🌸 Public Places (and some private ones)
6LS7: Kore catches a prowler off guard
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
The God of Love silently winged his way behind his mother to chuckle over her shoulder again. “Well, then?” he asked. “Who are we spying on today?”
The Goddess of Love gripped the carved rosewood pedestal upon which a bowl filled with rose oil perched in its sacred alcove. She leaned farther over it to block her son’s view with her decadent curves. “Descrying. And we are not.”
“Spying. Of course we are.” Eros flew higher. With a hard blink, he wrinkled his nose at the sight of who she was watching. “Ugh! What’s Apollo doing in Demeter's grove?"
Aphrodite sighed again and surrendered the view. "Sneaking."
"Who's he trying to sneak up on?"
“Kore, of course. Demeter just gave him permission to woo her.”
“Bleckh! ” Eros’ wings took on a green tinge. “Apollo wouldn’t know how to properly woo the likes of Blossomtime if I shot him with every gold-tipped arrow in my arsenal and loaned him my wings.”
Especially considering what Kore was doing in the spring fed pool at the heart of the Protected Grove. And what she was doing to everything around the pool. While she swam amongst wafting water weeds. Naked. And glowing…
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series
Also. Nobody calls Persephone by her true name. They call her KORE, “the Maiden,” and it’s pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.”
KORE, BRINGER OF BLOSSOMTIME
✨🌸✨
She emerged from the sacred pool, sparkling with droplets, glowing from within. Her hands ran up her belly to her collarbones and back down for one last delicious moment. She arched her spine and turned her face to the sun, letting it dry her skin naturally—
Her spine zinged.
Her instincts sung.
Another consciousness hummed nearby. It was not her mother’s. She would recognize Demeter’s vibration from across five seas. She sensed that the Mistress of Bounty had returned to the grove from her meeting, but had not yet come to the pool. Kore pretended to lose herself more deeply in the stretch as she intensified her awareness.
Ah. I know that vibration. Like a perfectly strung bow. Hmmm...she’s strung more tightly than usual. Trying out a new hunting technique?
A devious grin spread across Kore’s face as she coiled her aura and primed her essence to a superheated charge. Whirling around, she flung a bolt of her creative vitality across the pool. A clutch of ferns exploded. There was a full-bodied crash into a tree and then a slump into the bushes.
“Hah, Artemis! Got you!” Kore leaped toward the pool, then skimmed through place and time, transpiring on the opposite bank to tower over her felled companion, whom she had rendered naked with a wreath of rosebuds crowning that fair head. “Back so soon? You should know you can’t sneak up on me in my own—”
A face emerged from the bushes, blue-eyed, red-cheeked—and unfamiliar.
Kore squeaked, jumping backwards. Her delicate ankle caught on a rock and she toppled into what was left of the ferns. In an instant, a dozen ground-creeping vines whisked around her naked body, for it was not the nimble Goddess of the Hunt who stared at her with indignant mortification.
It was not a goddess at all.
“Who—who are you?” Kore asked, although she was pretty sure she knew.
The young god clambered to his feet, ripping the rosebuds from his white-gold curls. His corona intensified with a blinding flare as he stood over her, fists balled on slim hips, his athletic frame shaking with outrage. When she offered him a clump of vines to enshroud his own privates, he sniffed down his nose. “I’m not my prudish sister, that’s for certain.”
Kore pulled herself to standing, keeping her eyes averted from his physique—his manifestly masculine physique. “Y-you’re Apollon. Aren’t you?”
His sensuous mouth frowned. “In the flesh. Although that was not my intention. I do have respect for your mother’s rules, you know. She forbade me from appearing before you with my natural radiance unshielded.”
Kore gulped, understanding why. She had only glimpsed Artemis’ twin brother at family functions on Olympos, always from a distance. The up-close experience was quite different. “This grove is divinely warded,” she said. “How did you get in here?”
“Your mother also forbade me from transpiring into your midst unannounced, so at her invitation and instruction, I deigned to walk.”
“More like sneak.”
He glowered. “What did you do with my clothing?”
“I incinerated it.”
His eyes flashed fury, then narrowed as he sneered. “Like you did with the leaves around this pool?”
Her eyes flew open. “You saw that?”
“Such a dramatic display was rather hard to miss.”
She had thought she felt someone watching her—not an unappealing notion, but the last god she had imagined lurking in the shadows was the one her mother called Little Lordling Light. She tried to get a good look at him without making it obvious. Tried to cast him as the god who starred in her most covert (wicked) fantasies and just…
Couldn’t.
“I—I had no idea anyone was here.”
“Well, I am every bit the stealthy hunter my sister is. Besides, you were a bit preoccupied.”
She scampered a step toward him. “Please don’t tell my mother.”
Apollon’s head tilted. His gaze grew keen, a beguiling slash of sky. “Don’t tell? Oh, dear me…” As he sidled toward her in a roundabout fashion, his legs and smooth, bronzed torso flexed. Such a breathtaking display of athleticism in such a simple movement. The glow of his skin intensified, deepening the shadows of his every abdominal indentation and the outline of his perfect pectorals. Her attention snagged upon the twin grooves alongside his hipbones, angled downward as if pointing the way to—
Her round eyes shot up to meet his.
His grin glimmered, amplifying his handsomeness to worship-inspiring splendor. “Are you asking me to keep your secret, Kore?”
She took a step back. “I…well…yes.”
“Hmm. I could be convinced to do that. Just between us then.”
Kore nodded, leaving her knotted tongue well-ensconced behind her teeth. Had he seen more than the leaves? Amidst the throes of her ecstasy, she hadn’t cried his name—that name. She hadn’t so much as murmured it, but could Apollon have sensed it anyway? He was the God of Prophesy. Did he know who she’d tucked away so secretly in the most protected grove of her heart?
She glanced across the pool where she had shed her clothing. “I should…” Her head tipped in the direction of her chiton. Her very short, juvenile chiton.
“You should…?”
With a wink of pale light, her vine covering disappeared, replaced by her formal vestments. After so many years doing her own sneaking, she had become the mistress of summoning clothing through Aither’s light. No matter how infiltrated the light of the Mortal Realm was by the breath of Khaos, she could whisk up her most tidy visage in the bat of a lash.
Now a cornsilk chiton once again hung from the thistle brooches at her shoulders, but this one was long-sleeved and draped in flawless folds to her ankles, girdled high around her ribcage to provide a figure-concealing curtain. A shroud woven from new sprouts and sunlight further cloaked her shape. Her veil of morning mist revealed only a hint of her demurely coiffed hair and the purple crocuses that adorned it.
He drew in a breath at her dramatic transformation. “Oh, my. Don’t you look…courtly.”
“You are too kind, Lord Apollon.”
“No need to be so formal. You can call me Apollo.”
She stared at him with a tightly drawn mouth, knowing that her mother would not approve of such a thing.
“You know,” he murmured, “I saw that incarnation of my name in a vision once. My mortal worshippers will one day emblazon it across the stars like the trail of light in Helios’ wake.” Apollon closed another half-step between them, reclined his head, and offered a smile that did strange jellyfish things to her insides. “You can call me that, too. Now that we’re friends and all.” Another half-step of grass disappeared. “With secrets between us.”
She mustered up an appropriate blush to accompany her downcast eyes and bashful tilt of the head. It was no great feat to assume such a posture, considering the situation. She really needed to stop glancing at his privates. And all his gleaming, bulging, public places. And his breathtaking smile. And his perfect, saffron-oiled curls, begging to be mussed. A nervous laugh escaped her as she wrangled the shroud back up onto her shoulder.
She still wasn’t accustomed to the weight and burdensome layers of this outfit, no matter how many times her mother made her wear it. This particular chiton was usually reserved for trips to Olympos or any of her mother’s other temples, but those visits had grown sparser with every century. In direct proportion, Earth Mother’s formal vestments—and therefore the ones she made for Kore—grew bulkier, more billowy, much to the girl’s dismay. Customarily, she loathed this gown.
Now bathed in Apollon’s full, pulsing glory, she gave thanks for such modesty. When he bridged that final step and reached out to sweep her veil and a few dangling curls back from her shoulders, she blurted out, “Um...stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“What? No, little dove, don’t—”
She vanished. When she transpired inside the home the dryads had built in the treetops, Kalligenia squawked and dropped the basket of strawberries she was carrying.
Demeter offered an apologetic look to the panting nursemaid, then scowled as she went back to floating the newly lit oil lamps from Aunt Hestia’s sacred hearth flame onto the table in preparation for dinner. “Damnation, Kore! How many times have I told you not to—”
“Sorry, Mama!” With a flick of the eyes, the girl whisked the fruit into the basket and then back into Kalligenia’s quaking grasp. “Sorry, Kalli,” she said to the ancient nymph, then set to work transforming a heap of cornsilk into cloth as quickly as her divine fingers could manage.
Demeter huffed. “What, by the quaking earth, are you doing, child? You know I only fetch cornsilk after it’s been blessed by the Harvest Moon. Do you know the arrangements I have to make for that journey, to leave you here with Kalli—”
“I know, I know.” Kore tossed a strained, toothy grin over her shoulder. “But I owe a new chiton to—”
Demeter frowned. “To whom?”
The girl gulped and hunched over her work. Her voice barely registered above the twittering birds in the rafters. “Apollon.”
A rumble shook the house and all the surrounding grounds. “And where is the garment I insisted he put on only moments ago?”
“I, um...I incinerated it.”
“You WHAT?”
“I thought he was Artemis trying to sneak up on me while I was—s-swimming.”
Demeter’s eyes smoldered as they took in Kore’s blushing cheeks. “Swimming.”
“Bathing,” the girl whispered.
“I see. We already had our bath together this morning. Why did you need another?”
“Well, see, I danced extra hard while I was painting blossoms and then I slipped on some moss covering a boulder—you know how weak my ankles are.” Another ingratiating cringe.
Another unimpressed glower. “Mm-hmm.”
“Well, I slipped and got covered in mud and I know I could have just vaporized it but the day was ever so lovely and the sun was sparkling on the water and the temperature was so perfect. It just called to me so I took another bath, and then…w-when I sensed someone nearby, it felt so much like Artemis’ vibration. I could have sworn it was her! I mean, they are twins, after all. Well, I thought it would be amusing to exchange her chiton for a crown of pink rosebuds—you know how much Artemis hates pink. But it wasn’t her.”
“No. It most certainly was not.”
“How was I to know it would be her brother? The only immortals who can enter our grove are those invited by you, and you only ever invite goddesses here and so...” She flashed another hopeful grin.
“So the golden-headed grove-slinker, the smarmy lyre-plinker of Delphoi saw you bathing and you rendered him naked.”
“Must go! Leaves won’t do for Little Lordling Light.” Kore flung a smooch in Demeter’s direction and vanished again.
Up Next: LIAR, LIAR, IN A MIRE - (Oh, yeah. Something slightly important that the God of Love forgot to mention about his impending trip to the Underworld…)
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