🎶 6 Little Seeds: Interlude
Coming Soon: The 2nd Seed - Love & War
Because so many of my original readers from the Speakeasy are as big of music-lovers as I am, we got into the habit of enjoying some honorable mention musical gems as an interlude between Acts. So go on, have yourself a beverage, a stretch, a dance, a snack.
Just stay away from the pomegranates, yo. (Unless you like it down here with us in the Underworld.)
🌸☠️✨😈✨☠️🌸
Aphrodite and all the Erotes celebrating a triumph party in the Temple of Love on Mount Olympos - Ode to Eros:
Oh, you didn’t know Eros had a bunch of golden, winged brothers, all Love Gods like him? Well, he does. Six of them, in fact. (Okay, okay, fine. There’s nobody quite like EROS, but they are all Love Gods.)
As for the Master Matchmaker’s latest plot, he has never worried about the Bringer of Blossomtime. Today she paints petals on stems, crooning, “He loves me…he loves me not…he loves me…he loves me not…” (Serendipitously, everything she paints always seems to land on, “He loves me,” of late.)
(“He does,” Eros whispers across her image in the Descrying Bowl.)
Since she has always been eternally open to loving and to being loved, she was all too easy to shoot.
The growly, jaded, workaholic god who was Fated as her match, on the other wing…
Joyest of joys, the Lord of the Underworld is also sentimental this eve.
Eros would love to claim himself as the cause for that, and he is for some of it. But not for all. The rest is simply the inmost nature of the prey he chose to strike with three deviously architected darts.
💀 🔥 🐶🐶 🐶 🔥💀
Along the reeking, reed-infested banks of the Akherousian Mere, the Hound of Darkness lolls, gnawing on the thigh bone of a slain drakon. Snarky snatches the bone out of Snuggly’s jaws so he can have a go at it. “Hey!” Barky snaps and tries for the bone, but Snarky is too far away, on the opposite shoulder out there, so Barky contents himself with gnawing on Snuggly’s ear instead.
Always a friend of the central head, the snake-tipped tail rises up to chomp Barky’s ear in return—precisely why they call that tail Chomps. This incites a full-body war. The hound chases his tail, the tail dances and weaves, and the cadre of smaller serpents on the mane go crazy, striking, spitting, hissing and biting. All three canine heads can’t decide who to chomp so they fight over the bone again.
Snarky wins. Winking his spotted eye, he tosses the bone to Snuggly so they can all get some teeth on it, and the tail coils up for a well-earned snooze.
The serpent mane, however, whispers and hiss-chuckles amongst itself, for down on the rock that juts out into the lake, an immense, godly form sprawls, casual in nothing but a pleated hip-wrap. Treat-Bringer Bone-Thrower rests his cheek on his arm, and his free hand traces shapes in the water in an uncanny echo of the one he loves. (Such an uncharacteristic act, but give the poor god a break. He just got shot in the heart by Eros.)
When he rolls onto his back, eyes fixed on the leagues and leagues and leagues of Earth between his body and hers, he begins to sing. His voice hums with the bliss of imagining. For the first time, hope surpasses the agony of his longing, because he Knows.
Soon.
She will be here with him very soon, and there is nothing in the Cosmos that can halt that now.
🌝🌗🌚
Up the 999,999 stairs, far beyond the Walls of Bronze and Night on the other side of the Impassable Threshold, three figures stand back-to-back-to-back. Their three heads tilt skyward to stare at the moon. It’s full tonight, and fully risen.
But soon, it will be dark again, and then everything will change.
Hekate adores change, and this one is destined to alter the world from Below to Above. It will shift the trajectory of the sun and even change the flow of Time’s sands.
Up Next:
Did you miss the First Act?
The entire playlist of songs that I put on broken-record mode for inspiration while working on this series:
© 2015 Hartebeast
Another great story