by Diana Tyler
I have learned to see within you redemption, sacrifice.
Orange, like the healing flower, and the burning desert sun;
Both have power, both hold brilliance, but none compares to the Promised One.
Yellow for the amber scrolls, prophesying salvation amid our strife;
Your shimmer is a just shadow in the light of eternal life.
Green for the stone I carry, a symbol of forgiveness, growth, and mirth;
But nothing can bring as much happiness as a dying soul’s rebirth.
Blue, the color of Carya’s sword that cut us free from prison;
But the greatest freedom I have felt flows from faith that Phos is risen.
Indigo, hue of an opaque void, the barrier between Petros and glory;
Its power has been stripped away by the Finisher of our story.
Now violet: triumphant, royal, reflecting clouds in this bathing place;
I will emerge boldly from these waters, an orphan found and saved by grace.
Diokles said it wasn’t over, and as much as I would like to think he was rambling delusions and lies, I believe him. Dismantling Ēlektōr and killing its leader won’t hinder Python’s plan for this realm; there is far too much darkness pervading Petros than can be overthrown by any army, no matter how many domas it may have fighting on its side.
I will write this story as Asher wrote his, and will leave it for generations to come, so that they may learn and be reminded that evil is not weakened, let alone exterminated, by more evil. It must be conquered with good, and hope must never be lost.
The End.
GLOSSARY
Acheron: Iris’s master and man responsible for her brother’s death; he is named after Acheron, the river of pain, which in Greek mythology was a stream and swampy lake of the underworld and its god [1]
Alexa: Diokles’s younger sister; he name is the feminine form of the Greek word alexo, meaning “to defend, help” In Moonbow, Alexa’s name foreshadows her role in Iris’s story.
Alpha: polytheistic and/or agnostic people who rule Petros; Alpha is the first letter of the Greek alphabet from which the Alphas, the prominent ruling class of Petros, receive their name
Anatolius: the high priest of Eirene who name is derived from the Greek for “sunrise”
Asher: ancient ancestor of Iris; his name means “fortunate” and “blessed” in Hebrew
Aspasia: Gennadius the tanner’s wife; her name is Greek for “welcome,” “embrace”
Carya: an angelic messenger who appears to Iris; her name is inspired by the pre-classical mythology goddess of the walnut tree. In Moonbow, Iris notes that Carya is heard laughing from the treetops of a walnut orchard.
Corinna: Iris’s aunt, also an Asher; her name means “maiden” in Greek
Diokles: leader of the Soukinoi; his name means “glory of Zeus” in Greek
Duna: sole god of the Eusebians; his name is from the Greek word dunamis, which means power residing in a thing by virtue of its nature [2]
Eirene: Eusebian city; Greek for “peace”
Ēlektōr: Soukinoi desert fortress; Greek for “the beaming sun;” also related to elektron, meaning “amber”
Éleos: desert oasis where a group of peaceful priests dwell; its name comes from Greek word for “mercy”
Enochos: execution site; Greek for “involved in, liable”
Eusebian: monotheistic people group of Petros; from the Greek word eusebia, meaning “pious,” “reverent,” and “godliness”
Gennadius: tanner who welcomes Iris into his home to work; his name comes from the Greek for “noble” and “generous”
Ireneus: priest targeted by the Soukinoi; his name comes from the Greek for “peaceful”
Iris: main character of the story; her name comes from the Greek for “rainbow”; In Greek mythology, Iris was the goddess of the rainbow.
Jasper: Iris’s deceased brother; his name means “jewel” or “gem” in Hebrew
Limén: Eusebian town; Greek for “a harbor” or “a haven”
Lycus: leader of Diokles’s; his name comes from the Greek for “wolf”
Lysander: Soukinoi outlaw leader; his name means “the release of a man” in Greek
Niobe: a slave of Acheron’s; her names is Greek for “fern”
Okeanos: stream where Iris first encounters the Soukinoi; its name is shared with the name of the river, or body of water, thought by the ancient Greeks to surround the Earth. In Greek mythology, Okeanos was the Titan who personified this body of water. [3]
Petros: the world of the story; its name comes from the Greek for a small rock or pebble
Phos: Duna’s son; his name comes from the Greek for “a source of light” and “radiance”
Psiloi: In Ancient Greek warfare, the psiloi were unarmored or lightly armored infantry trained as skirmishers.
Python: evil entity that rules Petros from beneath the Great Sea
Soukinoi: the Eusebian army of rebels; their names is derived from the Greek word soukinos, meaning “made of amber”
Titus: the Soukinoi general, named after the mythological Greek Titans who were primeval deities and giants of incredible strength
Tycho: former Soukinoi; his name comes from the Greek for “hitting the mark”
* * *
[1] http://www.theoi.com/Khthonios/PotamosAkheron.html (accessed October 22, 2014)
[2] http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/greek/nas/dunamis.html (accessed October 22, 2014)
[3] http://www.behindthename.com/name/okeanos (accessed October 22, 2014)
To Mr. Kent Travis, my ninth grade history/English teacher at The Brook Hill School, whose passion for ancient Greek drama and mythology will remain with me all my life.
CHAPTER ONE
VOYAGE
The sky was clear, and the sun was so bright and high overhead that their bodies cast no shadows. Iris and Tycho stood hand in hand at the stern of the ship and looked out over the sapphire sea, the sweet smell of the cedar mast and the saltiness of the breeze welcoming them onboard. There had been a time when a sense of adventure would have overtaken Iris as she took in the beauty of the water, the vastness of the horizon, but today she was too weary to feel it…if it was there at all.
“Just one more time,” Tycho said to her, as if reading her thoughts.
The words were poetry in her ears. It had been nearly three years since she’d slept in her own bed, hundreds of miles away in Eirene. Their young daughter, now drooling as she slept on a blanket at their feet, had seen more of the ocean than dry land, heard more sailors’ shouts and seagulls’ squawks than nursery rhymes and lullabies.
Just one more voyage on the small merchant ship and they could go home: home to picnics on the cliffs, festivals at the temple, and suppers at the table of the old couple that had become grandparents to them.
Iris yawned as she heard the oars drop into the water and the crew become quiet as the captain prayed to Poseidon for fair weather.
“Miss?” a voice whispered.
Iris turned to see a young man, more boy than man, looking up at her with round, frightened eyes. “You’re Iris the Asher, aren’t you, miss?”
Iris nodded as she scanned the deck for eavesdroppers. On a ship full of rough mariners who liked their women weak and docile, a woman with a notorious power had not made her a welcome passenger. But in recent years, people had begun approaching her not with rage and hatred in their eyes, as they would a beast they wished to tame or kill, but with hope and desperation, as they would an angel that might deliver them.
Since the Feast of Therismos almost a decade ago, the name Iris the Asher had become more respected, and indeed more revered, than Iris the Goddess. In fact, many of the mystics were teaching their pupils that she was an Olympian incarnate, perhaps Hera or Athena, a notion that made Iris shudder.
Why couldn’t they believe her when she explained that her power was from the All-Powerful, that her gift was from the One who gave life and took
life away? All she was, all she had, and all she had overcome, was by the grace of Duna. Every day she prayed that not one pagan sacrifice would be made to a blasphemous statue of her image.
But apart from the mystics, with their oleander-induced delusions, countless Eusebians and Alphas were listening to Iris and Tycho’s story and accepting their faith as their own. They gathered into the temple courts by the hundreds to hear them, and, yes, to see if they might catch a glimpse of the mysterious fire that dwelled in the palms of Iris’s hands.
She’d mastered the power of her doma so well that she could conjure a flame as easily as she could blink. If providing an exhibition led to further discussion of the might of Duna and the love of Phos, she would happily acquiesce to the crowd’s wishes. But if she sensed that the crowd just wanted to see a show of sorcery, she’d ask Tycho to talk of his own miracle stories while she stayed hidden in the shadows.
Iris had seen what unbridled power could do to people. Each day, she prayed for Duna to use her only as a Vessel of the doma, and to forbid her from ever becoming its overlord, or worse, its slave.
Iris nodded again at the boy, this time remembering to smile. “Can I help you?” she asked.
Tycho squeezed her hand, a habit of his when he could detect her nerves. He often teased her, saying that for one who could destroy a man with a single flick of her wrist she was awfully skittish around strangers.
“I am an Alpha, miss,” the boy said, “but I don’t trust Poseidon for safe passage like my father does.”
“Your father is the captain?” Iris asked.
“Yes. And he knows who you are, but don’t be afraid. Though he won’t admit it, he fears your power. They all do.”
Tycho had been right. The reason it cost them one hundred drachmae each time they boarded a ship was not because they despised her, but because they feared her. If the sailors were going to risk their lives spending hours alone at sea in the presence of a presumed goddess, one likely to prove as testy and capricious as the rest of the pantheon, they insisted they be handsomely compensated. Iris couldn’t blame them. If she believed herself to be at the mercy of a fierce deity that could swim beside their boat as a sprightly dolphin one minute, then spring into the clouds and plague them with lightning bolts the next, she would also expect a wage to match any potential peril.
“Thank you, that is reassuring,” Iris said, expecting that to be all he wished to tell her.
But he took a breath to say something further, then stopped himself and started again. “Could you…” He almost squeaked the words. “Could you pray for … my father?” He sighed with relief when the question finally escaped his lips. “I heard your letter read in Ourania last year and my life has been changed ever since. I would give anything for him to know the truth as well, but when I told him of the letter, he said that if you had any power, it came from Python, for he is the only god.”
The boy’s sad gaze dropped to the sea. “My father has a stubborn heart. I doubt he’s capable of changing at his age.”
“Trust your father in Duna’s hands,” said Tycho, his voice stern, but his expression gentle. “He delights in doing the impossible, like when he helped a teenaged slave girl named Iris overthrow a tyrant,” he said, raising an eyebrow before kissing his wife on the forehead.
The boy smiled and stared at Iris a moment. She knew he was likely imagining her as that famed warrior-goddess who’d saved the temple from decimation, and mercifully proselytized the heartless maniac who slew his own people for power. But, as everyone knew, Diokles denied Duna to the last, wheezing threats and spewing contempt until his heart had finally stopped beating.
Surely it had crossed the boy’s mind that his father could very well reject Duna, and die proud and blind like Diokles. While the captain didn’t have innocent blood on his hands, how well Iris knew that sometimes the hardest people to reach were the ones who were noble and good in the world’s eyes, those who slaughtered bulls and rams to appease the gods and beseeched them for all to see.
Seeing the worry rise as glistening tears in the boy’s blue eyes, Iris took his hand and bowed her head before another care could invade his mind. “Duna,” she prayed, closing her eyes. “Our king and our protector. Thank you for this boy.”
“My name is Pontus,” he whispered.
“Thank you for Pontus,” Iris continued. “Thank you for the love he has for his father, the captain of this ship. I know, perhaps better than anyone, what it feels like to be utterly far from you, and yet, at the same time, to sense you chasing after me with a relentless fervor no Petrodian will ever fathom.
“Duna, I felt the rebellion in my heart toward you burning hotter than my doma, which can incinerate entire forests if I allow it to. So hostile was my soul toward any sort of love, most of all love from the one who allowed my family to die, leaving me an orphan and a slave to a sadistic soldier. But still…” Iris’s voice cracked as she felt the boat begin to glide out from the pier. “But still you pursued me. Still you brought people into my life to give me hope and show me what true love looks like. Still you set the Moonbow in the sky, not just so I could solve its mystery, but so that I might share its meaning with the world.
“My king, we ask that you would pursue the shuttered heart of Pontus’s father. Use whatever means necessary to melt the ice that covers it. We thank you for hearing our prayer, and we trust you to answer it. Your will be done.”
“Your will be done,” echoed Tycho and Pontus.
Iris and Tycho opened their eyes just in time to see a long, slimy black tentacle retracting fast as a snake’s tongue over the side of the ship, and that Charis, their three-year-old daughter, was missing.
CHAPTER TWO
SCYLLA
It’s Scylla!” the sailors cried out.
Iris turned to see them, at least fifty sailors in total, bracing themselves around the mast, holding tightly to the forestays and backstays as all color drained from their faces. They flinched and stumbled as violent movement from the unseen beast rocked the ship, drenching the deck far better than any tempest, and pushing it farther from shore. The pier might as well have been a thousand miles away; no one was brave enough to try swimming back to it.
Tycho lifted his arms, preparing to hurl himself into the ocean after his daughter.
Pontus grasped his hand and yelled, “Don’t! You’ll die in seconds.”
“I know how to swim, Pontus. Let me go!” Tycho shouted back.
“What’s ‘Scylla’?” Iris asked when her breath finally returned, fire already kindling in her fists.
“The sea monster, miss,” said Pontus, as he dropped to his hands and knees and crawled toward a tiny hole in the hull. “A legend, or so we all thought.”
“We never should’ve let her on board,” barked the captain from the bow. “No fortune is worth losing my ship and crew.”
Iris lifted her hands, a thin haze of flame floating before them. A hush fell over the ship as the men stared, transfixed and terrified, at the fire formed from human flesh.
“It isn’t your crew it wants,” Iris said.
She turned away from the crew and captain as the splashing stopped and a shadow the size of a thunderhead stretched across the deck. The first thing Iris saw when she looked up was her daughter Charis, stricken silent with fear inside the clutches of one of the dozen or so tentacles that protruded from the monster’s bloated gray belly.
Hearing the sound of growling dogs, her eyes traveled up to the mud-colored middle section of the creature and saw that it was surrounded by the heads of wolves, whose sulfurous breath was enough to slay a man. Should that tentacle—now threatening to squeeze the life from Charis’s body—move just inches closer to Scylla’s side, how easily one of those dogs might puncture the toddler’s skull with their sword-sharp teeth.
Iris decided to first send her fire to them.
Twin bubbles, gleaming like gold, broke free from Iris’s palms. She softly pushed them toward the six female heads a
t the top of Scylla’s body, each one a horror of tangled braids, hissing tongues, and haunting, hollow eyes glazed over from eons spent in Hades’ darkness. Every eye followed the fiery spheres as they traveled slowly over the ship’s edge before quickly swelling to triple their size and spewing sparks into the air.
The monster gave an earsplitting shriek, and the wolves turned their bristling necks and barked, distracted from the child just as Iris had hoped. With the beast’s attention fixed momentarily on the flickering diversion, Iris clenched her fists so tightly that her fingernails drew out drops of blood that worked to kindle the flames all the more.
She opened her red-hot hands and lunged forward, thrusting out her arms as far as they could reach. A string of fireballs rushed toward the wolves in a blazing blur, silencing each one on impact. Smoke settled over their lifeless heads.
“Give me my daughter or I’ll rid you of all your other heads, Scylla!” Iris yelled as she pressed her hands into her thighs, trying to suppress the throbbing pain left behind by the fire.
In perfect synchronization, all six heads spun back toward her. Their forked tongues flashed out and in, smelling the fear of the crew. Their matted braids danced wildly in the wind, and their eyes filled with chilling orbs of light that Iris had seen only once before in the most evil of men.
The tentacles lifted toward the cluster of repugnant faces, the one holding Charis trembling like an ice-laden branch.
“I only wanted to see the magic doma for mysssself. I thought it was nothing but a ssssilly ssssailor’s tale,” said Scylla, all mouths speaking together. “A ssssilly tale like Sssscylla,” she hissed. “We monsters must sssstick together, lest hisssstory forget all about usssss, don’t you think, Irissss?” The tentacle flexed, curling in closer to the monster, causing Charis to squeal with pain.
With no time for them to heal, Iris’s hands birthed two new scorching flames that soared like asteroids straight into the heads’ vile ring. Two of the heads fell limp while the remaining four howled like harpies.
