The Maw of Spring

You know Persephone’s face almost as well as your own, for hers is the visage of victory. It is difficult to imagine such a being can exist, holy from birth, perfect from any angle, a demigod above demigods—as close to the divine as a mortal creature can get. There’s an occasional cockpit livestream (pre-recorded footage, edited for public consumption, but who’s counting the difference) and every time she kills a colossus, it’s as if she has sunken Styx’s clawed fist right into you. Opening you up to reveal all the wet rot inside, show the world that you are unworthy. You nearly wish you were one of those monsters. To meet your end at her hand seems the most sublime terminus.

During the day, you work as a cog of the machine, at a mundane office that deals in delivery logistics. Elysium is vast, labyrinthine wards built upon one another, districts heaped upon districts. The structure of it is painfully nonlinear, best understood by a caste of holy architects, and even those have a partial understanding of how the city physically functions. The gods alone possess full comprehension, much as they possess this city and this world. But these complexities mean that entire companies have sprung up to handle the transport of goods from one end of the city to another, from Poseidon’s trawlers to the processing plants, from the Estate of Wheat to bakeries. People eat, and eat, and eat. There is no end to the process of feeding, supplying, ensuring dinners both extravagant and ordinary run like silk. The kitchens of Elysium know no rest, whether staffed by people or automata.

You have coworkers who enjoy the challenge of solving the logistic puzzles. This is their life, and they thrive within it. It’s not something you can understand, but handling this network is like figuring out poetry, for them; like figuring out the universe’s secrets.

Another coworker is a nymph. She has beautiful porcelain features, patterned like tortoiseshell and frictionless. You envy her, often. That she may not be entirely sapient, may be merely capable of appearing so, is yet another point of jealousy. What would it be like, to not have to think, to not have to decide? Sometimes she would meet your eyes and ask, “And how do you do, citizen?”

To that you try to ask about her weekend plans. Instead of answering that she of course has none, citizen, the nymph elects to smile, enigmatic. Nobody has any idea who she belongs to—a nymph must be property, maybe the company’s, but no one can say for certain. The possibility she may be a free agent is horrible. You want to be property so desperately.

Home is a small apartment, the same one you’ve fled to since the matter with your family… you prefer not to think about your family. It is fortunate that Elysium guarantees all its citizens food, medical care, and independent housing even for adolescents. Yours is thirty square meters, not much, but it has all you need. The work you do does not warrant a higher grade of accommodation, though you’re aware that you are comfortable indeed compared to many. Nor do you have ambition for more. There’s a small leisure stipend, you can afford treats, even the occasional pretty object to brighten the space. It is a life, and it is alone, just how you prefer it. You’ve had a lifetime of being surrounded by kin. As for partners—that’s a non-starter.

It’s not them, you know. It’s you. There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there? There is something wrong with what you want. Roleplay can only go so far. That tall barista might charm you, might take you home, she might not even mind whispering the words to degrade you. But if you tell her what you really want, she’ll run away like the rest of them.

No one can flense the skin off you, no one can replace it with synthetic dermis, at least not at your citizenship grade. It isn’t as though you want to be augmented per se, like the holy pilots are. You just want to be… something else, clad in brass and ceramic, ball-jointed; something other than you are now.

There are rumors that Father Pygmalion, a priest of Zeus, can do it—that under her scalpel, a person may become anything, anyone. Marble-like, exquisite Pygmalion. You dream of lying down on a slab. But of course you’re a nobody; you can hardly approach Pygmalion to petition. For such impertinence, you may well be turned into a roach, and that is not the metamorphosis you seek.

In the dark, lights turned off, you’re illuminated only by the glow of the screen. On it, Persephone. Footage of her exiting the car and entering the gala at Aphrodite’s palace. Those glimpses of hard, coiled muscles beneath her dress. Her beauty is so seamless that it seems a little artificial; you wonder what she smells like, whether the copper notes of blood follow her wherever she goes. She is beloved for her first sortie—Dread Persephone, the title like ambrosia on the tongue—but she is remote too, unlike many other champions. Hippolyta, now that’s a crowd favorite, but your love is not like others’. You do not seek a champion who smiles and laughs and assures the populace that Elysium’s defense is in good hands.

Over time you’ve reviewed each champion, examining them from every angle, seeking in them the fantasy of a—what? Fulfillment, yes, that is what you require. The Champion of Wheat is quiet, and a man; Poseidon’s Favored never sorties; Siproites, beloved of the moon and the sun, is fascinating but not quite right for you. Herakles fails to interest, being wedded and much too heroic. Methe is hard to imagine outside of her public role. But Persephone. Persephone you can fantasize about, can imagine so vividly, exactly because she is so unreadable and has such cruel eyes. Yes, there is something inhuman about her, a core that lacks warmth. She is made of knives, and you’re born to be meat.

Onscreen, she glides past the drone cameras, the reporters hungry for any look at the newest champion. She’s captured across a hundred lenses, reflected endlessly, countless copies of her proliferating across the network. The neurons of the city etch themselves with her image. She will be unforgettable.

You want to be that, too, but in a different way. You want to be prey that your hunter never forgets.

♦

The invitation comes to you at work, delivered by the nymph.

She hands to you a small black envelope, and advises you that it’s been keyed to your biometrics. “Press your lips to the seal,” she says, “as you would press them to the tip of a beautiful woman’s shoe.”

At this you nearly leap out of your skin. The red of your blood—it must show so starkly on your cheeks. How has she discerned your preferences? Are you written so clearly and read so easily? “I haven’t any idea what you mean,” you say quickly. “And what would you know about those things.”

The nymph only smiles, the same way she always has, and you wonder when or why you began to think of her as a her and not an it. “Please do not keep her waiting. The sender of this letter is not known for her patience.”

“Is that—is she your owner?”

Now she seems as if she might laugh, except the pieces of her face don’t quite allow it. The mouth can move only so much, the jaw too. Suddenly the thought of having a face like that is both impossibly horrifying and impossibly arousing. Can she be made mute, having a plate around her mouth screwed too tight, having a spike inserted into her throat? What would that be like? “Insofar as much belongs to her, in the aggregate,” the nymph says and offers no further clarification.

You sit in your cubicle and, the moment coworkers have left for their break (where does the nymph go, does she need food, does she have hobbies?), you kiss the envelope, exactly as instructed: reverent, eager, engorged with need. You kiss it like you would kiss a beautiful woman’s foot, yes, just like that. A good girl, obedient, delighted to follow rules. This is your only worth, the only point of you. Your tongue laps at the envelope’s seal.

It gives, loosening, somehow not sodden with saliva; the envelope maintains its dignity, and the paper within is dry. White, and penned in red ink. A scent wafts from it, difficult to identify; is it floral or animal? Complex, intoxicating. You imagine it as perfume—you’d follow the fragrance to its source, perhaps you would die for it.

Within is a location and a time, nothing else. The letter does not so much as deign to address you, by name or otherwise. It unpersons you, and you wonder how many have received this. Is that what the nymph does, off the clock, handing out little black envelopes? A sense of disappointment; you were hoping you would get to feel special.

But it doesn’t matter. You can’t tell what the destination is, what lies in store. Yet it feels as though this is precisely what you have been waiting for all your life, the answer to all your problems, the end to doubts and uncertainty. The nymph’s face, the nymph’s eyes: those cement, for you, that you’re being called to a numinous purpose.

You will go. You will be prompt. She does not like to wait.

♦

The address points you to the Underworld.

This means descending so many strata down, to unfamiliar territory, for all that your work has seen you direct deliveries here. The train disgorges you into biting cold, and your sensible shoes click on black stone. Your breath steams in the blue light. The shadows in this district are strange, the light too—none of it seems to behave the way it should, moving oddly, the illumination sourceless. For half a minute, you think of turning back.

The envelope, right in your coat pocket, impels you otherwise.

On foot, you keep to yourself, avoid the eyes of strangers. As always, you imagine that what you are is transparent and evident to every gaze: you’re a thing pretending to be a person, comprised of ugly longings and heading always toward annihilation. People want more than that, don’t they—companionship, creative fulfillment, intellectual pursuits? They want families, partners, children. Or perhaps they have ambitions: advancement toward the top of the hierarchy, as a pilot or priest or engineer. Someone like you is a hollow vessel, even if outwardly you perform all the necessary obligations of humanity. You pray, you worship, you make sacrifices, and most of all you are a functional member of society.

Or perhaps Elysium has thousands like you.

Before you can change you mind, your steps have brought you to a little tenement. The outside seems carved of basalt, windowless; the front door is slightly ajar. Whoever dwells within does not fear thieves.

You enter a vestibule. No one greets you there, and you half-expect the door to lock tight behind you. That does not happen. Deeper inside, then, down a corridor that winds seemingly in and around itself. The absence of windows disorients.

What you come upon is a red room full of dolls, arranged on carved wooden chairs, plain and without upholstery.

All of them look exactly like Persephone, Champion of the Underworld, and they sit with perfect poise—so much so that, at first sight, you don’t notice that they’re alive. Their chests stir. They respire. Except that hair, it must be synthetic; that skin, it gleams so lustrously, like ceramic. The eyes? At a glance, precious rubies cut to fine facets. Automata then, they must be, engineered to emulate signs of life. You move close, thinking to touch, to examine. To confirm.

On the far end of the chamber, the door opens.

“Go,” whispers a doll closest to you. “Be where you’re meant to be. She gives you a head start. Twenty minutes. On the other end, the way out, if you can reach it before she finds you. Freedom, for the rest of your life.”

You nearly jump away from her—from it. The automaton hasn’t even looked up at you. Its gaze remains straight ahead, as though it hasn’t seen you at all. But the next entrance beckons. Freedom: what does that mean? Yet you don’t stop to question it, don’t demand of the doll an explanation, for anyway what could it tell you? It has recited to you a rote script, prepared by the mistress of this place.

So you go on. You leave the red room behind.

It’s a longer corridor, this time, like traveling the gullet of a snake and just as crimson. Doubt plucks at you: why are you doing this? Still, it feels right. Something here, starting from the letter, has inebriated you. More than that, though, you feel… understood. This may be the only chance you get.

You exit into a garden.

Everything here is red, or the colors of pearls—long blades of grass, thick-stemmed flowers with white petals. It looks as though the plantlife from outside has crept in here, but that is impossible. The habitation dome is absolute, and Wall Caryatid stands tall and impervious. The air is sharp, biting. A head start, you were told. The game then is that you should progress forward until you find the way out. Success would mean freedom, in whatever form that entails. Failure would mean what? The doll did not say.

So you start moving, intending a good clip. Easier said than done—the growth is thick in some parts, and so full of thorns. They scratch at your legs, dig into your calves. Some cuts graze; others break skin. Blood seeps. You’ll not leave here unscathed, if you leave at all. The dimensions of this place are difficult to gauge too, the true breadth and length of it fathomless. Where does it end, where are you supposed to reach? The only certainty is that you’re moving forward—or are you? The peculiarity of shadows and the pervasive mentholated light makes you less sure.

Exactly twenty minutes after your arrival, a voice rings out—her voice.

“Greetings.” That sweet alto, the same one in your ear when you watch her, when you scour the network for any glimpse. Your pulse spikes. “You are here by invitation, because something was detected within you, a certain… factor. If you wish to be claimed by it, then stay where you are. If not—start running.”

The voice paralyzes. This is the trigger for your internal chemistry: it ignites you, it soothes you with the thought that soon you will have… what exactly are you after? Whatever it is, she can give it to you. This is confirmation. This is an answer.

But—she wants you to follow the rules, doesn’t she, even the unspoken ones? And you want to amuse her; you want her to reward you.

You break into a run.

The trees tear at you, their hard fingers ripping at your coat, their long thorns piercing and shredding your blouse. The noise of fabric ripping is loud, but not louder than your own heart in your ears. The thunder of your body as you move mindlessly, pointlessly. The direction to the way out was lost to you long ago, if ever it existed.

A patch of overgrowth catches at your shoes. You stumble, teetering—flinging a hand out, only for it to land on something that tears your palm to shreds. The noise you make is sharp and contemptible; you can’t help it. You are not used to pain. Physical agony terrifies you, the sight of your own blood brings nausea.

On your knees, you crawl forward, leaving smears and handprints along the grass, hard to distinguish from their natural red. The reek of your sweat is as intense as animal musk. Tears burn hot on your cheeks. Yet your mouth is transfixed into a rictus. Euphoria has made a pinhole of your throat. This close to the end, even the bleeding no longer matters.

You expect to hear her footsteps, but she is completely silent as she closes in on you.

Her hand grips your shoulder, firm, and she murmurs, “Caught you.”

♦

Your new body is breathtaking, because it looks so much like her, even though it lacks a certain spark inherent to the semi-divinity of Persephone. The mirror in here is peculiarly fragmented as you’re seated among the other dolls, but there is no need—they are reflections of each other, and so reflections of you. Mercifully you recall the process of change only in shards. The way you were cut open, the impression of being submerged… complex implantations. The sopping, slippery sounds of your organs. It doesn’t matter. When you were conscious again, you’d become this, and it is perfect.

Very badly you wish to move around, to admire yourself from every angle, to test the new joints and articulators. To see how the light reflects on this ceramic skin, off the gleaming cheeks and jawline. To, most of all, touch these flawless red lips, run your fingertips along teeth that can’t be human anymore.

But this new existence means you move only when ordered, speak only when spoken to. The rest of the time, you are to be inert and quiet in this room, along with your fellow dolls. Your mind hasn’t been stilled, though; you pass the time counting how many of you there are. About fourteen. This realization is oddly pleasing, to know that you’re among a select few, not so common after all. You would smile, if you were able to move your facial muscles, or what passes for them now.

In this state, you don’t need to eat or drink. All biological functions have been obliterated the same way bodily autonomy has been. You sit and dream and think; it’s oddly freeing. Like the gods, Persephone gazed into you and found within the core of you the raw material for her strange game.

Occasionally, the nymph—your very coworker—would appear, and select a doll. With a whispered command, she would lead the chosen one out. Across the rest of you, fear and excitement ripple. For bodies that cannot move and faces that cannot express, these feelings make themselves known through something like air currents. You are learning to understand how other dolls think, and it’s almost as though you can communicate through unseen means.

Sometimes, Persephone herself selects a doll.

This is an altogether different ceremony, for an altogether different end. Her very presence begets the feeling of ritual. The appearance of her—it would compel you to drop to your knees, if you could still do that without a command. The scent that wafts off of her would tense every muscle in your body, if your tendons had not been snipped clean to disallow such a response.

Her red eyes are lambent with hunger, the same gaze she subjects colossi to, in the cockpit. She scans the dolls, delicately arranged in a half-moon until she settles, almost, on you. What is the criterion, you want to ask her so badly; how does she determine who is worthiest? When is it going to be your turn?

She pounces, shaking the tidy seats. Some dolls topple into each other, fall to the floor. No matter. They will be rearranged once Persephone has finished. You feel bad for them, in a way, because their view is obstructed.

The holy champion likes to begin at the extremities. With a terse shift of her knee, she spreads the doll’s legs open. She drapes the doll’s arms wide. One of the doll’s hands, fingers furled, rests on your chest. A frisson rocks through you.

Persephone runs her nose along the arch of the doll next to you, savoring before she takes her first bite, then her second, before she becomes a riptide of consumption. One phalanx of ceramic at a time cracks, and soon the whole foot is gone. Red leaks from the wound (how organic still, how human) and Persephone sucks on it, grinds her teeth in the crease of the doll’s tibia before devouring her way up the leg. Her jaw is strong, masterful, an instrument of pure force. The proof of an apex predator, evidence she belongs at the top of the food chain and you at the bottom.

She shifts her weight to the hand on your chest. She places the pale, shining fingers in her red mouth and stares at you. Look at what you cannot have, what you cannot be. You are not even meat, not tonight. She holds your gaze, unblinking as she caresses the shaft of each finger before snapping them off. Her throat squeezes as she swallows, and it is torture to watch her take someone else, watch someone else be inside of her.

She is not without kindness: she lets the doll’s blood pool and soak through your blouse, wetting your skin. It feels like a gift—like intimacy. The blood smells faintly of irises and Persephone seems invigorated by the perfume of it. She has made you all smell like this. Something numinous you cannot grasp at: the appetite and taste of the divine.

She picks up her pace: entire limbs are consumed in moments, her jaw creaking open, the maw of spring. She rears back, the tips of her nails like talons, and shatters the chest of the doll next to you. The skin comes away in hard flakes, revealing the heart underneath. One of the few organs still left in your frame. Perhaps a technical limitation; perhaps by preferences of the house’s mistress.

Persephone withdraws her treasure, stroking the wet and throbbing muscle. With her feet, she kicks the remaining torso and head onto the ground and sits on the doll. Her thighs wrap around its face. You cannot see if she touches the doll with herself, but she rides it as she bites into the heart, as if this is the very height of ecstasy. She does not look at you again—you, as ever, are unpersoned. She makes you watch, her back turned. All you can hear is the whine and crack of the doll’s jaw as she shatters between Persephone’s thighs. The demigod pants as she eats, her breathing cresting into a predator’s triumph as she swallows the last of the heart. Her body shudders with great, rolling pleasure.

The doll dies without a whimper, without so much as a creaky breath. How exquisite, how lucky, how perfect that must have felt. She is gone, and you are still alive, graced only by a small tranche of her blood. Not even a drop of sweat has fallen into your mouth. You are still unworthy.

♦

How long have you been here; how long have you been this? Time blurs, and memories of flesh fade. In a sense, you’ve always been here and known no other existence. It is a comfort.

The number of dolls rises. Then it shrinks. There is no constant, and no comprehensible logic. Once you see two dolls leave together.

Patiently, you wait for your turn. It must come—and if nothing else, your previous life showed you that patience can be rewarding. Though you no longer sleep, you often fall into daydreams where you play back footage from Styx’s cockpit. Every frame is written indelibly onto you. You have memorized the accompanying music, the way it swells when Persephone slays a colossus, the rich notes of it. There were times when you saw images of her, and noted the madness in her eyes. This only made her more magnetic.

Very rarely, a newcomer—so human, so fleshly—would arrive. You would speak the script given to you; you would guide her toward her own metamorphosis, and this you consider a grand and noble purpose. Just like being a priest ushering a layperson toward prayer.

♦

The door to the red room opens.

The nymph stands before you, serene and ceramic. “Stand,” she says, and you do. “Follow me.”

This free short story was released as a preorder incentive for The Persephone Effect, functioning as a story-in-the-universe that mortals write about the gods and their pilots. If you came to this story without context, you might enjoy the series, starting with The Hades Calculus.