Helios sees the boy first. It’s not much; a flash of green light caught on the edge of a collarbone, then on a hungry face. The boy looks thirsty and hurt, as if he’s looking for something or someone. His eyes are tainted, the kind you only find on people that flew too high and crashed into devastating waves. He approaches the boy and kisses his neck. The boy lets him. Helios’ throat is fucked and his mouth is chapped but when he licks the boy’s skin his lips still taste of his sister’s expensive foundation where he kissed her cheek to say goodnight and don’t wait for me. There’s a moment of stillness, and then the boy wraps his arms around Helios’ shoulders, pulling him closer. “I think I could take you.” Gold curled in Helios’ mouth. It’s enough for tonight.
Selene’s hands are shaking and her mascara is smudged down her cheek. Her room is completely silent, isolated from the noise of the wood creaking or Helios’ music or Eos’ workout. She touches her ribs, one by one, feeling the alien surface of clingfilm over her tattoo. She wonders - when she’s aware of something that is not the pain from the needle - if Endymion will like it. In the mirror she sees the phases of the moon in black ink against reddish skin, changing from new moon through waxing crescent, quarter, gibbous, full moon, and waning back to new moon again. When she touches it the pain hurls inside of her. Her voice doesn’t follow.
Eos is tiny and bird-boned with eyes big enough to swallow dawn and her hair covered by a headscarf. The skin of her hands, peeking out underneath long Prussian blue silk, look like the color of the bark on cherry trees.
“The Gods see you, Eos,” her mother used to say, voice as wise and old as the world. “The Gods see you and they smile upon you. They have a plan for you. Be prepared.”
Eos stared at her - forehead creased and tongue-tied with all the words she’ll never say - and observed the bones in her wrist that turned whitish under sunburned skin. She looked tired and desperate and Eos can’t remember the face of her mother anymore, too many blurred memories, too many times when she cried herself to sleep. When men touch her waist before they touch her mind Eos wonders what kind of gods let their prophets starve themselves to death.
Celestial Dynasty
r.m | published in Songbreaths / buy me a ko-fi
