The Meadow of Wildflowers
They speak of how I was raped and abducted from the meadow of wildflowers -- woe to the innocence of the young, helpless, virgin girl.
No words are spoken of how I saw him coming. Nobody ever mentions the fact I caught sight of him out the corner of my eye, observing him as he watched me. His eyes were fire and I could feel the flames licking against me like gentle waves over sandy shores. His focus never wavered -- he was fixated and perhaps consumed almost as deeply by the heat as I felt myself.
The earth seemed to shake beneath my feet, the shockwaves making my legs tremble as I curled my toes into the dry grass. I fell to my knees and let myself tip forward, my hands hitting the ground and my arms locking so I was positioned on all fours. I slowly tilted my chin up and peered from between the tendrils of my dark hair. He was standing with his feet hip-width apart, his shoulders back and down -- a strong, powerful pose that spoke of confidence and domination. However, I only had to hone in on the way his whole body seemed to thrum with tension, the pinky finger of his left hand twitching, as he tried to remain steadfast in his composure. He was a god -- I'd met enough of them by now to know -- but as he looked upon me, his control seemed to fissure and crumble until he was nothing but a man.
[ Desire -- it runs hot like magma deep beneath the skin, scorching through the veins until you cannot help but to shudder and whimper against the overwhelming sensation. True desire can almost feel like a stimuli so immense it is almost devastating -- a heat so intense that it aches and one cannot pinpoint whether it is burning hot or freezing cold, breaking down the tether that separates the two in opposition. ]
I dropped to my elbows and wrapped the stalks of the yellow flowers around my wrists as if they were rope to bind myself to the earth. He took an unsteady step forward in response, his fingers rippling as though he was imagining himself playing an instrument, strumming against strings to create sweet music. There were stories of creatures in the water who used such music to lure men to their deaths and I wondered if he was thinking of that too.
I let me body rest flat on the grass and rolled onto my back, my wrists still bound by flowers, one resting delicately on top of the other. I was so overcome by the imagery playing through my head that the sound of him moving through the grass behind me felt almost like it was slicing through me. I could hear his feet hitting the ground, the grass and flowers rustling and crunching beneath his footfalls. There was an almost inaudible sound, but I knew it to be the hitching of his breath. It seemed to be in sync with the beat of my heart, the rabbiting of my pulse as it picked up speed, the blood flowing so rapidly through my body that I felt light-headed and flushed. I could hear the warnings being whispered by Artemis from the trees lining the meadow -- her voice travelling harshly with the wind that was beginning to stir the flora around me. We were being watched and the feeling only made me more desperate -- the sense of unease, discontent and anger was making the air above us spark.
The sky was becoming a dark, stormy blue, but that detail seemed inconsequential when he appeared looming over me. The electric blue of his bright eyes put the sky to shame and I let myself fall into the depths of them as he kneeled down beside me.
It was then I realised who he was. Hades -- god of the underworld.
This is the part where they say I did not know what was to befall me. They say that I did not mean to entice him, that my beauty and softness was my downfall, that he caught sight of me and simply wanted badly enough that he seized me for his own and dragged me forcefully down to the lower world.
They do not say my silk dress was pulled around my waist by my own gentle hands, my flower-woven hair dishevelled from my own desperate fingers as I waited for him to fall into me. They do not say that before I followed him willingly to the depths below, I took him first as my throne.
They do not speak of how he trembled from beneath my gaze and from between my thighs. They do not speak of how his darkness teased the light from beneath my ribs and turned it into scorched bronze.
I bit into that pomegranate while he watched the flowers around us turn black and die; I let the juice drip from my smiling lips onto his own, sealing the fate of the new passage of time with glee.
From then on, only Hades could coax the beauty of spring from inside me.
