🌸 Honeysuckle - The 2nd Seed Begins Here!
L&W1: The Bringer of Blossomtime sneaks out of the Protected Grove.
Previously in The 1st Seed:
Spoilers ahoy!
Earth Mother DEMETER works to arrange the marriage of her only child, the Bringer of Blossomtime. The girl’s name is PERSEPHONE but nobody calls her that. They call her “KORE”—the Maiden—for her birth name is plagued by a prophesy that says she will be made a bride by force and fall into Eternal Darkness. *cue spooky music* If only Demeter can find a mate that Kore will marry willingly—enthusiastically—no, ecstatically!—she is certain the prophesy will be broken.
But Kore already knows which god is her Fated Love. She’s been hearing his voice and catching shadowed glimpses of him in the spring-fed pool for centuries. If only her mother would let her meet him, Kore just knows that their union would be as sublime and harmonious as when their songs weave and meld. But no. Overprotective Earth Mother bans gods from the Protected Grove, and rarely lets the Bringer of Blossomtime leave anymore, even for official ceremonies.
Unbeknownst to Kore, the god with whom she has been singing is one of her mother’s enemies: HAIDES, Lord of the Underworld, King of the Dead. His epitaph “Klymenos” once meant “famous.” Now everybody uses it to call him “infamous,” and he has already sent numerous marriage proposals—all ignored by Demeter. When Haides realizes that Kore’s mooning and swooning songs have all been about Ares, God of War, he turns his back on the secret conduit between their realms and buries himself in work.
The God of Love will have none of that.
EROS has been working on this confounded love match between Kore and Klymenos for nearly eight hundred years, by Nemesis! He feels it in his ichor and his boundless primordial heart—this match will restore the Cosmos’ imbalance of Love & Harmony vs. War & Greed. In fact, it was this tantalizing project that lured Love Primordial into incarnating in the first place.
And all right, fine. He also yearned to experience the delectable fleshly delights that one must possess a body to enjoy. With its wings. And eyes! And, oh, lips. Yes, and hands and keen, stiff, woody arrows and—
What? He has a whole quiver full of them, plus the bow to shoot them.
Ohhhh….
Did you think he was referring to something else?
(No wonder he likes you, because you weren’t completely wrong.)
Anyway…for fourteen flippin’ chapters, there’s been a never-ending slew of annoying obstacles mucking up this project. Things like three-headed, red-eyed, neck-chomping guard-dogs. And lovely pits of eternal damnation for those who hack off grouchy Klymenos or his longest-standing rival, the King of the Gods, ZEUS. (That’s Kore’s dead-beat dad, by the way.)
And then there are Zeus’ annoying technicalities like an impassable barrier separating the Underworld from the Upper Realms, which makes it just a little difficult to shoot notorious, workaholic fiends in their brawny, armor-laden hearts. You kinda have to be in range and in eye-sight to shoot them. So in order to accomplish this, Eros has had to bend over backwards and twist himself around until he can look at the sky upside-down while standing (which he can totally do, by the way).
He’s not going to tell you how he managed to get three arrows into the Lord of the Underworld’s heart. You’ll have to read The 1st Seed - KORE & KLYMENOS to find that out:
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Neither will Eros spill any beans today about just how many gods, goddesses, primordials, and demigods he’s going to have to employ—and thwart, pesky enemies!—in order to accomplish the next phase of his matchmaking masterpiece: getting Kore and Klymenos face-to-face for the first time ever.
P.S. “KORE” is pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “the core of the planet.”
KORE, BRINGER OF BLOSSOMTIME
✨🌸✨
“Bye, Mama! I’m going to play in the waterfall.”
That’s what she had said upon skipping out of the house. Not a complete lie, but not an ichor-deep truth either.
Over the past few moons, “going to play in the waterfall” had come to mean something very special to Kore. The stone cliff, the cascading torrent, the pound of the falls and the rush of the river below—all these things helped to obscure an immortal vibration. Kore had learned this when her mother had gone to bathe there one afternoon.
The girl had flitted around one end of the Protected Grove to the other, feeling for Demeter’s presence. Only with concentrated effort had she been able to pinpoint her mother’s location. She suspected that the distortion had something to do with the intensity of Uncle Poseidon’s watery domain in that place.
Well, whatever the cause, it had allowed Kore to make several trial sneaks out of the Grove undetected.
More than three lunar cycles had passed since she had heard her beloved’s song in the spring-fed pool. Enough was enough. Tonight, Selene would turn her face completely away from the Mortal Realm to kiss the God of Sleep, a most auspicious time for this quest. After all, Mother had always said that dark moon was the perfect time to cut away that which no longer served.
Kore knew precisely what she wished to sever, and which blade would best see the deed accomplished.
Today she would at last make herself known to the god of her heart. That mighty one. That chariot-thundering, armor-flashing, dark-eyed marauder. I want him to maraud my mouth…and more. I want to be on that chariot with him, my hair whipping in the wind and tangling with his, headed anywhere—everywhere but here.
Yes, oh yes, at long last, she would show the God of War that there was so much more to passion than rage and fire.
And she would show him that there was so much more to honeysuckle than its bright, happy sweetness.
Up Next: After being shot in the heart by Eros and sending a marriage proposal to Zeus instead of Demeter, Haides prepares the Underworld to receive his bride by spiffing things up, overseeing rehearsals, and BEJEWELING COBWEBS & SKULLS. The Underworld is, after all, a bit…um…well, it’s rather dark. And dank. And creepy. But not everywhere:
Curious to start at the first chapter now?
For your bookmarking ease of The 2nd Seed:
The entire playlist of songs that I listen to for inspiration while working on this series:
—On YouTube
—On Spotify
© 2015 Hartebeast