The Seventh Seed

This is the current opening of my novel in progress, subject to change. It introduces a theme I hope to carry through the entire work, that buried within a story we're familiar with is an extra bit. A seed. And if we're careful and let it grow, there's no telling where it will lead us.

— Greg R. Fishbone

Part 1

Four years ago, on the low plains by the Helikon, within sight of distant Mount Parnassos, a flickering light danced outside the darkened windows of our villa. “We shouldn't go,” I told Lykomedes. “Poor Nurse might be flogged if she loses track of us again.”
This was back when my ten years of prudence could still sway my brother's nine years of impulsiveness, even during a venture away from our seven-gated home city. But not on that night, with such a fiery beacon blazing at us from across the countryside. “Nurse can fend for herself,” Lykomedes declared, and I chased after him into the fields.
The flicker flared brighter as we approached, resolving into a harvest bonfire that warmed our faces and stung our eyes with smoke. Leather-skinned Prometheus, the man who tended Father's cattle, presided over a clutch of farmhands and shepherds, deputy cowhands, milkmaids and millers, grape-stomping women from the winery, and those who waved winnowing fans over the threshing floor.
Plates of roasted mutton and honey cakes passed among them, along with barley bread and baked apples soaked in wine. But the most coveted side dish we obtained was a promise that our esteemed parents, Lord Kreon and Lady Eurydike, need never learn that their lastborn son and middle daughter had slipped away for the evening.
A round of fruited wine encouraged Prometheus's gnarled fingers to strum a set of gut-strings, pulled taut across a tortoise shell. Frenzied dancing ensued. I spun, barefoot in the grass, until I fell over. The world continued to spin while I lay still. Lykomedes took up a shepherd’s dance of hunched shoulders and back-kicks, conducted in a line of linked arms and elbows. The dance moved faster and faster, throwing participants aside until the final farmhand and the last of the milkmaids collapsed onto each other in a fit of giggles. The gnarled fingers slowed.
A new tune called our exhausted limbs and sweat-soaked bodies back into a tight-pressed circle around the old herdsman. Then, after invoking the Musai like a true priest of Apollon, in a resonant voice that rose and dipped and wound through the landscape of his words, Prometheus sang the tale of Persephone, the daughter of all-nourishing Demeter, at play in a meadow in one moment, and in the next, hauled, kicking and wailing, through the maw of a new-formed cave, into the sunless realm of Lord Haides, there to become his consort and queen over the dead for all eternity.
The story rolled along a familiar path, within the wheel ruts of a thousand retellings. My brother listened with rapt attention, while I chilled to think of the garden-bred maiden trapped in a land of darkness, only ever to be half-restored to her mother's household.
Except that Prometheus didn't end his story with the six swallowed seeds, the ruling of Zeus, and the annual seasons of Demeter's grief. Instead, the old herdsman sang in low tones of a seventh pomegranate seed, unswallowed at the moment of the maiden’s rescue. Of how Persephone had worked that seed from the back of her tongue, to the roof on her mouth, to the inside of her cheek, while the other daimones contested over her fate in the mountaintop court of Olympos.
A breeze stirred the dwindling fire, animating the deeply shadowed lines of the herdsman’s face and bringing glints to his eyes. The tortoise shell fell from his hands. Without accompaniment, the gravel and age returned to his voice. “That seventh seed could have unbalanced the fragile agreement between the lord of death and the preserver of life, a settlement that still maintains the boundaries of our mortal world. That seed, were it ever brought to light, still has the power to undo us all.”
If I'd been chilled at the thought of Persephone in the Underworld, my teeth absolutely chattered as the herdsman described a Stygian darkness that could yet spread across the living world, shriveling forests and fields, frosting the grasslands, and bringing an ice that would never again know springtime.
My brother hardly had the breath for words. “Can you imagine it, Pyrrha? Having, in one tiny seed, the power to unmake the world?”
I pulled my cloak tighter around myself. “You wish to unmake the world?”
My brother rolled his eyes. “I wouldn't actually do it. I just would want to know that I could. What happened to the seventh seed, Prometheus?”
The herdsman turned his wrinkled face toward a nearby pasture, where a lone pomegranate tree atop a hillock caught the moonbeams of Selene's crescent-shaped sky-chariot.
“Was that tree grown from Persephone's seventh seed?” Lykomedes asked.
I scoffed. “It looks more like a tree-sized weed, seeded by the leavings of some fruit-stuffed bird.”
But Prometheus said nothing more.
The fire faded to embers. The mutton grew cold. The servants retired to their quarters, or paired off into secret places to exhaust the last of their reserves. And if I hadn't pulled my brother away, he would have sat alone, staring up at that tree until Eos pulled open the eastern gates of Heaven.

To be continued...