Ataecina leaned forward. "The sun does as it must. The dry is my season. It is the time when things must go into the ground, rot, and be forgotten. That is my gift. Forgetting. Death."
She was not huge, nor terrible in a monstrous way. She was the size of a mortal woman, but the air around her sweated with power. In her right hand, she held a hammer to crack open skulls. In her left, a pomegranate, its seeds glistening like drops of blood. spanish diosa!
And deep in the Mons Sacer, she listened to the rain fall on the earth above, and she smiled, turning a skull over in her hands like a favorite marble, waiting for the next shepherd brave enough to come and listen. Ataecina leaned forward
She was not a gentle goddess of sunlit meadows. Ataecina was the Diosa Madre , but a mother of a profound and terrifying kind. Her skin was the pale grey of river stones in shadow, and her hair fell like cascading black water, woven with bones of small animals and the first pale crocuses that bloom in late winter. Her eyes held the still, knowing darkness of a deep well. The Romans, when they came, would try to fuse her with their Proserpina, but they failed. Ataecina was no kidnapped bride; she was the sovereign of her own shadow. It is the time when things must go
The story begins not in her cave, but in the world above, in a year of terrible drought. The sun, Helios (for the Romans had brought their names), beat down on the lands of the Vettones tribe. The river Tajo shrank to a muddy trickle. The acorns, the lifeblood of the people and their prized black Iberian pigs, shriveled on the branches. The cattle lowed in agony.