Ichor and Ambrosia

Mid-June was always the rainiest season on Sifnos, with its calm yet steady rainfall. The verdant grassy knolls rolled on and on across the gray backdrop of clouds, and amongst the stony landscape crowded by a herd of sheep sat a lowly homestead where a soldier named Heron and his wife Myrrhine had made their lives. They were rich by no means, but Heron's faithful service in battle had earned him two slaves; one man and one woman. The man, Theophilus, died in a stampede, though not before the nameless woman had taken his seed.

On the day of his birth, the summer air was humid and sticky, a comfort the people of Sifnos had come to enjoy over the many decades of living on the island. Heron and Myrrhine lived in a long, stone house with a lean-to for their livestock and a small garden for their annual harvest. A smaller, cramped hut sat a stone’s throw away from the farm, for the new slaves to live away from the masters.

And now the nameless woman lay in her bed of blood, cradling her newborn in her arms. “Acacius,” she breathed. “Innocence.”

Rain pattered down on the stone hut, with a small cast of crows who watched the dying woman with tears in her eyes. Myrrhine took the child from his mother's arms and marked him with the numeral I, for he was the first of his mother's children, and the last as she breathed her dying breath.