Eleutherios Ch. 02: Hestia

Author Note: This is the second part of a six-part story retelling the myth of the greek god Dionysus's birth and growth (the previous, from Zeus's perspective, is listed among my submissions). It is told from six perspectives: those of the children of Kronos and Rhea (in order presented here: Zeus, Hestia, Poseidon, Demeter, Hades, and Hera). In addition to being the story of Dionysus, it is also the story of the six storytellers. The six children of Rhea fought a war against the gods that came before them; here, they lay down their weapons and turn their attention to the future. What follows is a collection of attempts at characterizing the new era. This is not a pornographic text, though it deals with mature themes. I like to think I'm improving my craft, so any ratings and comments--even anonymous--are more than welcome. Thank you for reading this. I love you.

2. Eleutherios Raised

Or, the Abdication of Hestia

Eleutherios grew slowly, for a god, and that meant I had time.

I did not need to visit Pythia to know my fate. I knew my reign was near its end. I was a god of contradictions. Swallowed first and disgorged last, I was the eldest, yet the youngest. I ruled the hearth, yet had no house of my own. The first sacrifice went to me, yet I had no power to intervene on behalf of the those making sacrifices.

Despite my ancestry, I knew my place in the world: bound to the hearth on the mountain. I was little more than a daemon.

To me were relegated the purviews disliked or ignored by the other gods, chief among them the regulation of family. My existence was intertwined with the concepts of cousin and sibling and parent and child. Propriety gripped me as a result, while all around me these lines were crossed again and again. Zeus fucked our cousins the Titans, and he fucked us--well, my sisters--and he fucked their daughters, and their daughters' daughters, and THEIR daughters' daughters. Neither he nor Hera (god of marriage!) nor any other Olympian seemed to mind these transgressions against the sanctity of family, but they made me ill.

The stories have it that I refused marriage in order to keep peace between Poseidon and Apollon. There is a kernel of truth to it, naturally: Poseidon wanted me, and Apollon wanted me. But I did not refuse them to keep the peace. I refused them because they were my brother and my nephew.

I did not WISH to be the virgin of the hearth. But there was no god to fuck who wasn't my relative. And while some--like Hera (god of marriage!)--may sate themselves with toys, I had no interest in Prometheus's walking clay. Neither of my remaining options--primordials like Okeanos, nor animals like the bull or monkey--appealed to me more than celibacy.

So I was celibate. The virgin, and the god thereof. And for a while, I was the best virgin. That's what a god is, right? Hera, god of marriage, has the best marriage. Leto, god of children, has the best child.

But then my nieces came along. Artemis and Athena.

Virgins, the both of them--and, being as they could actually leave Oulympos, better virgins than I: for they had many suitors, and defended themselves viciously. To their cults flocked the human virgins, while I tended my flame alone.

The writing was on the wall. I may have been first in line for sacrifices, but I was last in line to the power of the Dodekatheon. The next time Zeus brought a divine whelp into the world, it seemed, my time would be done.

When I first heard whispers of the child in his thigh--before the name Eleutherios ever graced a god's lips--I did not imagine that this was the one. The twelve of us were all full gods, after all, and this child was part clay, conceived in the womb of a human woman who had, at best, a few dashes of nymph ichor in her veins.

But when Eleutherios arrived, and Zeus announced that he was father AND mother to the child--a pronouncement backed by Themis, god of law, so strongly that my own domain over family seemed irrelevant--I knew my replacement was here.

"Semele" was forgotten, and Eleutherios had two divine parents: Zeus and Zeus.

I set to planning.

Humans would understand, of course. They die, and they bury each other, and they scratch wills into tablets and parchment. They understand better than most gods what it is to fade away. When they can see it coming, they make a plan. They leave something behind.

Perhaps it is because Prometheus stole the one thing I owned and gave it to humans, or perhaps it is because every prayer made, regardless of the god it is address to, is accompanied by a sacrifice to me, but ever since hearths spread beyond Oulympos, I've understood "legacy." I, like the mortals, intended to leave something behind. If Eleutherios would replace me--if he would be what was left when I was gone--I would have a hand in shaping him.

"I'll take him," I offered one day, and Leto gladly passed my nephew to me, happy, I'm sure, that I'd taken an interest in children.

"Eleutherios," I murmured to the child as I held him. "Eleutherios, you will be a great god one day."

Leto rolled her eyes.

"You got him?" she asked.

I had never before held a baby, but it was something I knew how to do. I was the god of family. I nodded, and Leto left.

When Eleutherios was hungry, I fed him ambrosia. When he was tired, I rocked him to sleep. When he was bored, I played with him, dangling the gift of Hermes over his round face. He would bat at the berries, not unlike a cat, and he giggled uproariously whenever he managed to knock one off the bunch. With no effort on my part, the dislodged berries would always regrow.

"It's a wonderful toy," I told Hermes, one day.

"What is?"

"The grapes," I said.

"Huh," he said. "I guess."

It only occurred to me later that he had simply given Eleutherios a mundane piece of fruit on a lark. Something else was causing the grapes to regenerate. I investigated, bringing my questions to moody Demeter, sure that the god of harvests would be able to answer my questions.

"Sister, do you--"

"No," said Demeter. She turned away from me, as if she could not bear to gaze upon the bunch of grapes in my hand. "Those are not of me."

"This appears to be something harvested, though."

Demeter held her palm up to me. "That is no plant of my fields," she said, and Themis--always looming, standing behind Zeus's throne--nodded, according truth to Demeter's words.

My investigation ended there. I approached Themis and made her talk.

"The grape did not exist until Eleutherios," she said.

"But Hermes--"

"Hermes did not bring the child a gift," Themis said. She was non-judgmental. There was never any value ascribed to her assertions. Things just were one way, or they were another way. "He simply plucked the fruit from the floor, where it fell when Apollon cut the cord. He then presented it to Eleutherios."

My head ached, and I remembered why I rarely spoke with Themis. Why anyone rarely spoke with Themis. The grape didn't exist until Eleutherios, yet we all knew what it was when it became present. This phenomenon resisted notice, defied explanation. But Themis, god of law, could explain it. The divine is, and because it is, it was, because a beginning of existence implies a specifically undivine nonexistence--something like that. Every time she tries to truly explain the law, it hurts. So, for the most part, we stopped talking to her.

I rubbed my temples, and turned my attention back to the fire.

To the fire, and to this strange baby god of "grapes."

"You're already pissing off Demeter," I whispered to Eleutherios, dangling the grapes over him. He swatted at them with focus. "She is jealous of your crop."

I ruffled his wispy, black hair. "Way to go."

I knew, in that moment, that the grape would be central to my legacy.

Things continued like this, for a period, without change. Eleutherios was a baby, and we bonded, playing with his grapes, him always on my breast. Leto, occupied with every other child in the world, did not mind the relief, and soon stopped checking on us. Only Themis, ever present, would observe how I raised my nephew, and she would say nothing, because no one wanted to ask Themis anything.

"When I am gone," I would say to Eleutherios, "you will rule. You will displease our family as they have displeased me. You will betray the gods as Prometheus betrayed me, but you won't be punished: you are freedom itself, bound to be unbound."

Gradually, the child grew. He aged faster than a human, but slower than most animals, and glacially compared to most gods. I held him for years, tending the fire and whispering in his ear.

I watched him come into his divine body, a handsome lad with great dark curls. We all knew what Leto thought--that this child was no golden god like Apollon--but to me, Eleutherios's human darkness was pleasant. It made it easier to look past our family connection, to see him as something separate. First a tool. Then, a co-conspirator.

He came back from Hera's garden one day.

"Hestia, it worked! It worked! They grew!"

He carried in his arms several bunches of grapes.

I nodded, impressed.

"And check this out!"

He twisted a grape from its bunch and squeezed it between his fingers. Deep purple juice dribbled to the floor. For a moment, something glimmered in the small puddle that formed. It looked like putrescent nectar.

"What is that?" I asked.

"Wine," Eleutherios said. "Fermented juice of the grape berry. You'll never guess what it does to humans!"

"Tell me, Semelyios." My pet name for the child, another trespass against my brother's will, for it remembered his mortal mother. "What does the juice do to humans?"

"It drives them mad," Eleutherios said, almost in awe at his own power. "Their senses are numbed, as is their judgment. In a frenzy, the humans fight and fuck."

Fuck. Eleutherios's favorite word. I'd taught it to him. He knew it was what his father pursued in the realm below. He knew it was what so many in our family did together. And he knew it was what I would never do.

And yet.

"Hestia, when will we fuck?" he'd ask, regularly.

"Never," I'd say, every time with an affectation of haughtiness.

But Eleutherios had a hunger in him. An ambition that better gods never knew, for lack of competition. Apollon hadn't needed to prove anything, or be anything other than what he was. Eleutherios, on the other hand, knew he was going to be sliding into last place. He knew he was going to be the least of the twelve. He knew that if he was going to make his mark, he had to accomplish what other gods couldn't. He knew these things not because of Leto's smug glances, nor because of any sense of duty or grandeur instilled in him by his absent father. He knew these things because I told them to him.

I planted that hunger with whispers since the god's birth and now, as he came of age and began building his cult, he would let nothing block him from his goals.

"Hestia," he would say. "Nothing is truly never. Even the unassailable walls of Troy, raised by Poseidon's mighty trident, will fall one day. Surely you will fuck."

"We don't know that, Semelyios."

"We could ask any of the oracular gods," Eleutherios would say. "I know Dad's gone, but. Apollon. Asteria, somewhere. Gaia herself. But you don't need to, right? You have your own prophetic gifts."

I'd predicted that my star would fall, and soon. Did that count as prophecy?

"And if you're going to fuck, we should fuck," he'd continue.

Though his desire was part of the plan, I was revolted. He was my nephew. I turned him down every time. It was nothing for me to resist him--it was in my nature--but his insistence was what I'd cultivated. This was the god I'd raised. One who would stop at nothing, one who was nearly irresistible. His wine had no effect on us gods, but the wine was just one extension of his nature.

"He encroaches on my domain," Aphrodite said to me one day, with a sniff.

"You oversee love," I said. "Eleutherios knows nothing of love."

"Perhaps," Aphrodite said. "But his overtures into lust confuse my archer pet, and diminish my cult."

"Take it up with him," I suggested.

"Hmm." Aphrodite drooled a little at thought. "I suppose I could have another go."

"You're disgusting," I said, though inwardly I gloated.

The gods kept coming to me with complaints about Eleutherios. He was too crude, too crass, too this, too that. He spoke plainly, and wore human-spun clothes. He used the wrong words for things, and shared his divinity freely with his cult. But the biggest issue was that he was impervious to criticism. No one could approach him without feeling that holy lust. Aphrodite wandered off in search of him that day, fully aware that she would win nothing through debate other than good sex.

Eventually, the day came. I was tending the fire, and the fire flickered. I felt small in the halls of Oulympos. Insignificant. The feeling wasn't new, but it was stronger than ever. Themis was there, and I looked at her, and she nodded to me.

"Semelyios," I called.

Eleutherios heard me and came running.

"Yes, Hestia?"

I steeled myself for my unraveling.

"Semelyios, you have grown so much," I said. "You will be one of the rulers of the heavens, soon. Do you feel ready?"

"I don't know. Our family doesn't seem to like me much," Eleutherios said that day. "They treat me okay, I guess, but they're always mad before we fuck."

"I don't want to hear about your incestuous affairs," I said, more out of routine than actual revulsion.

"How do you do it?" he asked. "You're the only one who consistently tells me off."

I squeezed my thighs together, grinding down on the feelings bubbling up in me as my identity frayed.

"It was easy until now," I admitted. "But I'm changing."

His eyes lit up.

"Changing so you can fuck me?" he asked. This was not, somehow, a pushy question. There was a childish wonder in his voice, as there had been when I used to hold him and explain the world.

"Hah," I mused, "wouldn't that be something. No. Listen closely, Semelyios. I am changing. Your aunt will be gone soon."

He was confused, and worried. I had to remind him that gods can't die--though I omitted that our transformations can be even more definite and tragic than the deaths of mortals.

"Before I go, tell me what kind of god you'll be."

A smile crossed his face. "A god of fun mistakes," he said. "I will be enjoyed and blamed, by gods and humans alike. I am of the things of the other gods--of Apollon's music, and Hermes's pranks, and Aphrodite's lust, and Demeter's growth--and my theft of these domains will be unimpeachable so long as the gods are fueled by sacrifice. While worship scaffolds the halls of Oulympos, the other gods will acknowledge my sway over mortals, for I have brought man into me by putting myself into man."

I sighed, and looked to Themis. She confirmed his claim with another nod. By drinking wine, it seemed, and becoming intoxicated, humans were, in fact, imbibing Eleutherios himself, and briefly attaining the divine. The other gods hated this, but could do nothing about it. My legacy--a little thorn in perfect Oulympos.

I shivered as I returned my gaze to Eleutherios. My work was done, and just in time. My essence was slipping. I could resist him no longer.

"Alright, then. It's time."

As the last of my repulsions vanished with my divinity, I desperately felt the need for touch, even if it was Eleutherios's, but I always knew I would never say "yes" to his advances. It's hard to explain what happened next, as my consciousness and sense of time ribboned into a million places, into the flickering flames in every hearth of every age, but I maintained a small awareness of the halls of Oulympos, peering out of the fire I had once tended.

My nephew knelt by the fire for a time, and then he took my old seat by it. The others filed into the room, all the lords and ladies of Oulympos. Even Zeus, who had all but vanished from our halls following Eleutherios's birth, showed up to witness his son's ascent to the Dodekatheon.

No one asked where I was. They were too busy celebrating Eleutherios's rise the only way Eleutherios would allow.

For the first time, my stomach did not turn, both because I no longer had a stomach and because I was no longer the virginal god of family.

The first Olympian Dionysia lasted long into the night.