It was no longer summer. The sun shone with a lessening intensity, but it was still warm as ever when there was no shade to block it. The ocean upwelled from the deep; cold, nutritive waters lapping at the shores of the continent. This seeped into the land, which seemed to grow more and more verdant as the season waned on. Every nook was alive with scent &

sound. The wind billowed, and the rains moved through their pulsing cycles. It was all beautiful and distinctly, dreadfully, dolefully indulgent.

Bored, Ampoule could never be. Ampoule could smell the changes on the wind and in the water. Seeing as she was beholden to no one and knew loyalty to no lands, she moved away from the beach. She poked around the inland treeline, tracing the designs in brine that marked the treebark. Then she climbed, the sloping earth taking her upwards and closer to the sky, so that she might become of the clouds themselves and drift free across the land, truth untethered.

She found herself at a cascade. It was not large and grandiose as some she had heard of, but its waters trickled in force and created a mist in the churning bowl below. The siren gazed over the precipice, blinking at the light that danced, sparkling, gleaming back towards her like dancing searchlights. Ampoule smiled, taking a deep breath, and felt peaceful in this place. The roar of the falling waters was like a balm to a spirit, a metronome for her that gave her place in this moment – purpose. Perhaps somewhere in the back of her awareness, her body was experiencing hunger.

But hunger took a backseat to the splendor and wonder of the world that ran like a treadmill beneath her feet. She was hungry for so much more than food. She craved to experience everything that his corporeal life had to offer her.

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Tag: Hades

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There was a sound that reached her, somehow sounding louder (or perhaps just differently) than the aqueous chiming, the rolling roar of water turning unto itself, turn after turn after turn. Ampoule too, she turned in order to know what created a sound so distinctly alive that it sounded more solid and significant than a grandiose split in the earth, clearly the doing of the gods themselves. It was a man.

Ampoule did not immediately return his greeting, but instead stood and observed with a mindful look on her face. Somehow, she immediately assumed that he would not mind being her subject for the moment; possibly that he was already used to such things. After all, like recognized like. Magic recognized magic, and deities could recognize deities even if it was the perception of energy and pernasiveness alone. Her ears were specifically attuned to regard those who were like her, and he drew her attention and kept it.

But of course, she let on that she knew nothing, except perhaps an unfurling of herself away from the water, and towards him.

She let on nothing, until it was her turn to speak.

I am at your most humble service, she acquiesced with exquisite ease, with almost no prompting on his part, drawing her chest back and down into a bow that showed the propriety she knew was innate in this interaction. For as much as she had grandiose ideas about herself and her place amongst her people, she was a lesser god; a nymph, meant to steward the lands and the seas and everything in between. Whatever this man was, she knew it was greater than she. Perhaps her piousness might win her favor in these strange, new, blazing lands.

Thus, that was how Ampoule became the prostrate supplicant, a role that suited her as comfortably as the role goddess did.

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To be a god in a mortal world was both a simple and lovely thing, and also a question of worth. The body was fallible; it got old, it got ugly. The mind of a god stayed clear forever, through the endless lifetimes – it bestowed the divine one with a particular gleam in their eye, as if they could see beyond the boundaries of the normal realm.

It was this gleam that told Ampoule all that she needed to know.

In truth, he didn’t know her. Neither did she know him, but there was something so great about him that it made her knees to bend, and her mind to utter silent reverences. It wasn’t often that Ampoule was the one who supplicated, and she relished the opportunity to do so, when the opportunity presented itself. After all, was there nothing more holy than the relations amongst the holy things themselves?

Looking up from her bow, the nymph watched the golden ichor pulse in his potent gaze. Then she lifted, realising she was as uncertain about the next moves as he might be, both so unexpected was this meeting – one of two strangers, two eternal souls that had mattered naught to one another, but which now had a thread that tied them together through the very elements which could not be bound.

Furthermore, Ampoule had been very fulfilled in her lonesome, and had easily grew accustomed to solitude. She realized that perhaps she had not spoken to another soul in days, perhaps weeks or months. His tongue then spoke the same language as that gleam in his eye. Her voice felt raspy in her throat, but still her mouth opened to speak, and the lilting sounds of greek came out.

There are many of us, if you know where to look. her voice, already smoothed over from its momentary unuse, spoke with a jocular familiarity. Certainly those who existed as she would come if he were to call, in a way that the nymphs heeded no other call. In the trees, in the rivers, she suggested, with a flutter of her thick veil of lashes. They were entirely governed by nature, and the gods were the forces behind that nature.

Therefore, he ruled her.

If there were others, Ampoule had yet to find them. In truth, she had put forth no true effort to search, but this new acquaintance instilled her with new confidence that her sisters may just be concealed, fearful, and unwilling to be found. What may this nymph call you, god of gods? She wondered if she had ever spoken his name in reverence before, and waited for his name to unlock a memory smothered in the recesses of her mind.