As Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, got ready to leave, her daughter came running up and tugged on her mother's silky dress with her tiny hands. As Ceres turned around a strong wind came and blew her glistening, blonde locks away from her face, flowing in the breeze. She looked down to see her daughter in a flowy blue sundress. She smiled down to her daughter. “What’s wrong my little angel?” Proserpina looked up into her mother’s eyes, "Mommy, can I please go down to the shore?" Proserpina begged with puppy dog eyes and her bottom lip jutted out. Ceres looked up from her daughter in the direction of the ocean and thought, she turned back to her daughter and agreed to let her go, “You can go as long as you stay by the sea nymphs, for they are trustworthy enough.” She worriedly told Proserpina to stay away from the forest before she went off in search of the sea nymphs. As soon as her mother finished, Proserpina excitedly jumped in the air, yelling “Thank you” and ran off toward the ocean. Ceres chuckled at her daughter's carefree youth. She then reached up and hauled herself into her dragon-drawn carriage and went off to care to her fields.
Sweating under the heat, Ceres was hard at work for a mere ten hours when all of a sudden, she heard an ear-piercing scream – “AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH”. Ceres shot her head up, frightened at the resemblance in the voice to her daughter's own. With wide eyes, Ceres searched all around her looking for the source of the scream. When she couldn't find anyone, Ceres hurried back to her little cottage by the shore. Ceres slammed the front door open, frantically searching for her daughter. Inside, her house was eerily quiet. “Where is my daughter?!” Ceres dangerously and frantically asked the sea nymphs. “She went out to the forest to pick some flowers to make a crown and told us to wait here. So that is what we have been doing popping our heads up every couple of minutes looking for her, but she has yet o return.” Proserpina wasn't by the ocean with the nymphs and wasn't in the forest either, she was nowhere to be found. The sun was setting and the sky was already darkening into a deep purple and orange. What Ceres found as she looked through the dark, mossy forest truly horrified her — a humongous hole in the ground with uprooted flowers tossed all around. Her heart sunk as she thought surely her daughter had been kidnapped by a horrible man and vowed to only rest once her beautiful, loving daughter was back in her sun-kissed arms.
Ceres lit a magical torch, that would only blow out once Proserpina was released from her evil capture and set off on her journey. Ceres was on a mission to find her daughter, and nothing would get in her way. It was already well into the night when she knocked on the fifteenth door. “Have you seen my daughter?” Ceres asked once again. Dark circles had started to appear under her eyes from her exhaustion. “No I haven’t seen your daughter. You should come inside and rest, you look very ti...
