#The concept of masks is so neatly woven in and out- keeping an eye on Sev and Severus and Snape is good fun!

[momo-t-daye]

Here is my art for the story "The Masks We Bear" that @owlswithfins created for the 2023 Snapebang event hosted by @snapebang! The symbolism in this tale is delightful and the details are nicely intricate (and sometimes you go back and say "oh, of course!") and it's a fun read and re-read folks!

Harry's pose, with his glasses falling off, is based off of the concept of "Atlas holding up the world" slowly being crushed by the cracking concept of "The Golden Boy Who Lived", Severus' pose is meant to mirror "Hamlet contemplating Yorrick's skull", and Lily's (+) pose does rather draw a bit on that "Three Fates" or "Triple Godess" idea. Sev's wall of cracked masks ("The Spy" (sub rosa, who knows whether he is bad with a mask of good or good with a mask of bad), "The Professor" with potions on the brain, "The Prince", & "Snivellus") loosely on the Pink Floyd 2000 "The Wall Live" cover too because the story has wonderful homages and nods to Sev's musical tastes.

[chrysalispen]

Prompt #1 - Crux

Spoilers for 5.3. See below the cut.

The concept of the timepiece, Hades had always thought to himself, was both eminently rational and peculiarly irrational.

Nabriales was the keeper of the Convocation minutes, ever punctual, and ensured the ship of any given meeting was tightly and neatly run, which was an important thing, of course. To master the concept of time was to provide proper documentation, proper history.

But everyone knew that such things were a superficial conceit at best, even the Majestic himself.

Time was an elastic thing. 

Any Amaurotine with a basic grasp of creation magic learned when they were still young how to alter their perception of time. A second could be as years and a year could be as a day, and a season could be as a lifetime when one was separated from the things - the people - that made it worth living. Hades understood that fact better than most.

For Hades always knew, always, always, when the turn of the warm seasons ended at least and the time for travel was done. 

With the drifting fall of old leaves there would also come the hollow tapping of a beak upon the patio door.

It was always early of an autumn morning, when incipient chill had returned to the eternal ebb and flow of the star's winds. He would sit up - hair mussed from its journey over his pillows as he tossed and turned at night - and smile, and he would reach for the mask he always kept set neatly on his bedside table, because she would be there. Razor-sharp talons curled over the spindly back of a delicate wrought-iron chair, soft layered feathers ruffled in the high and thin currents, thin and colder still outside the penthouse apartment they shared- with her rounded golden eyes fixed expectantly upon him, calm and unblinking.

Waiting for Hades to invite her in.

She could simply let herself in, he knew, but that was not the Traveler's way.

It had become a game with her over the years, even as he'd warned her about the dangers of taking a form so drastically different from her own. But as much as he scolded and lectured, and as much as she scoffed and teased, it was a routine. A warm and worn blanket with the threads woven from memory and routine, and one Hades - for all his exasperation - secretly awaited with no small degree of eagerness. The bright months, spring into summer, were so interminable he had long ago taken that basic time-trick and put it to quietly selfish ends.

They were easier to endure, that way.

Tap, tap, came the sound of her beak on the glass. A single snap of his fingers, dry and sharp, left him sufficiently dressed to open the door.

He was already smiling. And when Azem the Traveler fluttered across the threshold in a flurry of leaf-brown and snow-white to take once more the form of the woman he loved, he saw she was smiling too.

~*~

Time was an elastic thing. 

It yawned between them now, a chasm, a gulf of fury and desperation stretched across hours and days and weeks. Their voices, lowered and urgent, echoed through the emptied hallway. Hades had seen her angry before, but that anger had never been directed at him. Not like this.

"You said you had convinced the assembly to wait before making any decisions," she said, and behind her mask of office, Azem's eyes simmered with fire like the core of Lahabrea's phoenix, alight with her fury. "You said you would tell them--"

"I did tell them--"

"--to wait for my report! You promised!" Her lips trembled, turning into a downward bow. "How could you agree to such a thing? How could you possibly think-"

"Will you kindly stop shouting long enough to listen to me? We have no other viable options left!"

"There is always a choice! Did you even try?"

"Of course I tried! What do you take me for?" His own temper flared as his hands squeezed her shoulders. "I tried to see things your way, I even convinced them to wait for some time, but there is no time left!"

The trembling ceased. Her lips drew into a flat and unyielding line, and a deep and uneasy chill rippled through his own limbs at the sight of it. He didn't need to see her eyes to see the door slamming shut in his face.

"None of you have ever understood the lives of those outside the city," she said flatly. "Not now. Not ever. Even you of all people-- as much as I have confided in you, shed tears over them-"

"I do understand that you have your duties as I have mine," Hades bit out between clenched teeth, "but I will never understand why you seem to feel so much more empathy for these creatures than you do your own people."

She flinched as though he'd slapped her. A frozen moment passed before she shrugged away the hand on her shoulder, and in that moment Hades felt the retreat of her very aether: the closing of doors one by one until he could no longer see the facets of that brilliant blue as clearly as he once had. It was muted and brassy, the color of the noonday sky in summer. 

"And there it is," she said. "That is the crux of it all, this division between myself and the rest of you. You don't understand me, Emet-Selch. Nor do the others."

She straightened her shoulders, the drape of her robes shifting with the motion-

-and removed her mask.

Before he could recoil in shock she had grabbed his wrist and placed her discarded badge in his hand, then with an almost insolent gesture the unadorned alabaster smoothness of an Amaurotine citizen's mask covered her features once more. "Not once, in all these years, have you ever learned to love the world that lives beyond these borders. And if you cannot understand what it means to love the world, you cannot hope to understand why I must put the world first."

His throat felt unbearably dry. So shocked was he that in that moment he forgot her title.

"Tisiphone-"

"Emet-Selch. Pray let it known: I hereby tender my resignation from the Fourteenth seat." The smile that curved her lips was joyless. "You may pass along my sentiments to the others. Though I doubt I shall be missed. They seem to have operated just fine without my input thus far."

Time stretched and constricted as her back turned, and Hades was left only with the Traveler's mask in one hand and the other opened--reaching for her, to call back the inevitable.

But Azem did not stop. She passed beyond him to the entrance of the Capitol Building and in moments he was alone.

Hades shoved his hood from his face and clenched his fingers through his hair.

~*~

Time was an elastic thing.

Time was an elastic thing and Hades could count down to the exact minute how long he could keep this moment fresh in his memory, holding her sundered and dying body in his arms.

"This was your fault," he whispered.

Rage

(his or his Lord's, did it matter, did it matter)

and anguish building deep within his breast, throttled into a scream, and for all his rage he found he could see nothing through his tears. Nothing save that serene and smiling face he had loved so much, as she left him behind for the sake of the world she said he had never cared to understand.

"This was your fault," he snarled again, throat tight, time stretching and dilating until it was too thin, pulled taut and unwinding to snap and tangle, the edges raw and bleeding and forgotten except for her final words.

Ten months, he thought. He could stretch this moment no farther than ten months. Just shy of a year. 

Seven weeks--a single season, to recall the exact gold of her eyes: the throat of one of Halmarut's day lilies, bright yellow darkening to liminal gold before it turned amber at the base. Two for her hair, sunlit gold. Four for her throaty laugh. Two for the warmth wrapped about him as they lay in their bed.

Ten months was all he had to remember the countless years of their lives together before the light in her eyes had dulled and her soul shattered into fragments. And all he had left to himself was his rage and his grief. 

Knowing that in the end, she had chosen the world over him. That she had abandoned him. That she would make that choice again if she could.

Hatred thrummed through his veins, rancor the very pulse that throbbed in his temples- but the claws that had wrapped themselves about his soul failed against the cry of his heart. 

And that is the crux of it all. You don't understand me.

He didn't. He was a selfish creature at his core, selfish and sentimental, and she had been his reliable and unwavering other half to the bitter end. Gentle where he was harsh, boundlessly loving where he thought only of himself, and at his core, far below the paired virtues of civic duty and learned devotion, all he had ever wanted was to keep the people he treasured close, and he had lost the one that mattered most.

Azem had been right.

Azem had been right, and Emet-Selch couldn't bear it.

The sun fled in the wake of the storm, and upon the last whole souls of a world torn asunder, a cold rain began to fall. And fall. And fall.