The Curse Of Ariadne Pt. 2
*continued excerpt from book, "Hades' Daughter" by Sara Douglass*
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In Athens, Theseus watched as his queen, Phaedre, died in an agonizing childbed, calling out her sister's name. In sorrow, he comforted himself with a young virgin called Helen, before he set off on many wandering adventures about the Aegean looking for his own revenge on the woman who had cursed him.
He never found her, but found everywhere the effects of her curse, and, in his very wanderings, spread the effects of Ariadne's curse farther and farther.
It was why she had not killed him outright.
The Game, a labyrinthine mystery of great power and sorcery, was used to entrap the evil that was always drawn to communities of wealth and contentment. Without it, cities became increasingly vulnerable to the predations of evil, of wrongdoing, of misfortune, of greed and sloth and hubris and all those mischiefs that haunt success and happiness. Cities fell to invaders from the north and west, or were consumed by earth tremors, or by fire.
Evil incarnate itself walked free. Ariadne's destruction of the Game and of its protective sorcery meant that Asterion was reborn into life to work his malevolence and depravity where and as he pleased.
It was pointless, because the mischief that ate at the Games' powers had been generated by the greatest Mistress of them all, Ariadne, who had controlled the founding Game at Knossos on Crete and who had most apparently found the means to undo all the workings of lesser Mistresses about the Aegean.
And Ariadne could not be found. She could not be stopped, and her mischief (as that of her half brother) could not be arrested.
There was worse. As the lands and cities failed, falling to mischief after mischief, so also the gods failed. Whatever Ariadne had tapped into, it was so powerful that it affected even the gods on their heights.
The cataclysmic explosion of Thera had shattered both the equanimity and the confidence of the gods. Thera's beautiful circular harbor had contained a great island—the island within the island—upon which rose the majestic citadel of Atlantis. Center of Aegean culture and supremacy, Atlantis had also contained the ancient and mystical God Well… the major source of succor and power for the gods.
Without it, the gods were not only ineffective, but they grew ever more so as each day passed. With the destruction of Thera and Atlantis, Ariadne had dealt a killing blow to the gods at the very start of the unwinding of her curse. At the height of their powers the gods could have stopped her; now they could do little but mouth feeble curses themselves… and succumb to the evil that stalked every part of Aegean life.
And so, as the seasons passed, and year turned into year, Ariadne's curse wrapped the Aegean world in its malevolent web. There were meager moments of glory, an occasional hour of laughter, but they became increasingly rare, and they passed entirely that day that the Trojan prince called Paris, enamored of the beautiful wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, stole her back to his home city of Troy.
Menelaus' wife was Helen, the girl who had comforted Theseus when Phaedre had died, and who had given him her virginity. Touched by Theseus, Helen was herself a walking curse. In her name all of Greece embarked upon a exhausting ten-year siege of Troy that ensnarled not only the Greeks and the Trojans, but the gods themselves. Weakened by the continuing effects of Thera's eruption as well as by the progressively worsening deterioration of the Game, Troy's collapse dealt the final death blow to the ancient Aegean gods.
Many died amid Troy's smoking ruins, others crept away to agonizing, lonely deaths amid the rocky peaks of Olympus. A few managed to keep drawing breath: Aphrodite, who secured Aeneas' escape from Troy, along with the magical kingship bands of the city; Hera, who, weeping, swore a revenge for Ariadne's destruction of all that was lovely; Poseidon, who crept away to his watery haven and took no further part in the lives of mortals; and Hades, who, alone among the gods, found a measure of strength within all the death.
Within a generation or two of Troy's destruction, Aphrodite had gone, murdered by her sorrow, and Poseidon was nothing more than a faint blue shadow moving slowly within the ocean's depths.Hades kept to his Underworld, wanting no more to do with the mortal realm.
Only Hera, crippled, dying a little more each day, was left to try to undo what Ariadne had wrought.
You see? One woman, destroyed EVERYTHING in her whole entire planet and even robbed the freakin' deities of the source of their power and then disappeared. Just. Like. That. Never to be seen or heard of again, for at least another millenia ever.
She could have just killed Theseus and Phaedre for their betrayal but she didn't. She took her sweet goddamn time and milked out that revenge and served that bish up cold. Then proceeded to eat it up with ice and wallow in the blood of her enemies, all while taking good care of her newborn daughter.
This is written, concrete (get it? Cus Crete? No? Okay then) evidence that the words, "Hell hath no fury seen than that of a woman scorned" is truer than the rapid beating of your heart after you've read this post.
I wanna know what y'all think of this version of the story. Let's discuss shall we?