minutia_r

When I participate in fanfic exchanges, I often mean to write treats. Sometimes I even start writing treats. The only treat I've ever successfully finished and posted was for cordialcount this purimgifts, and that was because I originally thought I was going to use it as one of the assigned stories but due to the peculiar rules of purimgifts I ended up not doing that.

I tell you that to tell you this: Sorry, betony, seeing as how I only posted my assigned fic just now, it doesn't look like I'll have time to finish the treat I meant to write you. And seeing as how I never seem to find the motivation to finish these things after the collections open, I'm just going to post what I've got as your Sunday, er, fifteen.

O Goddess, don’t let me be mad.

There is bird’s blood under your fingernails, and the tang of iron in your nostrils; you have just offered a sacrifice to a half-forgotten character from the books in your father’s library that no one imagined you knew how to read. As clear a sign of madness as anyone could ask for, she would say, the sharp-tongued girl you used to be. But nothing is clear anymore.

There is no sweet savor of smoke ascending to heaven. The fowl is raw and bloody, as sacrifices to me often are. O daughter, could you not have offered sacrifice to Athena, wise counselor, victorious in battle? Or Nemesis, of the dark eyes and the bright knife; she would have heard your prayer.

Or, having addressed your petition to me, you might have asked for madness. That lies within my power to grant. My husband’s arrows blind, but I can charm the reason and bewitch the senses. Instead of listening with your heart in your throat for a tread muffled by the herb-strewn floor, and eating your meals hunched over as if every morsel might be snatched from you, you might have glided through alabaster palaces in a dream, and feasted on phoenix and leviathan. But you asked for clear sight.

Did you think that my light would show your husband a kind man, your father a wise one, your story a comedy? When my sisters said I had married a monster, I knew better, and you know better, when they say you have not.

This is actually a combination of a prompt from rarewomen (the goddess Psyche deals with a petitioner) and a prompt from the 3 sentence ficathon (Katherine of Taming of the Shrew killing Petrucchio with kindness).