It Was A Hit And Run Type Thing, Her Apartment Had Been Broken Into.  But, As Criminals Go, Once You

my favourite thing about the story of hades and persephone is that the story grew up with us.

i think most of us, when we were young girls ourselves, heard that first, most tragic version of the story: persephone, the innocent child of spring, who wandered into a dark, terrible place, and ate of a cursed garden. hades, meanwhile, was cast as a shadowy, grasping seducer, looming from the darkness: here he stood, the god of riches, of gemstones and bones, of cold, dead things, who wanted to snatch a little bit of sunlight for himself.

and then came the second version of the story, when we were older, not so much a change in narrative as it was of perspective: we heard about zeus raping leta, we read the way medusa was cursed for being raped by poseidon, we read about athena’s jealousy when she was outwoven by arachne, about hera tossing little hephaestus down a cliff because he wasn’t as beautiful as a god ought to be.

once more, we considered hades: the youngest of the trinity, free of spite and hatred and fits of rage, running an empire greater than his brothers’ together, with little ego and quiet efficiency. a god who only took one wife, only loved once, and then too: wholly, completely.

like something not out of a horror movie, but perhaps, indeed, a fairytale.

then the third turn, when we had grown older, acquired a veneer of cynicism, suffered boys who never grew to men, when we realized that the only way our sexuality would not be annexed was if we conquered it ourselves.

then came kore, the woman of spring, who found in hades a quiet, dark refuge, away from demeter’s wrath and hungry possession, away from the squabbles of those tiresome, reckless gods. the girl who fell in love with darkness. the goddess whose spirit was of renewal and rebirth, and still flourished in the heart of the underworld, the duality of her nature only serving to highlight her strength.

hades remained as he ever was, unchanging, like death itself. but persephone grew, acquired facets and beauty in her change, spring given form in metaphor and mythology.

hades and persephone grew with us. that’s why they’re powerful. that’s why they’re loved.

Snow falling, bittersweetness, dancing in the dark on nimble feet, stillness and unsettling quiet with your mind beginning to become curious

She watches over us and the night, her soft purrs causing the stars stuck in her fur to ripple and our mossy forests to sway.  

Concept: You walk outside one night and notice that there are two full moons. A few hours go by and they don’t seem to move.

You stare up at them.

They blink.

part of me wants to become a pianist, elegant and poised wearing long light pink skirts on a daily basis, and kitten heels, and can perfect my craft for hours on end. part of me wants to become an author who can spin stories from lost things, and snuggle up with my notebooks and tea and sweaters and just dream of worlds that i wasnt meant to live in but i could share.  part of me wants to become a rebel and wear black leather jackets while reading angsty poetry, chop my hair short and fight for what matters to me, the kind of person who doesn’t care what others think of them as long as a point has been made.  So.  I don’t know what I want to do.  But whatever I do, I can assure you that I will not be boring.

Classic Book Recommendations For Each Hogwarts House

Gryffindor

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Henry V by William Shakespeare

Beowulf

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Histories by Herodatus

Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville

Hufflepuff

East of Eden by John Stenbeck

Othello by William Shakespeare

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Love In the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

White Fang by Jack London

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

Ravenclaw

Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Animal Farm by George Orwell

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

The Odyssey by Homer

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Slytherin

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

Hamlet by William Shakespeare

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Ok, rephrasing.  If you had an alien as a friend that wanted to disguise itself undercover in a school as to not create mass chaos and panic, what would you tell them about human customs and civilizational normalcies in general?

Hi!  So, I’ve been homeschooled my entire life, and am starting at a private school in a week.  I feel extraordinarily over my head, but excited.  Is there anything I need to know about what to expect or anything that I just… wouldn’t think of in the first place.

Tell me, what do I need to know to thrive?

Where my world building nerds at? Reblog this post if you LOVE doing world building, love TALKING about your world building, and would love QUESTIONS about your world building in your askbox!

Victoria Priessnitz

sooo during this quarantine, i decided to listen to Dracula on audiobook while knitting a scarf because I am not capable of sitting still without my hands doing something lord help me.  it was good for the first hour and a half.  aaand now we are in the middle of an obscenely long rant about this random harbor and this one ship, and a girl just got proposed to three times on the same day, and yes i am enjoying it thoroughly still but can we get back to the vampires and fear part yet?  so confused.