xenia?’

indignities

But as I studied him – and believe me, I drank him in like a parched animal at a riverbank – I began to see the cold, steady certainty of the chill green depths.

Was this my punishment? To live the reality of my dream and find out that its glittering beauty faded to nothing when I stepped close?

No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.

Dionysus continued, his gaze warm and that hint in his voice of a thousand untold jokes.

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing? Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled? And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.’

invective

eked