Page 143 of This Divine Revelry

We meet a curve of the river and race along it. When I see a boat tethered to the banks, it makes clear why I couldn’t access this exit before – I needed this. Needed Dionysus.

We throw ourselves over its side and I take up the oars, seeing those gates arching over the water ahead, the same wrought iron as Hades’ crown. They twist into swirling darkness, pitch and hollow and void. But my power sparks, those instincts surging on – and I could swear at the centre I see a rising sun.

Dionysus turns to the woman. ‘Whatever happens in there, follow Ariadne and don’t let go. She can get us out.’

They clasp my shoulders, gripping me tight. I face the darkness.

An exit, a labyrinth beyond. A path out.

I race towards it and I do not look back.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

THE GATE LEADS INTO SOME sort of tunnel – obsidian and endless. Suddenly we are standing, walking, racing through.

The hands clutching me are the only certainty I have that I am not alone.

I am not sure how it is for them – the cacophony of it all. Loud nothingness: like a relentless gale or an echo you can’t quite catch, yet deafening all the same.

I follow every twist, every turn. You might be lost in here forever. Or perhaps it would take some other shape, anything to confuse and disorientate you, to have you looking back to ensure you have not misstepped, or are not in here alone.

But it is easier to listen to those instincts drawing me on when there is nothing to see, nothing to follow, only my own feet and each step forward.

When we burst free – into the world, into life – I miss the darkness.

I think we are in a boat again and Dionysus is speaking, sending word ahead that there is another body to make, and maybe Hermes is briefly there too; I think the river becomes a lake and that there are trees and I think, at some point, there is a chariot racing through the air.

All I know with any sense of certainty is, at one point, there is clay – but not clay at all.

The moment my soul is pushed in, it shifts to flesh and bone, to each layered vein and each woven stretch of skin.

And that searing, agonizing burning that tore through me when I took my last breath rises as I take my first.

For a moment, I fear it’s followed me. That there is no outrunning this and I will smoulder in this body as I did my last, as my soul did in the Phlegethon, that the centre of my labyrinth is only pain, my destiny only to burn.

But those other flames surge within: the fires of the sun, and the other feelings burning, fuelling, those that Medea would not quench to stoke those of my revenge. The passion Dionysus commanded I hold on to and it is this:

Grit and determination, a fierce refusal to ever stop fighting. My aching heart, yearning to pulse again – to feel and never stop feeling, the hurt and the joy and everything in between. Pain – an arrow through flesh, the delirium of thirst, the ache of hunger, hands closing around my neck, my back slamming against floor or wall or mast, burning alive and hardening to stone – and pushing past it all, ready to go again.

It is a tapping beat, my drawing limbs, letting the music fill me like I am a part of the sound. Life. A limitless unravelling of it all. Immortality incarnate is to be at one with it all. To be and to never cease.

And it is mine.

I open my eyes to see Dionysus stagger and fall to the floor.

I fling myself from the table towards him but my limbs are clumsy, movement unfamiliar in this new body, despite its precise matching of my old. Someone has made the decision to dress this form in a ridiculously long chiton before perching that grape tiara over its brow, and now I am stumbling over hems and keeping my head still while Dionysus groans.

His back arches. Then drops hard on to the floor, and he writhes, groaning in pain.

‘Dionysus!’

‘It’s so cold,’ he gasps. ‘I didn’t … didn’t expect that.’

I want to hold him still but I fear that would only hurt him more if he were to suddenly jerk and smash his head into the floor – the shining gold floor, metallic and gleaming and evidently godly. Olympus.

‘Help!’ I shout. But there is no one else in the room with us, only the remnants of clay and another shape, yet to wake.

‘What’s happening?’ I demand. ‘How can I help?’