Totoka River You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Totoka River
Metageit 16
Thread titles are quotes from Homer's Illiad.

The last she recalled was the singing of the sisters, loud enough to contend with the roilihg sea, and the smell of honeysuckle where it had been applied upon her body; sweet and strong, as they had called her in life. To step out upon the water and be offered to a god! It had been all she had ever wanted.

When had that been? She could not recall. The transit to this underworldly place had been blissfull at first as she had begun to drown - embraced by Poseidon, who had asked for her by name; he had said to a sister, Dianikos is mine! The sisters gave willingly (all save Melidora, who wept in the procession but neither did she fight against what was right).

When she had regained herself, Dianikos was not within the bountiful sea, and touched upon the banks of a river instead. The thought that she had been rescued did not enter her mind - taken, more like. Stolen from Poseidon by Tethys perhaps (was she right to think herself such a catch? To be fought over by gods and goddesses?). For what purpose? It mattered little to the bleary-eyed girl now, as she lifted her battered body free of the mud and tasted, for the first time cognizantly, the warming aromas of things not of the island.

She saw red, everywhere. It was like mortal blood painted across the tops of the trees, shimmering, wet. There were dark spires all around her, springing forth from the mud - but that band of red upon the horizon, she had never seen the likes of it before.

So began Dianikos' journey. Upon shaking limbs she would rise, her golden coat slicked down by the river or layered with blackened ichor; Dianikos enjoyed the thought of a wounded Tethys after all, and fed her ego with it as she hiked away from her resting place - leaving behind a void where once her body had wedged in to the mud.