manticoreimaginary:

favourite faces for favourite mythic ladies: Persephone with Freida Pinto

My mother loves me, this I’ve never had to doubt. But her love is much like the plants she tends: it takes root and tendrils twist themselves into any hold they can find. It will suffocate and take over anything alien, anything that isn’t itself.

But maybe all mother’s love like that. I cannot know. I only have the one.

Snatched from that field, it was for my mother that I screamed. But too late, and from the bright world I was dragged down into the cold darkness beneath the earth, screaming and kicking and biting at my captor.

I sat silently and listened to him speak. I did not care for him, this dark and unfamiliar figure, but longer was I afraid. I could still taste the sharpness of his blood on my tongue. He was nothing more than I if he could bleed, and I feared nothing with skin that my own teeth could break.

I have no wish to be his bride. Wife is just another vine, this one a little darker, a little more deeply buried, a little more demanding. But another word of his appeals: Queen, he had said to me. Queen was more interesting. A Queen had only her own roots.

He turns his back and I reach across the table, slowly drawing one of the bowls towards me with my fingertips. The pink-red seeds are out of place here in the shadows. But maybe fit for a queen?

It is hardly even a choice I need to think about. I take what I want.