A smile twitched Metis’ lips. She nodded.
‘Teach me,’ Danae said quickly. Heracles’ words about his father’s power and strength had lodged in her mind.
‘What do you think I’m doing? It takes time to open your consciousness to the Mother. In the old days before the false gods, it would take some Titans years to achieve Gaiasight.’ She paused. ‘Think of life as a river, and your will is forever striding against the current of fate. That is all you have ever known. But it is not the only way to reach your destination. Imagine you cease your struggle and let the current take you – moving isn’t so hard any more, eh?’
‘But if I go with the flow of the river, I will not be guiding the direction. How will I reach where I need to go?’
‘All rivers ultimately flow to the sea, do they not? Your destination is your destiny. Whichever path you take.’
Danae rubbed her brow, struggling to quell her frustration. She still did not understand, but she was willing to try. She closed her eyes as she fed her life-threads into the stick, silently asking it to float. As the wood left her palms, she held tight to the image of the river, and pictured wading through the rushing water she and her ma used to wash their clothes in on Naxos. In her mind, she turned and fell back, letting herself be washed downstream. As she relaxed, her thoughts tumbled like the current. She imagined her flesh melting from her bones and then her skeleton separating into beads of pearlescent water until she was a thousand separate teardrops and the entire body of water all at once.
The sensation of weight across her palms drew her back to reality. When she opened her eyes, the stick lay once more across her hands. Glowing threads of light crackled across her vision, flickering in and out of sight for a heartbeat before vanishing.
‘Well,’ said Metis, ‘seems you aren’t a hopeless case after all.’
‘I … I did it.’ Danae swayed, a little lightheaded. ‘But I didn’t see the tapestry, not fully.’
‘That will come.’ Metis’ mouth curled into a smile. ‘You did well.’
Danae stared at the stick, now lifeless in her hands. She still could not fathom that, only moments before, she had granted it a soul, and now it was empty once more.
‘I can’t believe this is it,’ she murmured.
‘Hm?’ said Metis, wandering into the shade of the palm tree and plucking a fallen frond from the ground.
‘Everything we are … all our memories, our wants, our dreams, just disappear when we die.’
Metis looked back at her.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Hades. With no afterlife in the Underworld, he said after death there is only oblivion.’
Metis shook her head.
Danae’s heart tripped. ‘It’s not true?’
‘Perhaps it is, perhaps it isn’t.’
‘What does that mean?’ Her fingers tightened around the stick.
Metis cocked her head. ‘It may be true – the souls of our dead do not wander the Asphodel Meadows. But as far as I know, Hades never died and somehow came back to life. How would he know what happens to the mind when the body perishes? No one does.’
‘So, there might be an afterlife?’ Danae stared at the woman, hope expanding in her chest.
Metis shrugged. ‘I cannot say. It is better to live as the animals do. For them there is no death, only life until the end.’
In an instant Danae felt empty once more, as though she had expended a great deal of life-threads. She could not tread this path again. Without proof either way, the agony of not knowing if she would see her sister again would consume her. It had already nearly cost her life, her destiny. Alea was gone. Arius was gone. She must make peace with that.
When she looked up, she caught Metis watching her intently.
‘I could tell you that those you love live on in your memories, and as long as you go on loving them they will never truly be gone. I believe that to be true, but I suspect that will bring you little comfort. So, I will tell you what I know for certain. Life-threads cannot be created or destroyed.’ Metiscrouched down and touched a withered blade of grass. A single glowing strand travelled from the woman’s hand into the plant, flushing it from tawny yellow to vivid green. ‘The ichor of those who have died is still part of Gaia. Their life-threads are merely dispersed, part of a tree, a fish, a bird, another mortal. From the earth we are born and to the earth we shall return.’
Voices wafted down from the hillside, carried by the wind.
Metis glanced up towards the hut. ‘I best check on those companions of yours. Stay here and practise communing with the Mother.’
Danae nodded slowly as Metis scampered up the hillside.
