Luminescence
One by one the gods of Olympos gathered in the circular agora, sitting down on soft coaches, making themselves comfortable while talking gently among each other, silk whispering and jewelry gleaming in rays of sunlight as they moved about. Some were sampling food and drinks from a set table in a corner, others were browsing through notebooks, scribbling something perhaps. But most were discussing the return of Hera, waiting in anticipation for her doubtlessly remarkable fate and what she had to tell about the altered Earth. Naturally the talk died down when Zeus and Hera finally arrived, settling themselves at the head end, still holding hands. Soon the only things heard were the chirping of birds and singing of the waterfall in the garden outside and the silent crackling from the fire in the hearth.
Then Zeus stood up, facing the gathering of deities for a short moment before addressing them.
"My fellow Olympians," he began, his deep and mellow voice catching everyone's attention. "We're all overjoyed to have Hera back here with us, however the happiest one is of course she, who have find herself home again." Zeus turned to glance at his beloved, directing a gentle smile at her sweet, relaxed face. "Nonetheless, she has not failed to point out that the story does not end here. We still have Earth to attend to. Accidently that world was hurled 3000 years forwards in time, including Hera, who's essence became trapped within the body of one of those mortals down there. She's more or less recovered now, her memory has returned and proven mostly intact. However 3000 years of neglect turned Earth into a miserable place, since it wasn't ready to be left on its own when the Portal closed."
"I can feel the question 'how' being born on several lips now. Wait with that, we will discuss it, but we cannot deal with everything at a time. There are wars being fought down there, conflicts of the most awful kind, which would have made even the Nersiadan's chocked, and we can all agree that these beings were rotten to the core by millennia of tyranny. There is a brewing environmental disaster, there's crime and terror, there's poverty of horrible magnitudes and destruction and furnaces of violence almost wherever you turn. Still it's not all hopeless, there are some untouched places, there are still groups out there wanting to do good, there are gatherings of influential people who struggle to turn the ship around."
"Most of all, there are some hundreds of people down there who call themselves Neo-Hellenes. The most sensitive and receptive people on Earth have somehow discovered our presence and revived the worship of our pantheon. A faith which got lost when the contact between our realms was broken and prayers turned futile. We can begin with this group, use them as ambassadors at the same time as we try to affect others."
"We should of course also discuss the best way to actually reveal ourselves to the mortals of Earth. Since we have been lost to them for so many years, it's not an easy deed, it'll be nothing like paying a Narivo monarch a visit or speaking to the Congress of Elysium. Earth lacks a formal world government, they are too disintegrated for that. There is an assembly, the UN, but without any real power. Hera describes it as a cross between a conversation club and a money gorging monster. So my embryo of a plan is to start with those Neo-Hellenes. Approach them first, because they are already expecting us. Then work through the rest of the population. It will not take a week or a month, perhaps not even a year is enough. But every journey starts at home, so naturally this one starts here."
As Zeus handed over the word, the expected wild chatter exploded and then, like a wave retreats from the shoreside after wetting the sand, it calmed down before some kind of sequence of speakers was formed.
Waves...
Hera felt that she was not yet ready to partake in the sometimes overheated Olympian debates, so she closed her eyes and let another recollection wash over her.
Hera found herself dropping the primary blue crystal and seeing it roll away from her down the tuft-covered hillside, pulled by gravity into the chasm below.
"No!" she reached out to grasp it, but too late, and as it fell away, a flash of blue sapphire light blinded her before she closed her eyes.
Only to open them as churning water flooded over her head – and then withdrew, leaving her face down in the sand on the beach of Kao Lak, Thailand, wet grit grinding against her forehead and cheeks. Coughing and vomiting water, she rose on hands and knees in the muddy sand, disorientation sweeping in nauseating waves over her, making her tremble. Oh, what had really happened? She remembered the water withdrawing from the sand, she remembered the little Thai man calling out to them to run run run. She remembered that immense wall of water! She remembered...
"Mother?"
Around her water swirled. Up was down and down was up.
"Father?"
"I love you, my strong and brave Queen," the handsome stranger whispered. "Always will. Be careful!"
"Joly? Little brother?"
It was night, first all she had seen was blackness, but when she gazed to her left she spotted the faint luminescence of the few electric lamps still working. She tried to stand up, but nausea took over, and too weak she fell again.
Luminescence? Stars? Beloved, half of his face hidden in shadow...
Her tries to remember were cut off when she heard voices call out and outstretched arms reaching for her, firm hands grabbing her under her arms.
"Missus?"
"You aw right?"
"You hurt?"
"Can you walk?"
"Will sumefone get a doctol!"
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"You're always playing the doctor with the remedy, Apollo!" Persephone's sharp voice cut through Hera's recollections. "But in this case the patient is terminal. Face it, we cannot fix that world. It's beyond fixing. Let it die!"
"How can you be so cold-hearted?" Aphrodite raged. "There are seven billion souls down there, and you mean we shall not help them? How can we doom them because of a Portal accident? Which wasn't even their fault."
"Sometimes you have to let the hopeless cases die, to help the curable ones," Persephone insisted.
"And who are you intending to help in their stead, Persephone?" Aphrodite's anger was almost tangible as she faced her sister in law, her cheeks blossoming even without the help of make-up this time as her lavender eyes shot rays across the room. "People you suddenly discovered you can reach out and aid? Because you haven't exactly been the epitome of helpfulness earlier."
"That's none of your business, so shut your painted mouth," Persephone shot back. "I will not spend a second on that miserable globe!"
"No, you rather go to the Deathlands, I take it!" the Love Goddess scorned.
"Come on!" Hermes interjected with raised voice. "We have been reduced to dowdy athlete's games! If only for our pride's sake do we need to take that planet back!"
"I personally will do my best to help the Earthlings," Athena was standing up. "Then Persephone, Hades, Hephaestos and all the rest of you can do whatever your conscience tells you!"
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"What's your name, Miss?" the young doctor who had been examining her asked.
"I... I don't really remember. H... something?"
"Where do you stay?"
"Um... Olymp... Oh, my head, I can't remember!"
Luminescent balls dancing in front of her face and she squeezed her eyes shut. Wanting it all to end.
"You clearly suffer from a concussion, dear. If you recall your name or where you are staying, perhaps we can locate your family."
Zeus?
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"Hera, are you okay?" Zeus asked gently, taking her hand.
"Sort of, it's a bit too intense right now. I think I need a break, I'm going to take a short walk out in the garden."
"You want me to come with you?"
"Ever the considerate. No, my love, it's not necessary," she smiled as she stood and let go of his hand. "Stay and take care of the kindergarten will you!"
"It's a tough job but someone's got to do it." That was a one-liner Zeus had picked up on Earth and which he somehow found applicable to his own situation.
Hera giggled silently, as she let go of Zeus hand and turned around. Soon she was stepping out between two pillars and down four steps before her bare feet touched the soft grass and her nostrils became filled with the musty fragrances of earth mixing with sweet flower scent. She turned her face towards the sun and let it caress her face, inhaling the fresh air of her homeland. Right now her old life felt so far away, hardly more than a vivid dream, however she was convinced she would never entirely forget Hannah Bielke.
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"Hannah," suddenly the name came to her. "I'm Hannah Bielke, from Stockholm Sweden. I'm staying with my parents and brother in Jasmine Gardens."
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Sitting down by the pond, she watched the gold fishes there, how lazily they swam, how the sun reflected in their scaled bodies, gossamer tails swirling. Thousands of bright spots danced across the pond and when she shut her eyes they turned green on her retinas. She listened to the waterfall, thinking of how peculiar it was that while Hera found streaming water calming, it had always upset Hannah Bielke. However taking Thailand '04 in mind, it was not that strange.
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The tsunami had swept in and turned paradise to hell, transformed Thai tourist towns to wreckage. And in the midst the family Bielke from Stockholm, Sweden had been one of the many victims. While Ulf, Madeleine and Joly Bielke had been swept away by the profound and unrelenting streams, the daughter Hannah had somehow been flushed ashore, the sole survivor. How she really endured was something of a miracle, apparently the time she spent under water was more than enough to drown her. However something had saved her, had brought her ashore and back to life again.
But two weeks later when Hanna embarked the plane back home to Stockholm again, she wasn't so sure she could consider herself lucky. She had lost her whole family, she was all alone in the whole wide world now. She had nobody and there was nobody who had her. On top of that the concussion she had suffered from kept manifesting itself in strange ways. Most of what had happened during the three days in Thailand before the tsunami was gone. There were only faint, dreamlike recollections of having a seafood dinner at a pier and playing badminton with her father.
There were also dreams about a man telling her to be careful. What had he warned her about? The coming wave? Hannah felt convinced that there was a lot more than her family she had lost. She saw herself reach out for something blue. Something beautiful and important.
And what hurt the most? She hadn't been able to say farewell. To her father and little brother. Her mother...
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"Mother?" Athena's voice broke through Hera's remembrance. "How are you really feeling? You had us worried in there."
"I'm fine, Athena," she looked up at her blonde daughter, who sat down in front of her at the edge of the pond, sliding playfully with her left hand over the surface, drawing ephemeral lines in the water. The sun made her hair luster as if it was on fire, it wasn't as curly as Zeus', nor was it Hera's straight hair, but it had its own unique waviness, like rollers on the sea. Otherwise that lovely girl was so much alike her father that Hera would have doubted having anything to do with her genes, had she not herself plucked the baby out of her womb.
"I'm just a bit tired," she reassured after a second of silence. "Still disoriented. After all the things I've been through – It's hard to explain, you have to live it."
"What happened really?" the ever curious goddess asked, her radiantly blue eyes both caring and eager for pristine knowledge of how the human mind worked.
"I don't really know, my physical form was somehow rendered unstable for a while. My soul and my spirit fell through thousands of years and subsequently came to inhabit the body of a dying woman. A mortal human drowning in a disaster down on Earth. I sort of borrowed her form for a while, including memories."
"I never thought such a thing to be possible," Athena said thoughtfully, and Hera could tell her brilliant mind was fervently at work now, trying to solve another mystery. "Besides the race memory, which resides within our genes, I always assumed memories were connected to the soul, not to the body."
"Apparently they can be, or perhaps I was able to copy hers."
"Do you still have them?"
"Yes, but they seem more unreal now than earlier. I'm not forgetting, but – it's like having watched a theatre play. Engaging for the time being but not really important any longer when the curtain falls. So did you come to a decision?" Hera changed topic, feeling she was over the discussion of her Earthly life. For now at least.
"Yes," Athena said. "We're going down. At least some of us. I feel I want to do it. And so do Apollo and Artemis, they were after all born there. Aphrodite is coming too and when I left she was working hard on luring Ares down. Yet with all those insane wars going on there, I'd think he might do more damage than good. Hermes and Poseidon are also coming, but I think it's more out of curiosity than a pure desire to help. However Persephone and Hephaestos don't see a point. And Dionysos, Hebe and a handful more haven't made up their minds yet."
"And Zeus?" Hera asked.
"He says GO! I think he has a bit of a conscience added to that decision. He feels somehow responsible for the accident with the Portal."
"But he should not be," Hera said. "It wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault really. Besides, the alternative might have been worse. Having the Malaikin attacking the Earth of 3000 years back. They would have annihilated it! Or at least destroyed large parts of it. Now, we 'only' need to fix the things the mortals messed up on their own."
"I've seen it," Athena sighed. "Apparently they did a good job messing it up."
"You got that right, dear," Hera said. "That place sure needs a make-over."
"So this is where you're hiding, miladies," Zeus said as he came striding towards them. Behind him Hera saw Artemis eagerly discussing something with her husband Orion, while their twin daughters seemed fully intend on jumping into the pond, just to retrieve their parents' attention. In the shades of an oak a bit away Athena's daughter Nike was sitting in the grass together with Iris and Selene, sharing a carafe of wine.
She also heard Dionysos' happy-go-lucky laughter mingling with Helios roaring out a protest against something and Poseidon's rumbling assertions. The only thing unfamiliar in fact was the dark-skinned goddess Apollo's son Asklepios was flirting with. So little had really changed here since she left, Hera though. Then again, it was her own perspectives which were askew.
Zeus took her hand and kissed it gently before squatting in front of them.
"We're having a short break now, then we're going to start making a real plan for going down to Earth," he said. "I've been thinking some, while the discussion ran on repeat a while. How about using dreams?"
"As in talking to them through their dreams?" Hera asked, remembering the writer in the TV-sofa and her Facebook group. "It sounds like a great idea!"
"I agree," Athena said, "but we must prepare those dreams well. Oh, here comes Apollo!" she then said, her eyes shifting from Hera and to her right. The next moment the God of Reason let up his voice.
"Hera?" he asked. "I'm a bit curious about that woman you inhabited during your years on Earth."
"Yes," Hera responded warily, hating to be torn from the main subject just like this. "What is it you wish to know exactly?"
"How did it work really? This transfer into a mortal body and then back into yourself again?"
"Oh," Hera sighed and shook her head. "Honestly, I don't really know."
"Can't you see, my mother doesn't want to talk about it," Athena scolded her half-brother at the same time.
"But..." Apollo's shoulders slumped, he was just as curious as his younger sister and Hera was sure that if he hadn't asked, she would have to explain the same things to Athena instead later. Then she got an idea, like a flash out of a clear sky it came to her what she was going to barter.
"Apollo, it's quite a bit to go through," she told. "Will take perhaps an afternoon. But I'll do it, if you do me a favour in return."
"Yes," her stepson looked as if he was ready to promise her the sun, and she couldn't help smiling at that expression of eagerness.
"In Stockholm, Sweden there is a woman named Agnetha Anund. 33 years old, a mother of 3 – and with terminal cancer. Can you heal her, then I promise you I'll tell you all and everything you wish to know about Hannah Bielke."
"Deal!" Apollo almost made a salute, before he spun around and more or less leaped back into the house, nearly colliding with Demeter as he made the ascent up the stairs. The goddess of harvests turned after him with a snort, however he paid her no heed.
Now, Zeus was beaming at her.
"Hera, Hera, that was a very noble thing to do. Who is that woman?"
"The best friend of Hannah Bielke. The real Hannah Bielke. They had known each other since the age of five. So naturally I got to know her as well. A wonderful woman. I know we cannot and are not supposed to help all poor souls down there. But Agnetha was special to me. I just can't let her die at such young age and in such a wile way."
"True," Zeus said and took her in his arms. "My Hera, no matter whoever you were those years down on Earth, you've always been a queen in your heart. I'm so glad to have you back with me again."
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In Bromma, Stockholm an orange Thai lantern had gotten stuck among the branches of a huge elm. It had hung there now for weeks, and the children used to point it out, making bets on how long it would remain before someone plucked it out of the tree. From a thread hung a note, the ink on it almost faded away by the rain. It read one single world. Health.
At the hospital of Karolinska, Stockholm, Agnetha Anund opened up her eyes. She was well now, cured from her cancer, however she didn't know that yet.
In Olympia, Greece, Kostas Amarakis was counting money. His hotel had been fully booked since this Olympos craze had begun, and he was doing better than ever now on his life's autumn. Lifting his eyes, he faced the small statuette there of a god with wings on his shoes. Hermes, god of merchants and of trade. And wasn't the statue smirking slightly at him? As if they shared a secret?
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