A woman emerged from the shadow of the pillars. She seemed to float as she descended, her deep crimson robe rippling over the stone. It was clinched at the waist with bronze brooches of laurel leaves, her head covered by a translucent veil of the same color crowned with a headdress of golden coins.
“The Pythia has requested the novices enter one at a time. Who will be the first?”
Danae expected Olympia to jump at the chance of being first to be presented to the Pythia, but now the moment came, nobody moved.
“I’ll go,” she said quickly, the thought of returning home a shining beacon in her mind.
“Good luck, Carissa,” whispered Dimitra and gave her hand a final squeeze.
Danae glanced behind at the guards holding back the crowd of pilgrims. Her stomach twisted as she looked at the sea of desperate faces beyond the armored men. If she’d come on foot, it would have taken an age to get through all those people.
Her heartbeat reached a crescendo as she turned back to the priestess and walked up the stone ramp toward the temple entrance. Even though they were hidden, she could feel the woman’s eyes boring into her. She tugged the pale blue cloak tighter around her ragged tunic. Another priestess emerged from the darkness within, and wordlessly the women beckoned her into the gloom, flanking her as she stepped out of the sunlight into the cool shade of the sanctuary.
Unlike the temple of Athena, the entrance led not into an open hall, but into a low stone passage. She flinched as the doors slammed shut behind her. After the clamor of the sacred way, the corridor was eerily quiet. All she could hear was the beat of her own pulse and the clinking of the priestesses’ jewelry. Scented braziers smoked at intervals along the walls. As they walked, the priestesses seemed to flicker in the dancing light, as though they were visions and not really there at all.
She felt like she’d been walking for hours when they finally descended a narrow staircase. At its base, a door loomed out of the shadows. It was fashioned from oak and surprisingly plain. One of the priestesses twisted the iron latch, and it creaked open. The other placed a hand on Danae’s back and pushed. She stumbled into the chamber of the oracle and heard the door bolt shut behind her.
The room was suffocating.
Danae coughed as smoky vapors burned the back of her throat. Four bronze dishes filled with smoldering incense nestled in each corner of the chamber. Their light licked up the cavernous walls, casting wavering shadows across the domed ceiling. A crevasse ran the length of the room, splitting the floor in two, sulfurous smoke curling from its depths.
The oracle.
Her thoughts melted together as though someone had poured hot oil over her brain. She blinked. She had to hold on to why she was there. She needed the oracle to explain what had happened to her and, if she was cursed, give her a cure.
A figure emerged through the vapor. It was hard to tell where the Pythia began and the haze ended. Tendrils of smoke wove through her long, lank hair. She was dressed in a plain white robe, and, unlike the other priestesses, no jewels adorned her body. She was painfully thin. Pallid skin hung from her cheekbones and red-rimmed eyes stared out from shadowy sockets.
In the dizzying smoke, Danae fumbled to unclasp the owl brooch from the underside of her tunic, then proffered it to the Pythia.
“This is for you. I know it’s not much...” Her voice sounded muffled and distant. “But I need your help. There’s something wrong with me... I think I might be cursed.”
The Pythia’s hand closed around hers. Danae glanced down. The woman’s knuckles looked like pearls nestled in a bed of crumpled silk. Her grip was surprisingly firm.
“I made a tree grow out of my sister’s chest.” It felt important to explain. “She was already dead, but...it had golden apples...” she trailed off, her tongue thick and clumsy.
The Pythia placed a skeletal finger over Danae’s mouth. Paper-thin lips stretched into a smile over wizened gums.
“Come, novice,” said the Pythia. Her voice crackled like dry leaves underfoot.
She led Danae forward, until they were standing at the very edge of the fissure. She pushed Danae to the floor, then moved to stand behind her. The Pythia gripped her scalp and shoved her head down over the oracle.
“Breathe.”
There was something inside the crevice. Something smooth and shining, like a great black eye, covered in a web of cracks. And there, at its heart, was a chip, as though one piece was missing.
“Touch it,” whispered the Pythia, “and tell me what you see.”
Danae felt the urge to explain that she wasn’t really a novice, but instead found herself reaching forward until her fingers connected with something smooth and hard.
For a moment, she felt nothing but the vapors pounding against her skull and the acrid taste of sulfur in her mouth. Then, there was an intense tugging sensation down her arm. She couldn’t move. She tried to cry out, but her muscles seemed locked. Then the ground beneath her disappeared.
Darkness pressed against her eyes. Then she realized she had no eyes at all. She was immaterial, suspended outside her body in a vast emptiness. For a terrible moment it felt like she was the only living thing in existence. Then a single thread of light danced across the void. She watched it scamper away, then somehow without hands, caught it before it could disappear. Her consciousness was absorbed into the thread, and soon more strands appeared, swimming through the darkness toward her. They wove together and found other clutches of threads, until she was part of one great, interconnected web of glowing strands.
She saw shapes she recognized: a blade of grass, an ear of wheat, a beetle, a seagull, a galloping horse. She could feel the pulse of all their lives flowing through the tapestry, ever changing, ever weaving as energy traveled from a dying body to a new life at the moment of its conception. As she darted through them, she realized the threadswerelife itself. And she a spark, racing along the network of creation.
Then she stopped.
Before her was an apple tree, sketched by the ever-moving life-threads that cycled through it. She couldn’t see its bark, or the color of its fruit, but she knew, with absolute certainty, that this was the same golden apple tree that had grown from her sister’s heart.
