Oh-so-belatedly
- In my mind, Lethe is the youngest of Eris' brood.
- In her truest form, Lethe is the River. She had no childhood in a physical sense, as water is ageless, and her physical body has always looked much the way it does today.
- Her knowledge of the world came almost entirely from the memories she had taken from the dead. In theory she knew much - she had seen the earth entire through their borrowed recollections - but ultimately she was still a child who, though she held the memories of thousands, did not have the necessary understanding to contextualise this knowledge. A thousand different perspectives, biases, experiences, superstitions, educations, personal values - all absorbed without discrimination - left her deeply confused (and rather a bit intimidated) by the simplest of things, while she might demonstrate flawless knowledge on the most inane subjects. I don't know if I explained that coherently.
- She was a painfully shy child, inclined to hide in the deeps whenever she sensed anyone approaching her river.
- Nyx, I think, was probably more of a mother to Lethe than Eris ever was. As a child she barely knew Eris at all, and indeed was quite terrified of the snake-eyed woman who called herself Mother.
- Although physically 'older' than most of her brothers and sisters, she was the youngest and they were all too happy to take advantage of that. Lethe truly was the odd one out in a family of murderers, fighters, torturers, liars and lawbreakers, and her siblings were quick to single her out with taunts and bullying. (Horkos was the one abstainer, and he's probably the only one she has ever related to.) This almost certainly contributed to her timid, introverted demeanour as a child.
In time she gained confidence, both in herself and in her power, and her office commanded... well, if not respect then at least wariness enough to produce something grudgingly similar in her siblings' demeanour, but the discomfort she feels in their presence has never faded.
- Lethe has never been one to use her power flippantly. She takes her responsibilities very seriously: the waters of the Lethe were meant to cleanse the dead of their identities, to relieve all the pains and miseries of their mortal lives and, ultimately, to prepare them for reincarnation. They were never intended for the living, and Lethe makes very few exceptions.
- Though known as the river of forgetfulness, she does have some limited ability to restore memories. She can give back the memories she has personally taken, although the memory becomes more and more difficult to recover the longer it has been left to dissolve in her waters. She can also direct her waters not to touch a specific memory, the result being that the holder of that memory cannot forget it - as seen with her wedding present for MJ and Heroin. Her real power, though, lies in taking memories away.
- She's pretty much always worked as a nurse, whether in a hospital, hospice, psychiatric ward or aged care facility - anywhere the disoriented and forgetful can be found in numbers. In America, as in the Underworld, Lethe seeks to relieve people of their struggles and ease their passage into the next stage of their existence.