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shanastoryteller · 1 year

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Do you think you'll tackle Serene and Endymion in your Greek Myths? They are gorgeous btw. ;)

Not all titans were subdued. Not all were lost, or chained, or changed.

Some simply endured, too large and distant to be concerned with matters of titles and thrones.

Helios raged. Even bound within Tartarus, his sun burned brighter and angrier with each day, feeding off the hatred of the cursed titan. Seas turned to deserts as water was baked out of the earth. Apollo scooped up Helios’s chariot, bringing the sun to bear and returning a normal rhythm to the days and nights. Helios’s rage burns him even still, but the chariot has at least accepted its new master.

Artemis becomes associated with the moon because she is her brother’s other half in all things. But she constructs her chariot herself and it is used for races and to transport huntresses and little else.

The moon’s first goddess has never left. She has dragged the moon across the sky in her chariot of starlight uninterrupted for over a millennia.

The titan Selene did not join the fight of the new gods and the titans. She did not defend her brother nor did she attempt to save him.

But neither has she acknowledged the new pantheon. Zeus rules the sky and has demanded an audience with her many times, but she has never granted it. Zeus chases her chariot, but even riding lightning he can’t catch it when she unhooks the moon and no longer has its weight slowing her down.

Poseidon shakes his head and says, “Leave her be. I am the master of the sea and yet if I suddenly had to push forward every inch of the tide myself, I wouldn’t be left with much power to do anything else. All you’re doing is causing problems for the rest of us. Leave Selene to her work.”

Artemis agrees. If even Poseidon thinks bothering the moon titan is a bad idea, then they should listen. Usually he can’t be bothered to have opinions about anyone outside of his own wife, and even that’s rare.

Zeus gives up. Time passes, as it does, and no matter how the sun bucks and fights against her brother’s grip, sometimes going too quick and then too slow, the moon continues at the same steady pace.

Artemis grows stronger beneath moonlight. This must be because of her worshippers, or perhaps her brother’s. She never answers any prayers for tides or from people lost in the darkness, refusing every attempt to give her a power not her own, but her silence doesn’t seem to discourage anyone. Under the night sky her chariot moves impossibly fast and moonlight seems to always find her through the trees, which makes hunting difficult, but she doesn’t dare complain.

She does not want to earn Selene’s ire.

But despite her best efforts, Artemis does not manage to avoid her attention.

She is separated from her huntresses, spending the third night in a row tracking down a leopard that Demeter claims she drove mad on accident. Artemis doesn’t believe her, but the truth is irrelevant. This creature stalks and kills with Demeter’s blessing upon it, taking down all manor of creature and person.

Her temples have been filled with those begging for her aid. She’s blessed many spears, but her blessing doesn’t seem to be able to outweigh Demeter’s.

That irritates her enough that she’s seeing to this personally. She’s going to skin that damn leopard and wear it’s pelt to the next meeting of the pantheon.

One moment she’s skulking beneath a canopy of leaves, following several drops of blood she’s convinced will lead her to her prey, and the next the hair of her arms is standing on end and her heart is beating fast enough to make her light headed.

She swings around, spear raised, convinced that the damn leopard has found her first.

It’s not the leopard.

“You are the one they are praying too,” says a woman, her body soft with roundness and with the palest skin Artemis has seen on a living person. The extra skin beneath her chin gives her a perfectly circular face and the pockmarks across her face and body are a perfect echo of the moon’s many craters.

Selene tucks her ink black hair behind her ear and looks at her with equally dark eyes.

Artemis was born long after the war with the titans and she’s never ventured into Tartarus. She had assumed their presence felt much the same as other gods, that perhaps it was similar to the feeling of getting caught up in Hera’s rage.

It’s nothing like that.

Selene’s power is like a physical weight, as if they’re suddenly underwater and it’s surrounding them everywhere. Artemis lets it push her to her knees, bowing her head and trying to force her heart to calm. “Titan Selene. I swear that I did nothing to encourage them. I have not claimed any of your power.”

She should have done more than ignore them. She should have toppled temples and killed dissenters. She should have redirected their prayers. Anything to prevent what’s happening now.

“Would you like to?”

Artemis risks raising her head. Selene doesn’t sound angry and she doesn’t look it either. “I don’t understand.”

Selene gestures to the sky. “The moon is different from the sun. The sun pushes forward on its own and must be restrained and goaded in equal measure. Untethered, it will still rise and set. The moon must be pulled. It wants nothing more than to rest and unprompted it will stay motionless. If I step from my chariot for even a moment, the moon halts. It is unmoving now, as we speak.”

Artemis looks up. The moon always looks still to her. She wonders if the tides have noticed the difference.

“I have not been able to walk among earth for more than a few moments since I forged my chariot, lest all that follow the moon also go still and silent. They call you a moon goddess.”

“Please don’t make me take your place,” she says, not above begging. If the goddess traps her on her chariot, Artemis won’t have a choice.

Selene smiles, amusement making her eyes sparkle like distant stars. “You are young. You could not survive the chill or the weight for long. But perhaps you could endure for an hour or two.”

“I don’t understand,” she repeats, but some of her fear is starting to recede. Selene is not speaking like she’s going to strike her or curse her.

“There is a man,” she says, then pauses.

“Oh,” Artemis blinks, then, “Um, that’s not really my area. I could ask my brother?”

Selene laughs. “No, that is not necessary. I just need time. Will you steer my chariot each night so that I may walk across the earth unworried? Then you shall be a moon goddess in more than name.”

A titan, offering to share power for so little a reward? There has to be a catch. “Aren’t you worried that I’ll take too much?”

“I am not a goddess as you are a goddess,” she says, her derision light enough that Artemis can choose not to take offense to it. “My power neither grows nor dwindles based on the opinions of mortals. If you gain more, I do not have less.”

It shouldn’t be that surprising. All gods have some level of innate power. But not like this, not something that could alter the course of a planet, not this large and this terrifying.

Artemis decides then that Selene must be the most powerful of the titans. Anything else is too much to think about.

“I accept,” she says.

Selene reaches out, wrapping her thick fingers around her wrist, and then Artemis is somewhere else and she’s freezing.

“You get used to the cold,” Selene says, nudging her to the front of her chariot. The starlight glitters beneath her, driving home how her own silver chariot is nothing more than a pale imitation, no matter how it shines. “I drive the chariot forward with own will.”

Artemis’s works similarly. She focuses, and the chariot lurches forward, but then it jerks backwards. She glances behind, seeing the massive moon attached to the chariot with pulsing, heavy black chains. She tries again, slower, but no matter how much power she puts behind it, the moon won’t move forward a single inch.

“It’s alright,” Selene says. “I’ll help. You’ll grow stronger.”

She leans forward and spits out into space. Her saliva splits into two and then grows, until two massive, pearly white great wolves are standing at attention. Selene summons more of that strange black chain, looping it around the wolves’ chest and forming a hook to pull it through the front of the chariot before handing the ends to Artemis.

They’re heavy enough that she can feel the weight dragging her arms down. “What do I–”

Selene whistles and then wolves bound forward. For a moment they just strain against their chains, but then Artemis adds her own power to push the chariot, and then slowly, painfully, the moon is dragged forward.

“Good,” Selene says, the word settling into Artemis’s bones. “Stop when you must, but not before. I will feel the moon’s stillness and return.”

Her disappearance leaves the air surrounding Artemis even colder, but she refuses to shiver and instead urges the wolves faster with a snap of the celestial chains.

Endymion spends most of his nights on the tallest mountain within walking distance of the city, tracking the stars’ movements so that his fellow astronomers can check their equations against the realities of the heavens.

It takes him much longer than his colleagues and he blames it on an unsteady hand.

The truth is that his hands are perfectly steady. He has a one tablet of star positions and several rolls of linens with paintings of the moon. He’s not a very good artist, but something about it compels him, and so he spends hours each night determined to capture ever crevice and angle.

“Why are you always looking at me?”

He startles, dropping his brush, and turns on his heel to see who on earth is up here with him.

It’s a woman, with long black hair and a large body. There’s a puckered line along her cheek and he resists the urge to press his fingers against it, to follow it’s path until his fingers reach her lips. The soft pink of her plush mouth is the only bit of color on her.

Her question catches up with him and he sputters, “I’ve never seen you before!”

He would remember.

“You are always looking,” she insists, walking towards him. “What do you see?”

“I really haven’t seen you before,” he says, but doesn’t move away when she comes right up next to him. This close, he can see some faint color in her cheeks. He wonders if there are any other parts of her that tinge from pale to pink.

He feels heat rush to his own face at the thought. The bright moonlight that lets him see her so clearly is the same moonlight that’s going to give away his indecent thoughts.

But she doesn’t call him on it, instead pointing down at the crumpled linen. “Why?”

“Oh,” he flushes even more. “I don’t know. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? That’s reason enough.”

Endymion waits for her derision, the same that he’s received every time he’s gotten caught, but instead she curls her hands into the material of his shirt and says, “I agree,” and then she’s yanking him down to press her lips into his.

He tries to convince her to follow him home, but instead she disrobes right there and he can’t argue with that.

“Be here again tomorrow night,” she orders when the sweat is cooling on their bodies.

She likes to order him around. He doesn’t mind. “Won’t you tell me your name?”

“I will not answer questions that you already know the answer to,” she says, and then kisses him again before he can argue.

He means to walk down with her, to escort her home at least, but the moment he turns his back on her, she’s gone.

It takes him seven more nights with her for him to work up the courage to call her Selene.

She smiles and bites his shoulder, the imprints of her teeth a perfect circle.

gods and monsters series, part xxxiii

read more of the gods and monsters series here

#gods and monsters series #selene #artemis #endymion #greek mythology #asks #BEING-ELSPETH

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