HIGHLY COMMENDED
in the Frazzled Lit Short Story Award 2025!
Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world... Of happy men that have the power to die, And grassy barrows of the happier dead. Release me, and restore me to the ground; Selected excerpts from Tithonus, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Do you forget that he – him, my Tithonus – was just one of many princes of Troy? What else could he have been, when his shine was so unjustly overshadowed by the much-fated Priam? What would he have been but another plaything of us gods, another used-up corpse on that much-bloodied battlefield, if I had not loved him?
I knew him from boyhood. He would awake in the dark and face east, waiting for me with the same constancy with which I broke each morning, rosy-fingered and new. I am the dawn and all that is alight by my hand owns me in part, but even then it is to him I wished to truly belong. I bathed him in my warmth and chased away all shadows, leaving his beauty burning like my brother god the sun, lingering long and leaving skies tinged misty pink as mortals finished their fast and began to work the fields. My siblings teased me mercilessly but it was glorious, to be patient. To discover suddenly what it was to wait for time to pass.
I have been bed mate to the stars, have birthed the winds, but in all my endless days it was the possibility of what this mortal child could become that felt like true godliness;
for at first, he was but a promise: so golden and splendid in his coltish love. As the days grew shorter and the winter paled and quickened my light (though its dimness was a necessary, fleeting thing) still, still! He shivered in pelts and leant into me, eyes closed and lips wistful. Would any other worshipper have done so?
I caressed him as best I could through all seasons, tracing the lines of his slow broadening shoulders, rising as leisurely as I dared over his thick, honeyed hair. My light is cyclical, but my love was constant and
how I loved him, I loved him, I loved him.
Besides Tithonus, dearest to me were my brother and sister, Helios and Selene, the sun and moon. They watched over him when I could not; though often they liked to have me beg and plead to know how he fared when I was without him.
‘He is princely and wise, loved by the people, respectful to his father and honouring of his mother,’ admitted Helios.
‘You have strange taste, my love,’ Selene sighed, ‘though by firelight he does sing beautifully.’
How I ached to hear him sing.
Still I kept my distance, though on my most restless nights my sister might be persuaded to make for her bed early; and on occasion that my yearning should bring me to tears, Helios would take me with him as he rode out across the sky. While he flew across the mortal Earth and beat constantly onwards towards dusk, I looked backwards, always back, to see where Tithonus stood.
So I, Titan-born, waited. I waited until his beard had begun to grow and his spear had been bloodied. I waited, and handmaidens sighed with longing and nymphs and foreign princesses let their glances linger, but Tithonus was unwavering, he looked only for me. He could have chosen another then; when his beauty was known by all and the power of his stride shook dust from the earth, but when I at last bade him come away with me, he came willingly.
I took him to the end of the world, to Oceanus, so that we may lie by the river unseen by mortals or gods. There at last we kissed, and there at last I tasted the imperfections of his lips, smelt his hot sweat, the reek of him, felt his shallow, shaking breaths—
‘Eos,’ he whispered, ‘Aurora, oh sweetest of all goddesses, most lovely, most loved–’ I kissed him again, lest even at the edge of everything he was overheard, and his reverence for me taken as disdain for all others. To keep him hushed I placed my hands upon him, and my mouth upon him, and together we lay as man and wife.
After, I asked him to sing me a song.
So many men have written of me, of my loveliness and my brilliance and about all they would do for me. They would swim the wine-dark sea for my love, slay monsters and vanquish tyrants. They would walk through flames to keep me warm – me. Warm.
I have listened to so many promises of what men will conquer for love of the dawn – for the love of any goddess, any woman, any god or man –
it was entirely new to hear what a man might surrender.
You see? Even then he stood apart, my husband, my love. There in the grass he sung to me vows of sacrifice; how he would forsake all others to worship me, would give up all his strength to see my bright dawning, would bend low to see me soar –
the magnificence of my pleasure might have wrecked him, so I hid my smile in the salt-soaked crook of his arm.
You could have made me mortal, then. If you had come to me in that moment, sated and most beloved and asked, ‘Will you forsake your power and all eternity for this man?’ I would have told you yes, without hesitation. I would have veiled myself and followed him across land and sea, worked the loom and dressed his wounds. I would have cooked his meals and mixed his wine and let my teeth rot in my head. I am almost sure of it.
But the sun sets, he always sets. And then comes the moon and I must follow. So each morning I left my young husband sleeping on and went bleary-eyed to announce a new day.
To love a mortal was to perceive time, and now that was terrible. Never before had I considered anything I did to be a waste, nor had one thing deprived me of another. Yet now if I must rise – I must, always I must – then I must be away from my beloved. And though he himself was still too young to believe in its inevitability, I knew that sown alongside the bloom of his youth, his vibrant beauty, was the seed of his death, our parting.
My love became a savage thing. In the in-between of moon and sun, half-awake and greedy, I pressed my fingers over his breast. I could have pressed myself further, sunk through skin and snapped bone to reach his heart. I could have scooped it out whole and brought my mouth down to meet it for a first delicious bite, torn out the thrumming remnants of his heartbeat.
I am nothing, the world becomes nothing, if I do not dawn. But I would have done anything to hold back each day and keep Tithonus with me, to stop him going where I could not follow.
And so, I turned to Zeus.
It is no easy thing to beg a favour of the king of the gods, harder still to beg out of love for a mortal man. Mortal lives mean so little to him, and as for love, his melts quicker than beeswax. How many times had I watched him flee at the coming of my light, out of the bed of some nymph or goddess or queen or slave girl? How often had I seen him return, unashamed and still swollen with pleasure, in the form of some giant bird or beast or man, to lie beside his wife?
‘But he does come back,’ Hera would say, ‘he always comes back.’
And in the aftermath, he never interceded with whatever form Hera’s wrath took, lest she listed her grievances to him. No: the fate of most humans – no matter how great or terrible – had little meaning to Zeus, and for him Tithonus was naught but a freckle in my golden eye. I used all my loveliness, risked everything, to get what was needed.
So my eternal love took eternal form. In the after, invigored by his new immortality, my husband begun to follow me when I rose from our bed. As I worked above he hunted in the blaze of my rose-fingered light below. Across the land he ran, he ran, he ran, relishing his strength, revelling in his speed, counting each hot beat of his invincible heart. When I returned to him, the air was thick with richly laden herbs and the roasting of animal flesh, and I suckled the blood of his prey from his fingers. We were meeting again anew, the infinite now before us, and dawn came late for much of the seasons to follow. In that time I bore our two sons: our sweet, blessed boys, Memnon and Emathion.
As they grew, confronted by his seeded legacy – my other gifts – Tithonus started to take stock of himself. All that I had once catalogued with dread I now beheld with cherished reverence, and I smiled to see it become apparent to him. The beginning of an ache in his bones, the echo of his brilliant, crinkled smile lingering at the corners of his eyes.
‘Do you regret it, my love?’ he asked me then.
I told him no. Did he?
I ask you this: if I had chosen mortality, if I had succumbed to sagging and stooping and greying as I watched him do, would he have been able, truly, to love me still, as he does my godly form? And if with his immortality I had also begot him eternal youth, made him forever beautiful not just to me but to all who gazed upon him, could he have truly forsaken all others? You see then that I have saved him the anguish of making his young self a liar. That I have made him the rarest of things, alone among all creatures: an honest man.
When his bones began to wither, I let him lap ambrosia from my cupped hands, and though it soon became necessary for me to stop all my wifely caresses for fear of causing him pain, I was never anything but (am always nothing but) loving to him. Age has fractured his mind, so I have confined him to his chamber so as to keep each shard of memory contained within its walls. He picks through them endlessly, muttering as he works. I watched his once great city fall and wept alone over the broken bodies of our children; what does he have to recall but a life as sweet as honey?
When my work is done and the sun is high, I rest my ear to the door of his room and let the rhythm of his words soothe me to sleep. Sometimes, even now,
I hear him call my name.
There is the story of Tithonos, loved by Dawn with her arms of roses and she carried him off to the ends of the earth when he was beautiful and young. Even so was he gripped by white old age. He still has his deathless wife. — The beat goes on (fragment 58), Sappho
Ruby Allen-Cadman is an author and editor based in Edinburgh, Leith. She runs a social enterprise dedicated to diversifying publishing and storytelling called To Be Read, writes and performs stories for children and adults, and is incapable of finishing a cup of tea.
Find out more about To Be Read at https://linktr.ee/tobereadCIC
Ruby’s personal substack is at https://substack.com/@rubyallencadman