Chapter 50: Harvest of Despair
What was a person, really? A collection of actions, or the intent behind them? Was the self defined by its own private compass, or by the stories others wove around it? Was a man good because he did good, or because he was good?
Cyd had never considered himself a particularly moral person. His every action, from the moment he'd taken on Hephaestus's challenge, had been rooted in self-interest. Survival first, then a stubborn, personal quest for the peace that the bracer promised. He was no saint. He was pragmatic, often reluctant, and driven by a simple, unheroic desire to be left alone. His soul, he figured, was probably a pretty standard shade of grey.
Yet, the world had decided otherwise. The story of the " The pure white Hero" had taken on a life of its own. His deeds—the Calydonian Boar, the slaughter of the Colchian Dragon, his (supposed) pivotal role in Jason's quest—were being polished and amplified by bards and rumor. The fact that he'd vanished without demanding gold or glory only added to the mystique. In some circles, fueled by Jason's own cryptic praise and Medea's carefully planted tales, his name was now spoken in the same breath as Heracles. A new paradigm. A hero who didn't take.
[Cyd] was, in the public imagination, unquestionably good. Pure. A white knight in a tarnished world. Because he had done impossible things and asked for nothing in return.
He was thinking about this uncomfortable gap between perception and reality when he first set foot on the island of Sicily, a place whispered to be a favored retreat of Demeter, goddess of the harvest. His timing, as usual, was spectacular.
He and Medusa crested a grassy hill just in time to see a band of a dozen ragged, armed men descending on a small, vulnerable farming village below. Smoke already curled from one of the thatched roofs.
"Bandits. Again. I swear, I have a magnet for this stuff," Cyd muttered, more tired than angry. He didn't hesitate.
"Hey!" he called out, his voice cutting through the chaos. "You're blocking the road."
The bandit leader, a burly man with a scar across his nose, turned. He saw a lone traveler, pale and unarmed except for a strange black glove. An easy mark. "Piss off, pretty boy, or you'll be part of the haul."
Cyd sighed. He raised his right hand. The dragon-scale gauntlet hummed. He didn't imagine a weapon. He imagined… a warning.
A ripple of dark energy pulsed from the gauntlet. The earth to the left of the bandits' path didn't just crack. A five-foot-wide trench exploded into existence, running for twenty yards, dirt and rock flying into the air as if a giant invisible plow had just torn through the soil. The concussion was a physical whump that staggered the raiders and echoed across the valley.
Before the dust even settled, Cyd was walking down the slope, Medusa a silent step behind. The bandits, seeing the calm, pale-haired man with the strange, shimmering black arm, took one look at the freshly-made canyon beside them and threw down their weapons. They knelt in the dirt, babbling surrender.
The villagers, who had been cowering behind doors and barricades, emerged. Their terror melted, not into cautious relief, but into something far more intense: recognition.
They didn't ask his name. They knew it.
"The White Hero!" an old man cried out, tears in his eyes. "He's come! He's really come!"
A wave of desperate, joyous sound swept through the village. They surged forward, not to thank a stranger, but to welcome a legend made flesh. Young women, their faces flushed with a mixture of awe and something more calculated, pressed forward with baskets of figs and olives. Their hands brushed his as he accepted the offerings, fingers lingering with deliberate, inviting pressure on the back of his hand, on his wrist.
Medusa, in her dark cloak, was completely ignored—just another piece of the hero's mysterious entourage.
Cyd stood there, fruit in hand, surrounded by adoration, and felt a profound sense of dislocation. He understood it now. The reason the myth had spread so fast, grown so large.
People were small. The world was full of problems they couldn't solve—drought, bandits, monsters, the capricious wrath of the gods. They needed hope. A tangible force that could step into their lives and fix the unfixable.
They prayed to gods, but gods were fickle. They solved problems, yes, but often the problem was of their own making. A goddess slighted sent a plague. A god bored sent a monster. The cure was often worse than the disease.
So they turned to heroes. Mortals like themselves, but stronger. But heroes were human too. They had appetites. I helped you. Now you pay me. It was the unwritten contract. And to avoid a helpful hero turning into a new tyrant, villages paid whatever was asked—food, treasure, daughters. Sometimes the price was heavier than the original loss. But what choice did they have?
In their resignation, a tiny, stubborn hope survived. The hope for a hero who didn't charge. Who helped because it was right. Who was, in essence, the goodness they wished existed in the world.
And then, as if conjured by collective longing, Cyd had appeared. He might see his own motives as selfish, but the people needed him to be selfless. They needed the White Hero. His very existence was a comfort. It meant that somewhere, against all odds, true nobility walked the earth. Maybe he wouldn't come to their village. But he could. The hope was enough.
For this village, the hope had just paid off. The legend had walked out of the woods and saved them. He'd asked for nothing. Even when the village elder, trembling, offered their communal savings—a pitiful handful of silver—Cyd had waved it away. He'd just taken two ripe apples from a nearby tree, tossing one to Medusa.
To them, he was a miracle. A soul as pure as driven snow.
So when the elder, emboldened by this saintly behavior, tentatively asked if the great hero might also speak to the goddess Demeter, who dwelled in the island's heart and whose recent sorrow had blighted their harvests… and when Cyd simply said "Yes"… the village didn't just celebrate. They rejoiced. They sang his name to the sky.
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"If everything went exactly the way I wanted," Cyd said later, trudging up the path towards the island's central meadow, "life would be so boring I'd probably nap myself to death." He tossed his apple in the air and caught it. "Am I supposed to be enjoying this? It feels… gross."
"Most men in your position would be drunk on hubris and local wine by now," Medusa observed, taking a delicate, precise bite of her own apple. The villagers' adulation had been a physical thing—clinging hands, worshipful eyes, the unsubtle invitations from women who saw a legendary bed-warmer. A normal hero would have owned the village for a week.
"I did it for me. I'd have come to see Demeter regardless," Cyd said, his gaze fixed on the distant field of wildflowers the elder had pointed out. A lone, tall figure was just visible, sitting amongst the blooms. "But… I don't know. It's heavy. Their hope."
"The world looks different from every pair of eyes," Medusa said softly. She finished her apple and carefully buried the core at the base of a young oak. "Even if the harvest were plentiful, even if they'd never asked… if you help Demeter, in their eyes, you did it for them. Because they need to believe it. They need a pillar. Even a self-deceiving one is better than none."
"According to them, Demeter's been camped out here for months, moping. The usual bounty's gone. Fields are struggling." Cyd ran a hand through his hair, a gesture of mounting anxiety. "Hope's just the flip side of despair, you know? The higher they lift you up, the harder the fall when you disappoint them. That's a lot of pressure."
"Then do not disappoint," Medusa said simply. She rose on her toes and patted his shoulder. "I am with you."
"Ugh. Fine. I'm not doing it for their songs anyway. If I fail, at least the expectations vanish. Silver lining." He ruffled her hair, earning a quiet huff, and strode toward the figure in the flowers.
As he got closer, he could hear it: a low, heartbroken muttering.
"My baby… my sweet girl… how could you…"
The voice was thick with tears. The figure wasn't sitting regally. She was curled in on herself, knees drawn to her chest, face buried in a patch of lavender that was already turning brown at the edges. This was not the Demeter of hymns—the tall, stately, matronly goddess crowned with grain, radiating maternal abundance.
This was a mother having a breakdown.
"Um… Lady Demeter?" Cyd ventured, stopping a respectful distance away.
"Hmm?" The goddess lifted her head. Her face was strikingly beautiful, but tear-streaked and puffy. Strands of golden hair, usually bound in a neat, fertile braid, were tangled with dead flower petals and bits of grass. Her eyes, the color of rich soil, were red-rimmed and swimming with fresh misery.
"My legs… they've gone numb…" she whimpered, not with divine command, but with the pathetic frustration of someone who'd been crouching too long in grief. She reached out and grabbed the hem of Cyd's chiton, using it to haul herself unsteadily to her feet, wobbling as circulation returned with painful pins and needles.
"I'm… here to listen," Cyd said awkwardly, bracing her elbow to keep her from toppling over.
"It's my daughter," Demeter sobbed, now latching onto his arm with both hands as if he were the only solid thing in a crumbling world. "Persephone… she said she was happy! She said she was having fun! In the Underworld!"
The goddess's voice rose to a wail. "What does that mean?! Was being with your mother so terrible?! What does that gloomy, monosyllabic lump of shadows have that I don't?!"
The raw, maternal jealousy and hurt in her voice was staggering. With her outburst, the field around them reacted. The vibrant colors of the flowers seemed to leach away in a wave radiating from Demeter. Lush green stems withered to brittle brown. Petles shriveled and fell. In seconds, the lively meadow around them became a patch of desiccated husks.
Cyd swallowed hard. The "easy" goddess of the harvest was looking a lot more like a natural disaster in the shape of a heartbroken woman.
"My sweet, beautiful Persephone! That… that Hades must have filled her head with lies! She used to love these flowers! She used to run through these very fields! How can she be happy in a place of dust and ghosts?!"
Demeter's grip on his arm tightened, her fingers digging in with divine strength that would have pulped a normal man's bone. Her eyes, wide and crazed with possessive love, locked onto his.
"No! I won't allow it! Mother is coming to save you!"
Then her focus shifted fully to Cyd. The intensity in her gaze was like standing too close to a furnace.
"They say you're a hero who can do anything."
"Nope. Absolutely not. Just a traveler. Passing through. Lovely weather, isn't it?" Cyd tried to gently extricate his arm. This was veering into catastrophic territory. He'd been afraid of a simple "fetch quest." This was a domestic dispute of cosmic proportions. Go retrieve my daughter from her husband, the King of the Dead. That wasn't a trial; it was a suicide mission with extra steps.
It was daylight. Apollo's blessing should protect him from any direct curse. Maybe he could just… run.
"PLEASE! YOU HAVE TO HELP ME!"
But Demeter didn't rage. She didn't threaten. She collapsed, her dignity utterly gone, and wrapped her arms around Cyd's legs in a desperate, humiliating clutch. She buried her face against his knee, her shoulders shaking with great, heaving sobs.
"She left half a day early!" Demeter wailed, the detail clearly world-shattering to her. "She was smiling when she said goodbye! She wanted to go back!"
Cyd stared down at the weeping goddess clinging to him. Persephone's annual cycle was famous: three months in the Underworld, nine with her mother. Half a day? It was a statistical blip. A rounding error.
But to Demeter, it was the first crack in the dam. The first sign that her daughter's heart might be changing address permanently.
"She used to cry! She used to beg to stay! Why is she smiling now?! What if… what if she decides she doesn't want to come back at all?!"
Cyd, operating on autopilot and a severe lack of filter when dealing with hysterical divinities, patted her shoulder awkwardly. "Well, you know… a daughter getting married is like… water spilled on the ground. You can't really gather it back up. It's just… gone."
He realized his mistake the moment the words left his mouth.
Demeter went utterly still. The sobbing stopped. She slowly lifted her head.
Her eyes weren't filled with tears anymore. They were empty. Hollow. Dry as a desert bone.
The land around them didn't just wither. It died. The grass turned to ash. The soil cracked with a sound like snapping spines. The very air grew parched and hard to breathe. The life-force of the goddess of growth wasn't just withdrawn; it was inverted, becoming a vacuum of absolute barrenness.
Cyd stood frozen, one hand still hovering over the shoulder of the most powerful—and currently, most dangerously unstable—earth goddess in the pantheon, who was now staring through him at a future of eternal, childless winter.
Well, he thought, his mouth dry. This is going spectacularly poorly.