Stories of the Pirate: The Cycle of Zagreus (I)
You were awake in an instant, hands immediately flying atop your head as you hissed from being swatted by Uncle Ion.
"
None of that Lykos," he said, a pale light emanating from his eyes, having caught you sleeping in one of his lessons, "
You must understand these lessons if you are to know anything about this world. As I was saying-"
"
But Uncle," you unwisely cried, forgetting any sense of decorum in the face of your indignity, "
I wasn't sleeping! I was focusing with my eyes closed!"
Your uncle stilled, the shine in those eyes becoming dangerous, "
Are you implying that I am a liar
my dear niece?"
Immediately you felt the blood drain from your face, as you began to sputter, "
N-no Uncle, I did not mean to imply that you are such, I meant no excuse sir!"
It was the eyes, you thought, as he appeared to stare through your soul and assessing the truth of the matter, the moments slowly passing as a cold sweat breaking at your back as even the
hypocaust (the only true luxury your father had allowed when renovating your ancestral Villa some years past) beneath you did little to warm you in the face of his wintry gaze.
"
Then, my dear niece," he said slowly, that glint furious at your slight (not to mention the break in your decorum) as he switched to Greek, your mother's tongue, "
Why is Dionysus known as the thrice-born god?"
She paused, vaguely recalling such a matter in her mother's tales and, rather than admit defeat, leaned heavily on the memory in her response, also in Greek (tinged as it was by a faint Roman accent), "
Though I could be cheeky and tell you it is simply for the fact he has died and been reborn thrice, that is extremely
reductive, for he is the god closest to reaching Elysium."
She paused for a moment, licking her lips as she suddenly noticed they were dry, and taking into account her uncle's continued silence, continued in her account, "
In the days preceding the Titan War, when Zeus was hidden before Cronus' sight among mankind and very much as hotblooded as any a young man yet unburdened from forethought, slept with many a woman up to, and including, his own three thousand year long wedding day to Hera, among his favored so called conquests being the young Thracian priestess Semele, whom by some are called a mortal incarnation of Demeter, given your accounts of a Scythian client-vassal, but I digress. When it was discovered that she was with Zeus' child, the newly freed Hera flew into a rage and through trickery ensured the girl's demise by having her get Zeus swear to the River Styx before requesting him making an appearance in his true divine form, something said to be so perfect that the loss of its presence is madness inducing. It was in this way that Semele was lost, and only the babe Dionysus spared by the grace of his father, carrying the babe in a pouch sown into his body. As he grew in strength and power, Dionysus proved vital in ending the Titan War, being the one to actually land the killing blow on Cronus. In the aftermath of the war and having his fill of it, the god traveled to the distant lands of the east to come to understand his place in the world, his duel nature as part divine and part mortal, that of being juxtaposed between perfection and change, order and chaos, having lead him to question his position in the world. It is in doing so that the god comes across the surviving remnants of humanity from the Golden Age in the Zagros Mountains of Persia and learns from them the power of fermentation, how to best cultivate it in the pursuit of creating all manners of alcohols, but most notably wine; it is while there he amasses the fealty of the maenads, the greatest of their number being Aphrodite Areia, known to the Babylonians as Ishtar, born of the severed remains of Ouranos, whom he immediately takes a liking to and takes her under his wing as his adoptive sister.
It is upon his return home some centuries later, that he discovers that in his absence that the race of man found within his homeland had grown heartless and arrogant beyond measure under the guidance of Prometheus and his brother, whom upon their introduction of him by his unwitting, and newfound, brother (Hephaestus), was immediately seized upon and drawn-and-quartered in a mockery of Cronus' death in an attempt to rebel against the gods. Though Aphrodite managed to flee with Dionysus' heart, this act begat the beginning of what would become the Gigantomachia, and was retaliated by sending Pandora in a manner similar to the much later Trojan Horse. The first death."
Ion's eyes still yet shone, though the dangerous glint had long since faded, "
And what of Dionysus' heart in Aphrodite's hands? What then?"
A/N: That bit about Semele and the Scythians? Yeah, there's a fairly contested connection there with the Proto-Slavs, who were likely a client peoples of the Scythians at the time, largely based on the fact that linguists have noted that A) the name Semele bares a stark similarity with the Baltic goddess
Žemelė, and B) the Slavic word for seeds is
seme, C) the word for earth is
zemlja, and point to it as a potential connection between the eras.