She turned. Her eyes found mine, and the breeze paused. Not harsh. Not yet. Just still—like the space between lightning and thunder.
I braced.
Demeter did not storm. She crossed the clearing slowly, gaze searching, not my body, but mybeing. The way the earth around me pulsed a little differently. The way the light clung to my edges.
She stopped two paces away.
“You’ve been somewhere,” she said.
Not a question.
I didn’t reply. Not with words. That was enough.
She exhaled, the sound too soft to be a sigh, too weighted to be nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “Before I even stepped above the roots. Something shifted.”
The silence stretched long and thin between us.
At last, I said, “I was only walking.”
She looked at me then—really looked. Not as a mother. Not even as a goddess. But as a woman who had lost before, and refused to lose again.
