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sliceoflife90 · 1 year ago

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The Cromlech of Stonehenge

The Stonehenge Cromlech, an ancient marvel towering majestically in the British countryside, represents the most famous and imposing stone circle, known as a cromlech. This extraordinary monument is composed of a circle of colossal megaliths, imposing upright stones that support horizontal connecting lintels, some of which rise impressively in height. Stonehenge is an ancient and fascinating example of a trilithic system, a structure built with three main elements: two vertical uprights and a horizontal lintel.

While the impressive stones of Stonehenge underwent modifications during reconstruction work in the first half of the 20th century, they still maintain an alignment that some believe faithfully reproduces the original one. This precision has led to speculation about Stonehenge's possible role as an ancient astronomical observatory, particularly relevant during solstices and equinoxes. However, the interpretation of its use for this purpose remains a subject of debate.

In addition to attracting tourists from around the world, Stonehenge holds deep significance for followers of Celtic traditions, Wicca, and other neopagan religions. Throughout its history, Stonehenge has also played a significant role as the site of a free music festival held from 1972 to 1984.

However, 1985 marked the end of this festival as the British government banned it following a violent clash between the police and some participants, an incident known as the Battle of Beanfield. Stonehenge, with its rich and varied history, continues to be a source of mystery, fascination, and spirituality for those who visit.

Detailed Description of Stonehenge:

The Altar Stone:

At the center of Stonehenge stands the imposing block of green sandstone known as the Altar Stone. This majestic monolith reaches a height of five meters and captivates with its imposing presence. The stone is carved from an extremely hard variety of siliceous sandstone, naturally sourced from about thirty kilometers to the north on the Marlborough Downs. Its geographical origin adds an element of mystery, highlighting the logistical complexity of ancient builders.

Inner Structure – Bluestone Horseshoe:

Within the main circle is the complex structure known as the Bluestone Horseshoe. This formation consists of much smaller stones, each with an average weight of four tons. Surprisingly, these stones traveled a long distance to reach Stonehenge, originating from the Preseli Mountains in southwestern Wales. The variety of stones, including dolerite, rhyolite, sandstone, and volcanic limestone ashes, adds a unique dimension to the geological complexity of Stonehenge.

The Heel Stone:

Once known as the Friar's Heel, this stone tells a captivating story related to its origins. According to a popular tale dating back at least to the 17th century, the devil himself purchased these stones from a woman in Ireland, wrapped them, and transported them to the Salisbury Plain. While one of the stones fell into the River Avon, the others were strategically placed on the plain. The devil, confident in his cunning, exclaimed, "No one will ever find out how these stones got here." However, a wise friar retorted, "That's what you think!" In response, the devil hurled one of the stones at the friar, striking him in the heel. The stone embedded in the ground, where it remains anchored to this day, a silent witness to an ancient showdown between good and evil.

Historical Mentions and Scientific Investigations of Stonehenge:

The historical roots of Stonehenge extend into the mists of time, capturing the interest of ancient writers and modern scholars. In the 1st century BCE, the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus mentioned a place similar to Stonehenge in his Bibliotheca Historica, referring to an island called Hyperborea, beyond the Celts, dedicated to Apollo. Some scholars in the past have speculated that Hyperborea could indicate Britain, and the spherical temple mentioned by Diodorus could be an early reference to Stonehenge.

However, archaeologist Aubrey Burl has cast doubts on this theory, as some parts of Diodorus's description do not seem to fully reconcile with Stonehenge and its surrounding geography. Burl particularly highlighted the mention of Apollo "touching the earth at a very low height," a phenomenon incompatible with the latitude of Stonehenge.

The earliest detailed investigations into Stonehenge date back to 1640 when John Aubrey proclaimed the monument the work of Druids, an idea later amplified by William Stukeley. Aubrey, a pioneer in site analysis, created the first detailed drawings, laying the groundwork for a better understanding of its form and significance. From 1740 onwards, architect John Wood conducted further research, interpreting Stonehenge as a site for pagan rituals. This interpretation, criticized by Stukeley, reflected the beliefs of the time about the nature of the monument.

Isaac Newton, influenced by Stukeley, undertook a symbolic analysis of Stonehenge's stones in the context of the non-geocentric configuration of the solar system. This perspective, derived from his conception of a perfect model based on the Temple of Jerusalem, suggested that the builders of Stonehenge possessed ancient scientific knowledge.

Radiocarbon dating has revealed that Stonehenge underwent construction phases between 3100 BCE and 1600 BCE, with the circular earthen mound and ditch built in 3100 BCE. The visible stones today mainly belong to the Stonehenge 3 phase (2600 BCE – 1600 BCE). Recent research, such as the 2020 XRF spectrophotometry, has provided new data, indicating a dating of 2500 BCE.

Theories about the construction of Stonehenge, once tied to the Druids, have been challenged considering the late spread of Celtic society. Moreover, the practice of Druid rituals in forests suggests that Stonehenge might not have been the ideal place for their "earth rituals." Ongoing scientific research is gradually unraveling the mysteries of this monument, shedding new light on its past and true nature.

Controversies and Discoveries:

Restorations and Disputes:

Since the early 19th century, a series of modifications and restorations have shaped Stonehenge's current appearance. Victorian engineers, with zeal and preservation intentions, positioned many of the fallen stones in their current locations. Recent research indicates that these restoration works continued into the 1970s, introducing substantial changes to the original arrangement. Archaeologists from English Heritage acknowledge that, without these interventions, Stonehenge would look significantly different today. Very few stones still retain their original positions, erected millennia ago.

Discoveries in the Vicinity:

Just 3 km from Stonehenge, researchers from the National Geographic Society discovered a village dating back to 2600 BCE. This settlement, consisting of approximately twenty-five small dwellings, is presumed to have accommodated builders of the complex or participants in specific ceremonies. This discovery provides a broader insight into the life and social organization of ancient times, connecting Stonehenge's history to a wider context.

Prehistoric Astronomical Observatory:

Stonehenge's function as a prehistoric astronomical observatory is a subject of debate. The monument's axis is oriented towards sunrise during summer solstices, suggesting a connection with astronomy. However, this orientation does not occur during winter solstices, fueling mystery and conflicting interpretations about its real utility. The complexity of Stonehenge continues to intrigue scholars and enthusiasts, and its alleged astral function adds a layer of mystery to its history.

Denial of Roman Theories:

Contrary to the theories of Inigo Jones and others, suggesting that Stonehenge could have been built as a Roman temple, the historical fact that the Romans first arrived on the British Isles with the arrival of Julius Caesar in 55 BCE negates these hypotheses. Stonehenge, with its intricate history and connection to distant eras, continues to challenge and fascinate those seeking to unravel its secrets hidden over millennia.

Theories about Construction:

Extraction and Transport of Large Stones:

The majestic stones of Stonehenge, some of which weigh an impressive 25/50 tons and are made of gneiss, were extracted from a hill located 30 km from the archaeological site. The process of transporting these massive stones involved the use of sledges sliding on wooden rollers, pulled by dozens of men through likely collective efforts. This titanic operation represents an extraordinary expression of engineering capabilities of the time.

Origin of Smaller Stones:

The smaller stones, an integral part of Stonehenge, were extracted from various locations, expanding the logistical complexity of the project. A site just 3 km away contributed some of these stones, while others were extracted from more distant sites, including a location in Wales over 200 km away. The variety of sources underscores the geographic scope of the efforts made for the construction of Stonehenge.

New Research and Rejection of Previous Theories:

A study published in June 2018 challenged the previous theories of geologist Herbert Henry Thomas from 1923, which had influenced the scientific community regarding specific extraction sites and stone transport methods. The new research suggests that the Bristol Channel was not used as previously supposed, but that the stones might have been transported through internal roads. Additionally, it is hypothesized that the Altar Stone could come from Senni Beds, a sandstone formation extending through Wales to Herefordshire in eastern Wales. This conceptual shift sheds new light on the intricate logistics of Stonehenge.

Erection and Construction Process:

The raising of the vertical stones involved a complex process. Initially, the stones were dragged to a hole in the ground, then slid into the hole using a lever system resting against a "castle" of logs. Once in the upright position, the stones were secured using ropes, and the hole was filled with stones. The assembly of the lintel occurred gradually, using wooden scaffolding and levers, highlighting the technical mastery of Stonehenge's prehistoric builders.

Legends and Myths Surrounding Stonehenge:

Association with King Arthur:

Stonehenge is shrouded in the legend of King Arthur, where the wizard Merlin would have requested the removal of the monument from Ireland, originally built on Mount Killaraus by giants who transported the stones from Africa. After being rebuilt near Amesbury, the legend states that Uther Pendragon and later Constantine III were buried inside the stone circle. This mythical connection adds an epic charm to Stonehenge's story, intertwining the ancient monument with the legends of one of Britain's most famous rulers.

Similar Neolithic Circles:

Stonehenge is not the only prominent Neolithic circle, and several similar structures date approximately to the same era. Among these, the "Ring of Brodgar" in northern Scotland offers another example of Neolithic complexity. Additionally, a similar circle, dating to around 4900 BCE, is found in Goseck, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. These structures suggest the presence of ancient communities sharing ideas and construction practices.

Calendar Circle at Nabta Playa:

A complex known as the "Calendar Circle," originally built at Nabta Playa and now displayed at the Nubian Museum in Aswan, predates Stonehenge by at least a thousand years. This ancient structure, with its astronomical implications, highlights the diversity and spread of construction practices in ancient times.

Megalithic Circles in Italy:

In Italy, several examples of megalithic circles are found in Sardinia, adding a touch of mystery and global connection. The "Circle of Li Muri" in Arzachena and the "Circle of Pranu Muttedu" in Goni are examples of ancient megalithic achievements that emphasize the presence of common practices in different regions of the ancient world. These testimonies speak of a past rich in symbolism and meaning, where communities expressed their connection with the divine through majestic stone constructions.

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classicalmonuments · 4 years ago

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Odeon of Amman

Philadelphia (Amman), Jordan

2nd century CE

500 seats

Odeon ("singing place") is the name for several ancient Greek and Roman buildings built for music: singing exercises, musical shows, poetry competitions, and the like. Archaeologists have speculated that the Odeon of Amman was most likely closed by a temporary wooden roof that shielded the audience from the weather.

This Odeum is a Roman one, built in the 2nd century CE, at the same time as the Roman Theatre next to it.

Sources and more text below.

“The small theatre, or odeum, faces west upon the open space in front of the great theatre. Its southwest angle is about 5 m. east, and 14 m. north of the northeast angle of the theatre. It was built up entirely from the ground level and consisted of an outer west wall with five entrances in it, an inner wall, or proscenium, connected with the outer wall by a tunnel vault, two massive towers which formed the parascenia, and a small cavea divided by a single praecinctio. Of these parts, the first, or western wall, with three of its portals is standing to the height of one story; the doorways on the ends have fallen with the collapse of the angles, leaving one jamb of each with the springers of the relieving arches above them; the inner wall is partly preserved, and portions of the vaulting of the passage between the two walls are still in place; the southern tower is intact in two stories, and its west wall rises to a height of about 15 meters, but the opposite tower is a heap of ruins. The exterior curve of the cavea may still be traced at certain points; but the interior is filled with a mass of debris caused by the collapse of the northern tower and the high wall of the scaena, both of which fell inward. The ruin must have long served as a quarry; for almost all the seats that are not buried in debris have been removed. It was possible for me to find only short sections of four seats, at the extreme end on the south, and here I was also able to secure the measurements of the praecintio. It is plain that this building, though badly ruined, in 1881, when Captain Conder gathered the materials for his plan1 of the odeum, was not in the demolished condition in which we found it twenty-three years later·, for there are details in his description that are not to be found today. Captain Conder published only a plan on a very small scale without any details in the cavea; but his description gives a number of accurate measurements. With these as a check I am able to present the accompanying plan (Ill. 34), for which I cannot lay claim to accuracy in details, and a cross-section which is based largely upon conjecture. Plan. It is not possible, from the minuteness of its scale, to ascertain the precise measurements of Captain Conder’s plan of the odeum, where they are not definitely mentioned in the text; but so far as they are obtainable with the aid of the scale of feet given, they are substantially the same as those which I took. The whole structure, from the front wall to the exterior curve of the cavea, measures 35 m., or, according to Captain Conder’s plan, a little over 100 feet; the extreme width of the cavea is 40 in.; in Conder’s plan, about 125 feet; the stage building, at the middle, through both walls and the vaulted passage measures 7.48 m., in the other plan 25 feet. The old plan gives but three portals in the west wall, and makes this wall shorter than the width of the cavea; Captain Conder apparently did not observe that this wall terminates at either end in a door-jamb with the springers of a relieving arch over it; one of these jambs is shown in the photograph3 published by Captain Conder, the other may be seen in Ill. 35. These doors were of the same dimensions as the others, and, when they are restored, the length of the west wall will be equal to the width of the cavea. Captain Conder shows towers projecting inward at either end of the scaena wall; he states in the text that one of these towers measures 11 feet east and west, and 25 feet north and south. By this he must have meant that the north side adjoining the scaena wall measures 11 feet, and that the east wall was 25 feet long outside; for the south wall of the tower, now standing, is nearly 5 m. long. The earlier plan moreover places the centre of the semicircles of the cavea upon a line connecting the angles of these towers; but such a centre will not give a radius long enough to touch the rear curve of the cavea, which we agree is 35 m. from the west wall, without increasing the width of the cavea which we know to be 40 m. The measurement from the wall of the praecinctio at one end, to the corresponding point opposite is 24.15 m. In my plan I have therefore moved the centre backward 4 m. and I have constructed the semicircles of the cavea within the prescribed dimensions. This arrangement gives a space 4 meters wide for the paradoi. Down under the debris on the north side I measured a vault 4 meters wide, east and west, and a series of carved voussoirs of an arch that must have had a span of at least 3.70 m. I believe that the vault was the vault of the parados and that the arch-stones belonged to the arch which opened from it toward the orchestra. Captain Conder found seven rows of seats above the praecinctio; there could never have been more, if there were any passage at the top of the cavea: I found only four rows of seats, and no remains of seats below the praecinctio have ever been reported. Captain Conder describes three vomitoria from the cavea, one in the middle of the curve and one on either side. Only the barest remains of these are now visible. It is evident that these led from the praecinctio down to the level of the ground outside. The side of one such opening in the wall of the praecinctio is still to be seen on the south side at a distance of 5.75 m. from the tower wall. If the height of the praecinctio above the ground level be as I have indicated it, the steps of the vomitoria will descend from the praecinctio to the ground level at the outer curve of the cavea wall, at the same angle as the steps of the scalae within. These exits, of course, had vaults; these are likened, by Captain Conder, to segments of a hollow cone. Supers true hire. Satisfactory measurements of heights are out of the question in a ruin so filled with debris, unless the debris is removed; I have attempted to give a cross section, reconstructed in, what seems to me, the most logical method with the data in hand, and from what we know of the other buildings of a similar character. The ground level is, of course, unobtainable in a ruin of this character; but one may begin with the praecinctio, of which a small section is preserved, and place above it seven rows of seats with a narrow passage above them; parts of a scala are to be seen near the south end; the seats and the praecinctio terminate against the long wall of the tower. Of this much we may be reasonably certain; but the reconstruction of the cavea below the praecinctio depends entirely upon the existence of paradoi passing under the praecinctio and the upper section of seats at their extreme ends (Ill. 34). If there were paradoi at this point, a complete half circle of seats must be provided for within, i. e., east of, the paradoi, and the number of seats must be great enough to furnish height for the entrances on either side. I have assumed that the vault 4 m. wide is the vault of the parados, and that the voussoirs belonged to the arch of the entrance, and have therefore given a height to the lower section of the cavea, that will allow for ten rows of seats and a barrier about the orchestra 70 cm. in height. This arrangement provides for an orchestra 10.75 m. in diameter, and the semicircle of the orchestra, if continued to a circle would be tangent to the front line of a stage 2 m. deep. The standing portion of the south tower still towers above the rest of the ruin (Ill. 35), but in 1881, according to Captain Conder’s photograph, it was much higher, and was estimated by him to be 50 feet, about 17 m. high. This would give a scaena wall of at least that height. From indications in my photograph, as well as that published by Captain Conder, it is evident that there were large arched windows in the first story of the scaena wall above the vaulted passage at the rear of the stage: the jamb of the window and one voussoir are to be seen at the north side of the tower where a short section of the scaena wall is still in situ. It is very doubtful if the front wall of the odeum was carried up for an upper story; there is hardly enough debris to warrant it; yet this might have been carried away for building material; but the fact that the west wall of the tower, and the face of the section of the scaena wall still clinging to the tower, are both faced with draughted masonry, seems to show that they were exterior walls, although the rustication is carried to the base of the tower behind the vaulted passage of the postscenium. The outer wall is of finely dressed smooth ashlar, the portals were provided with arches of discharge above flat, three- piece lintels, the frame mouldings are of good but simple profile. On either side of the middle portal was a semicircular niche, and in the next spaces were rectangular niches with round arches. Beside each relieving- arch there were corbels in the wall which were more probably inserted to sustain the beams of a colonnade than to hold statues. The greater part of the ornamental details of the building has disappeared. The interior contains among its heaps of broken fragments several fine pieces of well wrought friezes and cornices which show that the scaena was richly adorned with entablat- ures. The mouldings of the seats were substantially like those of the great theatre (Ill. 34, detail), and have no resemblance to the detail given by Captain Conder, which must have been made from a broken example. “

(Text is told first hand by Howard Crosby Butler, who wrote the Syria series)

Sources: 1, 2

#art #Architecture #travel #history #roman #roman art #roman architecture #odeum #odeon #theatre #theater #amman #jordan #Philadelphia #2 ce #corinthian #roman theater #roman theatre

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yandere-wishes · 4 years ago

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💔Rotten Love💔 //Twisted Wonderland Yandere Idia Shroud X Yandere Eliza X Reader// Part 1

GIF made by the amazing @flowerofthemoonworld. Okay, so this story is really going to have a Persephone x Reader x Hades vibe to it. If we can get this to 160 likes before July 12 than I’ll release part 2. For now, my goal is to make it a 4 part story with a bonus 5th fluff chapter. Also for this story reader will be GENDER NEUTRAL.

WARNING: Gore, Angst

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There was always a cold, nostalgic air in the Ignihyde dormitory, a sort of homey sensation that made Eliza's heart skip a beat. Sure the dorm was quiet and secluded, unlike the ghost kingdom, there was barely anyone to talk to. Most may have even described it as "lonesome" and "boring". But to princess Eliza who had waited more than five hundred years to be with her prince charming, it was unadulterated, homespun bliss. Of course, there was still something missing, a tiny puzzle piece that refused to fit in with the rest of its kind, a stubborn little piece it was, yet all too important to paint the picture of her perfect life. That mulish fragment came in the form of her newly wedded husband, Idia Shroud.

"Idia~"

The "young" princess sang as she skipped over to where her "husband" was sitting, his posture crooked, like that of a scrunched up cat's. His long slender fingers where typing rapidly on that bizarre rectangular device that he all too attached to. Way too attached to, for Eliza's liking.

Eliza nuzzled her visage into the crook of the bleached-skinned boy's neck, taking in his smokey, ash-like sent. Her icy colored arms wafted over his shoulders, enclosing them his a tight embrace. Her fingers dangled over where his heart was, feeling tiny fast-paced pulses that sent a pleased blush to her face. "Idia let's go for a walk near that river. Please, my love! You haven't left this room since the reception!"

The taller male barely turned to look at her, preferring to instead to keep his eyes locked on his glowing blue screen. "Still busy Eliza" his cold dead voice was always so sharp and monotone whenever he spoke to her. It felt like someone was reaching into her rib cage and squeezing her decaying heart. Her voice cracked into a thousand tiny shards, as she tried to form a comprehensible answer. He might as well have told her to die again and rot in the deepest parts of hell. He doesn't love me....he'll never love me. The relation was like a heavy chronic toxic gas levitating overhead. Easy to overlook but still there, always there. Idia didn't move, if Eliza's arms weren't wrapped around his shoulders feeling every breath he took, she might have mistaken him for a statue. No, not a statue, she thought, some sort of sculpture of an ancient Greek God. A divine being set in stone resting in an altar, waiting for reparations and benedictions. 'I'd gladly pray at your feet every day. I'd sacrifice everything I had just for you to smile that charming smile at me'. The ghost thought to herself.

For an endless minute, the darkroom fell into a thick, suffocating silence. Neither Eliza nor Idia moved both too scared of breaking some invisible glass wall they had put up around them. However, no amount of serenity could dispose of the awkwardness, and annoyance Idia was beginning to feel. "You know" the lord of the dead began "maybe you should talk to the principle about join the school full time. It would give you more to do than breathing over my shoulder" despite Idia's tone harboring no malice, Eliza still flinched in shock. Her body going rigid, stiffening as if she was going into Rigor Mortis again.

HE DOESN'T WANT YOU HERE!

The voice in her head screamed,

HE HATES YOU!

Louder...

WHY CANT YOU LEAVE HIM ALONE

"Please stop" she whispered

YOU DON’T DESERVE YOUR PRINCE!

"If that's what you want" she finally replied in a broken voice.

"I'm... I'm only saying it for your sake," he muttered in a coaxing tone.

Deep down a delusional part of her wanted to scream that he was only saying all those harsh things for her own well-being. But she was still lucid enough to not believe those fallacies, imaginary words...Eliza perceived that her beloved prince Idia saw her as nothing more than a nuisance. One that he was far too eager to get rid of.

She couldn't bear the conversation any farther. Painfully slowly she peeled her arms off from around her so-called lover. In that taunting minute, Eliza swore she could feel billions upon billions of sharp needles piercing every piece of her dead body. She lingered in place staring at Idia's glowing, blazing hair. She didn't want to leave, she wanted to spend every second of her dead life with him! Touching him, kissing him, loving him! But he wouldn't love her! Why didn't he love her!! Without a customary goodbye or any form of acknowledgment, Eliza flew to the door. Swinging it open just a crack, wishing to slam it so hard that the whole underworld dorm would feel it. But alas she was still royalty and there was a politeness beaten into her every action. In the end after much debating, she closed the damn door quieter than a mouse. With a broken heart and eyes full of tears, princess Eliza began to hover up onto the surface of the school grounds.

WHY DOESN'T THAT SELFISH BASTARD LOVE ME!

A simple blaring thought that reverberated through Eliza's nonexistent skull as she marched through the glowing green halls of Night Raven College. Unlike Ignihyde, the rest of the school still felt rather alien and terrifying to the girl. She'd only been in the cafeteria for a short amount of time. Only to finish up her official marriage to Idia. After the marriage -and much persuasion from his friend with grey hair and glasses- Idia had carried Eliza in the traditional manner a groom must carry a bride, to the hall of mirrors and straight to Ignyhde. Neither of them had left Idia's room since then.

It was a rather short memory but one that always placed a smile on Eliza's face. Rather than remembering the halls, Eliza had been all too bewitched by Idia's shy golden gaze, his bloody red face, and his kissable thin blue lips. Such a darling memory that she would always cherish within her rotten heart.

But as the minutes ticked away and Eliza passed hallway after hallway all identical to one another, she soon began to wish that she'd paid more attention to the whereabouts of the school's rooms and offices. The headmaster's office seemed to be missing from this endless maze. Behind every corner was the same tiled floor, candles lit by a mystical green light and windows so large they put the countless classroom doors to shame. Every few minutes a crowd of students would pass by, disappearing behind another wall withing second. No one noticed her, which was rather odd considering she was the only female in an all-boys school, her purple dress and feminine curves were proof enough of that. "I guess this is the result of being a ghost, wandering the land of the living" She whispered hopelessly to herself. "You're invisible when you're me..."

The eighth turn that Eliza took brought her to a small cluster of peculiar students. Some donning ears and tails like those of wild beasts, while the other had odd features resembling Ortho's limps. Metallic and reflective. They were laughing at something, attentions enclosed within their small groups. A measly thought flew into Eliza's head, why not speak up? Raise your voice and ask where she could locate the headmaster of this complex establishment.

"Excuse me."

“....”

Silence

None of the boys turned to her, they just continued with there chatter. Eliza opened her mouth to speak once more when she -rather unwillingly- picked up stray words from their conversation.

"It's not fair!" A tall lanky one with striped ears and tail whined

"Yeah! How come that useless shut-in gets to get married to a cute girl !" the second one was even taller, with thick furry grey ears that reminded Eliza of a wolf.

"Look man I don't know what Idia has that makes him so damn lucky! He's a useless wimp..." A Bold statement made by the one with metallic features.

Eliza was sure they continued bashing Idia but the phantom pain of blood coursing through her ears droned them out. How dare such hooligans speak ill of her beloved husband! Her fingers flexed in a robotic-like movement, stretching open than closing once more. Around her tiny flame-like spirits began to materialize, cute and cheery with big eyes and smiling mouths...until they noticed the distress of their mistress. the tiny things took a look around, grasping the situation from the loud words of the boys as well as Eliza's grim expression. Slowly the little flames began to merge with one another. Fusing into a large ax with a burning end. The weapon floated down to her hand, positioning itself smugly between her ghostly digits.

Eliza's eyes locked with the backs of the boys, she didn't know how this would work, could the ax could even harm the living? It may just phase through them as if nothing had happened....or it may price through there flesh and bones, tearing them in two. Hosting the ax up over her shoulder with both hands and taking a shaky step forward, Eliza lunged towards the first boy. In a swift flick of her wrist, the blade of the ax was pushing through the Ignihyde student's back. Splitting ceaselessly at the skin and urging past muscles until it reached the creamy colored bones. Eliza didn't stop there, her arms still pushing forward trying to get the heavy ax to break those pesky osseins. He had to pay for what he said! No one was permitted to speak ill of her one true love! A satisfying crack filled the air followed by a choir of screams. Only when the ax had finally resurfaced on the other side, covered in plasma and the remnants of organs, did Eliza turned her attention to the other two students. There eyes where enormous staring at her in disgust and fear...and something else. Something that -although it revolted her to her very core- she wished Idia would look at her with that same look in his eyes. A look of want, a look of need, pure lust, yet the welcoming sort ONLY if it was coming from the person you adored so much.

The blue-haired ghost didn't move, her semi existent body felt overworked. Everything hurt! Or at least she thought what she was feeling was the ghost equivalent to human pain. "Why.." her voice glitched at every syllable, like a broken cassette player. The two boys didn't answer instead taking shall strides backward. "WHY DID YOU SAY SUCH AWFUL THINGS ABOUT HIM!" in a split second, anger over ran Eliza's boy once more, dragging her and the ax forward until the blade came in contact with one of the animal eared men's neck. Slicing it so it flung backward, crashing onto the ground with loud "thud" then rolling around in its own gore. The last man stand, the one with monochrome ears pushed his palms forward, a pathetic attempt of shielding himself from her wrath. "W-we..we d-d-did...didn't-t mean...mean any..offense...honest!" His voice creaked as tears gushed from the corners of his eyes. "You're...you're just so...so...pretty...beautiful even...and...and...Shroud well...we...well, he's a loser who w-w-wouldn't kno--" his words were left half-finished, as Eiza's ax severed through him diagonally.

Her heart was pounding much too fast, that it was beginning to make her feel sick. Her legs finally gave up, sending her crashing onto the blood coated floor. Her bare knees dug into the red liquidy substance, finding an odd comfort in the warm human ichor. Eliza didn't know what to do, or even where to go. If she went back to Idia like this he would surely use it against her, Ortho was too young to be introduced to such a carnage...and she didn't know anyone else! "I'm all so very doomed" she sobbed as transparent tears trailed down her eyes.

"Hey" A distant voice spoke up. "What's wrong with her?" another voice, this one more high pitch and raspy. Eliza tore her face from her hands looking up at a group of three strangers and a cat...no, not strangers, she recognized the orange and blacked haired boy. They both had tried to crash her wedding. But the other person was new, they had a gentle look in their eyes, a welcoming stare that the princess longed for. "Hey ghost bride," The orange-haired boy spoke up, "need some help with your mess?" Eliza nodded meekly. Her body still limp and voice still too frail to speak. The last person, the one that had unexpectedly piqued Eliza's interest extended a hand towards her. And with only a scrap of hesitation, Eliza gripped it.

"Come on, we'll help you out!"

💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙 👻💙

Tags: @yandere-romanticaa @ghostiebabey @lovee-infected @mermaid-painter @firemelody4 also tagging @twstpasta and @delusional-obsessions cause I know they're huge Eliza fans.

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spookyspaghettisundae · 4 years ago

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The House that Guilt Built

What is it when something is neither dream nor reality? Sometimes, you dream something so vivid that you cannot distinguish it from reality. Other times, reality is so strange that it makes you wonder if you aren’t dreaming.

Then there’s that space in between.

A space more narrow than most would have you believe. A space encapsulated in a singular place, connecting to our world through several innocuous junctions, with the space in between bleeding through and infecting our world. Or with ours infecting it. Truly, that place was powerful enough to blur any lines.

Such was the nature of the House.

When Kevin stepped inside, everything that made sense decided to cease doing so. His injuries stopped hurting. The alabaster statuette in his hand now fell apart. In disbelief, he watched its shape—resembling a Franciscan monk, kneeling, praying—slip through his fingers. The shape turned to chunks, the chunks to dust, trickling and raining down onto the hard wooden floor in gentle, painfully slow flurries of dust.

There was something oddly familiar about the floor but he could not yet place it. Or his mind kept pushing it back into the recesses of his mind before he could grasp it.

It took him a dozen or a thousand steps to traverse the windowless room, from one door to the next. The man sitting there next to the next door stared at him the whole time, awaiting his arrival with eerie patience.

But that man was no mere man. He was either an agent of the House. Or a demon.

There was nothing in between that.

The door slammed shut behind Kevin, but he did not bother to look. The door he exited from and the door he entered into this Otherworld were not the same, although the statuette had helped bridge the veil between them. A shame about the Artifact, but he had to stop Michael before Michael could unravel reality completely. And to stop Michael, he had to defeat him somehow—just killing him would not do the trick. And to defeat him, Kevin had to find Kim.

Kim screwed up something on her most recent ritual and it had landed her here somehow. Trapped in the House where your world was turned upside down. Where the walls challenged all your beliefs, and the doors opened to the darkest abysses in one’s own soul. And when—if—this House did deign to spit you back out, you would be changed.

Sometimes for the worse. Sometimes broken. A vegetable, trapped in a loop within your own mind. A psyche shattered by the House.

Those dozen steps that it took to cross through this room indeed felt like one thousand instead. The room seemed less like a room, and more like a corridor, stretching infinitely to unsettle any visitors. Or maybe it only did so for Kevin. His footsteps tapped loudly against the wooden floor, echoes that pierced an otherwise deafening silence. Each of them a little knife, plunged into the back of his head, piercing and painful and trying to get him to remember something. Something he refused to remember.

Kevin finally arrived by the man on the stool. That mysterious man never budged. Never blinked. Just stared at Kevin approaching him all the while.

“You will need these,” said the man on the stool in a silky and soft voice. Kevin had expected something gravelly or burly.

The man on the stool did nothing to follow up on that. He sat there, motionlessly. As if waiting for Kevin to act first. Kevin shifted his weight uncomfortably, waiting for the man to do something else. Anything.

“What will I need?” he asked the man on the stool.

He was holding out something to him. When Kevin looked down to inspect it, he realized that it was he who was presenting the something to the man on the stool, rather than the other way around. Thus was the House.

In his hand, Kevin offered a colorless pair of latex gloves, much like the ones a surgeon would wear in a hospital. They felt strange in between his fingers. Smooth, rubbery, silky—like the voice.

“No, I think you should keep them,” said the man on the stool.

Or had Kevin said it to him?

Kevin slipped the gloves on, letting the rubber-banded ends snap into place once the material snugly hugged his fingers and hands. He splayed and wiggled his fingers, getting used to the gloves within the blink of an eye. Still, the man on the stool never blinked. Just peered into Kevin’s soul. What darkness might he see there?

“They are not enough,” said the man. “You will also need a hammer and coins.”

Kevin’s nostrils flared as he focused. He realized he had to concentrate and not fall victim to the maddening void that permeated this place.

“Where can I find a hammer and coins?”

“Ask your grandfather,” said the man. He smiled widely and laughed, displaying a set of rotten teeth. The stench of his breath hit Kevin from several steps away. But the smile never reached his eyes. The laughter rang with a sinister echo.

Kevin’s grandfather was long dead. When he used to play in his band, The Lost Number—before he met Michael, before he learned how to work real magick—Kevin used to steal things and money from the old geezer to fund his drug addiction. All old history, but all things that came back to haunt him, every now and then.

And even after this strange man’s laughter ceased, and his face fell into a stoic, expressionless mask once more, the hairs still stood up straight on the back of Kevin’s neck. He knew what the House could do. Whatever haunted him in the real world could take shape here. It could draw from the writhing bodies of those lost inside of it, and make those inner demons assume a fleshly form.

The memory of those gnarled, spindly fingers—digging into his shoulder or leaving a stinging red mark on his face—flared up. He pushed it right back down, but something fell and landed—something audible—in the distance. A loud thud, like something landed in the house. Something weighty. Maybe dangerous.

Kevin shrugged it off, shrugged on the outside, and replied, “I need one thing, and one thing only.”

The man on the stool continued to stare at him but something about the intensity in his gaze shifted. Made the blood curdle in Kevin’s veins.

“That thing is not here. The curtains are made of the torn fabric of children’s laughter. You cannot have that thing,” said the doorman.

Contrary to the stinging sensation his words left behind in Kevin’s mind, the voice of the man on the stool remained calm and pleasant. He then pointed to the door behind him. As if he was inviting Kevin to enter.

Kevin kept his eyes trained on the doorman and the man on the stool stared back at him. He then turned to grab the doorknob on the red doors. Brass, smooth, cold; even through the thin layer of the latex gloves.

As he stepped into the next chamber, he saw from the corner of his eye that someone else sat on the stool now. A taller figure, not sitting at all. Ominous, leering. Familiar and threatening at the same time. Looming right behind him. Creeping closer. Carrying a stench like sweet rotten fruit. Gnarled, wrinkly fingers. Bright white dentures, peeking out from behind a hungry grin.

Then separated as Kevin slammed the door shut behind himself, shunting that awful presence back into the waiting room.

This second room in the House resembled the entry hall of a large mansion. Four sets of curved stairs, all blanketed in stunningly vibrant red carpets, swept their way up to a balcony overlooking the ground floor. Dozens, no—hundreds—of doors lined the walls of this room on every level. Whispers spilled from the cracks between the frames and the doors proper. Screams, too, carried through them, muffled by distance and layers of brass and wood and bruised skin turned to stone.

Throughout the room, in front of every support beam and every pillar, stood pearly-white statues, all beautiful and artistic like those fashioned by ancient Greek artists, yet as flawless and shiny as if they had been sculpted just a single day ago. Some winged, some horned, some both. Some held weapons, others fruit. One even carried a large trout in its hands.

A constant, reverberating electric buzz hummed in the air. The huge hall thrummed with history and uncertainty blending together.

The hub of the House.

Beyond all these doors, lost souls wandered without hope of egress. Strange things always hiding from sight dwelt here, feeding on human hope, dreams, sadness, anger, madness, and fear. Eyes, unblinking, watched. Whispers promised change—demanded it—and only minds of the strongest resolve could even dare to resist.

While Kevin pondered the nature of this dangerous abode, struggling to ignore the droning hypnotic hum of electricity all around, straining to focus on sensing which door to choose, one of the portals opened on its own.

Light flooded from it, obscuring sight of whatever chamber was beyond it.

And Kim ran from that door. Burst through. Her sneakers slapped against the cold hard marble floors. Full sprint, like her worst nightmare was following her right at her heels. Nothing actually followed, at least nothing that Kevin could see.

Her gaze swept over him but she saw through him, like he was made of thin air. She shot a glance behind herself but continued running like a bat out of hell.

Kevin raised a hand and called out to her. But she did not respond and he did not expect her to. At least not yet.

She ripped open a different door and charged through. That door slammed shut behind her within seconds, without a human hand present to close it. Then the door she had entered the hall by followed suit. Both slams still echoed in Kevin’s ears. He decided against trying either of those doors—too dangerous. Both of them bore strange symbols; one a spiral shape crudely carved into the wood at eye level, the other covered in alien-looking runes that did not belong on Earth, scorched into the wood, always blurring when he tried to focus his sights on them.

This was going to be tough. A sharp pain surged through his jaw and his stomach rumbled.

How long had he been here, anyway? It could have been minutes. Or it could have been years already. It reminded him of the old folk tales of the fairy world. He dismissed that thought, though. He had to because there was no way he would accept losing years in here. Losing himself in here.

As soon as he got a good feeling about another door, he hesitated. He had used that door before—it was just like a door in his grandfather’s house. Pencil marks and numbers on the frame indicated how the old man used to measure the height of Kevin’s mother. Sounds of agony—not even screams—echoed in Kevin’s mind. Groaning. Wet, slapping. Skin on skin.

Gritted teeth. Bleeding gums.

He turned from the door, dispelled those half-shaped memories. The more he allowed them to take shape, the more menacing they would become.

Scratching came from another door. At first, soft, from down low, like a kitten scratching at the wood. Then higher, and more fierce. Like claws of a beast. Or fingernails of a grown man. An old man. A man being strangled to death, struggling to call for help, barely managing to grab the doorknob, never quite reaching it.

Getting what he deserved.

Kevin stroked his own neck and had trouble swallowing.

He had to find Kim quickly. The perils of the House only grew in time. He could feel its hunger swelling at the same rate as the dark memories bubbling up onto the surface of his thoughts.

Almost passing by a door, dismissing it as one hiding danger, he swiveled. Doubled back and studied it. Elaborate carvings adorned its surface, depicting a stylized hammer. Something that would fit right in with some fantasy movie schlock.

But he couldn’t argue with the possibility.

Kevin quickly entered and found himself elsewhere.

Night, some parking garage. Subterranean. Parked cars, concrete pillars. The smell of gasoline, and burnt plastic. Flickering neon lights. Footsteps. Behind him.

Looking over his shoulder, a figure in black approached. Cloaked in a long coat, smiling. Passing through shadows, leaving everything but a wide toothy grin to the imagination, an imagination he dared not let wander freely.

Kevin ran, and the man in black followed.

Familiar—all too familiar—this was the nightmare that he had tried to entomb Michael in. But the man in black—the House taking Michael’s form—now followed him through this infinitely looping nightmare. And the House had taken him right there.

Kevin hammered his fist against the button to an elevator. The man in black indeed looked like Michael. And Michael would want to get back at him, real or not. Already put him through a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from before he tried to repay the favor in kind.

But this wasn’t Michael, though. He had to hold onto that thought and remind himself of it. Kevin could taste it. Taste the evil. See it when he strode on, walking underneath a cone of bright light, illuminating his features and revealing little details that were all just off. The skin on Michael’s face looked too rubbery, too fake. Like it was about to slough off, or wrinkle unnaturally. Or like latex; like latex gloves.

Only fifteen steps away now. Kevin hammered the elevator buttons some more, staring at the House’s agent with growing dread.

DING.

The elevator doors opened and he fled inside without looking where he ran. But as he turned to see where he stumbled into, there was no elevator. Only darkness.

A door slammed shut behind him.

Spinning around only revealed more darkness. No parking garage, no fake version of Michael. Just an empty void.

All but a pile of coins on the floor. A wooden floor, much like the one in his grandfather’s old farm house. The coins resembling the chump change he once stole from him to buy a pack of cigarettes from the gas station. And somewhere in the darkness, barely visible, on the edge of his perception, Kevin saw himself, high on heroin, slumped against a wall, lost in a trip that allowed him to escape from the horrors of reality, curled up in a corner and drooling. He looked like hell. One of the worst phases in his life.

Kevin screamed.

The void answered.

“I’m gonna teach you a lesson you ain’t never gonna forget, boy,” said his grandfather. The drunken haze made his speech slur. The reek of rot and booze hung in the air, wafting through the pitch black void that closed in on Kevin.

Suffocating him.

The gnarled hands gripped him, grabbing him by his neck from behind.

“Gonna teach you t'stop dressin’ like a girl, ya freak,” said his grandfather.

Kevin tried to fight back. Clawed at the hands closing in around his neck and strangling him. But the latex gloves rendered his attempts futile. His fingers slipped inside the gloves somehow, his fingers never found proper purchase.

The figure behind him felt like his grandfather, but also like he was three heads taller than he should have been. Ten times stronger than he ever was—because when he was eighteen, he paid that old bastard back in kind, finding that the old man wasn’t as strong as he used to be from working the fields.

But there was nobody there to save Kevin this time. Not his mother, no friends, and surely not himself.

“You wanna know what it’s really like t'be a girl?” asked grandfather, right into his ear. Foul, warm breath hitting his skin. “I can show you a—”

Hoarse croaking sounds escaped Kevin’s choked throat. He struggled even harder. This was the House. Making the memories even worse than reality ever was for him. Amplifying the terror and the pain, rendering everything inevitable.

The tearing wet sound released the iron vice around his neck. The texture of skin and muscle splitting as the knife went in and the blood came out. And then another stab, right into his grandfather’s chest. And then another. All the sounds behind him, the gnarled fingers releasing his neck as the strength drained from them instantly. Followed by the metal snapping as the knife’s blade got snagged on bone and lodged somewhere and breaking from the sheer force.

And then continuing to stab, using that broken blade, over and over again. The latex gloves came in handy.

The vase came next, bashing his skull in until the ceramics and the nose bone shattered. Then the old metal lamp, bashing and crashing until his grandfather’s face was unrecognizable and the bones and blood turned into a soupy mush.

Kevin ran, tears blurring his vision, putting distance between himself and the sounds of him killing the old monster. The shapes of that decrepit farmhouse melted with the darkness, molted into something else. He charged through a door frame and stopped.

A sunflower. On the ground, not growing from anywhere. Clipped cleanly at the end, not in a vase or anything. No dirt nearby. Just hardwood floor.

He picked it up and, in disbelief, watched it shed its seeds and petals—slipping through his fingers. The sunflower wilted as he watched, naked from things that made it recognizable, its vestiges of life now raining down onto the hard wooden floor in gentle, painfully slow flurries of fluttering petals and tumbling seeds.

A man sat on a simple stool at the end of the room. In his sixties, bald, with silver stubble on his face, dressed in jeans and a verdant green sweater. Stoic, unmoving. Staring at Kevin from the opposite end of the chamber. It took a dozen or a thousand steps for Kevin to traverse the windowless room, from one door to the next. The man stared at him the whole time, awaiting his arrival with eerie patience.

But that man was no mere man. He was either an agent of the House. Or a demon.

There was nothing in between that.

Kim jolted up in bed. Had she not deliberately entered this state of magicked consciousness, she could have confused it with a dream.

The sheets coiled and roiled as they moved in accordance to her own contorting limbs, tangled up in them.

Disoriented, she looked around in the motel room. The smell of Tibetan incense burning on her nightstand grounded her in this reality again.

Kevin’s spell had failed spectacularly, though she knew where to look for him now.

She would have to go that House. That damned House.

—Submitted by Wratts

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seprofcorp · 4 years ago

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▶ The Doors - When the Music's Over ( I RE-POSTED THIS TERRIFIC ANALYSIS FROM " BenS/b-rod, 7moths ago"}}: "Ew, he wants to what?" Well first of all, you've got to understand where Morrison was coming from. A little background information is certainly required for the uninitiated. Jim wanted first and foremost to be a filmmaker and a dramatist (and poet) before he ever wanted to be in rock n roll. He went on to graduate from UCLA (unlike the deplorable Oliver Stone movie where a full ONE THIRD of the thing is FICTION - ie, never happened, like certain scenes, and the very crass way Kilmer portrayed him was ludicrous - but that's another topic). In the film department there, he learned many things about cinema and drama in general that he transposed into his music. He even had acting lessons according to Paul Ferrara. Anyway, I think the main work that influenced Jim on "The End" was Artaud's "Theatre & Its Double," which I reread recently and it made a lot more sense to me why Jim went in that theatrical direction. When I reread it, pieces fell into place that I'd never realized before. Artaud goes through his theories and in one instance, he even mentions "Oedipus Rex" itself by name (which, for those who don't know is an ancient Greek play that Freud psychologically postulated as universal, Oedipus for boys and Elektra for girls - deep in the unconscious). On a side note, Artaud also had a major influence on the Living Theatre, which Jim saw every show he could of, with their confrontational approach to theatre, which was right before Miami, and is what got Jim in trouble down there for allegedly exposing himself, with it fresh in his mind. Anyway, I believe its drama. Jim didn't get into personal confessional lyrics until LA Woman with things like "Hyacinth House" or "Cars Hiss By My Window." "The End" does start out about a break up with his girl prior to Pamela but then obviously goes in another direction when they would improvise to fill their slot at London Fog. But Artaud's work, I think, is key to understanding where Jim was coming from and the theatricality of some of his lyrics. And as Ray said about the Lizard King to Ben Fong-Torres - "That Lizard King thing - that's out of "Celebration Of The Lizard" and he's acting a part; its a theatre piece. Its a drama of which a guy is leading a small band of people...out into the desert and at the end of the whole piece he says "I am the Lizard King, I can do anything" and people are going "Oh, he's the Lizard King, he's the self-proclaimed Lizard King." You bastards, man! He's ACTING! ITS A ROLE, you know? Marlon Brando is not Stanley Kowalski, Jim Morrison is not the Lizard King, but they ground him down [for it]."Could the same be said for "The End?" You fuckin bet.Here's Jim speaking in late 1970 (also to Ben Fong-Torres) - "Are you still considering yourself the Lizard King?" "What I was trying to say with that, and that was years ago, and even then it was kind of ironic. I meant it ironically, and it wasn't meant to be - " and Pam cuts him off saying "That whole thing was done tongue-in-cheek" and Jim says, "Well, half tongue-in-cheek" and Pam continues, "and everybody thought it was like so serious." Jim: "Well, its an easy thing to pick up on." Its interesting to note that his production company with, I think, Paul Ferrara and Babe Hill, joking called themselves the Media Manipulators."Well, its an easy thing to pick up on" is the operative phrase - memorability, standing out, and this, I think, is key to understanding "The End" and other things. In the same interview with Fong-Torres, he also talks about how at newspapers there's someone who is there to write only the headlines of an article, that it has to be a catch phrase. Maybe its hard for literal-minded people to understand, but Jim says "THE killer" and then proceeds to take a face, an ancient drama mask that actors would wear on stage. He doesn't say "I" until he's set up the scene and in that role. "The key to throwing the audience into a magical trance is to know where in advance the pressure points must be affected...But theatre poetry has long become unaccustomed to this invaluable skill...To make language convey what it does not normally convey. That is to use it in a new exceptional and unusual way, to give it its full, physical shock potential...and restore their shattering power...The thought it aims at, the states of mind it attempts to create, the mystical discoveries it offers...It all seems like an exorcism to make our devils FLOW...strange signs, matching some dark prodigious reality we have repressed...ready to hurl itself into chaos in a kind of magical state where feelings have become so sensitive they are suitable for visitation by the mind...We must not ask ourselves whether it can define thought but whether it makes us think [and feel], and leads the mind to assume deeply effective attitudes...Just as in former times, the masses today are thirsting for mystery" (Artaud) (And there are more quotes equally as good in his work).I'm not saying he was consciously thinking of Artaud's theories when he went up onstage that night at the Whiskey, but it certainly came out of him then - the culmination of many things going on in the background of his consciousness and trying to push the envelope as an artist. As a fellow INFP explorer (mine and Jim's personality type), I think I can understand Jim more than most in that respect. Its "drama of the highest order" said Jack Holzman

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willowwalker935 · 5 years ago

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MEDUSA

Medusa was one of the three Gorgons, daughters of Phorcys and Ceto, sisters of the Graeae, Echidna, and Ladon – all dreadful and fearsome beasts. A beautiful mortal, Medusa was the exception in the family, until she incurred the wrath of Athena, either due to her boastfulness or because of an ill-fated love affair with Poseidon. Transformed into a vicious monster with snakes for hair, she was killed by Perseus, who afterward used her still potent head as a weapon, before gifting it to Athena.

Family · Portrayal

Medusa – whose name probably comelos from the Ancient Greek word for “guardian” – was one of the three Gorgons, daughters of the sea gods Phorcys and Ceto, and sisters of the Graeae, Echidna, and Ladon. All of Medusa’s siblings were monsters by birth and, even though she was not, she had the misfortune of being turned into the most hideous of them all.

From then on, similarly to Euryale and Stheno, her older Gorgon sisters, Medusa was depicted with bronze hands and wings of gold. Poets claimed that she had a great boar-like tusk and tongue lolling between her fanged teeth. Writhing snakes were entwining her head in place of hair. Her face was so hideous and her gaze so piercing that the mere sight of her was sufficient to turn a man to stone.

Poseiddon and Perseus

It wasn’t always like that. Medusa – the only mortal among the Gorgon sisters – was also distinguished from them by the fact that she alone was born with a beautiful face. Ovid especially praises the glory of her hair, “most wonderful of all her charms.” The great sea god Poseidon seems to have shared this admiration, for once he couldn’t resist the temptation and impregnated Medusa in a temple of Athena. Enraged, the virgin goddess transformed Medusa’s enchanting hair into a coil of serpents, turning the youngest Gorgon into the monster we described above.

Soon after this, trying to get rid of Perseus, Polydectes, the king of Seriphos, sent the great hero on a quest which he believed must be his final one. “Fetch me the head of Medusa,” commanded Polydectes. With the help of Athena and Hermes, and after compelling the Graeae for Medusa’s whereabouts, Perseus finally reached the fabled land of the Gorgons, located either in the far west, beyond the outer Ocean, or in the midst of it, on the rocky island of Sarpedon. Medusa was asleep and Perseus, using the reflection in Athena’s bronze shield as a guide (so as to not look directly at the Gorgons and be turned into stone), managed to cut off her head with his sickle.

The Posthumous Fate of Medusa

Strangely enough, Medusa’s story doesn’t end with her death. In fact, one can argue that the most peculiar fragments of her biography are all posthumous.

Medusa’s Children · The Lament of the Gorgons

For Medusa was pregnant at the time of her death, and when Perseus severed her head, her two unborn children, Chrysaor and Pegasus, suddenly sprang from her neck. The Gorgons were awoken by the noise and did their best to avenge the death of her sister, but they could neither see nor catch Perseus, for he was wearing Hades’ Cap of Invisibility and Hermes’ winged sandals. So, they went back to their secluded abode to mourn Medusa. Pindar, a great Ancient Greek poet, says that upon hearing their gloomy lament, Athena was so touched that she modeled after it the mournful music of the double pipe, the aulos.

The Miraculous Head of Medusa

Now that Perseus had Medusa’s head in his bag, he went back to Seriphos. However, while flying over Libya, drops of Medusa’s blood fell to the ground and instantly turned into snakes; it is because of this that, to this day, Libya abounds with serpents. When Perseus arrived in Seriphos, he used Medusa’s head to turn Polydectes and the vicious islanders into stones; the island was well-known long after for its numerous rocks.

After this, Perseus gave Medusa’s head to his benefactor Athena, as a votive gift. The goddess set it on Zeus’ aegis (which she also carried) as the Gorgoneion. She also collected some of the remaining blood and gave most of it to Asclepius, who used the blood from Medusa’s left side to take people’s lives and the blood from her right side to raise people from the dead. The rest of Medusa’s blood – a vial containing two drops – Athena gave to her adopted son, Erichthonius; Euripides says that one of the drops was a cure-all, and the other one a deadly poison.

Always the protector of heroes, Athena put aside, in a bronze jar, a lock of Medusa’s hair for Heracles, who subsequently gave it to Cepheus’ daughter, Sterope, to use it to protect her hometown Tegea. Supposedly, even though it didn’t have the power of Medusa’s gaze, the lock could still cast terror into any enemy unfortunate enough to even accidentally behold it.

Sources

You can read a prose summary of Perseus’ quest for Medusa’s head in Apollodorus’ “Library.” For a poetic account, see the ending of the fourth book of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses.” Naturally, Medusa’s genealogy is described in full in Hesiod’s “Theogony.”

See Also: Perseus, Adventures of Perseus, Pegasus, Gorgons, Phorcys, Ket

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aliciameade · 6 years ago

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Wait For Me - Ch. 2

Title: Wait For Me Author: aliciameade Rating: M for dark themes Pairing: Beca/Chloe and Aubrey/Stacie Summary: This is a tale of a love that never dies. A tale about someone who tries.

This story is an adaptation of an adaptation of an ancient Greek legend. It's as alternate a universe as they come; there are no “Barden Bellas” here. Adapted story/lyrics by Anaïs Mitchell.

Also on AO3

~ ~

Chloe’s shoulder doesn’t ache anymore.

That’s a good thing given the fact that as soon as she signed her name she was handed a pickaxe and led to the depths of a mine.

However, she’s been swinging the pickaxe so long that she can barely lift it, yet somehow always manages to one more time.

She’s tried to leave more than once. She’s able to leave the mine only to find herself shoveling coal into a boiler alongside countless others. Everyone keeps their head down. Keeps to themselves. She has no friends here.

Aubrey said the wall kept them free but this isn’t freedom. It’s not the promised land. It’s true she doesn’t want for food. She doesn’t want for anything except freedom. She doesn’t feel anything except inescapable exhaustion. It’s not the type of life she thought she was agreeing to.

It’s not life at all.

~ ~

“Chloe!”

She hasn’t heard her name spoken in so long she almost doesn’t recognize it. But she does recognize the voice. She whirls and there’s Beca, running toward her, somehow, in the glowing orange light of the factory. “Beca?!”

Beca’s barely winded when she slams into her, holding her fiercely. “I can’t believe I found you.”

“Beca, oh, my God.” She pulls Beca impossibly closer as if she could pull her inside her very self. “Is it really you?”

“It’s me. I promise.”

She chokes back a sob. “How did you get here? Did you come on the train?” Her eyes tear at what that means but at least they would be together.

“I walked. Come on, let’s go.” Beca pulls from their embrace only to seize her hand and tug.

“You walked? But the wall...how did you get through it? I’ve never seen a gap.”

“I sang my song and the stones let me in. Take my hand; I’m not leaving without you.”

Chloe actually digs in her heels. “Wait, you finished it?”

“No, but it was enough to get through, so I know I can sing us home again.”

“But you can’t, Beca.”

Beca spins; she’s frustrated but there’s relief present, too. “Yes, I can.”

“Since when are you this confident?” Beca almost seems like a different person; Chloe’s only known her as quiet and introspective and everything about her feels loud right now.

“I’m confident when I look at you.”

Chloe can’t help but smile even in this urgent, scary time. “And what do you see when you look at me?”

Beca seems to hesitate, then drops to her knees and clasps Chloe’s hand between hers. “I see my wife.”

“What are you doing?” Chloe’s heart, what little of it seems to remain, cracks.

“Marry me.”

“I...I can’t.”

“What? Why not?”

“Beca, I wanted us to be together. You kept promising things would change, that things would get better. That you could take care of me and I know, I know you tried and I know you wanted to, but sweetheart, you couldn’t. And now...now I can’t.”

There are tears in Beca’s eyes and Chloe has to stop from reaching out to brush them away. “I don’t understand.”

“I made a deal, Beca.”

“A deal?”

“With Aubrey. I belong to her now.”

“What?” Beca falls backward off her knees to sit on the ground. “That’s not true. Say it’s not true!”

“It is. I love you Beca, I do. But I’m hers.”

“No; I don’t believe it!”

~ ~

Beca wants to cry and vomit and scream all at the same time but she isn’t offered the opportunity. With her next breath, she’s standing in an office. Or a bedroom?

And they’re not alone.

“I don’t think we’ve met.” It’s true; they’ve never met, but Beca knows exactly who Aubrey is. “But you don’t belong here. Everyone here is a law-abiding citizen and you’re trespassing.”

Beca sets her jaw and squares herself. Aubrey’s a literal queen. A goddess. And she’s no one. But still, she dares say, “I’m not leaving without Chloe.”

Aubrey laughs from where she sits on her desk. “And who the hell do you think you are? Do you even know who I am? She can’t leave, even if she wanted to. If you were from around here you’d understand that everything here is mine.”

“I don’t have to be from here to see that; it’s like you piss on everything you own like a dog.”

Aubrey’s head jerks a little as though she almost laughed. “Now, what do we do with you?” she muses thoughtfully.

“Aubrey, don’t.”

Beca hadn’t noticed her before, but now she does. It’s Stacie, from above. From better times.

“Don’t what? You know I can’t have people playing tourist here.”

“I’m not playing tourist!” Beca almost shouts it. “I came all this way just for Chloe. I let her slip away. I promised I would be there for her always. I promised her.”

“Why is that of any importance?”

“Aubrey!” It’s Stacie who shouts. “Damn you. How long have we been married?”

“Since the world began.”

“And I don’t care if your eye wanders—”

“She means nothing to me,” Aubrey answers quickly.

“But she means everything to this girl.”

“And?”

“Let her go.”

“Let her go?” Aubrey scoffs. “I can’t let her go. That’s not the way it works. I let them go and then what? Everyone will expect to be allowed to leave. Everyone will have an excuse.”

Beca felt Chloe’s hand tighten on hers and knew they were thinking the same thing: these two gods are fighting...over them.

“She is the only person who has ever found her way here past the wall uninvited. The only one. Can’t you see she’s special? Can’t you see how much she loves this girl?”

Aubrey frowns and turns her head toward Beca. “You think you can take care of this girl? You couldn’t even keep her fed. Look around you; why do you think she left?”

“All the riches in the world can’t buy love!” Stacie yelled, throwing a cup across the room, narrowly missing Aubrey’s head (she didn’t even flinch). “I didn’t fall in love with you because you could drown me in gold! There’s more to existence than this. Let them be happy!”

Aubrey does pause, though, as though Stacie hit a nerve. She pushes away from her desk and circles it to draw a piece of paper from a drawer as a pen appears in her hand. “I’ll tell you what, Beca.”

Beca holds her breath and squeezes Chloe’s hand harder; she can hear her breathing quickly, she’s so close.

“Since my wife apparently likes you,” she says with a dismissive wave as she writes, “and since I’m going to put you out of your misery anyway: you sang your way in here. I’ll give you one more song; make me feel something, anything, and I’ll think about it.”

Chloe’s voice whispers, “Beca…” and she can hear the worry in it. “You need to finish that song. Right now.”

“I will,” Beca says to her before kissing her, trying to draw strength from her but Chloe feels strangely empty. Beca hates that she knows why and it only motivates her further to find the end of her song. “Can you conjure up a guitar for me to use before you kill me? It wasn’t exactly an essential item for this trip.”

Aubrey doesn’t seem to do anything but nonetheless, the instrument appears in Beca’s hands. She slips the strap over her head and finds her opening chord, closes her eyes, and sings.

“Heavy and hard is the heart of the Queen Queen of iron, Queen of steel The heart of the queen loves everything Like the hammer loves the nail

But the heart of a woman is a simple one Small and soft, flesh and blood And all that it loves is a woman A woman is all that it loves

And Aubrey is Queen of the scythe and the sword She covers the world in the color of rust She scrapes the sky and scars the earth And she comes down heavy and hard on us

But even that hardest of hearts unhardened Suddenly, when she saw her there Stacie in her mother’s garden The sun on her shoulders, wind in her hair

The smell of the flowers she held in her hand And the pollen that fell from her fingertips And suddenly Aubrey was only a woman With a taste of nectar upon his lips, singing: La la la la la la la…”

“How do you know that melody?” Aubrey asks but Beca sings on. She’s not thinking about it now; she can hear the melody, the words in her head long before they leave her fingers and lips.

“And what has become of the heart of that girl Now that the girl is Queen? What has become of the heart of that girl Now that she has everything?

The more she has, the more she holds The greater the weight of the world on her shoulders See how she labors beneath that load Afraid to look up, and afraid to let go And she keeps her head low, and she keeps her back bending She’s grown so afraid that she'll lose what she owns But what she doesn't know is that what she's defending Is already gone

Where is the treasure inside your chest? Where is your pleasure? Where is your youth? Where is the girl with his heart on her sleeve? Who stands in the garden with nothing to lose, singing: La la la la la la la…”

“La la la la la la la,” Aubrey echoes and Beca feels the temperature in the room shift. The tiniest break in the oppressive heat as Stacie bursts into tears and runs, wrapping her arms around Aubrey to hold her tight as she sobs.

“You finished it,” Chloe says, voice hushed.

“How do you know that melody?” Aubrey asks again. She’s holding Stacie as though she hasn’t seen her wife in years.

“I’ve always known it. I just didn’t know why.”

“See?” Stacie says as she lifts her face from where it’s been pressed to Aubrey’s neck. “She’s special. Just let them go and sing to me.”

Aubrey sighs and hugs Stacie one more time before easing her back so she can have space at her desk. “I’ll allow you to leave together.”

Chloe gasps and Beca feels her push closer to her side.

“Under one condition.”

“What is it? I’ll do anything.”

“Chloe must walk behind you and you may not look back to see if she is following. Not until you are home.”

“Done,” Beca says as she rushes forward to grab the pen waiting for her in Aubrey’s hand to sign the contract.

“Then off you go. Same way you came.”

There’s no fanfare of departure; they find themselves on the other side of the wall in the dark, in the cold dead of everlasting night.

“Let’s go,” Beca says as she sets off, making sure to keep facing forward as she hears Chloe fall in line behind her. “Stay close, okay? Things get weird and scary out here.”

“I will; I promise.” Chloe’s voice sounds so nice; Beca has missed it so much. “Now I need to say something.”

“We got time. Let’s hear it.”

“You promised me so many things.”

“Chlo, I know. And I—”

“No, it’s okay. What I’m saying is that when you didn’t, I was dumb. I ran away instead of giving you a chance.”

Beca’s chest feels tight. “I know you wanted more than I could give you. But you promised you would stay with me. That we’d walk together forever. And I know I don’t have a ring and I can’t give you a feast and a feather bed like you want. But I will walk with you. Always.”

“I don’t need those things, baby. I just need to be able to eat when I’m hungry. Fire when I’m cold. You gave me those things and I wanted for more and it wasn’t until I had nothing that I realized I had everything. So don’t make me any more promises, okay?”

“I’ll make just one more: do you let me walk with you?”

“I do.” She can hear the gentle smile she knows Chloe’s wearing.

Beca smiles. “I do.” She wishes she could turn and kiss her new wife, but it will have to wait.

The walk becomes more difficult soon enough. They stop talking in favor of hiking over the sharp rocks that cut their hands and hurt their feet. Beca keeps an ear for the sound of Chloe scrabbling over the rocks behind her. It seems to get impossibly darker; she can’t see more than a few feet in front of her face and only due to a blood-red moon that hangs in the abyss above them.

When she makes it to the top, when the ground flattens, she listens for Chloe but hears nothing. “Still with me?”

“I’m here; hum your song for me so I can stay with you.”

Beca does, humming the story of the woman who so recently stole her love away from her, only to give her back. It was always a bittersweet song but now...now even more so.

The walk is easier and she’s able to set a quicker pace. She’s eager to get home, to start her life anew with Chloe whom she’ll never let out of her sight again. It’s not as dark now, almost like dawn, and a dense fog rolls in. She keeps her pace, though. She can sense the end is near. Can taste the steel of the railroad tracks just as she trips over one. It’s the homestretch now. She only needs to follow the tracks and they’ll be safe.

She can see their station rising out of the mist and she picks up speed until her feet hit the solid platform.

“We made it!” she says, spinning back to greet her excitedly just as she breaks through the fog. “We finally—”

“Beca!” Chloe says with a sharp gasp before she’s pulled back into darkness.

Gone.

~ ~

There was a railroad line on a road to Hell / There was a girl down on bended knee / And that is the ending of the tale / Of Beca and Chloe

It’s a sad song / It’s a sad tale, it’s a tragedy / It’s a sad song / But we sing it anyway

On a sunny day, there was a railroad car / And a lady stepping off a train / Everybody looked and everybody saw / That spring had come again

With a love song / With a tale of a love that never dies / With a love song / For anyone who tries.

~ ~

Credit and admiration to Anaïs Mitchell, creator of the musical Hadestown based on the Greek mythology legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. Please see the show on Broadway if you can.

You can stream songs from the show, including Beca's songs, on Spotify and other streaming platforms.

#bechloe #staubrey #bechloe fic #greek myth au #fanfic

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halilbabilli · 5 years ago

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A Thousand Year Old Hometown

It is believed that weasels bear the souls of children who die before being christened.

Encyclopaedia of Secrets and Superstitions.

Cora Linn Daniels & C.M. Stevans (2003)

In Greek culture, “A weasel seen about the house, just as on the road, is significant of evil.”

Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals, John Cuthbert Lawson (2012)

Chapter 1: Roots – 15th Century

Theophanes Kantakouzenos, or Theo as he was called by kith and kin, came into the world in Constantinople on the 1430th anniversary of the death of Our Lord. Thanks to his father, Andronikos, who was in charge of the Greek Emperor’s library, Theo was taught by the most erudite teachers of the Empire and learnt Latin and Classical Greek at an early age.

As soon as he had completed his education, he began to work with his father. The state of the library, which, in its day, had had row upon row of thousands of manuscripts, was a veritable reflection of the depths to which the empire had sunk. Most of those beautiful manuscripts had been sold either to Arabian merchants to pay off the state’s ever-increasing debts or had been plundered by officials struggling to make ends meet. But still, Constantinople, entirely surrounded by the Turks, reminded him of an oasis in the desert: the last remaining stronghold of a civilisation fighting to exist amidst the savage sands.

Alas, as history has shown time and again, every civilisation is born, grows and perishes. And it was evident that the time had now come for the Roman civilisation, moulded and leavened with wolf’s milk by two boys, also to be destroyed.

When the Turks besieged Constantinople, Theo, like every citizen, had helped to the best of his ability the soldiers defending the city.

He laboured heart and soul with his fellow townsmen caring not what he did or how difficult the task. His hands, which had never before held anything but a quill, became calloused from carrying rubble, and his palms bled.

The noise from the besieging cannons was indescribably loud. One of them, in particular, was far more deafening than the others and had a very distinct, earsplitting sound. "Shahi" was the name of that monstrous weapon and, when fired, its blast started with an eardrum-rupturing boom, shifted into a chest-vibrating thunder, and, before disappearing entirely, transformed into a deep rumble, giving everybody in Constantinople a throbbing headache. When Shahi's stone projectiles hit the ancient walls of the city, milk in the buckets spilt, pregnant women miscarried, cats fell from the roofs, roosters went mute, birds dropped dead, porcupines shed their spines, and bells in the church towers cracked.

At the end of three months baptised with blood and sweat, the thick, sturdy city walls could no longer withstand the force of the Turkish cannons. Faced with the terrible sight of the Turks beginning to pour through the crumbling walls, Theo too, like many other people, took refuge in the church of Hagia Sophia. It was widely believed that all Istanbul could fit beneath the dome of Hagia Sophia, a wonder of the world. That day it was seen that this had been a very optimistic estimate. In the packed church, priests and women with children were clinging to each other, wailing and looking to each other for help. Those men who were still armed and able were waiting tensely for the last battle of defence to be fought in the church.

That day, the interior of Hagia Sophia was bursting at the seams. Those waiting for the Turks to be extirpated from the pearl of Christianity by a final miracle from Jesus, others gazing incredulously around and those who couldn’t contain their anger were each like a grain of sand in this massive crowd.

Priests were making whoever came their way kneel and pray to the Virgin Mary for salvation. Theo did as everybody else was doing and was on his knees, but he was saying his own prayer and not really listening to what the priest said.

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Rather than letting me fall prisoner to those heathen Turks, gather me to the bosom of Jesus or have mercy and take my soul from here. We seek refuge in you from persecution.”

Towards the evening there was a commotion outside the church. The bells began to ring crazily. They could hear the Turks, shouting in their crude language, on the other side of the bronze doors, and everybody rushed to carry whatever he or she could to fortify the gates. The priests closed the doors, and heavy bolts were slid across. Despite the priests whose praying voices now resembled a sound close to a death shriek, Theo could still hear the battering rams pummelling the door and the hue and cry in Turkish. It must have been from trepidation that his head began to spin. Theo could stand no longer and sat down. So this was it. It was his fate to see the end of the great Roman Empire which for centuries had spread its branches like an enormous sycamore. Rather than fall prisoner, he thought to himself, I’ll fall on the swords of these heathens.

His dizziness increased. The sounds around him now seemed to come from far away. The colours he saw merged, black had become white and white, black. Suddenly the world around him began to grow rapidly. The church and people grew enormous in front of his eyes. The Bible he was holding became huge and could be carried no longer. After that, he heard the sound of the church door splintering. The last thing he remembered was the four horsemen entering the church and the nuns being dragged along the ground.

***

It must have been from the shock of his physical change that he had only a nebulous recollection of the few weeks following the raid on the church. In the meantime, Theo vaguely remembered seeing several nightmares. In these bad dreams, he seemed to be running away from huge animals and giant people. Sometimes dying of thirst, he was trying to save his life from fires and soldiers out for blood.

When he began to regain consciousness, and his soul got used to his new body, the truth started gradually to sink in. The Virgin Mary or some other kind saint had accepted the prayer Theo had said in the church and had granted his life by breathing his soul into a weasel.

He spent his first year as a weasel solely in prayer. Theo constantly begged God to wake him up from the nightmare, and he confessed to Him wailing that if the bad dream dragged on, he was afraid he would kill himself despite knowing it was an unforgivable sin. He wasted the following year weeping for the fallen empire and asking God for the Turks to be driven out of Constantinople forthwith. And most of the third year was spent cursing his fate.

How long did a weasel live? Five years, if it didn’t fall prey to a dog or cat? Perhaps ten years? Well, so he hadn’t much time left anyway, death was nigh. However, even if the form changes, the soul still continues to pursue thrills. Even if the new body was that of a weasel, at heart he was still Theo, the son of Andronikos, who had an unslakable thirst for learning. He decided to satisfy his appetite for knowledge in what remained of his life. He set to work by learning the language of the new owners of the city where he had been born and raised.

Yes, this was his city, called different names by different tribes — Lygos, Byzantium, Miklagard, Tsargard, Kustantiniyyah, Kostandina, Kushtandina Rabati, Bolis, Carigard and now, Istanbul. Regardless of whatever the other tribes called the city straddling two continents, the place where his ancestors were born, lived, and died was the thousand-year hometown to Theo.

Sure, Turks were warlike; they worshipped their horses and were technically advanced and enthusiastic about making pyramids from the heads of their fallen enemies. As he got to know them, he realised that they were in fact not savage barbarians. To the contrary, he saw how much their customs resembled his own. In one of the tunnels which riddled Constantinople under the ground, and which perhaps had seen no one for centuries, he made a home for himself.

After ten years, fifteen and then twenty years passed. The way things were going he didn’t seem likely to die. He began to think that he would live as long as a human and the Virgin Mary had granted him his life.

One cold winter’s day, because of his absentmindedness, he was caught by the cat of a bakery he visited from time to time and from which he stole bread. The cat got its teeth into Theo’s little body, and after savagely shaking the weasel - which had already snapped at the first bite - a few times, it left it on the ground in disgust. Theo lay buried in snow, with all his bones smashed to smithereens. He had no feeling from the waist down. So, Theo thought, this is it. He closed his eyes and began to wait for the sweet death that would come and embrace him with the cold. The next day when the weasel awoke, all his broken bones had set, and his body had healed completely. Far from any part of his body being frozen, Theo didn’t feel even the slightest malaise from the cold. The flabbergasted weasel put it all down to some divine attribute or a curse on him.

At the end of his endeavours which lasted years, he was able to write using his tiny hands. Following the lessons in a primary school from its attic, he mastered the Turkish alphabet.

The first fifty years he went to the church and the following fifty years to the synagogue and the next fifty years to the mosque. At one stage, he also listened to the German Lutheran priests who came to Constantinople. Finally, he decided to go to wherever free food was being distributed that day.

He saw powerful earthquakes, plague epidemics and great fires. Most of these he managed skilfully to wriggle out of. And the ones he was caught up in did not harm Theo at all. In one of the fires of Great Kostantiniyye (this was now the name of the city where he had been born and raised), he could not escape when he was caught in the flames of the house he had entered to steal a bologna sausage, and Theo too was burnt. The following day he awoke amidst the ashes as though nothing had happened. He took the sausages that, now cooked, were even tastier and returned to his home in the underground tunnels.

His dealings with other people were naturally limited. After a few attempts, he concluded that this was, in fact, to his own benefit. People were not very tolerant of a talking weasel trying to approach them. Their first reactions were to be afraid, and they reflected their fears on the weasel in the most violent way. He decided not to socialise unless really necessary and if pressed, to continue his communication from behind a veil of mystery.

Nevertheless, Theo was no ordinary weasel nor was he a complete recluse. He had discovered the ways to benefit from the fruits of civilisation. For this, he needed first to find either a family or a person in distress.

Nothing could really be done in secret, hidden from Theo who could listen to and view everyone’s private lives from the attics and from inside the walls. This was why he had no problem in ascertaining the houses beset by troubles. When Theo found such a household, he would immediately write a polite letter saying that he had learned of the owner’s distress from a mutual friend whose name he could not disclose. Theo told them that he was extremely saddened by the situation and if they wished, in return for a reasonable price, he could help the troubled person.

If the person, distraught with his tribulations, should write his answer in a letter and hang it on the branch of Theo’s designated tree or throw it into a bottomless well, the weasel which he had spent much time in training would fetch the letter and bring it to him personally. To attempt to catch the weasel was a fruitless effort. Inasmuch as it was impossibly difficult to capture this extremely nimble creature and, because it was specially trained, the weasel would drink and eat only from its owner’s hand.

If the poor wretch’s answer was yes, by hook or by crook Theo would find a remedy for their troubles, either by entering houses, listening to people, doing a little pilfering, or chasing the ghosts.

The fees he asked for were various. Daily newspapers hung on the branch of a tree every day for a year, a book, a few rings of bologna sausage and all sorts of other things. His customers would, of course, be at first surprised at these demands, but because the whole thing had developed mysteriously anyway, and because these needy peoples’ problems were solved at once, they agreed to pay his fees without delving into them too much.

Almost five hundred years passed.

During this time Theo had written and published fifty-five books, thirty of which were in Turkish and twenty-five in Greek. Recently, his articles regularly appeared in two Turkish newspapers and in one Greek. He would send his writing by the usual Delphic methods, and as long as the books were sold, the publishers did not complain.

He wrote about everything in his books… Five hundred years, easier said than done, is a long time to be occupied with just one topic. More than twenty books were about tales and legends. Two books were about Greek monsters in particular. He had singled out one book for the subject, what women do when men are not at home, and this was one of his bestsellers. Amongst his others, there were also books penned on magic, spying and sex. As a weasel, he had been able to easily observe people’s bedrooms for a few hundred years.

For centuries Theo had solved the problems of dozens of people, he had witnessed events which mortal eyes seldom see and overheard sounds which mortal ears very rarely hear.

So what is written here is the story of the extraordinary events that happened to this extraordinary weasel, which had survived in Istanbul for five hundred years.

#gelincik theo #theotheweasel #halilbabilli

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cheasethings · 6 years ago

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how cedar symbology reinforces the theory of Others as evicted weirwood spirits

asoiaf meta

this.. essay? heavily relies on theories and information gathered in the Mythical Astronomy of Ice and Fire by Lucifer means Lightbringer, so props to him and i hope this makes sense if youre unfamiliar with that work.

linking cedars to weirwoods:

"'Who knows more of gods than I? Horse gods and fire gods, gods made of gold with gemstone eyes, gods carved of cedar wood, gods chiseled into mountains, gods of empty air . . .'" -The Iron Captain, AFFC note 'carved'

"He did not like this Isle of Cedars either. The hunting might be good, but the forests were too green and still, full of twisted trees and queer bright flowers like none his men had ever seen before, and there were horrors lurking amongst the broken palaces and shattered statues of drowned Velos, half a league north of the point where the fleet lay at anchor. The last time Victarion had spent a night ashore, his dreams had been dark and disturbing and when he woke his mouth was full of blood. The maester said he had bitten his own tongue in his sleep, but he took it for a sign from the Drowned God, a warning that if he lingered here too long, he would choke on his own blood." -The Iron Suitor, ADWD

note 'too green' and the fact that Victarion has Strange Dreams sleeping here and wakes with weirwood stigmata (a mouth full of blood, like a weirwood)

HIstory of cedars:

"For centuries Meereen and her sister cities Yunkai and Astapor had been the linchpins of the slave trade, the place where Dothraki khals and the corsairs of the Basilisk Isles sold their captives and the rest of the world came to buy. Without slaves, Meereen had little to offer traders. Copper was plentiful in the Ghiscari hills, but the metal was not as valuable as it had been when bronze ruled the world. The cedars that had once grown tall along the coast grew no more, felled by the axes of the Old Empire or consumed by dragonfire when Ghis made war against Valyria. Once the trees had gone, the soil baked beneath the hot sun and blew away in thick red clouds. "It was these calamities that transformed my people into slavers," Galazza Galare had told her, at the Temple of the Graces. And I am the calamity that will change these slavers back into people, Dany had sworn to herself." -Daenerys III, ADWD

"Where were these cedars? Drowned four hundred years ago, it seemed." -THe Iron Suitor, ADWD

"On the day the Doom came to Valyria, it was said, a wall of water three hundred feet high had descended on the island, drowning hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, leaving none to tell the tale but some fisherfolk who had been at sea and a handful of Velosi spearmen posted in a stout stone tower on the island's highest hill, who had seen the hills and valleys beneath them turn into a raging sea. Fair Velos with its palaces of cedar and pink marble had vanished in a heartbeat. On the north end of the island, the ancient brick walls and stepped pyramids of the slaver port Ghozai had suffered the same fate." -THe Iron Suitor, ADWD

from these quotes we get a story of valyrians destroying cedars (directly or indirectly). In slaver's bay, the desertification resulting from the cedar's destruction creates the economic conditions that forces the three sister cities to start trading in slaves. Most valyrian actions fall into the pattern of the BLoodstone Emperor, that is to say, behavior that starts a Long Night (symbolically).

Linking the Slavers to the Others:

aside from the obvious fact that the Others are slavers, enthralling their victims bodies and minds to wage their war (i believe the wights are conscious, but thats another story) theres a lot of stuff linking meereenese culture specifically to the faith of the seven and other Other symbols, mostly through color symbology. if you're not familiar with the new gods' links to the Others, for now just think about how the rainbow of the seven is contained in White.

meereen is constructed of bricks of every color.

"she and her lord husband passed beneeth the bronzes, to emerge at the top of a great brick bowl ringed by descending tiers of benches, each a different color. Hizdahr zo Loraq led her down, through black, purple, blue, green, white yellow, and orange to the red, where the scarlet bricks took the color of the sands below. ...Across the pit the Graces sat in flowing robes of many colors, clustered around the austere figure of Galazza Galare, who alone amongst them wore the green. The Great Masters of Meereen occupied the red and orange benches. The women were veiled, and the men had brushed and lacquered their hair into horns and hands and spikes. Hizdahr's kin of the ancient line of Loraq seemed to favor tokars of purple and indigo and lilac, whilst those of Pahl were striped in pink and white. ... The black and purple benches, highest and most distant from the sand, were crowded with freedmen and other common folk." -Daenerys IX, ADWD

the graces wear rainbow colors (while their leader alone wears green...) Loraq wear indigo and other purples. indigo is a relatively rare color in asoiaf, most notable in the House of the Undying, who are symbols of the Others. (other things it describes are the strangler crystals, twilit skies, rhaegar's eyes, and the Mallister sigil.) Pahl wear Other colors. contrast to the freed and common people sitting in the black (and purple, so this isnt perfect) benches.

and from the dany III quote above, "I am the calamity that will change these slavers back into people, Dany had sworn to herself." Dany will presumably be one of the heros to fight against the Others, and put them to rest.

what it means:

Together with the history about cedars, the story i get from this is: Valyrians destroy trees and Slavers (Others) are born from the resulting desert (cold dead lands). this to me is strong evidence for the theory that Azor Ahai/the Bloodstone Emperor invaded the Weirwoods through killing Nissa Nissa in blood sacrifice to open them up, forcing out the spirit of the trees, who become Others, and starting the Long Night. the bit about "Once the trees had gone, the soil baked beneath the hot sun and blew away in thick red clouds" reinforces this in my mind. the balance provided by the trees has been destroyed, and thick red clouds appear after the soil gets blasted by the fire of the sun. if the moon meteor theory is right, this is the same thing as the balance provided by the fire moon being destroyed, and meteors that drank the fire of the sun raining down and throwing up huge clouds of debris. another symbol for the fire moon cataclysm, the doom of valyria, sends a tsunami to destroy the isle of cedars. same story. meteors cause tidal waves when they drop in the ocean.

the long night is caused by the destruction of the moon, which is also Azor Ahai trying to obtain greater power by usurping the moon's power, and Nissa Nissa the Amethyst Empress's power. (consider the idea that all valyrian steel swords are made from the fire moon meteors, just as the sword Dawn is made from a pale falling star, which means superior weapons for your army.) In similar fashion, the Others are caused by the invasion of the weirwood net, which is Azor Ahai trying to obtain the gods’ power by usurping the power of the trees.

the Cedar Forest in the Epic of Gilgamesh also seems to echo this story, but im not super knowledgeable about it, so ill only briefly talk about those links. Gilgamesh and Azor Ahai both try to invade a forest to steal the trees for themselves. Gilgamesh must fight and kill Humbaba, the demon guardian of the forest (who wears seven layers of armor), in order to get away with this. Azor Ahai must conquer and force out the Others. After Gilgamesh succeeds, he spurns the goddess Ishtar. Ishtar then begs her father to use the bull of heaven (taurus) to destroy Gilgamesh and his city, threatening to open the gates of hell, letting the dead out to roam the earth and eat the living. Sounds like some Other shit to me. Taurus also holds the Pleiades, which LML has identified as the Faith's seven pointed star and the seven stars given to Hugor of the Hill. the bull of heaven makes craters in the earth with its breath. Bulls are also symbols for the moon in greek myth, so to me this sounds like both came true in asoiaf. the moon wreaks havoc on planetos and Azor Ahai's city Asshai creating lots of craters, and also the gates of hell are opened by the Others. all because Gilgamesh and Azor Ahai were total assholes, though theyre remembered as heros.

Gilgamesh also has dreams before entering the Cedar Forest, one of the bull of heaven and another where "The skies roared with thunder and the earth heaved, Then came darkness and a stillness like death. Lightning smashed the ground and fires blazed out; Death flooded from the skies. When the heat died and the fires went out, The plains had turned to ash.” however both of these are interpreted to mean that gilgamesh will succeed. mhm. succeed in starting the long night by causing a firestorm of space rocks.

as a sidenote, there are only 11 times cedar chests are mentioned in asoiaf. i have a few thoughts about them.

THings in cedar chests:

men's clothes- -ned's light linen undertunic -renly's clothing -boy's clothing for tyrion from illyrio (inlaid with lapis and mother-of-pearl)

women's clothes- -the hound's white kingsguard cloak, blood and smoke stained, hidden under sansa's summer silks -wool and linen clothing for sansa given by littlefinger on the ship from KL -arianne's clothes when she's locked in a tower, she refuses to dress like a 'child' -ramsay's quilted doublet and well worn breeches stolen for jeyne to wear for her escape

misc- -dany's dragon eggs, given by illyrio -yunkish gold, a gift to dany so she wont attack yunkai (bound in bronze and gold) -a dwarf's head, given to cersei (inlaid with ivory in a pattern of vines and flowers, with hinges and clasps of white gold) -the 3 pickled heads of dany's envoys to mantarys

they are decorated in lapis, mother-of-pearl, bronze, gold, ivory, and white gold- all ice symbols ('hands of gold are always cold').

the women's clothes are what im most sure about- theyre all given by men to women, more specifically by solar figures to lunar figures. Sansa gets Sandor's cloak which she then dyes green and wears as she escapes King's landing. Sansa then recieves more clothes from Littlefinger, primo evil Azor Ahai figure. this is all in the context of her journey from fire to ice as it were, from kings landing to the eyrie and from Sansa the fire maiden to Alayne the ice queen, which has been theorized to echo the story of Nissa Nissa entering the weirwoods. Jeyne pool gets clothes stolen from Ramsay. Arianne gets her own clothes, but given by Doran for her imprisonment. To me this all reinforces the idea of Azor Ahai dressing Nissa Nissa in the Weirwoods. another detail is that Arianne chooses to dress in her most revealing clothes, saying "Prince Doran might treat her like a child, but she refused to dress like one." if Nissa Nissa was a child of the forest, or had blood of the cotf, this makes a lot of sense. Azor Ahai treating a lunar figure like a child of the forest means using her greenseer blood to open the weirwoods to himself. Similarly, Tyrion, an Azor Ahai figure, gets a child's clothes from a cedar chest, i.e. Azor Ahai becomes a greenseer.

as for the others, im not as sure. dany's eggs being inside cedar/weirwoods seems to show simply that dragon people like Azor Ahai, or Azor Ahai and Nissa Nissa's children are in the trees or became greenseers, but the would be Tyrion's head and the envoys' heads arent as clear to me. Ned and Renly also are clothed in weirwoods apparently which doesnt seem that symbolically far fetched. Neds a Stark and Renly dies and is reborn, and also has green armor that tells you your future if you peer into it (but only if youre Catelyn).

#ASoIaF #asoiaf spoilers #azor ahai #nissa nissa #cedar #asoiaf meta #the others

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rhetoricandlogic · 6 years ago

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The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek, or, the Luminescence of Debauchery By Catherynne M. Valente

Issue #200, Special Double-Issue

, May 26, 2016

AUDIO PODCAST

EBOOK

(Finalist, Eugie Foster Memorial Award, 2017)

When my father, a glassblower of some modest fame, lay gasping on his deathbed, he offered, between bloody wheezings, a choice of inheritance to his three children: a chest of Greek pearls, a hectare of French land, or an iron punty. Impute no virtue to my performance in this little scene! I, being the youngest, chose last, which is to say I did not choose at all. The elder of us, my brother Prospero, seized the chest straightaway, having love in his heart for nothing but jewels and gold, the earth’s least interesting movements of the bowel which so excite, in turn, the innards of man. Pomposo, next of my blood, took up the deed of land, for he always fancied himself a lord, even in our childhood games, wherein he sold me in marriage to the fish in the lake, the grove of poplar trees, the sturdy stone wall, our father’s kiln and pools of molten glass, even the sun and the moon and the constellation of Taurus. The iron punty was left to me, my father’s only daughter, who could least wield it to any profit, being a girl and therefore no fit beast for commerce. All things settled to two-thirds satisfaction, our father bolted upright in his bed, cried out: Go I hence to God! then promptly fell back, perished, and proceeded directly to Hell.

The old man had hardly begun his long cuddle with the wormy ground before Prospero be-shipped himself with a galleon and sailed for the Dutch East Indies in search of a blacker, more fragrant pearl to spice his breakfast and his greed whilst Pomposo wifed himself a butter-haired miller’s daughter, planting his seed in both France and her with a quickness. And thus was I left, Perpetua alone and loudly complaining, in the quiet dark of my father’s glassworks, with no one willing to buy from my delicate and feminine hand, no matter how fine the goblet on the end of that long iron punty.

The solution seemed to me obvious. Henceforward, quite simply, I should never be a girl again. This marvelous transformation would require neither a witch’s spell nor an alchemist’s potion. From birth I possessed certain talents that would come to circumscribe my destiny, though I cursed them mightily until their use came clear: a deep and commanding voice, a masterful height, and a virile hirsuteness, owing to a certain unmentionable rootstock of our ancient family. Served as a refreshingly exotic accompaniment to these, some few of us are also born with one eye as good as any wrought by God, and one withered, hardened to little more than a misshapen pearl notched within a smooth and featureless socket, an affliction which, even if all else could be made fair between us, my brothers did not inherit, so curse them forever, say I. No surprise that no one wanted to marry the glassblower’s giant hairy one-eyed daughter!

Yet now my defects would bring to me, not a husband, but the world entire. I had only to cut my hair with my father’s shears, bind my breasts with my mother’s bridal veil, clothe myself in my brothers’ coats and hose, blow a glass bubble into a false eye, and think nothing more of Perpetua forever. My womandectomy caused me neither trouble nor grief—I whole-heartedly recommend it to everyone! But, since such a heroic act of theatre could hardly be accomplished in the place of my birth, I also traded two windows for a cart and an elderly but good-humored plough-horse, packed up tools and bread and slabs of unworked glass, and departed that time and place forever. London, after all, does not care one whit who you were. Or who you are. Or who you will become. Frankly, she barely cares for herself, and certainly cannot be bothered with your tawdry backstage changes of costume and comedies of mistaken identity.

That was long ago. So long that to say the numbers aloud would be an act of pure nihilism. Oh, but I am old, good sir, old as ale and twice as bitter, though I do not look it and never shall, so far as I can tell. I was old when you were weaned, squalling and farting, and I shall be old when your grandchildren annoy you with their hideous fashions and worse manners. Kings and queens and armadas and plagues have come and gone in my sight, ridiculous wars flowered and pruned, my brothers died, the scales balanced at last, for having not the malformed and singular eye, neither did they have the longevity that is our better inheritance, fashions swung from opulence to piousness and back to the ornate flamboyance that is their favored resting state once more.

And thus come I, Master Cornelius Peek, Glassmaker to the Rich and Redolent, only slightly dented, to the age which was the mate to my soul as glove to glove or slipper to slipper. Such an age exists for every man, but only a lucky few chance to be born alongside theirs. For myself, no more perfect era can ever grace the hourglass than the one that began in the Year of Our Lord 1660, in the festering scrotum of London, at the commencement of the long and groaning orgy of Charles II’s pretty, witty reign.

If you would know me, know my house. She is a slim, graceful affair built in a fashion somewhat later than the latest, much of brick and marble and, naturally, glass, three stories high, with the top two being the quarters I share with my servants, the maid-of-all-work Mrs. Matterfact and my valet, Mr. Suchandsuch (German, I believe, but I do respect the privacy of all persons), and my wigs, my wardrobe, and my lady wife, when I am in possession of such a creature, an occurrence more common and without complaint than you might assume, (of which much more, much later). I designed the edifice myself, with an eye to every detail, from the silver door-knocker carved in the image of a single, kindly eye whose eyelid must be whacked vigorously against the iris to gain ingress, to the several concealed chambers and passageways for my sole and secret use, all of which open at the pulling of a sconce or the adjusting of an oil painting, that sort of thing, to the smallest of rose motifs stenciled upon the wallpaper.

The land whereupon my lady house sits, however, represents a happy accident of real estate investment, as I purchased it a small eternity before the Earl of Bedford seized upon the desire to make of Covent Garden a stylish district for stylish people, and the Earl was forced to make significant accommodations and gratifications on my account. I am always delighted by accommodations and gratifications, particularly when they are forced, and most especially when they are on my account.

The lower floor, which opens most attractively onto the newly-christened and newly-worthwhile Drury Lane, serves as my showroom, and in through my tasteful door flow all the nobly whelped and ignobly wealthed and blind (both from birth and from happenstance, I do not discriminate) and wounded and syphilitic of England, along with not a few who made the journey from France, Italy, Denmark, even the Rus, to receive my peculiar attentions. With the most exquisite consideration, I appointed the walls of my little salon with ultramarine watered silk and discreet, gold-framed portraits of my most distinguished customers. In the northwest corner, you will find what I humbly allege to be the single most comfortable chair in all of Christendom, reclined at an, at first glance, radical angle, that nevertheless offers an extraordinary serenity of ease, stuffed with Arabian horsehair and Spanish barley, sheathed in supple leather the color of a rose just as the last sunlight vanishes behind the mountains. In the northeast corner, you will find, should you but recognize it, my father’s pitted and pitiful iron punty, braced above the hearth with all the honor the gentry grant to their tawdry ancestral swords. The ceiling boasts a fine fresco depicting that drunken uncle of Greek Literature, the Cyclops, trudging through a field of poppies and wheat with a ram under each arm, and the floor bears up beneath a deep blanket of choice carpets woven by divinely inspired and contented Safavids, so thick no cheeky draught even imagines it might invade my realm, and all four walls, from baseboard to the height of a man, are outfitted with a series of splendid drawers, in alternating gold and silver designs, presenting to the hands of my supplicants faceted knobs of sapphire, emerald, onyx, amethyst, and jasper. These drawers contain my treasures, my masterpieces, the objects of power with which I line my pockets and sauce my goose. Open one, any one, every one, and all will be revealed on plush velvet cushions, for there rest hundreds upon hundreds of the most beautiful eyes ever to open or close upon this fallen earth.

No fingers as discerning as mine could ever be content with the glazier’s endless workaday drudge through plate windows and wine bottles, vases and spectacles and spyglasses, hoping against hope for the occasional excitement of a goblet or a string of beads that might, if you did not look too closely, resemble, in the dark, real pearls. No, no, a thousand, million times no! Not for me that life of scarred knuckles whipped by white-molten strands of stray glass, of unbearable heat and even more unbearable contempt oozing from those very ones who needed me to keep the rain out of their parlors and their spirits off the table linen.

I will tell you how I made this daring escape from a life of silicate squalor, and trust you, as I suppose I already have done, to keep my secrets—for what is the worth of a secret if you never spill it? My deliverance came courtesy of a pot of pepper, a disfigured milkmaid, and the Dogaressa of Venice.

It would seem that my brothers were not quite so malevolently egomaniacal as they seemed on that distant, never-to-be-forgotten day when our father drooled his last. One of them was not, at least. Having vanished neatly into London and established myself, albeit in an appallingly meager situation consisting of little more than a single kiln stashed in the best beloved piss-corner of the Arsegate, marvering paltry, poignant cups against the stone steps of a whorehouse, sleeping between two rather unpleasantly amorous cows in a cheesemaker’s barn, I was neither happy nor quite wretched, for at least I had made a start. At least I was in the arms of the reeking city. At least I had escaped the trap laid by pearls and hectares and absconding brothers.

And then, as these things happen, one day, not different in any quality or deed from any other day, I received a parcel from an exhausted-looking young man dressed in the Florentine style. I remember him as well as my supper Thursday last—the supper was pigeon pie and fried eels with claret; the lad, a terrifically handsome black-haired trifle who went by the rather lofty name of Plutarch—and after wiping the road from his eyes and washing it from his throat with ale that hardly deserved the name, he presented me with a most curious item: a fat silver pot, inlaid with a lapis lazuli ship at full sail.

Inside found I a treasure beyond the sweat-drenched dreams of upwardly mobile men, which is to say, a handful of peppercorns and beans of vanil, those exotic, black and fragrant jewels for which the gluttonous world crosses itself three times in thanks. Plutarch explained, at some length, that my brother Prospero now dwelt permanently in the East Indies where he had massed a fabulous fortune, and wished to assure himself that his sister, the sweet, homely maid he abandoned, could make herself a good marriage after all. I begged the poor boy not to use any of those treacherous words again in my or anyone’s hearing: not marriage, not maid, and most of all not sister. Please and thank you for the pepper, on your way, tell no one my name nor how you found me and how did you find me by God and the Devil himself—no, don’t tell me, I shall locate this lost relative and deliver the goods to her with haste, though I could perhaps be persuaded to pass the night reading a bit of Plutarch before rustling up the wastrel in question, but, hold fast, my darling, I must insist you submit to my peculiar tastes and maintain both our clothing and cover of darkness throughout; I find it sharpens the pleasure of the thing, this is my, shall we say, firm requirement, and no argument shall move me.

Thus did I find myself a reasonably rich and well-read man. And that might have made a pleasant and satisfying enough end of it, if not for the milkmaid.

For, as these things happen, one day not long after, not different in any hour or act than any other day, a second parcel appeared upon my, now much finer, though not nearly so fine as my present, doorstep. Her name was Perdita, she was in possession of a complexion as pure as that of a white calf on the day of its birth, hair as red as a fresh wound, an almost offensively pregnant belly, and to crown off her beauty, it must be mentioned, both her eyes had been gouged from her pretty skull by means of, I was shortly to learn, a pair of puritanical ravens.

It would seem that my other brother, Pomposo—you remember him, yes? Paying attention, are we?—was still in the habit of marrying unsuspecting girls off to trees and fish and stones, provided that the trees were his encircling arms, the fish his ardent tongue, and the stones those terribly personal, perceptive, and pendulous seed-vaults of his ardor, and poor, luckless Perdita had taken quite the turn round the park. Perhaps we are not so divided by our shared blood as all that, Pomposo! Hats off, my good man, and everything else, too. Well, the delectably lovely and lamentable maid in question found herself afflicted both by Little Lord Pomposo and by that peculiar misfortune which bonds all men as one and makes them brothers: she had a bad father.

Perdita told me of her predicament over my generous table. She spoke with more haste than precision, tearing out morsels of Mrs. Matterfact’s incomparable baked capon in almond sauce with her grubby fingers and fumbling it into that plump face whilst she rummaged amongst her French pockets for English words to close in her tale like a green and garnishing parsley. As far as I could gather, her cowherding father had, in his youth, contracted the disease of religion, a most severe and acute strain. He took the local clergyman’s daughter to wife, promptly locked her in his granary to keep her safe from both sin and any amusement at all, and removed a child from her every year or so until she perished from, presumably, the piercing shame of having tripped and fallen into one of the more tiresome fairy tales.

Perdita’s father occupied the time he might have spent not slowly murdering his wife upon his one and only hobby: the keeping of birds of prey. Now, one cannot fault the man for that! But he loved no falcons nor hawks nor eagles, only a matched pair of black-hearted ravens he called by the names of Praisegod and Feargod (there really can be no accounting for, or excusing of, the tastes of Papists) which he had trained from the egg to hunt down the smallest traces of wickedness upon his estate and among his children. For this unlikely genius had taught his birds, painstakingly, to detect the delicate and complex scents of sexual congress, and the corvids twain became so adept that they were known to arrive at many a village window only moments after the culmination of the act.

Now you have taken up all the pieces of this none-too-sophisticated puzzle and can no doubt assume the rest. My brother conquered Perdita’s virtue with ease, for no such dour and draconian devoutness can raise much else but libertines, a fact which may yet save us from the vicious fate of a world redeemed, and put my niece (for indeed it proved to be a niece) in her with little enough care for anything but the trees and the fish and the stones of his own bucolic life. No sooner than he had rolled off of her but Praisegod and Feargod arrived, screeching to wake the glorious dead, the scent of coupling maddening their black brains, and devoured Perdita’s eyeballs in a hideous orgy of gore and terribly poor parenting. Pomposo, ever steadfast and humbly responsible for his own affairs, sent his distress directly to me and, I imagine, poured a brimming glass of wine with which to toast himself.

“My dear lady,” said I, gently prying a joint of Mrs. Matterfact’s brandied mutton from her fist, hoping to preserve at least something for myself, “I cannot imagine what you or my good brother mean me to do with a child. I am a bachelor, I wish devoutly to remain so, and my bachelorhood is only redoubled by my regrettable feelings toward children, which mirror the drunkard’s for a mug of clear water: well enough and wholesome for most, he supposes, but what can one do with one? But I am not pitiless. That, I am not, my dear. You may, of course, remain here until the child... occurs, and we shall endeavor to locate some suitable position in town for one of your talents.”

Ah, but I had played my hand and missed the trick! “You misunderstand, monsieur,” protested the comely Perdita. “Mister Pompy didn’t send me to you for your hospitalité. He said in London he had a brother who could make me eyes twice as pretty as they ever were and would only charge me the favor of not squeezing out my babe on his parlor floor.”

Even a thousand miles distant, my skinflint family could put the screws to me, turn them tight, and have themselves a nice giggle at my groans. But at least the old boy guessed my game of trousers and did not give me up, even to his paramour.

“They was green,” the milkmaid whispered, and the ruination of her eye sockets bled in place of weeping. “Like clover.”

Oh, very well! I am not a monster. In any event, I wasn’t then. At least the commission was an interesting enough challenge to my lately listless and undernourished intellect. So it came to pass that over the weeks remaining until the parturition of Perdita, I fashioned, out of crystal and ebony and chips of fine jade, twin organs of sight not the equal of mortal orbs but by far their superior, in clarity, in beauty, even in soulfulness. If you ask me how I accomplished it, I shall show you the door, for I am still a tradesman, however exalted, and tradesmen tell no tales. I sewed the spheres myself with thread of gold into her fair face, an operation which sounds elegant and difficult in the telling, but in the doing required rather more gin, profanity, and blows to the chin than any window did. When I had finished, she appeared, not healed, but more than healed—sublimated, rarefied, elevated above the ranks of human women with their filmy, vitreous eyes that could merely see.

I have heard good report that, under another name, and with her daughter quite grown and well-wed, Perdita now sits upon the throne of the Netherlands, her peerless eyes having captivated the heart of a certain prince before anyone could tie a rock round her feet and drop her into a canal. Well done, say all us graspers down here, reaching up toward Heaven’s sewers with a thousand million hands, well done.

Now, we arrive at the hairpin turn in the road of both my fortunes and my life, the skew of the thing, where the carriage of our tale may so easily overturn and send us flying into mud and thorns unknown. Brace your constitution and your credulity, for I am of a mind to whip the horses and take the bend at speed!

It is simply not possible to excel so surpassingly as I have done and remain anonymous. God in his perversity grants anonymity to the gifted and the industrious in equal and heartless measure, but never to the splendid. Word of the girl with the unearthly, alien, celestial eyes spread like a plague of delight in every direction, floating down the river, sweeping through the Continent, stowing away on ships at sea, until it arrived, much adorned with my Lady Rumor’s laurels, at the palazzo of the Doge in darling, dripping Venice.

Now, the Doge at that time had caused himself, God knows why or by dint of what wager, to be married to a woman by the name of Samaritiana. Do not allow yourselves to be duped by that name, you trusting fools! Samaritiana would not even stop along the side of the road to Hell to wrinkle her nose at the carcass of Our Lord Jesus Christ, though it save her immortal soul, unless He told her she was beautiful first. Oh, ’tis easy enough to hate a vain woman with warts and liver spots, to scorn her milk baths and philtres and exsanguinated Hungarian virgins, to mock her desperation to preserve a youth and beauty that was never much more enticing than the local sheep in the first place, but one had to look elsewhere for reasons to hate Samaritiana, for she truly was the singular beauty of her age. Black of hair, eye, and ambition was she, pale as a maiden drowned, buxom as Ceres (though she had yet no issue), intoxicating as the breath of Bacchus. Fortunately, my lady thoughtfully provided a bounty of other pantries in which to find that meat of hatred fit for the fires of any heart.

She was, quite simply, the worst person.

I do not mean by this to call the Dogaressa a murderess, nor an apostate, nor a despot, nor an embezzler, nor even a whore, for whores, at least, are kindly and useful, murderers must have some measure of cleverness if they mean to get away with it, apostates make for tremendous company at parties, despots have a positively devastating charisma, and, I am assured by the highest authority, which is to say, Lord Aphorism and his Merry Band of Proverbials, that there is some honor amongst thieves. No, Samaritiana was merely humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, morally conservative, and incapable, to the last drop of her ruby blood, of admitting that she did not know everything in all the starry spheres and wheeling orbits of existence, and this whilst believing herself to possess all of these that are virtues and eschew all that are sins. Can you envisage a more wretched and unloveable beast?

I married her, naturally.

The Dogaressa came to me in a black resin mask and emerald hooded cloak when the plague had only lately checked into its waterfront rooms, sent for a litter, and commenced seeing the sights of Venice with its traveling hat and trusted map.

Oh, no, no, you misapprehend my phraseology. Not that plague. Not that grave and gorgeous darkling shadow that falls over Europe once a century and reminds us that what dwells within our bodies is not a soul but a stinking ruin of fluid and marrow and bile. The other plague, the one that sneaks on nimbly putrefying feet from bedroom to bedroom, from dockside to dinner party, from brothel to marital bower, leaving chancres like kisses too long remembered. Yes, we would have to wait years yet before Baron von Bubœ mounted his much-anticipated revival on the stage, but never you fear, Dame Syphilis was dancing down the dawn, and in those days, her viols never stopped nor slowed.

That mysterious, morbid, nigh-monstrous and tangerine-scented creature called Samaritiana darkened my door one evening in April, bid me draw close all my curtains, light only a modest lantern upon a pretty lacquered table inlaid with mother of pearl which I still possess to this day, and stand some distance away while she removed her onyx mask to reveal a face of such surpassing radiance, such unparalleled winsomeness, that even the absence of the left eye, and the mass of scars and weals that had long since replaced it, could do no more than render her enchanting rather than perfect.

It would seem that the Dogaressa danced with the Dame some years past. Her husband, the Doge, brought her to the ball, she claimed, having learned the steps from his underaged Neapolitan mistress, though, as I became much acquainted with the lady in later years, I rather suspect she found her own way, arrived first, wore through three pairs of shoes, departed last, and ate all the cakes on the sideboard. But, as is far too often the case in this life ironical, that mean and miserly soul found itself in receipt of, not only the beauty of a better woman, but the good fortune of a better man. She contracted a high fever owing to her insistence upon hosting the Christmas feast out of doors that year, so that the gathered noblility could see how lovely she looked with a high winter’s blush on her cheeks, and this fever seemed to have driven, by some idiot insensate alchemy, the Dame from the halls of Samaritiana forever, leaving only her eye ravaged and boiled away by the waltz.

All was well in the world, then, save that she could not show herself in public without derision and her husband still rotted on his throne with a golden nose hung on his mouldering face like a door knocker, but she had not come for his sake, nor would she ever dream of fancying that it was possible to ask a boon of that oft-rumored wizard hiding in the sty of London for any single soul on earth other than herself.

“I have heard that you can make a new eye,” said she, in dulcet tones she did not deserve the ability to produce.

I could.

“Better than the old, brighter, of any color or shape?”

I could.

She licked her lily lips. “And install it so well none would suspect the exchange?”

Perhaps not quite, not entirely so well, but it never behooves one to admit weakness to a one-eyed queen.

“You have already done me this service,” said she to me, loftily, never asking once, only demanding, presuming, crushing all resistance, not to mention dignity, custom, the basest element of courtesy, beneath her silver-tooled heel. She waved her hand as though the motion of her fingers could destroy all protestation. The light of my lantern caught on a ring of peridot and tourmaline entwined into the shape of a rather maudlin-looking crocodile gnawing upon its own tail, for she claimed some murky Egyptian blood in the dregs of her familial cup, as though such little droplets could mark her as exceptional, when every dockside lady secretly fancies herself a Cleopatra of the Thames.

“Produce the results upon the morrow! I will pay you nothing, of course. A Dogaressa does not stoop to exchange currency for goods. But when two eyes look out from beneath my brow once more, I will present you with a gift, for no particular reason other than that I wish to bestow it.”

“And if I do not like your gift, Clarissima?”

Puzzlement contorted her exquisitely Cyclopean visage, causing a most unwelcome familial pang within my breast. “I do not take your meaning, Master Peek. How could such a thing possibly occur?”

There is, it seems, a glittering point beyond which egotism achieves such purity that it becomes innocence, and that was the country in which Samaritiana lived. In truth, had she revealed her gift to me then, or even promised payment in the usual manner, I might have refused her, just to experience the novel emotion of rejecting royalty—for I am interested in nothing so much as novelty, not love nor death nor glass nor gold. Something new! Something new! My kingdom for something new! But she caught me, the perfumed spider, wholly without knowing what she’d done. I did indeed take up her commission, and though you may conclude in advance that this recounting of the job will proceed according to the pattern of the last, I shall be disappointed if you do, for I have already told you most vividly that herein lies the skew of my tale.

For the sake of the beautiful Dogaressa, I took up my father’s battered old pipe and punty. I cannot now say why; for a certainty I owned better instruments by far, and had not touched the things in eons except to brush them daintily with a daily sneer. Perhaps a paroxysm of sentimentality seized me; perhaps I despised her too much even then to waste my finer appliances on her pox-punched face, in any event, I cannot even say positively that the result blossomed forth from the tools and not some other cause, and I fear to question it now. I sank into the rhythm of my father and grandfather and his before him: the dollop of liquid glass, the greatbreath of my own lungs expelled through the long, black pipe, the sweet pressure and rolling of the globule against the smooth marver stone, the uncommon light known only to workers of glass, that strange slick of marmalade-light afire within crystal that would soon ride a woman’s skull all the way through the days of her life and down into her tomb.

The work was done; I fashioned two, an exquisitely matched pair, in case the other organ required replacement in the unseen feverish future. Samaritiana, in, so far as I may know or tell, the sole creative decision of her existence, chose not one color for the iris but all of them, dozens of infinitesimal shards chipped from every jewel in my inventory: sapphire, jade, emerald, jasper, onyx, amethyst, ruby, topaz. The effect was a carnival wheel of deep, unsettling fascination, and when I sewed it into her flesh with my golden thread she did not wail or struggle but only sighed, as though lost in the act of love, and, though her faults were called Legion, they were as yet unknown to me, thus, as my needle entered her, so too did my fatal softening begin.

The Dogaressa departed with her stitching still fresh, leaving in her wake but three souvenirs of our intimate surgery: one gift she intended, one she did not, and her damnable scent, which neither Mrs. Matterfact nor Mr. Suchandsuch, no matter how they scrubbed and strove, could remove from the premises. I daresay, even this very night, should you venture to my old house on the High Street and press your nose to its sturdy bones, still yet you would snatch a whiff of tangerine and strangling ivy from the foundation stones.

The gift she intended to leave was a lock of her raven hair, the skinflint bitch. The other, I did not perceive until some weeks later, when I adjourned to my smoking room with a bottle of brandy, a packet of snuff, and a rare contemplative mood which I intended to spend upon a rich, unfiltered melancholy as sweet as any Madeira—for it is a fact globally acknowledged that idle melancholy, like good wine, is the exclusive purview of the wealthy. To aid in my melancholy, I fingered in one hand the mate to the Dogaressa’s harlequin eye, rubbing my thumb over that strange, motley iris, marveling at the milky sheen of the sclera, admiring, unrepentant Narcissus that I am, my own skill and artistry. I removed my own, ordinary, unguessable, nearly flawless glass eye and held up the other to my empty socket like a spyglass, and a most thoroughly stupendous metamorphosis transpired: I could seethrough the jeweled lens of that artificial eye! Truly see, without cloud or glare or halo—ah, but what I saw was not the walls of my own smoking room, so tastefully lined with matching books chosen to neither excite nor bore any guest to extremes, but the long peach-cream and gold hall of the palazzo of the Doge in far-distant Venice! The chequered black and white marble floors flowed forth in my vision like a houndstooth river; the full and unforgiving moon streamed glaucous through tall slim windows; painted ceilings soared overhead, inlaid with pearl and carnelian and ever-so-slightly greyed with the smoke of a hundred thousand candles burnt over peerless years in that grand corridor. Women and men swept slowly up and down the squares like boats upon some fairy canal, swathed in gowns of viridescent green cross-hatched with silver and rose, armored in bodices of whalebone and opal, be-sailed in lacy gauze spun by Clotho herself upon the wheel of destiny, cloaked and hooded in vermillion damask, in aquamarine, in citron and puce, their clothing each so splendid I could scarce tell the maids from the swains—and thus looked I upon a personal paradise heretofore undreamt of.

But there were worms in paradise, for each and every beauty in the Doge’s palace was rotting in their finery like the fruit of sun-spoiled melons within their shells. Their flesh putrefied and dripped from their bones and what remained turned hideous, sickening colors, choleric, livid, cyanic, hoary, a moldering patina of death whose effusions stained those bodices black. Some stumbled noseless, others having replaced that appendage with nostrils of gold and silver and crystal and porcelain, and others, all hope lost, sunk their visages into masks, though they could not hide their chancred hands, the bleeding sores of their bosoms, the undead tatters of their throats.

Yet still they laughed, and spoke animatedly, one to the other, and blushed in virtuous fashion beneath their putridity. Such is the dance of the Dame, who enters through the essential act of life, yet leaves you thinking, breathing, walking whilst the depredations of the grave transact upon your still-sensate flesh, making of this world a single noisy tomb.

My breath would not obey me; my heart ricocheted amongst my ribs like a cannon misfired. Was it truly Italy I saw bounded in the tiny planet of a glass eye? Had I stumbled into a drunken sleep or gone mad so swiftly no asylum could hope to catch me? I shot to my feet, mashing the eye deeper into my socket until stars spattered my sight—closer, look closer! Could I hear as well? Smell? Taste the tallowed air of that far-off moonlit court?

I could not. I could not hear their footsteps nor inhale their perfume nor feel the fuzzed reek of the mildewed canals on my tongue nor move of my own volition. I apprehended a new truth, that even the impossible possesses laws of its own, and those unbendable. I could only observe. Observe—while my vision lurched forward, advancing quickly, rocking gently as with a woman’s sinuous gait. Graceful, slender arms extended as though from my own body, opening with infinite elegance to embrace a man whose head was that of a Titan cast down brutally into the pit of Tartarus, so wracked with growths and intuberances and pulsating polyps that the plates of his skull had cracked beneath the intolerable weight and shifted into a new pate so monstrous it could no longer bear the Doge’s crown, which hung pitifully instead from a ribbon slung round his grotesque neck. Those matchless arms which were not my own enfolded this hapless creature and, encircling the middle finger of the hand belonging to the right arm, I saw with my altered vision the twisted peridot and tourmaline crocodile ring of the Dogaressa Samaritiana.

I cast the glass eye away from me, sickened, thrilled, inflamed, ensorcelled, the fire in my midnight hearth as nothing beside the conflagration of curiosity, horror, and the beginnings of power that crackled within my brain-pan. In that first moment, standing among my books and my brandy drenched in the sweat of a new universe, an instinct, a whisper of Truth Profound, permeated my spirit like smoke exhaled, and, I confess to you now, all these many years hence, still I enshrine it as an article of faith, for it was with breath that God animated the dumb mud of Adam, breath that woke Pandora from stone, breath that demarcates the living and the dead, breath with which we speak and cry out and divide ourselves from the idiot kingdom of animals, and breath, by all the blasted saints and angels, with which the glassblower shapes his glass! The living breath of Cornelius Peek yet permeates every insignificant atom of his works; each object broken from his punty, be it window or goblet or cask or eye, hides the sacred exhalations of his spirit co-mingled with the crystal, and it is this, it is this, I tell you, that connects the jeweled eye of the Dogaressa with the jeweled eye in my hand! I dwell in the glass, it cannot dispense with me any further than it can dispense with translucency or mass, and therefore it carries the shard of Cornelius whithersoever it wanders.

Let us dispense with a few obnoxious but inevitable inquiries into the practicality of the matter, so that we may move along past the skew. How could this mystic connection have escaped my notice till now? It is only sensical: Perdita vanished away to the Netherlands with both marvelous eyes, and no window nor goblet nor cask is, in its inborn nature, that organ of sight which opens onto the infinite pit of the human soul. Would any eye manufactured in the same fashion result in such remote visions? They would indeed, my credulous friend. Does every glassblower possess the ability to produce such objects, should he but retain one eye whilst selling the other at a fair price? Ah, here I must admit my deficiency as a philosopher, for which I apologize most obsequiously. It cannot be breath alone, for I made subtle overtures toward the gentleman of the glassmen’s guild and I can say with a solemn certainty that none but Master Peek can perform this alchemy of sclera and pupil. Why should it be so? Perhaps I am a wizard, perhaps a saint, perhaps a demiurge, perhaps the Messiah returned at last, perhaps it owes only to that peculiar rootstock of my family which grants me my height, my baritone, the hairiness of my body. Grandfather Polyphemus’s last gift, lobbed down the ancestral highway, bashing horses as it comes. I am a man of art, not science. I ask why Mrs. Matterfact has not yet laid out my supper oftener than I ask after the workings of the uncluttered cosmos.

Thus did I enter the business of optometry.

When you have placed a mad rainbow jewel in the skull of a Dogaressa as though she were nothing but a golden ring, a jewel which drove the rotting men of Venice insane with the desire to tie her to a bridge-post and stare transported into the motley swirling colors of the eye of God, lately fallen to earth, they began to say, somewhere in Sicily, advertisement serves little purpose. I opened my door and received the flood. It is positively trivial to lose an eye in this wicked world, did you know? I accepted them warmly, with a bow and a kerchief fluttered to the mouth in acute compassion, a permanently sympathetic expression penciled onto my lips in primrose paint—for that moth-eaten scab Cromwell was finally in the grave, where everything is just as colorless and abstemious and black as he always wished it to be, so full of piss and vitriol that it poisoned him to the gills, and Our Chuck, the Merry Monarch, was dancing on his bones.

Fashion, ever my God and my mother, took pity upon her poor supplicant and caused a great miracle to take place for my sake—the world donned a dandy wig whilst I doffed my own, sporting my secret womanly hair as long and curled as any lord, soaking my face in the most masculine of pale powders, rouges, lacquers, and creams, encasing my figure, such as it ever was, in lime and coral brocade trimmed in frosty silver, concealing my gait with an ivory cane and foxfurred slippers, and rejoicing in the knowledge that, of all the men in London, I suddenly possessed the lowest voice of them all. So hidden, so revealed, I took all the one-eyed world into my parlor: the cancerous, the war-wounded, the horse-kicked, the husband-beaten, the inquisitor-inquisited, the lightning-struck, the unfortunately-born, the pox-blighted, and yes, the Dame’s erstwhile lovers, for she had made her way to our shores and had begun her ancient gambols in sight of St. Paul’s. And for each of these unfortunate angels of the ocular, I fashioned a second eye in secret, unknown entirely to my custom, twin to the one that repaired their befouled faces, with which I adjourned night by night to a series of successive smoking rooms, growing grander and finer with each year, holding those orbs to the light and looking unseen upon every city in Christendom, along with several in the Orient and one in the New World, though it could hardly be called a city, if I am to be honest. And Venice, always Venice, the first eye and only, her eye, gazing out on the water, the moonlight, the dead.

In this fashion, I came to know that the Doge had died, succumbed to the unbearable weight of his own head, long before Samaritiana appeared on my night-bestrewn doorstep, the saffron gown she wore in the moonlight, and every other in her trunk, torn violently, soaked with bodily fluids, rent by the overgrown nails of the frenzied rotting horde who had chased her from the palazzo through every desperate alleyway and canal of the city, across Switzerland and France, in their anguished longing to touch the Eye of God, still sewn into the ex-Dogaressa’s skull, to touch it but once and be healed forever.

But of course I aided the friendless and abandoned Good Samaritiana as she wept beside her monstrous road. Oh, Clarissima, how dreadful, how unspeakable, how worthy of Mr. Pepys’ vigilant pen! I shall have to make introductions when you are quite well again. I sent at once for a fine dressmaker of my acquaintance to construct a suitable costume for the lady and save her from the immodesty of those ragged silken remnants of her former life with which, even then, she attempted to cover her body with little enough success that, before the dressmaker could so much as cross the river, I learned something quite unexpected concerning the biography of Samaritiana, former queen of Venice.

She was quite male. Undeniably, conspicuously, astonishingly, fascinatingly so.

I called up to Mrs. Matterfact for cold oxtongue, a saucer of pineapple, and oysters stewed in Armagnac, down to Mr. Suchandsuch for carafes of hot claret mulled via the latest methods, and listened to the wondrous chimera in my parlor tell of how that famous Egyptian blood was not in the least of the Nile but of the Tiber, on whose Ostian banks a penniless but beautiful boy had been born in secret to one of the Pope’s mistresses and left to perish among the reed-gatherers and the amber-collectors and the diggers of molluscs.

But perish the lad did not, for even a grass-picker is thoroughly loused with the nits of compassion, and the women passed the babe one to the other and back again, like a cup of wine that drank, instead, from them. Now, it is well known to anyone with a single sopping slice of sense that the Pope’s enemies are rather like weevils, ever industrious, ever multiplying, ever rapacious, starving for the chaff of scandal with which to choke the Holy Father and watch him writhe. They roved over the city, overturning the very foundational stones of ancient Rome in search of the Infallible Bastards, in order, not to kill them like Herod, but to bring them before the Cardinals and etch their little faces upon the stained glass windows as evidence of sin. My little minx, having already long, lustrous hair and androgyne features more like to a seraph than a by-blow son, found it at first advantageous to effect the manners and dress of a girl, and then, when the danger had passed, more than that, agreeable, even preferable to her former existence. Having become a maid to save her life, she remained one in order to enjoy it. Owing to the meager diet of the Tiber’s tiniest fish, little Samaritiana never grew so tall nor so stout as other boys, she remained curiously hairless, and though she escaped the castrato’s fate, her voice never dipped beneath the pleasing alto with which she now spoke, nor did her organ of masculinity ever aspire to outdo the average Grecian statue, and so, when the Doge visited Ostia after the death of his first wife, he saw nothing unusual walking by the river except for the most beautiful woman in the Occident, balancing a basket of rushes on her hip with a few nuggets of amber rolling within the weave.

“But surely, Clarissima,” mused I, savoring the tart song of pineapple upon my tongue, “a bridegroom, however ardent, cannot be so easily duped as a vengeful Cardinal! Your deception cannot have survived the wedding bower!”

“It did not survive the engagement, my dear Master Peek,” Samaritiana replied without a wisp of blush upon her remarkable cheek. “Oh, mistake me not, I do so love to lie—I see no more purpose in pretending to be virtuous in your presence than I saw in pretending to be fertile in his. But there could be no delight in a deception so deep and vast. It would impair true marriage between us. I revealed myself at Pentecost, allowing him in the intensity of his ardor to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until I stood clad only in honesty before His Serenity and awaited what I presumed to be my doom and my death. But only kisses fell upon me in that moment, for the Doge had long suppressed his inborn nature, and suffered already to get upon his departed wife the heirs he owed to the canals, and though my masquerade, you will agree, outshines the impeccable, he would later say, on the night of which you so confidently speak, that some sinew of his heart must always have known, since first he beheld me with my basket of amber and sorrow.”

I did not exchange trust for trust that night among the oysters and the oxtongue. I have a viciously refined sense of theatre, after all. I made her wait, feigning religion, indigestion, the vicissitudes of work, gout, even virginity, until our wedding night, whereupon I allowed Samaritiana, in the intensity of her ardor, to unfasten my stays and loose my ribbons until at last all that stood between us was the tattered ruin of my mother’s ancient bridal veil, and then, not even that.

“Goodness, you don’t expect me to be surprised, do you?” laughed the ex-Dogaressa, the monster, the braying centaur, the miserly lamia who would not give me the satisfaction of scandalizing her! That eve, and only that eve, under the stars painted upon my ceiling, I applied all my cruellest and most unfair arts to compel my wife to admit, as a wedding present, that she had not known, she had never known, never even suspected, loved me as a man just as I loved her as a woman, and was besides a brutal little liar who deserved a lifetime of the most delectable punishment. We exchanged whispered, apocryphal, long-atrophied names beneath the coverlet: Perpetua. Proteo.

Samartiana treated me deplorably, broke my heart and my bank, laughed when she ought to have wept, drove Mrs. Matterfact to utter disintegration, kept lovers, schemed with minor nobles. We were just ferociously happy. Are you surprised? I, too, am humorless, witless, provincial, petty, small of mind, parched of imagination, stingy of wallet and affection, a liar and a cad. He was like me. I was like her. I had, after all, seen as she saw, from the very angle of her waking vision, which in some circles might be the definition of divine love. I have had wives before and will have again, far cleverer and braver and wilder than my Clarissima, but none I treasured half so well, nor came so near to telling the secret of my smoking room, of the chests full of eyes hidden beneath the floorboards. Samaritiana had her lovers; I had my eyes, the voyeur’s stealthy, soft and pregnant hours, a criminal sensorium I could not quit nor wished to.Yet still I would not share, I held it back from her, out of her reach, beyond her ken.

The plague took her in the spring. The Baron, not the Dame. The plague of long masks and onions and bodies stacked like fresh-laid bricks. I buried her in glass, in my incandescent fury at the kiln, for where else can a man lose his whole being but in a wife or in work? These are the twin barrels in which we drown ourselves forever.

It soon came to pass that wonderful eyes of Cornelius Peek were in such demand that the possession of one could catapult the owner into society, if only he could keep his head about him once he landed, and this was reason enough that, men being men and ambition being forever the most demanding of bedfellows, it became much the fashion in those years to sacrifice one eye to the teeth-grinding god of social mobility and replace it with something far more useful than depth perception. Natural colors fell by the wayside—they wanted an angel’s eye, now, a demon’s, a dryad’s, a goblin’s, more alien, more inhuman, less windows to the soul than windows to debauched and lawless Edens, and I, your servant, sir, a window-maker once more. I cannot say I approved of this self-deformation, but I certainly profited by the sudden proliferation of English Cyclopses, most especially by their dispersal through the halls of power, carrying the breath of Peek with them into every shadowy corner of the privileged and the perverse.

I strung their eyes on silver thread and lay in a torpor like unto the opium addict upon the lilac damask of my smoking room couch, draping them round and round my body like a strand of numberless pearls, lifting each crystal gem in turn to gaze upon Paris, Edinburgh, Madrid, Muscovy, Constantinople, Zurich—and Venice, always Venice, returning again and again, though I knew I would not find what I sought along those rippling canals traveled by the living dead. It became my obsession, this invasion of perspective, this theft of privacy, the luxurious passivity of the thing, watching without participating as the lives of others fluttered by like so many scarlet leaves, compelled to witness, but not to interfere, even if I wished to, even if I had liked the young Earl well enough when I installed his pigment-less diamond eye and longed to parry the assassin’s blade when I saw it flash in the Austrian sunset. I saw, with tremulous breath, as God saw, forced unwilling to allow the race of man to damn or redeem itself in a noxious fume of free will, forbidden by laws unwritten not to lift one hand, even if the baker’s boy had laughed when I offered him a big red eye or a cat-slit pupil or a shark’s unbroken onyx hue, any sort, free of charge, even the costliest, the most debonair, in honor of my late wife Samaritiana who in another lifetime paid me in hair, not because she would wish me to be generous but because she would mock me to the rafters and howl hazard down to Hell, begging the Devil to take me now rather than let one more pauper rob her purse, even if I saw, now, through his eye, saw the maidservant burning, burning in the bakery on Pudding Lane, burning and screaming in the midnight wind, and then the terrible, impossible leap of the flames to the adjoining houses, an orange tongue lasciviously working in the dark, not to lift one hand as what I saw in the glass eye and what I saw in the flesh became one, fusing and melding at last, reality and unreality, the sight I owned and the sight I stole, the conflagration devouring the city, the gardens, and my house around me, my lovely watered ultramarine silk, my supremely comfortable chair stuffed with Arabian horsehair, my darling gold and silver drawers, as I lay still and let it come for me and thee and all.

I did not die, for heaven’s sake. Perish the thought! Death is terrifically gauche, don’t you know, I should never be caught wearing it in public. I simply did not get up. Irony being the Lord of All Things, the smoking room survived the blaze and I inside it; though the rafters smoked and blackened and the walls swelled with heat like the head of a Doge, the secret chambers honeycombing the place contained the inferno, they did not stove in nor fall, save for one shelf of books, the bloody Romans, of all things, which, in toppling, quite snapped both my shinbones beneath a ponderous copy of Plutarch. Mrs. Matterfact and Mr. Suchandsuch fought valiantly and gave up only the better part of the roof, though we lost my lovely showroom, a tragedy from which I shall never fully recover, I assure you. And for a long while, I remained where the fire found me, on the long damask couch in my smoking room, wrapped in lengths of eyes like Odysseus lashed to the mast and listening to all the sirens’ mating bleats, still lifting each in turn and fixing it to my empty socket, one after the other after the other, and thus I stayed for years, years beyond years, beyond Matterfact and Suchandsuch and their replacements, beyond the intolerable plebians outside who wanted only humble, honest brown and blue eyes again, their own mortal eyes, having seen too much of wildness. And what, pray tell, did I do with my impossible sight, with my impossible span of time?

Why, I became the greatest spy the world has ever known. Would you have done otherwise?

Oh, I have sold crowns to kings and kings to executioners, positions to the enemy and ships to the storm, murderers to the avenging and perversities to the puritanical, I have caused ingenious devices to be built in England before the paint in Krakow finished drying, rescued aristocrats from the mob and mobs from the aristocracy by turns, bought and traded and brokered half of Europe to the other half and back again, dashed more sailors against the rocks than my promethean progenitor could have done in the throes of his most orgiastic fever-dream. I have smote the ground and summoned up wars from the deeps and I have called down the heavens to end them, all without moving one whisper from my house on Drury Lane, even as the laborers rebuilt it around me, even as the rains came, even as the lane around it became a writhing slum, a whore’s racetrack, a nursery rhyme.

Look around you and look well: this is the world I made. Isn’t it charming? Isn’t it terrible and exquisite and debased and tastefully appointed according to the very latest of styles? I have seen to every detail, every flourish—think nothing of it, it has been my great honor.

But the time has come to rouse myself, for my eyes have begun to grow dark, and of late I spy muchly upon the damp and wormy earth, for who would not beg to be buried with their precious Peek eye, bauble of a bygone—and better—age? No one, not even the baker’s boy. The workshop of Master Cornelius Peek will open doors once more, for I have centuries sprawled at my feet like Christmas tinsel, and I would not advance upon them blind. I have heard the strange mournful bovine lowing of what I am assured are called the proletariatoutside my window, the clack and clatter of progress to whose rhythm all men must waltz. There is much work to be done if I do not wish to have the next century decorated by some other, coarser, less splendid hand. I shall curl my hair and don the lime and coral coat, crack the ivory cane against the stones once more, and if the fashions have sped beyond me, so be it, I care nothing, I will stand for the best of us, for in the end, the world will always belong to dandies, who alone see the filigree upon the glass that is God’s signature upon his work.

After all, it is positively trivial to lose an eye in this midden of modernity, this precarious, perilous world, don’t you agree?

#Catherynne M. Valente #The Limitless Perspective of Master Peek #Or #The Luminescense of Debauchery #short story #actually long story

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