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Your first memory is of pain.
There’s searing white light and unimaginable agony as you’re ripped from the warm cocoon of your mother’s body into a world you’re not yet ready for. Your tiny, undeveloped lungs flutter uselessly as you struggle to keep your fragile heart beating.
Then there’s darkness and nothing at all.
oO0Oo
Your next memory comes when you’re three.
It’s little more than a blur of colours and sounds, the smell of fresh bread wafting through your dreams. Theíos Athamas and Theía Ino raise you alongside their sons, Leacharus and Melicertes, and though you cannot remember their faces clearly, the echoes of their childish laughter haunts you long after they’re gone.
They dress you as a girl when you venture outside the house, call you Iolanthe and refer to you as ‘she,’ but when you’re back inside you become Bacchus once again. You strip out of the long fabrics of your peplos and wrestle your cousins in nothing but your skin until the slaves announce that the evening meal is prepared.
Unfortunately, your third memory comes immediately after that, and it’s much clearer.
A crack of power. Screaming and blood splattering around the room. Cowering behind a pithos with your hands slapped tightly over your mouth to muffle your breathing.
A thump and Leacharus falls to the ground, an arrow protruding from his chest, eyes wide and staring blankly at the ceiling. His cheeks, still round with baby fat and once flush with life, drain of colour.
You might start screaming then, but you’re not sure. It comes out as a strangled wheeze, almost like the noises the animals in the palace farms make when they’re in distress. You don’t feel like yourself in your body anymore, a strange sensation so different from what you feel when you wear dresses and call yourself Iolanthe even though you know your name is Bacchus and you’re a boy.
At least the dresses are comfortable and lightweight, not at all like the itchy fur that traps the heat against your skin and covers your body from your nose to your hooves.
Somewhere in the palace, someone is screaming.
You’re pretty sure it’s not you.
Pretty sure.
(But not certain — never certain. That’s the trouble with madness, isn’t it?)
A minute or a millena passes before the screaming dies. Strong arms scoop you up, dissolving the glamour from your image and returning you to a normal boy again.
You look into the stormy blue eyes of the god holding you and burst into tears.
oO0Oo
The god says he is Zeus, your father, and spirits you away to Mount Nysa to be given to the care of the nymphs there.
He doesn’t seem to know what to do with a crying child and you long for Theía Ino’s warm embrace and Theíos Athamas’ deep rumble as he tells stories to soothe you back to sleep after a nightmare. Zeus won’t tell you what happened to them but the image of Leacharus falling to the ground is seared behind your eyelids.
Zeus deposits you before the cave mouth and vanishes in an instant, leaving you on the sun-baked ground. Aesyle, one of the nymphs, takes you in her arms and brings you further into their cave. She smells like rain and crackling ozone, and she hums softly and rocks you as she walks.
“What is your name, young one?” she asks as the flickering light of a hearth comes into view.
You’re quiet for a long moment. Bacchus or Iolanthe. Boy or girl. God or mortal.
You don’t know.
Aesyle’s solid-white eyes soften. “You’ve had a trying day; it’s alright if you don’t want to speak now. I’ll introduce you to my sisters—”
Iolanthe had been who you were with your family, but they’re all gone now. Bacchus had been what your father had named you, the gift bestowed upon you by your divine sire, but it is the name of a boy who had been blissfully mortal, ignorant of all the pain and suffering of the world.
You’re neither of those boys anymore and you are both of them. You are Iolanthe, a mortal prince. You are Bacchus, a god-born hero. You are—
“Dionysus,” you whisper, “My name is Dionysus.”
You are Dionysus, the God of Nysa, and you are a twice-born boy who is really nobody at all.
oO0Oo
Ampelos is your only friend. The other boys in the village at the foot of the mountain jeer at you, at the strangeness of your demeanour, at the fact that you are just one of many bastards whose mother claims was fathered by Zeus, at the idea that you could ever be anyone important.
Dionysus, they call. Dionysus, the worthless god.
Your cheeks burn in humiliation because it’s true. You are neither the fastest boy nor the strongest, you are not as clever as one might expect from a son of Zeus nor are you humble enough to be ignored. And when they find out that you’d been raised as a girl…
So Ampelos is the only one you decide to associate with. He’s kind, a year or so younger than your fifteen — though satyrs don’t really age the same way — and his skin darkens under the sun as the two of you run through the fields and groves of olive trees, his black eyes shining like precious jewels when he smiles.
It’s just the two of you, and that’s perfectly fine.
Until two becomes one and you’re left staring in horror at the halo of blood slowly growing around his head and the dent in his skull where he’d hit the rocks. His limbs are still tangled in the vine, in the stupid vine you’d asked him to get. His curly hair is matted and his eyes are wide, bulging in terror, his final scream frozen on his face.
You whirl away and vomit.
When you wipe your mouth on the fabric of your chiton and force yourself to turn back to him, the puddle of blood has stopped growing. You know what that means, know that his heart has stopped, but you fall to your knees anyway and grip his shoulders.
“Ampelos,” you whisper, ignoring the stickiness of his blood on your legs. “Ampelos, wake up. Please. If you wake up, I’ll give you all my figs from dessert, and — and I promise I won’t ever make fun of your obsession with those stupid bulls ever again.”
Nothing. Ampelos continues to stare at the canopy of leaves above, seeing nothing.
You let out a scream that shatters the world. Plants grow and blossom, the birds fall silent. Even the sunlight flickering through the trees seems to dance with its own type of madness.
At your feet, the vine tangled around Ampelos’ body quivers, drinking in the blood soaking the ground. Clusters of green fruits emerge from the tiny yellow buds and quickly ripen to a dark purple, as though they have been dyed with the mortal ichor of your friend.
You stare down at the vine, at the strange fruit you have made it bear, at the way it is entangled in Ampelos’ grip, and you slowly reach down to pry it away.
You stare at the fruit in your hands and suddenly realize you have a purpose.
oO0Oo
You’re twenty when you fight in the Gigantomachy alongside your half-brother, Heracles. The two of you are the only demigods in the fray, overshadowed by your more powerful immortal brethren. But the prophecy had been clear: only demigods and gods working together could defeat the Giants.
Heracles is everywhere, it seems. Blessed with immortal strength in his mortal body, he fires arrow after arrow and takes Giants down with extreme prejudice, but you are more human than god, more fragile than the rest, and even if the gods need you there, you know they wish they had another Heracles. Another warrior with a lion’s skin cape and the courage of ten men, not a twice-born mortal boy whose only claim to fame is creating alcohol out of sour grapes.
You take your thyrsus in hand and scream a battle cry at Eurytus, one full of raw challenge and twisting bitterness. The name your father had given you upon birth, Bacchus, means ‘the noisy one,’ and when you yell, you let loose a torrent of power that explodes into existence with the tart smell of wine and turns Eurytus’ club to a bunch of purple grapes. Vines burst through the ground at the Giant’s feet and wrap around his legs, pulling him to the ground. So much smaller than the others, you are nearly lost in the fray, but it also allows you to run to the Giant unhindered by enemies and pummel the sharpened end of your thyrsus into the Giant’s head.
Blood leaks from his temple as you slam the butt of the shaft into his skull over and over again, splattering the ground and your chiton with gore.
A sudden drop in pressure, a crackling of ozone in the air, and you’re jumping off the prone Giant just before a lightning bolt slams into him, turning his molecules to ash and leaving nothing but the grapes that had once been his club.
You don’t give yourself a chance to process it, to think about how Eurytus’ blood leaking into the ground reminds you of Ampelos and the creation of the grape vine.
You can’t think about it because by the end of the day, you have several more deaths on your conscience, their blood staining your hands. And you know that even if they were Giants, even if they were the enemy, it won’t stop your dreams from being filled with dead satyrs and bloodied fruit.
It’s fitting that red is the colour of both blood and wine.
oO0Oo
After the Gigantomachy, both you and Heracles are defied. Him, because he died a brutal, horrific hero’s death and you… because you invented wine.
Sure, you have a large following that extends across the known world, thousands of devoted followers who willingly surrender themselves to your madness for just a glimpse of your god-born power. Still, it’s strange that they make you the Olympian and not Heracles, who’s stuck guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean.
But deep down, you know why. There was pressure from both mortals and gods to reward the two demigod heroes who fought the Giants with the Olympians and Zeus had no choice but to comply, not unless he wanted to risk another coup. But you also know your father’s paranoia, even if you’ve rarely met him, and the idea of the strong, powerful, beloved Heracles with as much influence and divine might as an Olympian… He’d become a threat to Zeus’ seat of power. The sins of the father and all that.
(Prophecies are funny, that way.)
You’re already undergoing your apotheosis; Zeus is just speeding the process along. Really, there’s no way you can say no to it.
And when the rush of power fills you, it’s exhilarating. It’s like drinking the best wine you’ve ever tasted, like the majesty of seeing what your followers accomplish while consumed by your madness, like holding a strange vine for the first time and forcing the plant to bear fruit with the blood of your dead friend.
You flex your fingers, long and lean and tan, not a callus or scar marring them. Your eyes have always been an unusual shade of blue — more a soft periwinkle than anything, especially when looked at in the right light — but now they’re a startling violet that drives those who stare into them too long to madness. Your body is forever twenty, the age when you ascend to godhood, and you revel in the glory of being eternally young, of cheating fate in timeless youth.
You never realize how quickly time passes when you’re immortal.
oO0Oo
As Bacchus, you are a different god. No less wild, but that wildness is contained, channelled into something else. You are still the god of ecstasy and wine, but more sophisticated than you had been in your drunken parties with the maenads on Mount Cithaeron.
It’s strange to see how much your family changes with the advent of Rome. You were Bacchus before you were ever called Dionysus, and so for all that you change to become the god of an empire, you do so in a much subtler way.
For all the triumphs they throw in your name, for all the festivals dedicated to you, you still can’t help but feel a sense of not belonging. The Romans already have Liber, so why do they need you? Perhaps you are an Olympian, but you are still just the little boy from the mountain who pressed grapes into wine in his grief.
You spend most of the Late Empire getting drunk with the emperors and the Imperial household, and hardly notice the passage of time. When the Empire falls and the Western world is plunged into the Dark Ages, you just shrug.
The Twelfth Legion Fulminata will carry on the legacy of Rome and for the next thousand years, nothing much will change.
oO0Oo
You spend much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drinking with Apollo and all the wild, wicked young things of the world. Wine staining their lips and glorious ecstasy guiding their pens, you and your brother inspire some of the greatest artists of the era.
Lord Byron is a particular favourite of yours. A man utterly entranced with his youth and sleeping his way across Europe with an almost-ritual devotion, it’s no surprise you are drawn to the young English poet. You stay by his side for months — perhaps it’s even years; you don’t keep track and the crates of wine you and he drink often serve to muddle the days further — and through it all you find yourself enamoured with the man and his brilliant, bright mind.
Apollo sticks closer to Percy and Mary Shelly — you suspect he’s courting at least one of them, likely both — but you find solace in the quiet despair and disillusionment of Byron’s poems. Somehow, this mortal soul, broken and fractured by the betrayals of his world, has come to resonate with the timeless beating of your own heart.
But whence his name / And lineage long, it suits me not to say; / Suffice it, that perchance they were of fame, / And had been glorious in another day: / But one sad losel soils a name for aye, / However mighty in the olden time;
Your mouth goes dry when he recites the lines of his newest poem onto your skin, and it has nothing to do with the warmth of his breath against your neck.
You’re gone before he wakes the next morning, and you don’t return.
Days or months or years later, you hear his name spoken again and you turn your attention to the mortal world, just for a moment, just long enough to hear what they’re all gossiping about. After all, if it has Aphrodite in tears, it must truly be a beautiful work indeed.
In secret we met — / In silence I grieve, / That thy heart could forget, / Thy spirit deceive.
You shut yourself in your quarters and don’t venture down to the mortal world until word comes of Byron’s death in the land he’d loved so fiercely — in your land, in the land where you’d been born and forged anew.
You touch a hand to your cheek. You’re surprised to find yourself crying.
oO0Oo
For all that you are gods, you are tied to the ideals of mortals. As the decades fall into centuries, you change with the perception of your worshippers. Wine, once drunk by everyone across the known world, becomes a thing of temptation, a sin in the eyes of the Western world, restricted for special occasions and a sip at their Christian churches on Sundays.
The Temperance Movement is the worst. Suddenly, those who indulge in alcohol are ostracised, seen as disgusting and a shame by the rest of society. Even as the twentieth century comes to a close and people begin indulging in leisure drinking once again, the Temperance Movement remains a stain on your soul.
Your body, once lean and toned, sags with a potbelly. A scruffy beard begins to grow on your chin. Your violet eyes become bloodshot and your nose turns red and bulbous. Utterly revolting, a mirror of how your domain is seen in the eyes of mortals.
The other gods laugh at you, their forms not quite as drastically different than yours. Ares becomes a drill sergeant, Athena resembles the college women of the new feminist waves, Poseidon begins wearing Hawaiian shirts and bucket hats with fishing tackle hanging from them.
You scowl at their amusement and bury your face in the latest issue of a wine catalogue. You think of sunbaked fields and running barefoot through groves of olive trees, of being free and alive and utterly wonderful.
You try to forget the millenia that separates you from that boy.
oO0Oo
You’re banished to Camp Half-Blood not once but twice, sentenced to watch over the discarded offspring of the gods.
Time passes far too slowly.
The children get younger and younger every year.
Soon, drowning your sorrows in wine, and then Diet Coke, becomes easier than facing the truth: that you are just like them.
oO0Oo
The worst part about your enforced sobriety is the clarity of your mind. After millenia of drinking your problems away, you’re suddenly left to confront them with a clear head and heavy consciousness.
When you look at the campers, it leaves a bitter and burning aftertaste in your mouth, like the volatile whiskey head drained in the distilleries before the heart of the liquor can be brought forth. They remind you of the mortality you gave up, of the dull, never-ending life you made the mistake of accepting.
The children often die young, yes, but they don’t realize that the ability to die is what makes life worth living.
You know this more intimately than the others could ever understand.
oO0Oo
In the early 1990s, after decades of Chiron’s pestering, you finally agree to seek help. There’s a local chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York, just a few miles from Camp, and you attend the meetings weekly.
It’s there that you meet Marjorie Wakefield. She’s the counsellor in charge of the meetings, and she’s beautiful, with curly blond hair and full lips that just beg to be kissed. When you introduce yourself as Dionysus Eleutherios, her hazel eyes glitter as she asks, “Like the Greek god?”
“Exactly like the god,” you agree.
oO0Oo
It’s blissful, the time you spend together, and it’s almost intoxicating enough to make you forget your sobriety. After decades without wine, you’ve found you can get drunk on her laugh just as easily.
But as all good things do, it comes to an end. Ares makes a snide comment during the Winter Solstice meeting and your father frowns disapprovingly when it’s implied that you’re neglecting your duties, and that’s that. You disappear without a word, leaving Marjorie to wonder what happened, and put those months out of your mind.
After some time, you almost forget about it all together.
oO0Oo
Ten years later, two boys with curly blond hair and vibrant violet eyes stumble up the crest of Half-Blood Hill.
A few years after that, the blink of an eye to an immortal, you’re burning one of those boys in a purple shroud.
You couldn’t save him.
Pollux’s eyes are red-rimmed from crying and he won’t look at you. You know what he’s thinking.
Staring into the black flames of the funeral pyre, you wonder if Castor thought the same.
oO0Oo
They take the traitor’s body away. The Fates themselves wrap the broken demigod in a silken shroud and Hermes says goodbye to the son whose fate he knew all along.
You swig deeply from the Celestial bronze flask in your hands, a reward from Zeus for your part in the fighting, and block out the memory of a blond-haired boy clinging to the hands of a little girl, his eyes jaded and far too old to be those of a child.
A child the gods turned into a monster.
For all the celebrations in the throne room, an air of death hangs heavy over the crowd. You don’t know the death toll yet, don’t know how many of your children, Greek and Roman alike, perished fighting the Titans.
You don’t know if any perished fighting you.
But Jackson had ensured Pollux’s survival, had kept his promise to keep him from danger, so it’s a little easier to breathe in the crowded room.
The heroes line up for their commendations, bruised and battle weary. Fear and distrust shine in their eyes. How long would it take for these children to heal, for the aches of this day to ease?
They call the demigods up one by one, bestowing each of them with honours. Of course, the satyr makes a big deal out of everything and promptly collapses upon being named a Lord of the Wild, but it could be worse. You could still be dealing with Leneus.
Finally, they call up Perseus Jackson, the boy who’d reached sixteen despite it all. The boy who’d managed to save the world without the help of the gods. The boy who, judging by the sorrow and betrayal hidden behind his eyes, is slowly losing faith in them.
“The Council agrees,” your father says through gritted teeth. “Percy Jackson, you will have one gift from the gods.
He hesitates, green eyes suddenly alight with wonder and possibility. “Any gift?”
The air in the council room becomes charged. You sit forward, tucking your wine magazine under your arm.
Zeus explains the nature of the gift, the impossible honour bestowed upon humanity only twice before — once, with god-born Heracles, the most famous of all heroes, and then again with a twice-born mortal boy who somehow came to be sitting in front of him now, watching the council vote to add another to their ranks.
Jackson stays silent as the council voices their approval and the demigods seem frozen in shock. He glances back, only once, at the Chase girl. He looks forward again, jaw set, and scans the assembled Olympians.
His gaze catches yours.
You wonder if Jackson can see the silent message in your eyes. Don’t do it, kid. It’s not worth it.
You are the youngest Olympian, the only one who was born a fully-mortal demigod and received divinity upon achieving great things.
You watch Perseus Jackson reject the gods’ offer and wish you’d had the courage to do the same.