Skin Of Marble
The year is nineteen hundred and thirty-five. Workers in the hot summer sun of Central Tennessee toil with stone and concrete. Nashville, much to the consternation of a certain town in Georgia, was known as the Athens of The South. From the steps set upon the field, the massive double rows of columns, and moulded sculptures high above they formed the liquid stone into a monument the designer had promised would be glorious. Soon, the massive effigy of the goddess who Athens was named for would be complete and installed. Only one piece in the entire structure would be true however.
At the Pentelic marble quarry on the other side of the world, men drilled and hammered as they had done thousands of years in the past. Every hole precisely placed via a slow grinding. The brace twisted by hand as it had always been done. Wedges hammered into the line of holes, then filled with water. The wooden wedges expanded against the near indestructible marble. A near perfect cube of marble is released from the wall and carefully hauled down. Days of chiselling by hand and hammer smoothed the faces. The smoother it got, the finer the chisels to be used until each surface was smooth.
Into a wooden crate and aboard a freighter, the stone set off for the new world carrying with it something few had seen or heard in over a thousand years. The massive ship cut through the waves. A journey that Poseidon would have doomed to the smaller ships of the past, nothing could stop it now. Within days the crate was offloaded onto the shore of "The New World." Hardly new now, except to her. The sound of the truck over the pavement was unlike anything she'd ever heard before. She could feel when it moved from the lowlands of the shore to the gently sloping and winding mountains until again the land was flat. Never before had she been so far from the sea.
Men in brown and grey overalls speaking in a language she'd never heard lifted the stone and set it into the base that the statue was to sit. Time passed both fast and slow as she waited. Then one day, the masses gathered. The Parthenon of Nashville was complete and the people flocked to see it. And now, there she stood among them, looking up at the massive statue dedicated to her. But she felt something was missing. Looking around the room Ailith could feel that everyone there was not there to worship her but to worship the designer. A false sense of worship. "Fuck this," she whispered to herself as she turned to make her way through the crowd. On the steps of "The Parthenon" she looked up to the sky. It looked so different and yet the same. She hadn't a clue where she would find worshipers or if anyone in this strange new land would even know who she was. And not just the name that rang through history, but her.
Years of wandering this land of false prophets and dealers of misinformation led her to few if any potential followers. It wasn't until after near eighty years of looking did she finally find a place where all the gods could gather. Where they were safe. Where they could rebuild. And it was there, to Goodluck, she set off. The long journey of looking was coming to and end.
