Chapter 51: Earth Mother and Overgrown Veggies
What was a mother's love?
It was a force of nature. It could be a gentle spring rain nurturing life, or a hurricane-level obsession that left destruction in its wake. Demeter, in her current state, was a perfect case study of the latter.
Cyd stared down in exasperation at the goddess currently wrapped around his leg like a particularly distressed, golden-haired barnacle. Since his ill-advised 'water spilled on the ground' comment, Demeter had demonstrated her power—the life around them withering into a desolate wasteland—before latching onto him physically as if he were the last lifeboat on a sinking ship.
"Lady Demeter, please! Your dignity! Think of your station!" Cyd tried to gently pry her fingers loose. They were slender, elegant fingers, currently possessing the tensile strength of steel cables.
"I know! I know you need blessings! I'll give you any blessing you want!" she cried, looking up at him with eyes wide with desperation, her earlier divine aura completely shattered. "I can make stones turn to gold! Would you like that? Gold is nice!"
"Look, even if I wanted to, I don't have the power to just waltz into the Underworld and drag your daughter out," Cyd said, rubbing his temple where a headache was forming. "And what if she wants to be there? My job description doesn't include divine kidnapping."
"She does NOT want to be there!" Demeter insisted, her voice climbing an octave. "It's all gloom and stone! No flowers! No sunlight! Just that… that dour, mumbling lump of a god!"
"Alright, how about this," Cyd said, holding up a finger in a 'stop' gesture. "I'll go and ask her. I'll deliver a message. I'll find out how she truly feels. That's the absolute limit of what I can do. And you," he added, his tone firming, "are a goddess. Act like one."
The words seemed to penetrate the fog of her misery. Demeter blinked. Her sobs hitched. The sheer, unvarnished truth of it—she was a primordial Olympian weeping in the dirt, clinging to a mortal's leg—seemed to dawn on her.
The transformation was startling.
"Ah. Yes. You are… correct." Her voice smoothed out, the hysterical edge vanishing. The tears on her cheeks seemed to evaporate. She straightened her shoulders, and the air around her shifted, growing heavier, more present. The goddess of the harvest was back.
Except she was still wrapped around his leg.
"Then… I shall not impose further," she declared with regal grace, as if granting him a great boon.
Cyd looked pointedly at the pair of slender, immovable arms still locked around his thigh. "Uh-huh. The… appendage?"
A faint, un-goddess-like pink tinged Demeter's cheeks. "Ahem. As a token of my… appreciation for your service." She released him and stood in one fluid motion, dusting invisible dirt from her simple, earth-toned chiton. She lifted a hand, and her finger glowed with a soft, rich brown light, the color of fertile loam. She tapped the center of Cyd's left bracer.
A new crystal, nestled beside the others, ignited with a warm, steady earth-brown glow. Power, subtle and deep, flowed into him—not strength or speed, but a profound connection to the cycle of growth and decay, a whisper of the deep, slow pulse of the world itself.
Cyd raised an eyebrow. The blessing felt genuine, but the whole performance reeked of a divine being desperately trying to make him forget she'd just had a meltdown while hugging his knee. Still, he knew when to quit. Most other gods would have turned him into a scarecrow for less. Demeter, for all her issues, seemed to operate on a different, more… human wavelength. A terrifyingly clingy one.
"What message would you have me deliver?" Cyd asked, rotating his wrist, feeling the new blessing settle.
Demeter's composure immediately cracked again, but in a different way. Her face lit up with maternal fervor. "Tell her to eat her meals! And to stay away from that… that dog! It's filthy! She mustn't be lonely, even without flowers! And if Hades is being mean, she must tell me right away! And she should remember to—"
"Whoa, hold on!" Cyd interrupted, holding up a hand. It was probably blasphemy, but he had a sudden, vivid premonition of being trapped here for a week listening to a divine shopping list of worries. "I'm sure you tell her these things every single day."
"Of course I do! Every morning and night!" Demeter said, beaming with pride.
"Then maybe… tell me something you haven't said. Something that's hard to say." Cyd tapped his own chest, over his heart. "The thing that gets stuck in your throat."
Demeter's proud smile faded. She looked at him, really looked at him, her soil-dark eyes searching his face. For a long moment, she was silent, the only sound the dry whisper of the dead grass around them. He could see the understanding dawning in her eyes—the understanding of why her daughter might have left a half-day early, fleeing not the Underworld, but the suffocating blanket of her love.
She sighed, a sound that seemed to carry the weight of centuries. She leaned in close, her voice dropping to a whisper meant only for his ear. The words she spoke were not a litany of instructions. They were simple. Raw. And filled with a love so vast and painful it finally sounded true.
Cyd listened, and a slow, understanding smile spread across his face. Of course. Beneath the smothering, the fussing, the divine-grade separation anxiety… that was the core of it. It was the kind of love that was terrifying to voice, because giving it voice meant acknowledging the possibility of loss.
"I'll tell her," he promised, his voice quiet but firm. "Every word. Even if I have to walk through the gates of Tartarus itself to do it."
"Thank you," Demeter whispered, and for the first time, she looked not like a hysterical mother or a regal goddess, but simply like a woman entrusting her most fragile hope to a stranger.
---
"So," Medusa said as they left the barren field behind, her voice breaking a long silence. "How exactly do you plan to get to the Underworld? It's not a place you book passage to."
"There's always a way," Cyd said, a determined glint in his eye. He snapped his fingers. "This world runs on stories. And the stories say living men have gone down and come back. So there's a path."
"And your plan to find this path is…?"
"Ask around." Cyd shrugged, then gestured towards the village's farmland, which lay in a state of pathetic, withered ruin thanks to Demeter's earlier grief-stricken outburst. "But first, we clean up the mess. I kind of helped cause it."
The villagers' crops were dead. Without a harvest, winter would be a death sentence. Their plea to him took on a new weight. He'd triggered the goddess's despair. The least he could do was try to fix the result.
He focused on his left wrist, on the warm, brown crystal of Demeter's blessing. He willed the power forward, not really knowing what to expect. The brown light crept from the bracer, tracing delicate, root-like patterns up his forearm. He didn't feel stronger or faster. Instead, his perception… shifted. He could see the latent life in the soil—not visually, but as a sensation, a map of potential energy lying dormant and distressed. He could feel the tiny, desperate sparks of the seeds that hadn't fully died.
"Alright," he murmured, more to himself than anyone. "Grow."
He raised his left hand and snapped his fingers.
The world exploded.
It wasn't a fireball or a shockwave of force. It was an eruption of life, so sudden and violent it was catastrophic.
FOOMP-SKRITCH-CRACKLE-POP!
The entire field of dead, dry stalks and hard-baked earth seemed to convulse. A geyser of dark soil, shattered vegetable matter, and an impossible verdant green shot twenty feet into the air. A booming, wet, organic thump echoed across the valley, followed by a rain of dirt and leafy debris. A colossal dust cloud, thick with the smell of wet earth and chlorophyll, mushroomed up, blotting out the sun.
Cyd stood frozen, his hand still raised, his expression one of pure, unadulterated shock. This wasn't a gentle sprouting. This was botanical armageddon.
As the dust began to settle, Medusa tugged on his sleeve. "Cyd. Look."
He squinted through the thinning cloud. His jaw went slack.
The field was gone. In its place stood a jungle. A grotesque, magnificent, overwhelming jungle of… vegetables.
Cabbages the size of small huts, their leaves leathery and thick as elephant hide. Carrots as tall as pine trees, their orange tops brushing the lower branches of the actual trees at the field's edge. Beanstalks that didn't just reach for the sky—they punched through the low-hanging clouds, their stems thicker than temple columns. Wheat stalks stood like a forest of golden spears, each grain the size of his fist.
The "explosion" had been the simultaneous, catastrophic growth of every single plant in the field, tearing through the earth and each other in a frenzied race to fulfill the command of a god's blessing.
"Are… are those edible?" Cyd asked, his voice faint. They looked more like siege weapons than food.
The villagers, who had been cowering from the blast, now crept to the edge of the new, monstrous garden. Their faces, initially terrified, transformed. Awe. Disbelief. Then, unbridled, hysterical joy.
One man, covered head to toe in rich, black soil, stumbled forward and threw his arms around the trunk-sized stem of a gargantuan leek, weeping and planting kisses on its rough surface.
"I think… they'll manage," Cyd said, a weak, relieved smile finally breaking through his shock. He turned and melted into the tree line before the villagers could mob him with gratitude.
---
"Gods above…" the village elder breathed, emerging from his hut to stare at the vegetable titans that now dominated his world. He trembled, tears of joy streaming through the dirt on his cheeks. "He did it! The hero really did it! Where is he? We must thank him!"
A young woman with hair the color of polished silver stepped forward, her hands clasped reverently at her chest. She gazed not at the miraculous crops, but at the forest path where Cyd had vanished.
"He is gone," she said, her voice soft but carrying a strange, melodic certainty. "As he always is. A pure white hero, passing through the shadows of our troubles, leaving only light behind."
The elder nodded, overcome. He clasped his own hands, bowing his head. "May his path be ever blessed. May his journey find peace."
Around him, the villagers followed suit, bowing their heads in silent, fervent prayer towards the empty path.
The silver-haired girl smiled, a secret, knowing curve of her lips. Her eyes, for a moment, seemed to hold a light that was not entirely mortal.
"You will be the greatest of them all," she whispered, the words lost in the rustle of the gigantic cabbage leaves. "I will make sure of it."
---
Miles away, skimming across the waves with Medusa clinging to his back, Cyd suddenly, violently sneezed.
"Ugh. Someone's talking about me," he grumbled, shaking his head. "Probably complaining about the giant turnips."