Dislaimer: I'm not Ron Moore, David Eick, or the SyFy Channel. I am also not Edith Hamilton, though many details of this myth and certain phrases of dialogue come from her rendition of the story in her classic work, Mythology.
Daphne
(drabble, Sometimes A Great Notion)
The god Apollo loved a huntress, the Scriptures said, who fled from him in terror. He gave chase – close, desperate chase – and Daphne screamed to feel his breath upon her neck.
"Stop!" he pleaded. "Stop and know who I am."
But she heeded no word and suffered no touch; trusted not to his love, though he, the god of truth, declared it.
Before his eyes her bare white arms blurred under dappled shadows: new-grown leaves. Her feet, so fleet and sure, twisted to roots and burrowed deep. Her face, pale and defiant, lifted one last time beneath his sun and hardened into laurel, triumphantly devoured.
Alive and untouchable, the maid became a tree, and so escaped the heart of her divine.
Awestruck and anguished, Apollo grieved beneath her rustling limbs. Softly he whispered, "You are lost to me, my first – my one – beloved. Yet in the days to come, you shall retain your honor. Your leaves will crown my champions. Find, then, your glory in mine."
Kara heard the story young and liked it. No one could outrun the gods forever, but there was something to be said for losing on your own terms. In a childhood of snapping twigs and slamming oak, she relished imagined flight and the rush of grass beneath her feet. In later years, when destiny and love pounded close on her heels, her instincts took over.
She should have stopped running while flesh and blood had still been hers to give.
But Earth had rooted her in its undiscovered soil, ripped her apart to nourish her, inhumanly remade. She felt its distant contours in her skin, in her pores, as if she'd never left. Blindly she ran, leading her race and her ever-trailing lover to this wasteland.
Now her body – the body that had known him – is tinder, feeding its second fire. She sees her bones stacked like kindling, ashen and charred, and all by her own hand.
She wants his hands to catch her, now, but has forgotten how to reach for him.
Her limbs are long grown strange.