Grace’s Short Stories #1: Eos and Tithonus

Like many of the amazing people I’ve met in New York City, I cannot reign my creative pursuits to one specific interest always. And though theater takes up about 90% of my time and being (a ratio I feel privileged to maintain, having worked retail before) I do enjoy indulging in other pursuits. Whenever I’m in a book store I want to I give it all up and move to a lake New England and become a writer. What an absolutely unusual desire, and what a profitable choice seeing as there’s no money in either! I joke, but much of my heart is in writing and editing. I listen to Jayne Eyre audiobooks for fun while walking to theater school in New York City, I am never escaping the insufferable art bitch allegations. So this I’d like to think of this blog as simply insight into how I work, all the things that go into my work. Because truly the only way to learn to act is to experience. And why not put my writing out there? This slightly upgraded echo chamber where people can see my work, and I flatter to think I have some skill with it.

But last summer, the last time I truly had any time off (which honestly I am grateful to be so busy) I wrote a short story because I always swore up and down I could be a writer and I’d never proved it to myself. And George RR Martin (I am continually obsessed with GOT, please cast me in House of the Dragon) said to start with short stories and I too am obsessed with myth retelling (shout out Hadestown), so please enjoy the fruit of my rested and relaxed writing labors.

Eos and Tithonus

Short Story by Grace Wade

Between godly ribs, under skin deep and bronze as a sword lived a crimson light. Within her it said the night had been long; the world was ready to wake and thus must she. And she woke. Plush wings unfurled from under the covers, pushing off pillows and shaking the sleep from them as they went. The amber curls that crowned her head spilled down to her shoulders as she sat up. She stretched her arms above her head, and the soft crimson glow in her chest grew brighter. As it grew it warmed the bronze of her skin, slowly melting it to molten golden hues. The warmth reached her face, pinkening her cheeks, her lips. Rays of gentle golden light emanated from her form, caressing the inky darkness of their chambers into retreat. 

It was as it was always. Every morning, always, her arms unwound from his sleeping form and she would rise. She would give her lover a gentle kiss, then turn from the pillowy white expanse of their bed. Then it was to her silent walk, cushioned by the thick carpet of wilted purple flowers squishing between her rosy toes. Walking became a gentle lope, then a smooth sprint with strong beats of her wings, and finally soaring through the mouth of their cavern and out to the sky. From her form the soft pink and golden light descended to bathe the Earth in the herald of morning.

As it was then, and then, and then before, she bent and delicately pressed her lips to her lover’s cheek. But as she turned to take her first step she felt the faintest touch, like the barest kiss of a butterfly. Her gaze shot back from the beckoning duty at the mouth of their cavern and back to the form half buried in pillows. An arm as skinny as Nile reeds was stretched out to her, fingers shakily reaching for her hand, scarcely grazing her golden flesh. Her mouth fell open. 

“My love?” she asked, brows knit tight together as she quickly sat back at the edge of the bed. With a sharp exhale his trembling arm fell back into the down mattress. The effort exhausted him, and labored, wheezing breaths echoed against the stone walls around them. And her shock was not short lived. For despite the grievous cost it had been to merely stretch out his hand, Tithonus began to stir.

“Tithonus!” she cried, instinctively reaching for him.

“N…” he croaked out on his breath.

Aghast, she pulled her hands back to her chest. Their wringing sent ripples of light through their cavern. 

“My love, anything you need, you need only gesture and I will have it done,” she insisted, golden eyes wide. But Tithonus only slowly shook his withered head, and so she stayed seated and idle mere inches from his agony. As her radiance grew stronger she could see his bony limbs. They were wiry, speckled with unfathomable age. He was trying to right himself, forearms to digging fruitlessly into the mountain of pillows. Tithonus writhed and dozens of words started and died in her throat. Her palms itched with inaction. An ancient feeling stirred within her. Fear. But why it had returned after all these years, she didn’t know. He would not leave her - death could not touch him.

His withered hands shook furiously as he blindly grasped for the carved oak of the headboard. His head seemed too heavy to follow, chin remaining at his chest, lolling side to side with his efforts. The sight broke her heart, but she could not look away. Ribs expanded and contracted, threatening to rip his paper thin skin as his hand searched desperately for the wooden lip. For all his labors, it was only mere inches closer than it had been.

The dawn could stand to watch it no longer. A gentle flap of her wings brought her to hover over his body. Now nearly blinding arms slid under his chest and pelvis, pushing against the give of the mattress. He weighed nothing. She righted him so that he faced her, cradled in her arms. The dawn and her love floated back down to their bed. The flesh of his cheek, wrinkled and soft as an old peach, pressed just beneath her collar bone. Maybe he intended to protest as he had before, but now he could only breathe. Small expulsions of breath whispered against her skin, each too far apart. In the crook of her arm she felt the sharp ridge of his spine. Blue veins twisted through the hands curled to his chest. Despite the skeletal claws before her eyes, the memory of them young and tanned and sinewy and dancing across a lyre came easily to her. Tithonus and that lyre, she thought, a trace of smile on her lips.

His music had halted her path across the sky. A voice silken as king’s robes reached her careening through the air, tangling her heart. The dawn stilled where she flew, knocking the wind from her own godly lungs. In her ears the sound was like a caress. The song it sang was sweet as any played on Olympus but there was something else to it. A sadness colored each note, low and honest and indigo. In her chest some foreign sensation bloomed. On earth the sky turned a deeper crimson. There was a prick in her eyes, and a swipe of her rosy finger showed a thin trail of water. She floated as if paralyzed, staring as the liquid dripped down her flesh and to the world below. What had this mortal noise done to a god?

In an instant she tucked her wings and trained her sights on Earth, Troy’s sprawling palace below her. But in the next she stopped. The sun must rise. She shook off her stupor and flew on, cheeks rosier than before. It was a passing madness and nothing more, thought the dawn, wind whipping and stretching her amber curls as she cut through clouds, a passing madness I will forget before the day is here. But back at the mouth of her cavern, the world bright with her labor and her incredible radiance fading to a soft glow, she only gazed back out over Oceanus. Her feet left the slippery rocks and touched down on the arid road before the Trojan palace. Dust clung to beads of seawater still on her feet as she stepped off the path towards the voice. Helios was but peeking over the horizon as she donned her mortal form, wingless and hazel eyed but still bronze skinned, stepping silently through the browning brush and bramble. She simply closed her eyes and followed the golden voice that had bewitched her body. It grew louder and richer and soon, she found its source. 

On a cliff overlooking the sea, a man sat beneath a twisted olive tree. All that was visible to her was thick black hair bouncing in the wind and the fluid movement of his shoulder as he played his lyre. The dawn lingered just downhill, hidden in the shadow of another olive tree a stone's throw away. Her absentminded hands traced along the truck as she listened to each sweet pluck of the lyre, the graceful sway of the vibrato on his voice. Wind through gray-green leaves rustled a gentle accompaniment for his song. The prick in her eyes returned, and tiny rivulets spilled over the apples of her godly cheeks, passing by the upturned curve of her mouth.  Hours may have passed, but she was a god and what were hours to her. 

Eventually, the man gave a pensive strum and sighed. Slowly he rose and the dawn wiped her face. As he tucked out from under the tree, her eyes put face and body to the glorious noise. He was mortal, as mortal and handsome as any of the other men she’d chosen to warm her bed over the years. And yet that something foreign, wonderful grew in her chest when she looked upon him. 

The man shielded his eyes with his hand as he walked directly into Helios’ blinding rays. Too bright for him to see where she stood, mere feet from him crunching through the bramble. The dawn stepped out of the shadow. 

And he saw her. Deer-like in surprise, he froze, his hand tightly clutching the lyre at his side. They were steps from each other, staring mutely. Birds chirping and the wind’s faint howl was their eyes' accompaniment. His wide black eyes shone almost cinnamon in the sun as they flit from her to the empty wood and back.

“Forgive me, my lady, for my stupor,” he said finally, bowing his head and blinking rapidly, “Your face isn’t one familiar to me,”

“It need not be for a first meeting,”

He gave an unsure smile, shifting beside her to escape the sun’s glare but keeping his distance.

“That is true, but usually first meetings are not meant for the woods,”

“I find it as good a place as any,” she said, moving closer. He stepped back ever so slightly. 

“My lady, what brings you to the woods at such hours?”

“I could not help myself but follow your voice,” she said, entirely genuine. His face twisted at that. 

“Ah, my apologies. I hoped to not disturb anyone,”

“Disturb? Who could be disturbed by your song?”

“There are those who prefer the morning quiet,”

“You could play at a time other than before Helios’ first appearance,” she said with a raised brow.

“Of course,” he conceded, eyes downcast.

“Thus?” 

He then began to fidget with the lyre in both of his hands, tracing his thumbs against the wood.

“Lady, you pry much for a first meeting, and I have yet to learn your name,”

She found herself smiling, charmed even by his reserve. “I am but a godly woman, done with her duties for the day, you need not trouble yourself with my name,”

He gave her a puzzled look, “Well, may I escort you back to the town, godly woman who wanders the woods at dawn?” A laugh escaped her lips, and his eyes softened.

“You may,” she said with a coy smile, “if you tell me why you play your lyre in the wood before the sun rises,”

He gave a half smile with a sweeping motion of his arm in the direction of the palace, bowing his head slightly.

“After you,”

The birds of morning warbled and chirped as the pair picked their way through the wood, and the man revealed he was a prince called Tithonus. A prince of Troy, son of Laomedon, and of an age to have responsibilities. 

“As of late, the demands of my birth have been… ” he hesitated, holding a low hanging branch out of the way for her, “Well, in my youth I would play and sing whenever my heart desired. I would play at father’s banquets, to great applause and praise. Father could boast about his son being the most skilled musician in his kingdom - though he dare not say the world lest he anger Apollo,” he chuckled, “And my siblings would clutch to my leg like barnacles until I played them a tune. I wrote them silly songs about our kingdom and the gods, and servants would linger in doorways just to listen,” 

He stared ahead, smiling as if the memory was before him, but grief flickered in his dark eyes like a candle.

“But I have grown older, and the men who used to praise my song now prefer to hold my ear about their lands, their daughters, the alliances I could make for them when I am at my father’s side. Father now is more concerned with my ability to understand trade than entertain his guests. Trade makes the world go round, not so much a lyre’s strumming. Prince’s hands are meant to be making their contracts and marrying their daughters, not fiddling the strings. My siblings have grown too, busy with becoming great warriors and wives. I find both less time for my lyre and less of an audience. And I can play for myself but,” he shook his head, “most times I can think of it as nothing but a waste. My lyre collects dust by my bed, and everyday is the same. Somehow they still exhaust me, and I lie awake at night, unable to sleep,” the corners of his mouth twisted down, “And so, my lady, last night in some restless, mad thought of the peace it used to give me, I slipped from my chambers with my dusty lyre, hoping that playing for the empty sky and an audience of one would be enough to soothe me. I thought that I would play until my head was clear,” he gazed up at the sky, now the pale blue of morning, “and I played right through the dawn,”

A silence fell over them when he had finished. Her eyes lingered on his sharp profile and the foreign, wonderful feeling within her grew. The dawn stopped, gently touching his arm.

“I would be your audience, Tithonus,”

His cheeks flushed pink and he bowed his head to her, “I am grateful for that, my lady, but my story wasn’t meant to engender pity,”

“I don’t believe it’s pity I feel,”

The flush of his cheeks grew. The dawn only smiled, sitting down in the dry grass, hands folded attentively in her lap.

“My lady?”

“I am your audience, so play. Sing me a song,”

And he had. Hesitantly, at first, picking at the strings and voice soft with self-consciousness. But sat across from her, his hands grew more sure and his voice grew resonant and sweeter. His dark eyes stole lingering glances at her and a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he sang. The dawn could not help but smile back.

The morn after, she heard his sweet song on her celestial path. The rest of her flight was restless. As soon as she had completed her lap around the world she turned around. In an instant she found herself back in the brambly woods outside the palace. This time she did not hide from him.

“You came again, godly woman,” he said, rising from beneath the same tree, black hair waving like the tide in the wind. 

The dawn nodded, shrugging her shoulders with a soft smile. “I said I would be your audience,”

“I have a new song for you,” he blurted, eyes glittering.

At this the dawn’s heart leapt, but she merely arched a brow as she sat. His diligent hands danced across the strings as he sang - a new song about the beauty of the dawn and a chance encounter in the woods. The melody’s tenderness brought tears to her eyes. When he finished the song and looked to her for reaction, she could only lean towards him. On his lips, she placed the only kiss she had given in her unknowable existence meant for more than a passing moment.

 The days of their courtship were kept under the peals of light and the olive trees. Could she have shed her duty to simply be only with him she would have. But even gods have rules they must follow. After the sky was pinkened she would fly to the woods outside the palace, disguise herself, and meet her prince. He would play and she would listen. Or they would walk and they would speak about whatever was on their minds, mostly his mind because what could truly trouble a god. Or they would kiss and touch and pray the wood and the distance would hide the sounds of her pleasure. It was always too fleeting, their stolen moments before he was stolen away from her by the palace. But the next day he would return to her, waiting in the dim early morning light, eyes burdened and weary until they rested on her.

If he wondered where she came from or where she disappeared to, if he wondered who she was and why she only appeared when the sky was turning pale blue, he never asked. Once he took her hand and asked her to come to the palace with him but she shook her head. Gods could always go where they pleased, but she could not walk the palace of his misery. Not when they had their haven outside its walls. At this his brow had knit, but then merely smiled, and picked up his lyre.

As he played, the dawn watched his hands, thinking on their time together as they deftly plucked at the strings. How was he content knowing the little of me I give him when I hunger for all of him?  Perhaps he was content to have her as he could, as she was, and that was enough for him. And she knew then that she needed him. That being together, that strange and wonderful feeling it brought, was something she must keep, forever. 

She could keep her godly secret no longer; he deserved to know her as wholly as she knew him. Rising, in a great burst of light shed her mortal form. His obsidian eyes glinted gold as he gaped at her naked divinity. For a moment he grew as quiet and guarded as he had that first morning in the woods, and she felt another new, unfamiliar twinge. Fear. She feared that she would lose him. She could not lose him. Her lip quivered as he looked at her in mute shock.
But the gods, the other ones, were kind. Tithonus simply smiled, and rued himself for not surmising the truth of her being a “godly woman” sooner. He reached out his string-calloused hand clasped her golden hand, planting a kiss on her knuckles. In that instant the dawn blurted an offer.

“Be with me,” she said, “forever. Make my home yours and I will make you immortal and you can play your lyre for all the gods and they will know your brilliance as I do,”

The prince had looked over his shoulder at the palace, at all of the life he had known and the life he would have lived. The decision was quick. He placed one hand in hers and held his lyre tight in the other. As high as she had ever flown above Gaia in that moment her heart seemed a million miles above. She pulled him to her body and took to wing, soaring with her beloved back to the cavern that for an eternity had only been hers.

The dawn had lied, though. Only slightly, but nevertheless. She herself could not make him immortal. But she had ways. 

Ways that had not been as successful as she had hoped. Ways that lead her to now, cradling the man she’d begged for on the edge of their bed. The lyre she’d promised he could play everyday for the gods lay near, under the bed, wood cracked and strings snapped and covered in dust. She held him, rocking back and forth and his breathing grew less frightening. His head slowly lifted to look up at her.

“My love?”  she asked, her hand going to hold his head.

He wheezed in and out more, lips trembling with the ghost of words too difficult to form.

“A…m…” he breathed, quiet as the breeze over blades of grass. She touched her rosy finger to his lips, hoping to save him the pain of speech. The dawn knew what he wanted, and that old twinge of fear returned in her chest. The golden liquid of the gods did give him strength, shed a few decades from his demeanor, but each time the effect was weaker and lasted a shorter and shorter time. At some point he’d stopped asking for it, and in ways she was glad at that. It was painful to have short moments where his eyes regained some sparkle, only for it to be stolen away from her a seeming instant later. The fear in her asked why he wanted it now.

From her gown she produced a draught of the golden liquid. With a rosy thumb she popped off the lid, placing the vial delicately at his lip. The smallest drop slipped between the crack of his mouth.

“M…mo..,” 

Her godly heart sank. She hesitated, fingers delicately pinched around the vial. But she gave him another drop.

“M…mo..re,”

Her heart grew heavier. Another.

His speckled hand grew barely strong enough to close around the vial, gently pulling it from her grasp. Her own lips quivered as he spilled the rest of its contents onto his tongue. The empty vial dropped from his pinching grip, falling to the floor among the petals where her heart now lived. The dawn held him still, stroking his head and kissing him. She willed it in her heart that it was her kisses giving him the strength to flex his hands and sit up straighter in her arms and tilt his head further, though she knew it wasn’t. Eventually he grew so strong that Tithonus rolled his shoulders and pointed his chin towards the sky, such that it seemed threatening to rip long stagnant skin and muscle. The ambrosia had given back some nimbleness and she hoped he was basking in it. His eyes, though, were still milky white and his hands fumbled for the bed beneath him.

“My…my love…m…may I…” a horrible pause for ragged breath,“sit…beside you?”

Tears were spilling out of her eyes as she placed him gingerly. Tithonus sat up straight, or as straight as his crooked spine would let him. Each vertebrae gave a horrible crack that made the dawn want to cover her ears. But Tithonus was smiling. And despite everything, the smile brought that wonderful feeling, though no longer foreign, when she looked at it.

“Ahh…I…I feel…a life…time younger,” he said, punctuated by a cavernous sounding laugh. He flexed his hands in his lap. Open, close. Open, close. And then one slid beside him, hand searching for her’s like a mole searching for worms. She unwrapped her arms from the white knuckle grip they’d had on her biceps and laced her fingers through his. His blind eyes turned to her, crinkled at the edges.

“Forgive…me love…for my silence of late. I… I was h…hoping to conser…ve my energy… for this,”

“And - ” her voice caught, “And what is this, my beloved?”

His hand gave the barest squeeze to hers. “Please…. don’t cry. I did… do not…mean to…”

She cried still, and he couldn't know because he was blind. “Then what do you mean, my love?”

He rested his head on her shoulder. 

“I mean… to ask… a boon,” he said, turning his face into her neck and breathing deeply. 

“I almost forgot… what it was like to smell… Your skin has always smelled…of saffron. Remember… how you used to collect the flowers for me… when I first found my legs no longer trustworthy? So that I could smell…my old home and youth?”

She glanced at the masses of wilted purple flowers that adorned the floor in a carpet. She had never stopped. 

“You… have loved me… so well,” he said.

Tithonus took his head from her shoulder, shifting slowly to face her. Blind, his milky eyes were fixed at her right brow instead of her eyes. His shaky hands began to lift slowly from his lap. She stayed still, watching them make their graceless arc to her face, like a baby water bird fighting to fly instead of sink. At last his index finger found her godly chin. The softness of his gnarled hands tickled her face as they slid along her jaw to cup her face. His thumbs traced the pout of her lips as she fought to keep them from quivering.

“Ah, to look at you… was to know that you are, in every way, a goddess. I don’t know how my stupid… young eyes could not put it together the instant I saw you…disguised as a mortal or no,” he chuckled. His right hand trembled up to her nose, tracing along its bridge with his finger, “I always thought…that no man, however much an artist, could ever hope to replicate the beauty of your lines, the shade of pink that is your lips,” his finger went to her brow, light as a feathers touch, “I feel the luckiest man in all the kingdoms across Gaia…,” his lip began to quiver through his smile. Soft palms went back to her cheeks and she held them there. Tears that had spilled from her eyes found new routes down his arms. 

“Eos…Eos,” the god blinked hard at her name, strange on his lips as it was in her ears, “divine love of my life, great and long as it is. Goddess who blessed me beyond blessing,” he said, voice bare more than a whisper, “We have loved such that Zues himself felt stirred to sympathy - if jealousy disguised as sympathy. And I was blessed - blessed to live by your side for many, many happy years. Blessed to have gazed upon you … and to have gazed for so long,” he bent, cracking, and pressed his wrinkled lips to her shining hand.

“But my love… I cannot see you anymore,”  tears flowed from his milky eyes and he made no effort to wipe them, “Every morning you take care to leave before your glorious radiance wakes me from my sleep. My love, the only time I can see you is when you grow brightest. And even then, just your glorious golden glow. Just in the small moments at its brightest. And you are always away, far from me, over the world. I only glimpse it when you touch down at the mouth of our home,” he chuckled, squinting his white eyes, “except for now,”

For the second time that morn, the dawn was shocked. She had forgotten herself. She was at her brightest, and the sky outside a sickly gray for lack of her. The cave was illuminated such that any sighted man would have been blinded. Walls of carvings were lit as they had never been before, casting bizarre upturned shadows on themselves.

She pulled away from, turning back toward the mouth of the cave, toward her sacred duty.

“Please, stay,” he said, reaching out but unable to grab her, “Helios can make his rounds without a herald just once. The sun will rise, please let me see what I can of you…” 

She hesitated for only a moment, stuck between the weight of duty and the  gravity of her lover’s need.

 The bed gave a small sigh as she sat back beside him. Tithonus sighed in relief. He offered her his shaking upturned palms, and the dawn’s slender fingers tucked delicately into the soft crag of his hands.

 “My love, would that I could stay… in this radiance, your radiance, forever. But its moments are so brief. My hands…” a soft, knotted hand trembled up her arm, “so withered and stiff I cannot feel the suppleness of your skin as I used to. Soon the last of my hearing will be gone and I will be nothing. I cannot offer you even my company when that happens,”

“Tithonus…” said the dawn, “you need not offer me anything. I am a god who needs nothing but you. Please, speak no more of such things,”

On her arm his fingers gave a delicate squeeze. His blind eyes seemed to gaze at his thumb.

“My love… how long has it been since I held my lyre,”

The dawn bit her lip, “Some years, I suppose,”

“It has been five centuries,”

“Five centuries?” 

  “Five centuries. Five hundred years. Many, many mornings. It is nothing to you, as it always has been - but I can still feel it. Mortality has never left me in the way I left it, I cannot expect you to understand,” he sighed, curling and uncurling his fingers. The dawn did not understand, for gods know time in only two measures, moments and eternity. Moments where all the fleeting pleasures before, Tithonus was to be part of her eternity.  “It had been long since we realized Zeus’ trick - my hair had grayed and disappeared, and my body was so weak. Fatigue bound me to the bed and weeks had passed since I’d last held my lyre. But that day I wanted to play for you. You had taken such care of me, filling the bed with pillows and feeding me sips of ambrosia and bringing me flowers. I wanted to play for you like I had when we met… You fetched it for me because my legs were weak. I summoned what I could to sit at the edge of the bed as I am now. My sight was near gone but I still could see your hands glorious glow as you handed it to me…” The old man seemed to fold over on himself, weighted down by the memory, “My love, you must recall how it fell from my hands. I heard it splinter at your feet. The gasp that came from your lips was…it gutted me from sternum to naval. I…I cannot describe what that was like, my love. My music… was everything that I was. It is what brought you to me. It’s why you spirited me away with you. To know that it was gone… that my hands could never hold it again…” Under his downcast brow, his wet eyes gleamed in her now fading golden light. “My love the sun will always rise and you will always have purpose. I am a husk with nothing. Music was my purpose. And when that was no more it was you. Now I fail both,”

A fat tear ran down his cheek.

“And I must beg, I must beg you to let me go,”

It was a lightning strike through her body. The tingle of numbness filled her chest and stomach. In her godly heart the dawn knew that this would be his boon. But eternal and ever lastu

“I love you, Tithonus,” her voice as thin as his, “and I cannot let you go,” 

His wail cut through her like a sword. She felt his paper weight as he slumped upon her, face pressed into the golden flesh between her wings. He wept, each exhale like the desperate gasp of a bellow. Tears trickled down her back as well as her cheeks. 

“My love…” his lips brushed against her skin, like the touch of insect wings, “if you love me you will let me go,”

“I -” she stopped. Her folded wings brushed against his face as she turned from him, her face in her hands. The sound escaping her mouth was foreign to her. She recognized it, from her rounds over courts handing down sentences, over women holding their stillborn children, over men betrayed by their love. But she had only seen and heard, for she was a god overhead. She did not know it was called grief. Inside her godly mind it overwhelmed her, swirling like the angry wine dark sea. As she drowned she bargained, swearing to forget and forsake every wonderful sensation Tithonus had given her to escape this one. To love is to be mortal, she thought, wrought with anguish.

Her hands dropped heavily as stone from her face. Her gaze was locked on the bed, soft beneath her. The day after the dawn asked Tithonus to away with her she had made this bed. A gift for him, stuffed with the finest down she could find across Gaia. Eternally restuffed and restuffed, it had been their refuge. But it has long since been his prison. 

With godly grief she straightened and cradled her love like a babe. She opened her mouth to speak but found there were no words. TIthonus wept still as she looked at the man in her golden arms for the last time. Tears, whose she wasn’t sure, splattered on the feather bed as she touched a rosy finger to his boney chest. She sent a prayer to the greatest god, uncertain if he would help unmake as he had made his blessing. 

To her bitter gratitude, he answered. For once, the golden light that illuminated their chamber came from her lover. It bloomed under her rosy fingers, golden light shimmering out in ribbons, wrapping around his frail body. She watched through bleary eyes as his skeletal hands and speckled skull were swaddled in gold. Soon he was cocooned entirely in the blinding radiance of the gods.

As the dawn wept and prayed her thanks, the golden light subsided for the briefest of moments. Zeus’ mercy, like his blessing, was not free of his cruel complacency. Her golden eyes blinked painfully as the cocoon split to reveal Tithonus’ face. Shining black eyes blinked with sight and bewilderment as she cradled a head of thick waved hair. His old face, smooth and untouched by the centuries. The dawn let out a sound that was half cry and half laugh. It was a wicked final twist of the divine knife, but the dawn could only see it as a gift. Tithonus’ strong, sinewy hand reached up to touch her face.

“A last blessing,” she croaked, holding his beautiful hand to her face. Tithonus smiled, sadly and sweetly. 

“One last to be grateful for,” he whispered, thumb tracing along her cheek. She bent and kissed him on his youthful lips. It was the most divine of the millions they had ever shared because it was mortal. As quickly as it had been it had gone. His face disappeared under her lips, back under the blanket of golden light. She wept like an animal, loud and ragged - cacophonous with its echo against the stone. As his body dissolved in her arms, eternity stretched out before her, vast and for once a modicum of uncertain. Her arms wrapped tighter, and tighter, till all the light that remained was cupped between her hands, pressed hard to her chest.

There was a tickle on her palms. She was too grieved to be startled, and tenuously cracked her thumbs. A broken laugh escaped her throat. Down in her hands was a shining pair of obsidian orbs, attached to a fat, green winged body. Zeus had spared only the color of his eyes. The bug began to make a creaking sound, droning and continuous. Somehow, the dawn still found it beautiful.

The creature crawled up her arm, tickling her bronze flesh as it went. In the remnants of her glow its body sparkled like a green jewel. It reached her shoulder, creaking away by her ears. Thanks, she imagined, or she hoped. Translucent wings lifted from its body, and it began to move them rapidly. Away it flew, out the mouth of their cave and to the blue of the new day. 

The dawn did not stir from where she sat, all through the ride Helios. Nor did she lay to sleep during Selene’s. But sure as it ever was, the radiance in her chest returned, burning insistently through her body and she rose. The men that toiled the earth held out their palms, feeling rain drops but seeing no clouds in the pink and gold sky. 

Millenia passed, and then more still. As they passed, familiar, strangely beautiful creaking sounds grew stronger from the Earth below her. A song, and it is always loudest during the dawn.