The Stranger's captive was no longer tied to the stone, and the bird that had been tearing at the captive's stomach had disappeared along with the arena. The wounds I had seen before were gone, replaced with a mass of scars across his chest and stomach. The captive curled into the fetal position, and I went to check on the man I just saved.

His face was rugged. While the Stranger and his watchers' faces were handsome in their perfection, the captive's features were more primitive, carved from clay rather than marble. Lines marked his mouth, as if finally relaxed after a permanent scream. I rubbed his back as I had countless friends in pain before, and the captive relaxed, turning over on his back.

"Thank you, kind sir. You cannot know how long it has been that I was held there by the Tartarean." the free man whispered. "If there is anything I can do, any gift I can offer, I'd give it gladly."

"Heh, I don't think you have much to offer, friend, but th—"

He grabbed my arm and I looked into the captive's eyes.

"Fire. Knowledge. I have much to give. So, so many things... lessons from the Gods. Your people learned to harness the power of Zeus, to sail across Poseidon's great seas, to hammer out weapons that would make Haephestus weep and Ares slaver in jealousy. You have gained a way to transfer Gnosis through nets of fine wire, but why stop there?"

Then the visions came. A world without death. A world without want. A world perfect and ablaze with the passions of intellect.

And above them all I sat, sitting in a Throne of twisted bronze. But it wasn't me. The eyes, those cruel and vicious eyes

I felt Spot licking me through my torn pants, and it was the only thing that saved me. The captive had wrapped me in his embrace, his eyes wild and staring into mine, spittle running out of the corners of his mouth.

The blade slid in clean. His eyes clouded, and I let his body fall back to the slab.

I dug the grave shallow, my small trench shovel ill-equipped for the work in this gravelly mess. I wrapped his body in the shroud he had risen in as my lantern cast strange shadows in the clearing. I saw my fate in a thousand shadows, a hundred deaths, a hundred happy endings.

But each was mine.

>Are you suggesting that Persephone the Bringer of Death, Goddess of Spring, and Queen of the Underworld would be wearing anything short of the finest silks?

Yes, I am. This is my telling, and how I framed it for this story. In another story she may wear silk. She may cuckold Hades with Charon, or be a skeleton animated by Hades inability to love living flesh. Perhaps she'll be a he, or not even there.

The gods, or any mythological representation, is to provide a frame. You didn't have an issue with Medea being represented with a dandelion crown, which would have a much different sociocultural meaning in Greek lore but was utilized to represent joy in spring (and would have been more fitting of Persephone). The amount of changes between the myths of the ancient Greeks and modern understanding is wide and ranging, and in some retellings the relationship is not all wine and roses.

I, as any writer not producing historical fiction, use these archetypes as needed to portray a story. It's kinda irksome when someone rushes in to correct rather than accepting that a story is a story, not a myth.