Chapter Text
In a world where Hecate never came to be, a young goddess came to the shores of Erebus. Partially mortal and belonging to the younger generation of gods, Melinoe wasn’t all powerful, but she was curious; and many friends she would make out of shades and beasts; for she was raised by them, and it was the only home she knew.
Melinoe knows about the war, but she decides not to interact. She reasoned she couldn’t even if she wanted to. She was too weak and unwilling to communicate with the gods for the fear that their tales provoked and out of fear that things would change and spiral out of her control; her systematic nightmares didn’t help cope with that stress either. Mostly she spoke with the shades who raised her, sings to them, dances with them, builds bonds, gets more shades to join her safe glade and even befriends a few beasts. Everything is good until she starts spreading word around and becomes more well known. More shades come around to meet this benevolent goddess. Melinoe starts becoming confident and travels further beyond her abode to further her influence, she can still fight if need be but has a harder time with it than our own titan slayer, she would also be an amateur witch, self-taught, influenced by the moon who was always above her. It brought comfort to know she was never truly alone. The shades fight for her too and although she can’t return to shadow, her shades always bring her back home to recover.
Melinoe starts to notice even more than before that ghosts are typically afraid of her; they struggle to look in her eyes, some of them can’t even bring themselves closer, they are too afraid. Once, in trying to console a younger shade whom she didn’t know, she almost got through to them! But then they just looked in her eyes and were immediately filled with dread. “Goddess!” they whispered, the shade backed away and no matter what she said, Melinoe could not persuade them to come back. The young witch decided she needed to understand the shades better, to see if they were truly so scared of her; as it turns out even shades, she had known for years couldn’t look her in the eyes for too long. This wouldn’t do; she needed to be approachable if she wanted to truly befriend them, to live up to her title of goddess of ghosts, to keep the only thing she had; she needed to do something about this.
An idea came when she thought about how she would sometimes use simple magick tricks to make it look as if certain shades were different colours, blue, purple, red, gold, black, and white she could do them all! What if she could change her red eye to look like her green one? Would they welcome her more easily; trust her even? She had to try. And as it turns out it was without too much effort that she made a small concoction, two in fact, one to make the black part turn white, the other to turn the red part green. The irises would be filled accordingly without much difficulty for magick was as much about the recipe as it was about intention.
It wouldn’t last forever. Only a day. The amateur witch would have to administer it every nightfall if it was to become a permanent solution to her disfigurement; part of her hoped it wouldn’t, as doing so did involve poking her eye with a needle twice and the side effects of long term use were yet to be discovered, she always advised shades not to ask her to turn them into a different colours all the time for magick could be fun in small doses, but quickly turn dangerous when used recklessly. The only thing left was covering her burning feet with long robes. It wasn’t as commented on since most just didn’t notice at first, but it seemed fitting to go all out with her disguise. Alas, she decided to find a shade she had yet to know to measure the success of her experiment.
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It couldn’t have gone better. The shades thought she was actually human! They weren’t scared of her; they would even come up to her first! A permanent solution it would be, for even when they learned she was a goddess; they had already talked to her and felt safer than if it were the first thing they noticed. Her witch side however shall be kept away from the public eye, witches weren’t famous for they’re good deeds, and a witch goddess? She shuddered to think of what they would say of her then.