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This story starts with a boy. It starts with a girl. This story starts with the son-daughter of Dionysus. It starts with a child—for what are twelve year olds but children?—and a father already mourning.
What use is a god mourning? What could possibly bring a god to mourn? To be in such a pathetic state. The answer is usually love. But is this what brings Dionysus to mourn?
Here is the thing about godhood, it cannot be buried, it cannot be changed. Dionysus is what he has always been. He is a god. He is mad. He is terrible in his own way and yet—
He is caged. Trapped. Made to sever the part of him that is drunk-divine. Dionysus is a bird in a cage. Worse. He is a bird that has accepted the cage.
What Dionysus mourns is not a future he does not know. What Dionysus mourns is the cage and his acceptance of it. But what choice does he have? The Mad-God doesn’t possess enough power to defy his father.
No, that task would be better suited to Apollo.
“I think,” Dante says, as their feet urge them to go, to run, to wander and see. He doesn’t. He sits, he fiddles with the embroidery needle in his hand and debates where to put purple. “That you are pathetic.”
Bold words to say to a god, bolder words to say to his father. But his father is a bird, his father glowers and glares and grumbles but there is something terribly mortal about how he treats his children.
Dionysus loves his children. His princes and princesses of madness. He loves their wild, wandering ways, and while the twins—the twins will die, Dante thinks, but he doesn’t want them to—are less mad than their father, than their sister-brother, they are still children of the god.
So Dionysus loves them, he will suffer for that love.
“Terrible words to say to a god,” Mr. D says, because he is Mr. D. He is not Dionysus. Lord of the Revel, Leader of the Bacchae. He is A Mister.
“I’ve smited people for less.”
“I’m your child,” Dante says, “You won’t smite me. Your affections are too mortal for that.”
“You’ve inherited my madness,” Mr. D speaks as though Dante has said nothing, “Horrible for you. Really, I pity you. You’ll be ranting and raving before long.”
Dante blinks. She turns her attention from her embroidery to her father. Her eyes, purple, glazed over, match the gaze of Dionysus.
“That’s not my madness,” she tells her father, “You know that. Mine is—” Dante stops. Tilts her head to the side as if to examine the world more clearly. When she speaks again it’s as if she’s viewing the world through a distorted lens. “—My madness is the madness of Alice. Of poor Victorian women in movies and books. It is the madness of something out of place. Something that slips through the cracks in-between stars. I’m not to rant or rave. My madness is defined by my existence.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” He pauses. “Father, what do you know of me?”
“You are my child,” Dionysus says, “And you are quite mad.”
“Like you.” The grin that stretches Dante’s face is wild. “But not. You died and became a god. I died and—well—I’m here now, aren’t I?”
“You did not die.”
“I did. Stabbed by my Other Father.” A pause. “I don’t get good fathers do I? But you are better than the other. That’s not saying much. Am I cursed?”
“You’re not cursed. You didn’t die. I would be able to tell—”
“Then look.” The grin fades. The mania abates. “Look at my soul father. Tell me what you see. If it’s not the soul of something dead I’ll be truly impressed.”
The gaze of a god falls upon the squirming writhing mass of drink addled divinity that rests in Dante. It moves past the light of divinity. It lands on morality.
It lands on death.
The can of Coke in Dionysus’s hand rots.
“Ah,” Dante says, “So you see.”
“When?”
Dante’s grin is sharp.
“2022.”
“That year hasn’t happened yet.”
“It hasn’t happened here. It has happened other places.” A moment of silence. Dante ponders. “Father, is it foresight, if I know how this all shakes out?”
“How what shakes out?”
“The war of course.”
“There is no war.” Dionysus’s gaze sharpens. “There will be one.”
It isn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“You’re no prophet.”
“I don’t need to be a prophet to read.”
“Oh? Is the future written in books?”
“It was, a long time ago.”
“You are horribly lucky that father dearest cannot see here.”
“Yes,” Dante agrees, “This is the only place I would tell you.”
A small room made into a temple of madness. It smells of sandalwood and wine. There is an armchair in which the god rests with a blanket thrown over on shoulder. His child, the mad one, sits on the ground by his feet.
Dante picks at the leopard skin rug beneath them. Zeus cannot see into the temples of other gods unless he is granted permission.
He has no such permission here. Dionysus has told Dante as much.
“I hate working,” Mr. D tells Dante.
“I know. You won’t have a choice.”
"It never seems like I do. I suppose you've inherited that too."
Dante smiles.
It doesn't reach his eyes.