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Her finger hovered above her thread as she moved to the right, tracing it. “Watch what happens with it. I can trace it back.” She stopped in the center of the tree where two threads that were dark, crossed and wrapped around her thread. “These two threads are my parents—both dead, so their threads are black. And from there I can follow back farther and farther as all my ancestors cross over their threads onward back through time. Most panthenites have parents that join—cross over on a thread far off to the left. My parents cross in the middle of the tree because I come from both sides—my father’s side moves off to the right. My mother’s to the left.”
“Fascinating.” It was. It was also taking too long. I was getting dizzier by the second and I was also terrified about what had just happened to Damen. I wanted to get back to him and get him off the mountain before someone found us here. “So where is my thread?”
Skye moved to her left, then took several steps backward so she could see the tree in whole. She studied the tree with her left arm wrapped over her ribcage, her right elbow propped on her forearm as she tapped the front of her teeth with her fingertip.
“There.” High on the wall, she pointed to a thread pulsing a deep maroon. “There it is. You see how it’s flickering crazy at the end? That’s because you’re in here and near to it.” She moved forward, her right forefinger pointing to it as she got closer, hovering over it but not touching it as she moved to the right.
Along my thread, there was a bump where two dark threads crossed over it—my parents, I presumed, and she used two more fingers on their threads as she started to move closer to the base of the tree, following threads as they crossed and swopped and zigzagged.
“What? No.” She muttered something unintelligible to herself and stepped back to the left and retraced her same journey from left to right, veering differently along a few threads.
She glanced to her right out the malefic side of the tree fanning out, then shook her head, went to the far left and started to retrace my thread a third time.
One time too many, and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled.
“What?”
She didn’t respond, her focus solely on the threads of the tree in front of her. She got to the base of the tree, her head shaking.
Spinning around, she went to the wall behind me and plucked out a feather from a container hanging at eye height. Spinning it in her hand, she quickly moved out to the start of my thread and followed the lines inward a fourth time. When she got to the thick base of the tree which held thousands of dark, dead threads intertwined, she used the soft edge of the feather to tease apart a few of the dark threads.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“The threads are delicate, they can’t stand touch, so I have to use something soft to shift them about.” Painstakingly slow, she moved one thread and then the next.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
“You’re starting to freak me out, Skye. What is it?”
She went silent, moving another thread in the middle of the tree, her head shaking.
With a sudden grunt, she stepped back from the tree and her hands clasped together over the back of her neck, the feather between her fingers pressing into her brown hair as her eyes ran frantic over the entirety of the tree.
“What? What it is it?”
She heaved a long breath, clearly buying time.
So much for efficiency’s sake.
She cleared her throat. “I have spent a number of years learning which threads belong to which people, all the way back to the original panthenites, or what we think are the original panthenites—some of the oldest threads do not have names.” She paused, shaking her head, her stare still focused on the tree. “And if this is true—if I am reading all of this right…”
She expelled a loud sigh, then looked to me, her hands falling to her sides. “You know the story of Persephone and Hades?”
“Of course. They were real?” There weren’t many panthenites that hadn’t been schooled in the tales of the old ones—the ones that took it upon themselves to become gods to the humans. Some of the gods humans created were fiction, some were real. There really was no way to know what was true and what wasn’t.
“Well, those two were. Hades was malefic. Persephone was panthenite.”
I nodded. Made sense.
“The mythology on that one had it kind of right. It was generally thought Hades couldn’t conceive because he was the ruler of underworld—life cannot come from death. The reality of it was that he could talk to the dead, so in a way, I suppose, I could see why he was imagined to be the ruler of the dead.”
I nodded. “I recall—people always did love the myths around those two.”
“Exactly.” She stepped around me and set the feather entwined in her fingers back into the container. “So, you’ll remember Hades was deeply in love with Persephone, and she with him, but they couldn’t have children—because again, the life from death thing. Hades was distraught by the pain it caused his love, so he asked his brother, Zeus, to help. Zeus was only too willing to disguise himself as Hades and go to her and impregnate her.”
“Creep.”
“Yep.” Skye nodded. “Persephone had two children in that way. Zagreus and Melinoë.”
