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Her father's garden had many things to delight an observer, few though observers were. The only beings who knew the location of the garden and could thus enter it were the gods, Ladon, her family, and Zoe herself.
It was a beautiful place, but almost entirely silent.
The trees never creaked, the birds never sang, the sky never broke and cracked with thunder, the wind never blew hard enough to generate any kind of real sound or destruction, and pebbles dropped in the mirrored surface of the ponds hit the bottom without a splash.
Indeed, the only real noises came from the living creatures, but they seemed to only amplify the silence.
Girlish laughter echoed, draconic grunts were absorbed by the earth he pressed his scaly chin to, and her father on his outcropping had little breath to project himself.
It was like living in a gaping mouth, and with every inhale it swallowed their sound.
And in a strange twist of fate, they only resided in their muted twilight because of the actions of their father.
The gods' creativity, and by extension their cruelty, knew no bounds when they sentenced him to carry the weight of the sky upon his back. It was the kind of thing that made Zoe wonder if they had dwelt on their decision, attempting to engineer a fittingly terrible punishment, or if it had been a spur-of-the-moment, vicious thought that led to their continued isolation.
That Atlas' daughters were imprisoned alongside their father was no surprise, but the fact that they had escaped an equally brutal punishment was. The new rulers of the universe, the very beings her father had underestimated and undermined, had a true talent for pettiness.
But the Pleiades were left practically unharmed.
They were not permitted to leave, but their prison was far from grim, and their treatment far from torturous.
Their father suffered alone. But he had earned that, in more ways than one.
Even before his imprisonment, his moods had swung swiftly between hot and cold, leaving his children in constant fear of him.
Zoe preferred him under the weight of the sky. It had him pinned like a moth, a good distance away from her and unable to break free unless someone willingly took his place. And he had so few volunteers, given his brutal nature.
In her mind, it was best to leave him to his sacrosanct task.
She found ways to fill her day, tending to the garden and it's surroundings, swimming no more than a few metres from the shore, and spending time with her sisters. She challenged them to races, from which she always emerged victorious. Despite their grumbles, they would always accept another chance to prove themselves, and following that would fail miserably.
When she tired of their company, she spoke to Ladon.
Well-aware that he was no pet, she kept a safe distance, but even so he seemed to tolerate her more than her sisters. Perhaps he even liked her.
After a while, however, the dragon would growl or hiss into the empty air and she would take it upon herself to stroll the perimeter of the garden, as if by sheer force of will and repetition she could force it a few feet larger, or summon some new sight to stop her mind from rotting.
Imagine her surprise, then, when one day she saw someone who was not her family.
Zoe stood a safe distance away in a grove, watching the stranger.
It had been a long time since she'd been face to face with a man, but even she could guess that he was no god or titan. In fact, he seemed to be entirely without divinity, and that intrigued her.
He was handsome, to begin with, with sandy hair and a beard to match, but the most immediately striking thing about him was his strength.
Clad as he was in a mere tunic, she could see his muscles. If he had taken a fancy to, she had no doubt he could have bent one of the thick trees surrounding them and pulled it down for use as a bench. Just who was he, and what was he doing in their prison?
-
Looking back, Zoe wished she'd never so much as caught a glimpse of Heracles.
No-one had taught her about love- about how intoxicating it could be, how all-consuming, how utterly overwhelming, especially after so many years with so little company. She had fancied herself as a romantic lead in a beautiful story, where he would whisk her away from the isolation and tedium of the garden and spend the rest of his days by her side.
Heroes were fickle. Men even more so.
She grieved and missed him, she cursed his name, she begged for his return, all to no avail. Deep down, she accepted the truth. She had been nothing more than a stepping stone to him, a way to steal from her own garden.
How could she have been so foolish?
And for what? She was disgraced, and soon she would have to face the punishment from her family. She knew they were ruthless. If they didn't kill her outright, whatever the thought up would likely be more horrible, and some stubborn part of her, buried deep under the heartbreak and loathing her recent mistakes had brought about, railed against that notion.
If she had to go, she would go out on her own terms.
Zoe had always been exceptional at tending to the garden, memorising it's plants and each one's uses.
It was simplicity itself, then, to stroll to the far edge of the garden at the pace of someone with all the time in the world until she reached woodland. It was so dense that her fine dress caught as she walked, but it did not deter her. She scoured the ground for any trace of the rich, deep purple she had committed to memory.
There.
Tapered green leaves, a star-shape at the tip of the stem, and a shiny black berry in the centre. Nightshade. Specifically, the deadly kind, which would do for her purposes.
Once again, she took her time, removing her veil and using it to carry her bounty. A fatal dose could be anything from a dozen to twice that, and since she wished for a quick, definitive death, she aimed for the upper end of that number.
Now that she was at the end of her mission, however, the only feeling that Zoe could muster was a vague sadness.
Her lamenting and crying and cursing were done.
She sat on a tree stump surrounded by vines, and watched the starry sky from a small gap in the leaf canopy. There was no need to leave a note, nor to offer an explanation- once her family discovered her betrayal, they would understand why she'd chosen to die rather than face them, or anyone else for that matter.
The first drop of juice touched the tip of her tongue as the moon emerged from behind a cloud.
When pressed to answer, years and decades and centuries and millennia down the line, how exactly she had met Her Lady, and why she had decided to spend her functionally immortal life as an eternal maiden in the wilderness instead of joining the gods or mortals, she would tell the truth.
Lady Artemis had saved her life. Her saviour came down in a thin moonbeam and offered her a choice- endless night, or the chance to walk under the stars for eternity?
That was no choice at all. Every day that followed, Zoe thanked the gods for the life she had been given- for the pathetic death she had been spared- for the freedom she now had.
But she would not allow herself to forget. She would not forget her own stupidity, her rashness, her flight of fancy that nearly led to her destruction.
She called herself Zoe Nightshade, and never mentioned her family.
She made a new one, alongside the moon and stars.