2.10: The Goddess of Rhamnous

Location: Attica, Eastern Coast

Time Remaining: 16 Years

Nemesis had gone to Tartarus partly hoping that the masters of the underworld would be able to spare her from the pregnancy that Zeus had inflicted upon her, but Hades had been unable to do anything about it - if either of the parents had been mortal, perhaps, but with god-blood from both sides, there was nothing conventional to be done. As Nemesis's due date came closer, he did come up with a risky alternative involving an egg (for lack of a better word), that allowed Zeus's offspring to be removed from Nemesis and birthed by a surrogate mother devoted to Persephone.

It was the best possible outcome as far as Nemesis was concerned - she'd been afraid of what she might feel if she'd actually given birth to a child. She thought she might love the child in spite of the circumstances of their conception, but that terrified her - she knew nothing of children, she was barely coming to grips with understanding and taking care of herself, and couldn't imagine being responsible for another person in that way. Just as bad, she was afraid that she'd birth the child, and feel no love at all for them - that thought made her profoundly sad, and she was relieved to avoid the issue altogether, by passing her unborn child onto a prosperous family in Sparta.

Nemesis stayed for a while in Tartarus, trying to work through her issues with people she now understood were 'her friends'. Eventually the seasons changed, though, and Persephone had to return to the Constellar Palace to over see the spring planting. Nemesis had become very fond of Hades, but she was still uncomfortable with the idea of being alone with the man for six months, and uncomfortable with how attached to her hosts she'd become. Nemesis excused herself, promising to return eventually.

Nemesis wandered. She didn’t flee; despite Persephone's assurances, Nemesis no longer believed there was anywhere safe she could go, above or below ground. Persephone seemed confident that she and Hades could handle Zeus if he'd showed up looking for them, but to Nemesis's understanding, there was a reason Zeus was the king of the gods - one didn't trifle with him. With that mindset, Nemesis lived every day expecting that to be the day Zeus would return to pick up where he left off, and believing that there would be nothing she could do to prevent it.

As Nemesis wandered, she thought a great deal about who she was and what her purpose was. Zeus and Hera had treated her like livestock at best and as the gods above all gods, surely their judgments of a person's character and value were beyond rebuke? Yet, Persephone and Hades had treated her like... family. They'd given her shelter, shed tears for her, raged at her treatment, calling it unjust and morally reprehensible. They too were powerful gods, so could Nemesis really dismiss their kindness as sentimental nonsense?

Nemesis eventually realized that half the reason she'd stayed in Tartarus as long as she had was the hope that Hades or Persephone would either give her an answer to that question, or give her a new purpose, a new identity, and a new direction in life. Nemesis had always been goal-driven and task-focused, so having no clear mission left her directionless. Unfortunately, the lord and lady of the underworld pushed intensely for her to either create her own purpose (Persephone's answer), or to accept that a life doesn't need meaning to have value (Hades's take on the matter).

Nemesis didn't think she was capable of what Persephone encouraged her to do. That sort of independent thought was not something that had been written into her when Hera had created her. Lacking purpose or the means to create her own purpose, Nemesis defaulted to her most basic programming - survival. She stalked the countryside in her raptor form, picking off mice and rabbits that plagued the mortal's harvested crops. One day she picked off a dangerous snake that came uncomfortably close to striking a human child. That felt good - not because the snake was wicked or evil, deserving of her divine wrath, but because the child was innocent and (mostly) good. It had given Nemesis a touch of happiness when the small child had cried after her to thank her for striking down the deadly asp that had been slithering quickly towards him.

At the same time, Nemesis felt herself continuing to weaken. She didn't fully understand the way gods worked - not the way Hera did, certainly - but she'd been told a god was only a god so long as he (or she) had worshipers, and since her ostracism from Olympus, Zeus had shut down every one of the few temples devoted to the goddess of divine retribution.

At first it had merely diminished Nemesis's more spectacular abilities - creating lightning and shadow became difficult - but now it was sapping her health. She was slower and everything that hurt suddenly hurt more. She could feel herself aging. However, when she'd saved the child, there had been an invigorating rush, a feeling of being replenished, like drinking a glass of water after a day of thirst. It compelled her to find more such opportunities.

One night, stalking field mice at a farm near the coastal city of Rhamnous, Nemesis heard a disturbance coming from the farmer's house and went to investigate it. She quietly jostled open one of the window shutters and observed a single room dwelling; a man was wrestling with a woman on the bed, while at least half a dozen children either watched in terror or pretended to sleep.

"Not again!" the woman cried, "I nearly died last time!" the woman pleaded.

The man grunted as he tried to separate her legs, "You're my wife," he said, "I didn't buy you so I could jerk off in the field while you sit on the front porch makin' eyes at the wealthy bastards on the road."

"I didn't!" the woman cried, "I didn't, I swear! I'd never be unfaithful to you!"

The man forced himself between her knees, "It doesn't really matter if you're faithful when you won't fuck me, does it?"

"It's too soon," she said, "I'm still nursing... there won't be enough to feed another..."

"Then I guess it's good we've got seven already," the man said.

The woman began screaming and crying incomprehensibly. Nemesis wasn't sure what to do. Viscerally, the scene was all too familiar. Persephone would certainly have sided with the woman, but if Hera had been there, the goddess of marriage would have sided with the man. The woman was his property, and her purpose was to produce his children. Of course, Hera would have said it was a man's obligation to protect his wife from harm, but she seldom seemed to extend that to harm inflicted by the husbands themselves, and if the men themselves were aware of any contradiction there, they seldom seemed to care about it.

Nemesis was reflecting on this when one of the children, the oldest boy, not more than eleven or twelve, grabbed his father's arm and tried to pull him off, begging for him to stop, and finally demanding he stop. The man released his wife, got off the bed, grabbed his son, and slapped him across the face with the back of his hand before throwing him onto the hearth, cutting the boy's face on the hot brick.

"What's the matter, boy?" he shouted as the child began crying in pain, "You want to play man of my house, but start bawling like a baby girl when life gets a little rough?" The man kicked the child, "You want to coddle a woman, you leave this house and go out and find your own - you'll wise up real quick when she walks all over your pussy ass. Now sit down and shut up while I get what I'm owed."

Nemesis's stomach turned. Zeus and Hera would likely have been fine with all of it, but in her gut, it all felt wrong, like it violated some underlying principal beyond even the gods' purview to dictate. She thought back to her conversation with Echo, years earlier – she had believed that the concepts of right and wrong were independent of divinity. But that still didn't make sense; how could there be something greater than the gods? Either way, if a banished goddess intervened in the mortal's affairs, it would likely bring down Zeus and Hera's wrath.

In answer to that thought, though, came a voice in her mind, "So?"

Nemesis shook her head to clear the thought. Zeus and Hera had wielded power far beyond her even when she wasn't in the weakened state she was in now.

The voice in her mind came again, "What's the worse they could do?"

That gave Nemesis pause - ordinarily Zeus would inter a rogue titan or god in the penal block of Tartarus, but Hades and Persephone were her friends, and Tartarus itself was - for some reason - infatuated with her. The three of them would almost certainly find a way to circumvent any sentence Zeus passed. Still... Zeus might just kill her outright this time. Gods and titans called themselves immortals, but it was a relative concept - they could certainly die. Nemesis was directionless, hopeless with respect to her future, but for some reason the notion of oblivion, brought painfully and cruelly by Zeus's righteous anger, filled her with dread.

"He's been killing you anyway," the voice said, "every day, a little bit at a time."

That was an odd thought, and it felt strange to have thought it, since Nemesis could barely grasp the notion it was trying to convey. On some level, though, it felt right. Watching this man torment his wife - or even leaving knowing it was happening - would make Nemesis feel like she was dying inside. Should she really let her fear of Zeus condemn her to centuries passively wasting away while such cruelty went on?"

"Better to die well for someone else, than to live poorly for yourself," the voice said.

Nemesis burst through the window of the house with a screech and for the first time in a long time she transformed into her natural god form - a flurry of black wings and gleaming talons. The man rolled off of his screaming wife and scrambled for something to fight with, but the best he could manage was a clay pot that shattered harmlessly off of Nemesis's god-skin. Nemesis rushed forward with a baleful scream, grabbed the man, and flew through the wooden door of the farm house, using him as a battering ram. She tossed him as they cleared the doorway, looped upward and then swooped down on him. In her godly form, she weighed in at over four hundred pounds - enough that when she landed on him she crushing his legs, snapping both of his femurs.

The man screamed in anguish and begged for mercy. He began promising everything he had and more as bribes to appease her. The more he screamed, the better Nemesis felt - not emotionally, but physically. The world grew sharper, she felt faster, stronger, younger. Lightning flickered at the tips of her claws for the first time in years. His terror was feeding her like no amount of rabbits or snakes ever could. She plunged her sparking talons into his abdomen, hooked them through his flesh and began slowly pulling it away. Every scream, every plea, replenished a long dry well of energy.

She was all but lost in the ecstasy of his fear when the man's wife struck her from behind. The broom handle she used broke uselessly on Nemesis's back, but it startled her out of her feeding frenzy and triggered memories of her confrontation with Tellus and Minia. Nemesis stood up and grabbed the woman's shortened weapon as the wife attacked again.

"I'm not here to hurt you or your children," Nemesis said. She shrank down to her human form and manifested some humble clothes with a sparkle, to emphasize her point. "Just let me dispose of this garbage and you can go on with your life."

"No!" the woman wailed, "Leave my husband alone!" She dropped the stick and began attacking Nemesis with her fists. Nemesis flinched from the first few hits, but reverted to her god form. In that form, a punch from another god could have hurt Nemesis, but the frantic pounding of the small mortal was mostly just confusing.

The boy who'd stood up to his father ran out of the house and pulled his mother away. He told the woman that his sisters were frightened, and convinced her that they needed her. The mother staggered back, sobbing and ran back into their home, cursing Nemesis.

When his mother was out of earshot, the boy asked flatly, "Is he dead?"

Nemesis stepped off of the mangled man. His chest was heaving, struggling to get air as blood pumped from the wounds in his abdomen.

"Save me..." he rasped to his son, "Have mercy," he begged Nemesis.

"The crops have had a poor yield this year," the boy said, "and I have so many brothers and sisters to support... I don't think we can afford to feed a cripple."

Nemesis was surprised at the child's coldness, but the three inch gash along the side of his face that narrowly missed his eye was a grim reminder of what sort of home he'd been raised in. Nemesis summoned a small bolt of electricity and slammed it into the dying man's chest, stopping his heart.

"Thank you," the boy said, "for ending it quickly."

"Your mother wanted to save him," Nemesis said, "He was torturing her. He would have cared nothing for her life if their roles had been reversed. But she attacked me, trying to save him."

"Well, he always said women are stupid."

That was painful to hear, "You don't really believe that do you?"

"He beat us, all of us," the boy said, "even when he was sober. And when he was drunk he did worse things to my sisters. But she defended him. She always defended him. Against my grandparents - even against his parents when they found out. She cooked for him, cleaned up after him, nursed him through illness, and bore him nine children. She pampered him at every turn while he tormented us. So..." the boy sighed, "maybe women aren't stupid, but my mother must certainly be a fool. Isn't she?"

 Nemesis thought about it for a moment, "Achaean marriage is an institution of loyalty; women are expected to side with and support their husbands no matter the circumstances. Greek men show the same devotion to their kings. I've seen those men reduced to cold meat by the engine of war, for no reason but to appease their master's vanity or fill his coffers. Are they foolish?" Nemesis asked, "Or are they sacrificing themselves for what they believe is a greater good?"

"I don't know," the boy said honestly.

"Then I'd give your mother the same benefit of doubt you'd give them," Nemesis said.

The boy thought about her words for a long moment, and finally nodded, "You are very wise, and... kind. Rhamnous is fortunate to have such a goddess watching over it. I shall sacrifice our best chicken to you, and remember you when I pray for guidance."

Nemesis smiled at the boy, "Go to your mother now, I'll take care of this," she said as she picked up the heavy man's body almost effortlessly.