Artemis sheds her skin easily, peeling the divine layer off like a husk. She wriggles into whatever shape suits her best. The sleek lines of a wild cat, the sharp teeth and fast paws of one of her hunting dogs, the bounding legs and dark eyes of a deer. 

Bears, lions, fleck-winged falcons—she’s been them all. 

But whatever she is, Artemis is entirely herself. 

Her first request was for freedom—nothing to tie her down to four walls and a collection of body parts. Who would ask for such a thing? 

Aphrodite speaks of sighs and pleasure, the all-powerful grasp she has on mortals. It seems like that’s all the other gods speak of, seduction and what goes on behind closed doors.

Her huntresses sometimes leave her for it. This all-encompassing attraction. 

Artemis leaps or flies to their doors. Knocks at the entrance. Begs them to run with her again. But they stay inside, content with their closed lives.

Artemis doesn’t understand why. 

She knows what it is to want—she wants sacrifices, fresh meat, the chase. She longs to race down a mountain at high speed, the wind whipping until it rattles her bones. Yet she has never wanted something enough to carve herself away. 

She can understand romance. It is sex she can’t make sense of. 

She could have spent forever in Orion’s company. They hunted in tandem, both in perfect lockstep. When they spoke, there was no expectation, no trap waiting to spring. No Eros hiding around the corner with his bow loaded. 

But Apollo did not see how love could be unbound from physical shape. For him, love meant touch. He refused to believe her definition could be different. So he tricked her into loosening an arrow that killed Orion and love on her terms. 

Artemis has tried to explain what that love felt like—multiple times. Her heart pounded, but there was no desire. No desperation like Atalanta once described to her, defending her liaison with Hippomenes in Rhea’s temple. As if Atalanta had no choice but to go in there with her husband. 

She can understand wanting children, at least abstractly. 

She cared for Atalanta as a child. Took Hippolytus under her metaphorical and literal wing. 

She simply has no interest in the process that makes them. Giving into that would be like cutting the moonlight out of her hair (or fur, or feathers, as the case may be.) She cannot shift who she is inside. 

The moon has its cycle, from crescent to whole and back again. It reveals a different part of its face each day, but it is still the same stone set in the same sky. 

If Artemis sweeps tiger stripes down her back and covers herself in fish scales, what does it matter? She is capable of many things, kindness and cruelty. 

If Artemis punishes what she does not understand, it is only because the world has done the same to her.