Who: Lethe and OPEN What: Rebirth Where: Central Park When: Around 11am, Monday Rating: TBD
It was a mixed blessing, as Memory's favours often were. Lethe would not forget how it had felt to die, however much she might like to - the agonising pain that had swallowed up everything else as the knife plunged into her heart, and the rage-infused face of the woman behind it, all of it burned indelibly into her mind. She would not forget, either, the horror of fading, of losing herself, of drowning. But nor would she forget anything else. She was complete again.
She had spent the next several days at her river, gathering strength. She drew shamelessly from the shades - those who, having drunk of her water, now wandered without aim or purpose along her shores - as well as the less-defined spectres of those still living, the amnesiacs and Alzheimer's sufferers whose souls waded obliviously in her shallows. Lethe had never been the best-known of the Underworld waterways, and Guns' and Ares' assaults on the Greek texts had left her weak, but though her worshippers were few, she would always find power in her own element. The blank spaces in one's recollection, the name that sat on the tip of the tongue but refused to go any further, anywhere her waters had smoothed and eroded the rough edges of memory - that was where Lethe's power resided, and it was here in her river where all of those places converged.
It had been no hassle, returning to the mortal plane. All rivers flowed into one another, after a fashion, even those of the Underworld, and she navigated her way through the waters with greater speed and certainty than ever she had been able on land. Lethe may not have been born of Okeanos, but she was still a Potamos in her own right.
She emerged in Central Park, and the same stream by which she had died less than a week earlier, and pausing beneath the half-melted ice considered her next move. A body. That was more involved. Her old one was beyond repair; in all likelihood, it had already dissolved back into the nothingness from which it had been shaped. She would have to fashion a new one for herself, a task that did not come naturally to Lethe. Her being was water, her building blocks oblivion, two things quite resistant to form by their nature. To force a thing to go against its character in such a way was not impossible, but it did require a greater exertion.
Gathering her power, Lethe began to pour up out of the stream. Where it touched the ground, the silvery dark liquid that was her being did not seep into the soil as ordinary water would have done. Instead, it began to expand, first growing in volume and height, then gradually finding definition - a head, a neck, then limbs--
Then, abruptly, a dry gasp as air rushed into her newly-formed lungs, and Lethe staggered to her hands and knees, wobbly as a new-born foal.
She exhaled, almost a sigh. Sapped from the effort, she let herself slump where she had fallen, naked as a babe and shivering in the dirt.