FFM29: Harbors

Lamia was okay in the beginning, a Lady Stardust herself. She may have fallen from royalty, and children may have become snack items, but humans themselves no longer mattered. She was free, to walk among the cosmos with her starman, and no one was the wiser.

She may have loved him, in the same way a supernova loves the starts and starts it will sacrifice itself for. She may have loved him, she supposed, but Aeon always made it clear he felt nothing the same. Lamia was a threat, a seductress he could not rid himself of. She would birth the lamiae, children- no, daughters who would be just that.

Lamia, herself, would remain in a smoldering place beside her not-so beloved, watching others raise their children without so much as a hiccup in time. She would slip, sometimes. Aeon was far more lenient that Zeus has been, decades before.

His hands were different, as well. Smoothed by the sands of time, she would tell him. His pillow was always cool by morning. Then, a familiar grief would settle in. She would hoist empty cradles towards her, and again, longing was the only company a childless mother could have.

She'd kill Hera again, and again, and again- if Aeon hadn't done away with her first. To be exiled among beds of quicksand and cacti and spiders, without the hope of death or draft. It wasn't enough, not for the sons and daughters that had been taken from her.

But she would keep her newborn son close, and it would be enough. It had to be enough.