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“At the beginning of things—at the beginning of all things—there was fire.”
— those who are afraid of wolves, ohladybegood
They are not human enough yet for parents. They find them, but not as other immortals. They are not born.
An archer rises from the night and finds hearth and home with the goddess of love. A squalling infant with the beauty of immortals is brought home to a king's household. They are named for the heart and the mind. He is god and she is mortal. She has always been human enough to die.
They call her Psyche and do not tell her they found her on a mountainside, but she knows anyway. She is human enough for deception, but once she was a spider and she wove this world from her own strands. Even the gods do not know who she is.
She also does not know the gods beyond what any other girl is taught in their land, so when her sisters marry and she is the most beautiful of all, she shares her parents' consternation that no one will have her. She understands why they consult the oracle and ask what is wrong with their youngest daughter. She trembles when they bring back word that she has angered the gods.
Do they know that she burnt the world with fire and wove it anew?
"She will have no human husband," the oracle says. "She is to wed the great dragon who harasses the world with fire and with iron." She is to go to a rocky crag to await her husband.
She is troubled, as troubled as her father the king and her mother the queen and her sisters with their human beauty and human husbands, but she is not afraid. She is not human enough yet for fear. Instead, she furrows her human brow and considers the puzzle before her and prepares.
They take her to the mountain, dressed for a funeral with songs for a wedding. One rite, one ritual, one ceremony. They leave her with the funeral fire and she steps as close as she dares. They call her Psyche. She is using her mind rather than her troubled heart, and she knows what she promised, remembers her words, and trusts her weaving.
"You will find me in the fire," she murmurs.
The wind finds her first and bears her away to her husband's house.
—
"The young men worship this Psyche instead of bringing offerings to my house," his mother tells him, bitterly, in a voice that remembers what it is to be scorned and how to heap it on another. "They give her of their tithes and offer her prayers, saying she is my second coming." His mother grinds her palms into the balcony railing and looks out over the mountainside toward the world of men.
She calls him Eros. It is a name. He is human enough for a name.
He has seen his mother loved and adored. He has seen her scorned. He has seen her wreak revenge, and he knows what she wants when she looks at him and demands, "Fix this."
He shakes out the wings he has not wholly lost and throws himself over the edge of Olympus to the world below. His bow and his arrows of gold and lead are with him. He does not suspect that he'll need them. She is merely a human girl.
—
She is not a human girl. He staggers at the sight of her, at the sunlight gleaming like fire on her hair, at the way she lingers at her father's hearth and puts her hand to the flickering flame to adjust a log when no one is looking.
"I will be with you," he remembers. "You will find me in the fire."
He sets his mouth grimly and changes his plan. He remembers other things, vaguely but certainly, the flash of silver below him as he takes to the air, like the silvery scar on his back, and a spider still and certain before she begins to weave. He does not remember her face, her eyes, but her hair and her words stayed with him. He changes his mind and heeds not his mother, not in this. He is not human enough yet to fear her anger. He is not human enough yet to care.
—
She wakes in a meadow and approaches the sprawling house uncertainly but without fear. No other dwelling stands near. The house is wood and ivory and silver engraved finely and with gold columns on its face. Voices welcome her in but there is no one in sight.
She pauses when she sees dishes fly to the table and fill with food and musical instruments rise in the air as they begin to play. This is a home of the gods, and still she wonders if they are angry with her in a way that will matter. She was never a goddess, only a spider.
But "sit, sit," the voices coax and she sits and eats what is set before her.
It was late afternoon when she woke in the meadow. The sun is sinking fast with a last splash of golden color and fiery reds kissing the sky. She looks about to light a candle, but there is none and the voices do not answer when she asks for one.
"Come, you must refresh yourself."
They direct her to a bedroom with a marvelous bath and there they leave her in the growing dark.
"Have my servants treated you well?" a low voice asks.
She turns toward it but cannot see the speaker in the dark. This is not like the airy voices of invisible servants, but has the weight of flesh and blood. "They have," she says cautiously. She remembers the oracle who told her she must wed a dragon. "Are you my husband?"
"I am." A moment's silence. The air displaces and she can feel the heat of his body nearing her. "You must not try to see me," he tells her. "I will leave before dawn."
She does not know what to make of that. She does not know what to make of a hand warm against her cheek, the taste of his mouth covering hers. She is human now and her heart is beating fast as he kisses her, drawing her into what feel like human arms. Her fingers touch something soft and warm and she splays her hands against his back to make out the pattern and feel of wings.
She falls asleep cocooned in feathers and hot skin.
—
She has not been human forever. She lies with her head against her husband's chest before dawn and remembers the forest after eternity and before the world's end. She remembers the flash through the sky of a hawk's wings and his piercing cry. She remembers the hawk in the dust with the arrow in his flesh and remembers walking across his wing in her spider body.
Her hand traces over the wing covering her loosely and tries vainly to match senses attuned to the faintest vibration in a silken thread with that of her all too human skin. Is this the wing of her hawk?
He stirs, waking beneath her scrutiny. He speaks to her gently and leaves before the dawn.
—
By day, the servants attend to her slightest wish. She spends her nights wrapped up in her husband's arms and sleeping beside him. She finds his quiver with her hands and murmurs a soft 'oh' of surprise at the shape of the bow, but she heeds his sharp command to avoid the arrows.
He asks so little of her, and somehow the note in his voice warns her that he has good reason to demand.
—
They know his mother, they call him Eros, but he is not human and he was not born.
When he first sees the arrows, something rises up in him as dark as the night he emerged from, and his wings draw him up so the wind cuts into memory. A woman's voice, murmuring in a tongue he'd barely understood then, "You must master the arrows…"
He puts his hand to the bow and the quiver. He tips his arrows in gold and in lead. He strikes hearts with love and with hatred.
"You must master the arrows so they cannot harm you again."
—
She does not know at first what makes her snappish, but she stifles the violent impulse that seizes her in the night. She wants to love him, to hold him; she wants to tear him apart into pieces and she does not know why.
"I am restless. Give me leave to visit my sisters in the earth."
He denies her sharply, but she persists in asking and finally he agrees that she may see them, "But here. I will have them brought."
—
Her sisters have always had little patience for love. As a spider, her fellow widows killed their husbands at the appointed time. In this life, they remind her of the oracle's words that her husband would be the hated dragon and would devour her and her child.
Her child.
She trembles when she realizes what she has done and why she too feels the urge to be rid of him. She is human now, but she was once a spider, and she too once killed her husbands at the appointed time.
—
She pretends she is human. She pretends she is human enough to love without condition and to hate that which is not human flesh. She pretends she does not run fingers over feathers in hope and desire and pretends her sisters are wiser than the wisdom of spiders.
She lights the lamp they gave her and that she hid among her things. She looks on her hawk, and it is him, his body she wove him from bloody wings and beautiful strength and suppresses the urge within her to destroy him now that she has his child. She backs away so she will not harm him and stumbles over his arrows, wounding herself in the thigh on a golden point. Hot oil spills from the lamp onto the bed and splashes over his skin.
He wakes in pain and sees her, sees the fear and love and violence in her eyes she was never human enough to feel, and flees.
—
"We kill our husbands after we get our children," she had told him.
Did you forget, my hawk, my love?
"Then don't have children."
—
She does not know what to do with this love burning inside her. She was not so human as this. She loved in her way but not with human passion that makes her dream of him, long for him, and desire to protect him. She has never felt anything like this.
She wanders the meadows searching for him, and a woodland god tells her it was the arrow that did this to her. It was his arrow that made her love him and made war against what is left of her spider nature.
She wanders the fields searching for him and puts in order a lonely temple. The harvest goddess whose temple it is cannot aid her but can tell her to go to Aphrodite, his mother. "You must be cunning."
She was once a spider. She is cunning.
—
She serves Aphrodite and studies the house where she serves. She accomplishes impossible tasks and is certain he is here within the walls. She entreats the aids of the other gods to do more impossible things still and they answer her because she loves the one called Eros and has done nothing to deserve his mother's ire.
—
She's here.
She is fire and burning and he remembered her promise but never thought it a warning. "You will find me in the fire."
She is here and beautiful and her head is bowed before his mother and her back before his mother's abuse of her. She is here and trembling before his mother's anger, but she is not afraid and he does not see the violence in her eyes.
He watches her from a distance, gaze dark upon her as his wound heals slowly and painfully. He watches the keen intelligence glinting behind her eyes and watches her become a gentle, trembling girl before his mother. He watches her gaze soften when she wearily drops a hand to where his child is growing in her womb. He sees better from here, like he once saw sunlight glinting off of silver webs. He once knew what every creation of hers meant, but now he is uncertain, so he watches her in his mother's house until he knows what happened between them and what his arrow did to her in return.
She burns with passion but that means little in the end. Passion can still kill.
—
"Mother," he snaps out, chiding, as she dresses his wound with the care she still has for him.
Her eyes narrow.
"She is still my wife." He holds her gaze steadily with intent anger. His mother has gone too far in her abuse. "That is still my child."
"You defied me," his mother tells him harshly. Her hands remain tender until she finishes tying off the bandage. "I will not acknowledge her."
But Aphrodite no longer strikes out in her anger. She increases the difficulty of Psyche's tasks.
—
The River Styx and the land of death. It is too much and his wound is healed enough. He stretches out his wings and leaves through a high window his mother never watches. There is too much chance that Psyche will die.
—
He finds her outside the border of the underworld in the daylight, the box of sleep sprawled open near her. He draws the sleep from her face and shuts it back in its box, then rummages in his quiver for the plain arrows that do not cause love and do not cause hatred. He pricks her and she wakes, startled, and looks at him.
He cannot read her expression. Her eyes widen slightly and her hand settles gently against the scar left from where the hot oil struck him on his side. She doesn't seem to want to kill him anymore.
"You forgot," she accuses him in an undertone. "We weren't supposed to have children."
He blinks at her, uncertain. He remembers nothing about children and shrugs helplessly. He was once a hawk, but he is no longer. He does not remember all that came before the fire.
She tucks herself into his arms and breathes outward in relief. He holds her and does not let her go.
—
They have their child, their wedding among the gods, their happiness. The world burns, the arrows splinter, the gods destroy the world. They are not afraid.