Eleni, the Light | Helen of Troy

Fiction | Poetry | Mythology Retelling

I was only a story that Kassandra told. Of waves that sweep upon the sands and pull away into the uncountable leagues. Of the sun’s warmth born again and then the dark that chases on its heels. Of the light consumed by winter and then winter loosening its grip.

The earth has poetry. In its wild distance cradled by the wind. In the weight of the sky when rose, when blue.

The earth has memory. Writ upon the stars. Thrown into the expanse of time.

I sit here all night with a lantern stirring quietly on the table before me. It is summer and the door is left ajar, opening onto a sheltered courtyard. It is deep into the night when Kassandra begins. The stars tonight are unchallenged by any moon, and they tell their own stories by burning away the ink of the night sky.

I could write and lay down careful strokes of black ink upon smooth, costly parchment. But when I did so, each line of ink burned as a flame across the dark, slumbering night of my memory. And look what Kassandra’s visions did to her. What difference if they are past or future? The fire burns until the present is but ashes.

She was born with a twin. And now that centuries have passed and all the bodies have worn away, I am now her twin. And now is calm and still and we speak to one another of all that has been.

But she, Kassandra, is then as well as now. And then is chaos and burning. Then is still the City and then Kassandra cries warnings of my name.

Now I am the only one for Kassandra to talk to. Everyone else let their memories drift into the stars and, with the stars, draw slowly away. Or they threw their memories into the waves and let the currents pull them to fragments. Or they left their memories with the bones, buried by the seasons and worn to dust.

I ask her for a new prophecy but she has gone no further into her future than this long night of now.

She can only give faith here. Here, she is like any other priestess. She tells me that when the dawn comes, I will see it rising in that next land.

I tell her that from this night there is no dawn. Here, there is no resurrecting sun nor shifting moon. Only stars that flare into stories and names, only constellations memorialising heroes. Only memories. Distant and long-dead, the fires of then shining into the night of now.

I look into her eyes and see pools of black ocean holding monsters and sirens and drowned men. I tell her that she should have learnt to give honey before the nettle. To gain trust with false words and love with insincere vows. To inebriate with flattery before offering the surgeon’s blade of truth.

“Eleni,” she whispers. It is a chill coiling up my spine. “Eleni – Light – summer waking from the death of winter, sun rising from the other world.”

The heat of her words are kindling to flame, shining into this night, pulling back the darkness and revealing the long-covered past. The towers burning and the lives rising as smoke and frail leaves of ash to the heavens.

I pull back from her, draw back from the heat of her being, her intensity. Draw back into the dark and stillness of now. Into the cover of night.

But her eyes are cinders in the dark. She does not quiet herself but speaks on. “Into the dark caves we crawled, lanterns flicking and dimming against the cold and the damp. We sat, huddled in a circle, hungry and thirsty from our fast. Our minds ready, disciplined. Our thoughts trained to one steady flame in our mind’s eye. We were ready for this. We listened to the heartbeat behind the drips of water, behind the scratching and the slithering of unseen life. Totems placed in the niches around and above us, watched through the hollow impressions of their eyes. The thumbed circles pressed into the plain smooth faces when the clay was pliant and cool. The flames from the lanterns casting unstable light upon those faces, exaggerating angles and changing their expressions, morphing into glances from their eyes.

“In unison we women chanted until our words lost meaning, dissolving into a droning hum. We opened up to a deep silence within ourselves. Our silence opened up to Her. A path between us. Then a sharp singular voice would ride upon the hum. A voice of birth and death and animal cry and cracking of forest trees and cracking of the mountains to ice or to fire. A voice that, in its grandeur, terrified some of the women. And drove them to retreat back to the chant and the lanterns and the totems and back to their own consciousness.

“But if you stayed and curled yourself within the embrace of it, then you could feel memories that She held recorded in the settling earth, the layers of fallen leaves and rotted flesh, the layers of the crumbling and the forming rock. Records lain down for us to read once we were ready. And I thought then, because I stayed, that I was ready. But I was not ready until now.

“Give me the words, Eleni, to take back to these women. Though they tremble and shut fast their ears. The Divine made flesh. The overwhelming light pushing us back into the coolness and darkness of our retreating self. We tremble in our frailty to the withholding heat inside the winter soil, the forsaking Sun shining on another land, the Dark Moon. It drives us mad and we make of our madness a vicious song.”

She quiets, and we sit calmly and in silence. Outside, the night is unchanging.

I was a story that Kassandra told. When she was a priestess speaking of renewal and of the gods who change, who die to feed life and who rise from ashes and from pain. I was a story of shining light and warming earth and of beauty.

Now I have no believers but her, Kassandra. And we sit together in my darkness and my silence. I have yet to return.