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AShellfishLover t1_iuhqm5x wrote

Sometimes family traditions are quaint. Maybe you eat cabbage on New Years Day, or eat on the fine china on your half birthday. I'd love to be part of a family with fun little traditions. Hell, I'd take a white elephant exchange over being the barista to gods and monsters.

"Alex, I need you to pull a double. Greg's got a toothache and Shauna's battery died, I'm in the weeds here." I sighed as Tony laid out the reasons, as I already knew it was coming. You get a feel for it, the need to stay in place. It starts with a tingle in the palms and a heaviness in the legs, like you just grabbed an electric fence. There's a subtle change in the light, and you just know that within the hour one of them would walk in, and you would be asked to Serve.

The gig comes with benefits. I never need to worry about money, for one. I can't count how many times I've found by happenstance that I'd won a sweepstakes I never entered, or someone dropped a winning scratcher in my tip jar. Never a fortune, but always enough to get by. Tips for a Cupbearer, we honored descendants of Hebe.

It was thankfully a slow night, and I had been sweating covering my dog's vet bill. I'd had Service happen in a packed shops, bars, and once on the City Ferry. The gods keep their own time, and having to hurriedly mix a hot cocoa wrapped in a sheet while your boyfriend asks who was at the door isn't the most fun, but it helps me get by. A calm Sunday evening? At least it would be a distraction.

I felt her coming from a block away. So did the plants in the window. The sad potted things perked up as she walked towards the coffeehouse, new growth sprouting and tendrils of growth stretching away to the south like hands reaching for a lover in the night. Flowers bloomed in a riot of yellow and orange, rich green leaves unfurling as they were called to their mistress.

She was as beautiful as they always were. The Meliae were the nursemaids to the Greek divines, and wore faces as pale and lovely as the ash trees of their birthright. She was dressed conservatively for a nymph, a thin merino wool sweater unbuttoned over a sundress in muted blue and white. As she came closer I saw the worry on her face and felt a pang of sadness through the call of Service. This was a woman who had had a long day, a memorable thing in a life that had lasted for millennia. I began to call to the Void that existed for Cupbearers, feeling my hands over the invisible vessels from which we poured. I knew what she needed by that look, like any good Server does. My hands touched the tall carafe of Lethe, the water of forgetfulness. It was a common bitter draught these days among the divines. I turned my face to the spirit and put my best customer service smile.

"Well met, weary traveler. What is your desire?" The words tumbled out, like they always do. To anyone who overheard it would sound like a greeting, oh, the usual ma'am?.

At this distance I saw the worry. Whorls like wrinkles across that fine skin, the marks of some sickness pocking the perfect smoothness. Eyes the color of drowned leaves, and hair lank as grapevines at the first frost.

"Hail and well met Cupbearer. I have come to this land far from home and ask only release. Pour for me this day from the River Styx."

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AShellfishLover t1_iuhtypb wrote

Styx. The river of the Dead, the eldest sister of Lethe. It was a glass of death, just as sure as a random guy coming off the street and asking for a cup of rat poison. I chuckled at the dark humor and awaited the response, my hands sitting idle in the Well. It only took a moment before she began to speak.

"They killed him this morning. Fools. He was an artist, my Michael. A preservationist. He would go into the woods and find the fallen trees and turn them into art. Never cutting down, always bearing my honored dead from my lands and making them beautiful again.

"I came to him like this, deep in the woods. That smile... I will remember that smile while I drink. We talked of his work, and he offered to show me. Oh! Muses be praised, was his work beautiful. Ash and Thorn and Willow, they turned in his hands from dead wood to things of beauty.

"He was not perfect. He sought the sisters of inspiration in bad medicines. He would smoke as he sat on the tree stumps left behind by the loggers upstate, then it became powders. I loved him even then, knew I could fix him. I had bound the wounds of gods, what was a mortal artist's hurts to the pain of the Divine?"

She smiled then, a pained thing, and began playing with a necklace of wooden beads. A wooden cameo, her perfect likeness, played over her knuckles and she twisted and worried the thing.

"I found him in our bed this morning. Cold, the foam of his last breaths. I wanted to go with him, but I could not. It is not our way, is it? Those grand gestures. You are lucky, young one, to touch the soft veil between this world and the Divine, and not to sit wrapped in it, not mortal enough to die but not divine enough to live without hurt.

"I cannot die here by my own hand, but you are meant to serve. So serve me, wench, and let my time be done."

I wanted to tell her it would be okay. That the world was still young, that there would be other lovers. But that wasn't my place. How was I to understand the pain of a creature whose life had been measured not in years but centuries? If the trials of those endlessly stretching days had not broken her, then this was a harsh thing.

"I see it in your face. You want to tell me everything will go on. 'Oh,', you'll say, 'there will always be another lover!' I am not the Father of Olympus, dear sweet scion. Until Michael took me abed I had not been with man nor god in centuries. Our years together were the best of my life, and that life stretches before we came across Atlas' waters, before even the Shepherd hung on branches of our sacred trees.

"Asked thrice and done. Give me what I wish, and let me rest in His arms again."

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AShellfishLover t1_iuhx8g6 wrote

It struck like a lightning bolt.

"I love you. "

The nymph looked at me with alarm.

"You don't seek death, meliae. You seek love. Purpose. The sickness you saw in your Michael? It's in the City. There are shelters, clinics, places where a healer who has seen the worst and best of men and gods could do good. You have been far too long wandering in your woods. Come out and enjoy life, for a year and a day, then return to me. It will be the day we celebrate our dead then... if you wish to join them? I will not make demands."

The spirit looked beaten, then determined. She didn't say a word, though I was ready to invoke the innkeeper's privilege.

I set the date, knowing I wanted to be at work. This wasn't a Service I wanted to be surprised about.

I took the double on Halloween. Children and adults all dressed in their scary costumes, while all I got was a spooky button. Divine blood doesn't stop corporate. I had moved up in the world a bit, to a manager's position, so the scheduling wasn't a problem. I put myself on for the whole day and enjoyed the view.

I felt her coming again, and sat watching the plants dance to greet their beloved. I nervously felt for the Well, fumbling a drink order as the last of my late rush wrapped.

My nymph walked in dressed in green finery. Leaves of a hundred shades of green and gold trailed down the long dress she wore, with butterflies flapping their wings.

She hadn't come alone. A tall stocky man in his thirties, dressed in a pirate's puffy shirt and leather pants held her hand, his other held by a little girl in a blue and white dress and snowflakes. I walked around the counter to greet my last three customers, a slight bow to the nymph.

"Well met, weary traveler. What is your desire?"

Her hug was the best tip I got all night.

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