The Legend Of Persephone

Persephone walked with her mother Demeter through the fields, their towering divine forms shading the toiling farmers as they passed. Persephone, as much as she dwarfed the mortals, was herself still a child in the eyes of the Olympians, and so her head bobbed next to her mother’s curving hip. They wore their ethereal robes, and their sandaled feet barely left prints. Demeter’s hair was the color of harvest wheat, and her daughter’s the color of the fertile soil. Most men working the fields kept dutifully to their work even as the immortals strode by, but one man in twenty might look up. He might catch Persephone’s eye, and mirror her guileless grin. He might do this, and if he did he would inevitably meet the eye of Demeter. Her stern gaze

In her anger, Demeter didn’t think to call Persephone back. Persephone wandered. In the beginning she was only angry, but as she left the lands to which her mother jealously confined her, she was overcome with wonder. The world was already so much larger than she’d imagined.

Persephone passed out of the fields over which her mother presided, and into untamed wilderness. Without men to work the land, the trees and other vegetation choked the land with their knotted tendrils. Even towering above them as she’d come to do, they were hard to pass through.

Ahead she saw a mountain. Olympus! She quickened her pace to reach it, but when she crested it she saw it was only a small hill. Ahead, however–the Earth began a slowly steepening curve upward. The soil turned to jagged stone and the trees spread further and further from one another until a bare icy peak pierced the cloudy blanket far

At the bottom of the valley to her left, much closer than the home of the Gods, a crevasse opened in the earth. It seemed to split the Earth in half. The midnight sky did nothing to illuminate it. For all Persephone could see, it might extend down forever. Out of this hole in the world, as Persephone watched in awe, stepped a man. He had black hair and a close-cropped beard. He carried a brilliantly polished helm under his arm which seemed to shimmer like gossamer in the starlight. She couldn’t make out his face at this distance, though he was huge. Persephone saw that he towered over the hill she had climbed, above her atop the hill even, to the point at which he filled almost as much of her vision as distant Olympus. Her mother, she knew, was a first generation Olympian. Her mother was the largest piece of the world Persephone had seen until tonight. The God before her seemed as large as the Earth