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autisticlancemcclain · 2 years ago

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When Shiro woke, everything was dark, and the stone was cold under his hands, and the flickering flame of torches cast a thousand shadows on Adam’s terrified face.

He scrambled to his feet with a gasp, scraping his knees on the rough stone, thin sandals digging into his feet. The dampness was suffocating, a blanket of wet air filling his lungs until he was drowning. He reached out to Adam, to touch and hold him, finally, finally, finally, but his hands would not obey, nor would his arms stretch out. Instead he only stood paralyzed and looked at him, watched as the shadows danced across his face. He wasn’t wearing his glasses. Where were his glasses? Adam couldn’t see. He needed to see.

“Son of the Skies, Grand Master of the Lyre and the Silver Tongue,” boomed a voice, not loud, but strong, strong enough that the pebbles on the ground shook in fear and the water rushing behind the walls of the cave froze. Shiro looked up, terror making his movements jerky, fragmented, and saw for the first time in front of him a throne grander than any he’d ever seen, woven together with bones and skulls and ash, studded with gold and diamond. The flames of the torches soared, burning brightly, blinding white in the blackness of the cave, illuminating on the throne skin of bleached bone, eyes of crimson rubies, and a crown of blood and marrow, dripping in rivulets down his face.

Hades.

Shiro did not know how he knew the god, from where the certainty came, but he was sure: in front of him, giant in stature and horrifying in posture, the god of death and dying and riches sit before him.

“Orpheus,” Hades thundered, more final than before.

Shiro knew that Hades spoke to him. He was Orpheus. He knew also, somehow, that he was the one who had demanded an audience, he was the one who stood trembling in front of the King and asked a task impossible, implored the mercy of the god for whom mercy was a slight, an insult.

“Do you understand the gravity of what you ask? I am moved by your plea, by your song. But what you demand is an imbalance. A disruption of the natural order. Your lover died of no unnatural means. To send him back to the living would be to risk the delicate balance of life itself, for no gain for anyone but you and your love. And still you ask me?”

Sweat dripped into Shiro’s eyes, even as he shivered from the cold. He looked over to Adam — to Eurydice — who stood frozen beside Hades’ throne, black tendrils of poison still lining his skin from the venom of the snake that befell him; the lines of betrayal because Shiro could not save him, because Shiro left him behind.

To die.

He would not leave Adam behind again. Not at his own behest, not at Hades’, and most certainly not at the world’s. He would choose Adam, this time. This time he would choose to be selfish.

He turned to the god, resolve hardening his jaw, straightening his spine, even as terror churned in his belly, trembled his hands.

“I understand that gravity of my request. And I make it again — I beg you, Lord of the Underworld, for the return of my love’s soul.”

This time, he would choose Adam.

The god stared at him for several minutes, unmoving, unspeaking, endlessly. He looked silently ahead for long enough that Shiro felt as if his would skin wrinkle and his hair would grey. He feared he would be trapped in this cave until he perished, and he and Adam would never be free.

“I will grant you his freedom,” Hades said finally. “Your performance and bravery are admirable, boy. You have nearly won your prize.”

Shiro swallowed. “Nearly?”

Hades’ gaze grew cold. “My domain is large, and treacherous. You have played waylaid your way into it, and now you must find your way out. Your love may follow you, and once you are both in the land of the living, there you shall both stay until the sands of time finally return you to me.”

“Thank you,” Shiro gasped out, hunched over in his relief. “Thank you, my lord —”

Hades held up his hand for silence, and Shiro’s tongue grew heavy in his mouth.

“But,” he warned, “Eurydice shall walk behind you. And if you look back, even once, he will remain here for eternity, and he shall never be with you again. These are my terms.”

“I accept,” Shiro said hastily. Immediately. Hades could have suggested any sacrifice and he would have made it. This would be easy; a sacrifice only of faith.

“Go, then,” said Hades.

Shiro hesitated. “Adam, call out to me, so I know —”

“Go now, boy!” Hades boomed, coming to his feet, and the weight of him shifted the walls and shook the ceilings, a rain of rock falling from the sky. “Do not look back!”

Shiro turn and fled. He ran from the cave, from the throne of bone and blood and the flames that stank of rot and the god that held the souls of everything that had ever lived in his palms. He ran past the weeping poplar trees, silver in the eternal night of the underworld. He ran until his sandals ripped and his feet bled on the unforgiving ground, skin cracked and torn. He collapsed finally to the ground, heavy breathing the only sound in the heavy stillness of the Underworld.

“Adam?” he called softly, once he had his breath again. “Adam, are you behind me?”

He heard nothing, even when he held his own breaths. Not the quiet uptick of an inhale, nor the steady sigh of an exhale; not the shifting of clothes and skin, not the shuffling footsteps of a man waiting. Not even a faint heartbeat. There was no sound but the near-silent rustling of the poplar leaves, and the slow movement of the river Lethe.

“Please,” he begged. “Just — even a click of your fingers. Please let me know you’ve followed me.”

When no sound made known the presence of his love, he pressed the heels of his hands to his red and aching eyes, holding back a sob. He had to have faith. He had made the selfish choice, and now he was paying the price. He would stave forward, eyes steady, until they were both securely back to the land of the living, and then they would both live their lives.

Onward he trekked, much slower this time. He limped and pushed his way over the uneven ground, careful of fragments of forgotten bones and shattered glass, of spilled dreams and broken promises. He walked along the bank of the Lethe until the temptation of its waters grew to strong, and then he followed the bends of the Phlegethon, occasionally plunging his hands into the searing flames of it to drink when the exhaustion grew too great for him to continue.

For weeks he stumbled on the floor of the Underworld, crying out for any hint of his love’s faith, of him following, only to receive stony silence in return. On some days the hopelessness grew too great for him to ignore, and he would collapse in a heap, forcing his head down so as to not look behind him, and weep. He did not know where he was going, nor how long it would take to finally escape. Or even if he ever would. All he wanted was the barest glimpse, the smallest assurance that Adam had even been allowed to follow him from Hades’ throne. What if he had not? Hades was not known for his mercy. For him to allow Shiro an audience at all had been a miracle. He had sworn no oath, made no promise. For all that was certain, he had simply said what Shiro wanted to hear to get him away from the throne room, and Adam was still trapped, soul severed and alone, hopeless.

But there was some hope. Shiro could not hear him, could not see him, could not even catch the barest hint of his scent — peppermint and evergreen — but he trusted Adam. Even when they fought, even in anger, he trusted Adam. Even when they tore themselves apart Shiro trusted him. He had to trust that Adam would fight to follow him, and that he was right behind him.

After months at least of travel, although no time passed in the barren fields of the unloved and unliving, his hope was finally in sights. A bright light shined from the side of a mountain — too warm to be from the endless night of this barren hellscape. Shiro knew in his heart that once he reached that door, once he clawed his way up the mountain and through to the light, he would be free. He and Adam both — please let Adam be behind me, please, please make a noise or a sound or even the barest huff of air, please, I need to know you’re here with me that you’re behind me that you followed me that you want to live with me that you want to be with me that you want to live Adam please please please — would be free.

He stumbled finally through the light, out of the frozen and uncaring darkness and into the gentle warmth of the sun on his skin, the scent of the grass in the air, the packed earth under his cheek and his hands.

The land of the living.

Finally.

With relief more palpable than he had ever felt, he turned finally behind him, praying to any gods that would listen that he would find Adam behind him, sandals on the ground, chestnut hair glowing golden in the sunlight, gentle smile rivalling the brightest stars.

Please.

When he gathered his courage to open his eyes, slowly, too afraid to go quickly, he saw finally the face of his love. Adam stood tall behind him, long and lean and beautiful, one step into the warm beauty of the world.

Only one foot was still behind him, mid-step, toes of his sandal barely brushing the rough stone of the Underworld.

“No,” Shiro moaned. A freezing dread rose slowly from the soles of his feet up his legs and arms and froze over his heart. “No!”

“Shiro,” Adam whispered, quiet and crackly and desperate. “Shiro —”

As if a thousand hands had grabbed onto his tunic he was suddenly yanked backwards, pulled back into the depths of the unknown.

“Shiro! Help me! Please!”

“No! No! We made it! We were on land!”

Shiro lunged forward, desperate to grab him, to finally wrap his arms around him after days weeks months years of stumbling through the barren wasteland without any indication that Adam was following and he couldn’t lose him now, not now, please, they were so close, they were on land! Their feet were on the soil! They were so close, please, no, no —

He reached forward as far as he could, fingers brushing Adam’s, before he was pulled away with a final cry of Shiro’s name and the stone was shut behind him.

“Adam!”

Shiro gasps awake with his hand still outstretched, reaching for a soul that had already disappeared from his life. Everything is dark, but this time there is no cold stone under his hands, only soft blankets. And the flickering of light doesn’t come from dimly lit torches, but the strange glow of the Altean crystals that power the castle.

There is no Hades. No underworld. No desperate bid for Adam’s soul.

Shiro buries his face in his hand and cries.

On reflex he tries to touch the gold of his engagement ring, something he’s done to self-soothe for ages, but the stark reminder of why he can’t do that anymore only makes him cry harder. The metal of his left hand is cool against his heated skin, unforgiving.

Why couldn’t he have been selfish? Or maybe he was selfish, choosing the Kerberos mission. Maybe Adam was selfish, to try to keep him from it. He doesn’t know. He’s thought about it — spent hours and days agonizing over it, locked in a Galran prison cell — and there’s never a clear winner, in his mind. He knows Adam cares about him. Cared. He still feels the open wounds in his chest, the feeling that his heart was ripped open and bared to the world when Adam slipped through his fingers. It haunts him. He dreams about it often, every single night, in a myriad of different ways. It’s always painful.

The Greek mythology allegory is new, though. He has to hand it to his subconscious — it never runs out of new ways to torture him.

He forces himself to take a deep breath, pressing his fingertips into his eyes until it hurts.

“You don’t have time for this,” he whispers to himself. “You have a mission tomorrow. You need to sleep.”

He forces himself to lie back onto his pillows, untangling the blankets and dragging them up to his chin. He slows his breathing, steady inhale, steady exhale, trying to lull himself into a deep slumber.

He lies awake until the alarm sounds in the morning.

#:(((( i’m sorry shiro #vld #voltron #shiro #takashi shirogane #adashi #shadam #adam/shiro #adam #angst #shiro angst #shiro has ptsd #nightmares #hurt no comfort #greek myth #my writing #fic #longpost

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jngles · 1 year ago

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Why did Orpheus turn?

Assured of his many talents

Raised and beloved by muses

Using his voice as a shield of men

Already confident in his love’s devotion

Now acquainted with the pathway to hell—

Tread only for the sake of others

Just a few more steps until he’d won

How could such a man falter in faith

Certainly not from doubts in Eurydice

But maybe some in the demons left below

And what joy they would truly allow him

Maybe he couldn’t help but feel

The pull of the underworld calling him back

Now that it couldn’t be unseen

And it was that abyss he was looking for

As he gazed right through the pale

Fading light of Eurydice’s eyes

This love had triumphed over nature

But perhaps his own steps into the light

Became his sole focus and he forgot

The journey was made for partnership

For what is the purpose

Taking such a steep risk

Painstakingly climbing in tandem

Investing in the future with each step

Learning how to transport a soul

What was it all for if in the end

He was still alone with no one to blame

But his impulses that he valued higher

Than giving Eurydice time

To find her own light next to his

I worry what will become of him

Where he will wander and who he will meet

Whether he will keep his head

Without me there to hold him together

But Persephone chides me to remember

It was he who cast me back to hell

All the worse because of how far

We’d traveled to escape it

She says I was placed in the back

Because there was never a doubt

I would catch him each time he stumbled

Even if I wasn’t yet solid again myself

Down here I’m becoming something new

Or maybe I’m returning to what I once was

I could feel the change swallowing me

The second he turned around

Eurydice as she was can keep her Orpheus

Forever linked in earthly memory

I will embrace the life I’m finding in death

And bathe in the glow of a million souls

Not get lost in the shadow of one

#orpheus #eurydice #breakup #mental health #greek tragedy #maenads #heartbreak #mourning #over-relating to characters #emo #2000s era cringe #embracing it #bad poetry #my offering to the internet void

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keeperofbook · 9 months ago

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Queen dead on the pyre ever higher

Quivering Dido

Now I don't know

How to guard my heart

As barbarous Iarbas

Seeks to tear it apart

Queen of wit

Queen on piles

Of dirt

Tell me how to avoid tricky Venus' wiles

Avoid the hurt

He leaves

And leave my towers tall

Before I fall.

Seeress crazed

With city raised

By hazed secrets

Cassandra

I draw

Forth your voice

Praise your words

Unheard

By blind men

In the dark hidden

Tell me my future

Only after my past

All to ensure

To outlast all

The heavenly glow

Of jealous Apollo

Tell me how you know

He was not the one

That had his sights won?

Helen

Beholden

To all men

Hell in hell

They tell on

As though you are no person

Just prize to be won

Did you rise as the rose

And down Troy fell

Or did you cry for all

Your love cost

All a great deal

Did you deserve Aphrodite's heel

Upon your face

And to doom

Fool Paris' race?

Eurydice

Did you see

Him turn to you

Unknowing you true

Dooming too

Or set free

And made him see

All doubt

Reflected at he

Without doubt.

Orpheus

A speaker for all us

Who could not trust

The justice

When it's just us

Did he sing with the last song sung

Left to the dust

As you turned to rust

Right before his eyes

Make him realize

How real was

Your love

Till plucked by Hades

Does still he hate these?

Pray did Medusa

Pray till she could no more pray

When the sea embraced her

In a wave she did not embrace

When the storms cursed her

To be a monster

Only in face

Unlike the heavenly grace

Which hides within a cloak of farce

Did she know when her head

Was not hers but dead

And cursed each God once more

Before she turned to bed

Dear Clytaemnestra

Who looked ad astra

And prayed for her love

Who would return her love

In black hate she soaked

He who his guilt had cloaked

In her eyes

As she spied

His own lies

In which bed he lay

As he for ten years did stay

The hypocrisy

Driven her crazy

So she did the only thing she could see

And rid of his infidelity

And laid a breath of ease

Right upon the seas

For daughter lost unto the

Slaughter

Ariadne

What more can I say

Did you pray

For brother warped

By mothers harp

Plucked all wrong

Against god's song

And you paid the price

So that it might suffice

Or had the prayers

Been sent to the airs

And brought along a thesaurus

So you might have words more than the chorus

Until he stole it from you far away

And called it love all the same

Oh muse

Don't just amuse

But tell me the views

In your heavenly eyes

Don't tell me soft lies

Sing your rough cries

And tell the poet

To end the flame

Blow it

Out

Send the blame

And shout anew

For all you knew

#writing #poetry #writers on tumblr #spilled thoughts #original writing #spilled ink #spilled poetry #writers and poets #greek mythology #greek gods #mythology and folklore

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eerna · 8 months ago

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West End 2024 arrives with yet another new version of Epic III. Once again, the lyrics are dumbed down in favor of spelling out the point of the song, and sadly the part that got axed is another NYTW/London original. Once again we sacrifice the beautiful imagery and character work ("And what has become of the heart of that man/Now that the man is king?") in favor of Orpheus repeating that he knows how Hades feels ("I know how it is because he is like me/I know how it is to be left all alone"). But what makes me especially sad is that it also gets more specific about who the verse is about: "His work never done, his war never won/Will go on forever whatever the cost/‘Cause the thing that he’s building his wall around/Is already lost" can't be interpreted in any way except Hades and Persephone. But the original, "So he keeps his head low, he keeps his back bending/He's grown so afraid that he'll lose what he owns/But what he doesn't know is that what he's defending/Is already gone", describes BOTH men. It uses the vocabulary from Chant, when Hermes is trying to warn Orpheus to look up because he is so consumed by his work that he didn't notice Eurydice left, and the workers' plight, to describe Hades himself. These lyrics hit much harder, presenting Hades as a regular man on the same level as Orpheus or any of the residents of the Underworld. Orpheus sings about himself, and Hades sees himself in him, and he breaks down. We don't need Orpheus telling Hades that they are the same, Hades knows it, and it is the final straw.

And that means that my quest for the definitive version of Epic III continues, my goal now even further away than back when I first wrote this post. The show keeps evolving with each production and I hope one day we'll get our time to shine <3

the effect of first time hearing the chorus joins Orpheus in Epic III is the closest humanity has gotten to magic

#hadestown liveblog #i was boo boo the clown spent the entire chant ii praying persephone is about to drop some bars and instead...#like bro. the first time i listened with context and suddenly understood what orpheus is talking about in those final verses. i was unwell #''he doesn't know that what he's defending is already gone'' DECIMATED me. these new lyrics wouldn't #BUT SINCE THE OG POST WAS ABOUT MAGIC. YEAH. NOW THAT I'VE SEEN IT LIVE. GOD.#the entire audience is washed in golden light and orpheus is there in the centre and you feel like springtime has arrived #it was. insane. INSANE.

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4rainynite · 3 years ago

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I thought I posted this back in January after I saw the show, but I accidently saved it to drafts (well better late than never).

I've been a fan a Hadestown before it went on Broadway and I was so happy I got to see it on tour. As a fan of mythology I was already familiar with the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice and Hadestown does not fail to deliver it in a new way.

We start the musical introducing the charcters:

The Fates - I would best describe them as chaotic- neutral, because one minute they're having fun and join in with the characters and the next they're sowing the seeds of discord (myth pun). They do move the plot along and ask the characters important questions on their situations.

Hades - God of the Underworld is the equivalent of a CEO, who does bad things, but isn't evil. It's obvious he loves his wife, Persephone, but his actions not only cause damage to the world, underworld, but his marriage as well!

Persephone - Goddess of Spring/Summer and the Underworld is the fun drunk aunt who's just trying to do her job! Though she drinks for fun it's also a crutch for her to deal with her marriage to Hades not going well. She knows it's her reasonability to bring Spring and Summer to the land, but Hades keeps bring her back too soon for her to do her job.

Hermes - God of Travel who helps those reach their final destination. Hermes acts as the narrator, gives great advice, and Orpheus's wingman (pun not intended)

Orpheus our lovesick hero who sees the world in what it can be. While working on his song to bring the world back in order he accidently neglects Eurydice who goes to Hadestown. Once he realizes she's gone he travels to Hadestown to save her.

Eurydice is our heroine who loves Orpheus, but knows love is not enough to survive. When Hades offers her a deal she travels to Hadestown and forgets her life above... Until, Orpheus returns.

The acting, music, and stage was phenomenal! The musical reminds of the world we live in now and what we wish it to be! What I love most about the story is that even though Orpheus failed to save Eurydice he still won by repairing Hades and Persephone's relationship and return the seasons and world back in order. Even though the ending is bittersweet it gives us hope to try and that's why we tell it again and again.

#hadestown #hadestown musical #my art

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mbti-all-the-things · 3 years ago

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Myers-Briggs Types as Songs from my Greek Mythology Album

The album is called From the Kindly Ones, and it tells the stories of figures in the Greek Underworld, from the point of view of the Fury Alecto, who punishes or otherwise knows them. Each one teaches a lesson Alecto feels the figure needs to learn, or features some other opinion the Fury has.

There are 16 songs, so I figured, why not? Each blurb includes the title, the type, a sample lyric, and some explanation. There are four sections of the album: Kings, Queens, the Innocent, and the Guilty.

The lyrics are here, and the entire album (a rough acoustic recording) is included here if you want to listen to your type’s song!

I. KINGS

Dictator - INTJ

It’s no fun when you didn’t want to be the ruler of the world ? But the job is yours, there’s no denying

Hades’ song is about a man in an unwanted position of power, forever set apart with terrible duty and ability from the rest of his kind. But he was granted this broader perspective of the world for better or for worse, and I think the INTJ Mastermind type can relate.

Peaches Before Gold - ENTP

You earned the gold / You made the score / You saw a win and made it yours

Midas’ song cautions against ambition and greed trumping interpersonal relationships. While he gains unimaginable wealth, he becomes unable to show his daughter what he’s won. ENTPs can be prone to falling into a need to “win” above all else.

Down - ISFP

Death is no giant; it’s more of a king / Small like a tyrant, and just as inevitable

Sisyphus’ song details why he is condemned to roll a boulder up a hill forever. He was cunning and creative, and managed to cheat death more than once, for which he was punished. The ISFP’s individualism can sometimes make them believe that rules don’t apply to them.

The Dictator Remix - ENTJ

Lie on the chaise lounge while they lower grapes in front of you / Go on, keep chasing the high like the dictators do

Tantalus’ song is a mirror of Hades,’ showing a man who grasped at power his whole life, trying to cheat the gods, only to hurt those around him and damn himself. The ENTJ can be incredibly focused on success, but needs to understand humility to be truly powerful.

II. QUEENS

Friend of Fury - ISTP

You drew a bath of roses and you stood behind the king / You heard it then, the sound of blood when it decides to sing

Clytemnestra’s song depicts a woman taken advantage of her whole life, who finally breaks the chains of society to take revenge on her husband. The ISTP is an independent, practical soul who often thinks against the grain and is willing to take swift action, like this queen.

Upside Down - ESFP

You’re a creature of ego, oh Lady in the Chair / To see Aphrodite’s face beside your own could grant some clarity

Cassiopeia’s song tells the story of a vain queen who boasted of her daughter’s beauty above that of a goddess. While ESFPs can fall into the trap of vanity, they (like this queen) also have strong bonds with others, especially taking pride in their families.

The Queen of All The Ghosts - ESFJ

I was once like you / I was once a martyr, too / You, a sign of spring / Me, a warning of the justice I would bring

Persephone’s song gives a glimpse into the mind of Hades’ wife, and how her internment in the Underworld was more her decision than the myth leads us to believe. Like the Queen of the Dead, the ESFJ often makes quietly strong decisions for their family and for their own needs.

III. THE INNOCENT

Good Boy - ISFJ

If they would listen to your words and not the mouths that they escape / I think they’d love you, dear

Cerberus’ song is a sad one, but it’s also full of compassion. The three-headed dog is most often seen as a terrifying figure, but the narrator of this song sees him as an innocent. The ISFJ’s desire to care for others and natural gentleness is on full display here.

Falling From Grace - INFJ

So climb the stairs to heaven while I wait here on the ground / Paying no attention to the bodies raining down

Icarus’ song warns against perfectionism, following the story of a young man who up until now has easily navigated the patterns of life. INFJs are prone to god complexes due to their ability to see beyond the surface of life, but they may come crashing down if they are too reliant on it.

Coins - INTP

‘Cause the ferryman will take it from under your tongue / Doesn’t really matter if you die young

Charon’s song covers the ferryman’s singular interest in his mission: ferry souls across the Styx and receive payment for it. The INTP can become completely fixated on a certain topic, neglecting all else to puruse what they deem most interesting at the time.

Follow Me, Prelude - ISTJ

One, too bound to his lyre / And one who a liar kept in the ground

Orpheus’ and Eurydice’s songs are preceded by this very short prelude. While it’s the shortest song on the album (sorry, ISTJs!), the practicality of this piece lines up with the ISTJ’s. They are also very to-the-point, and these lines pack a powerful punch, summing up the next story.

Follow Me, Pt. 1 - ENFP

What you wanted was a mystery, even to me / Why do I follow you when I don’t even know where you’re leading me?

Eurydice’s song is the only one on the album from the subject’s point of view, rather than the narrator’s. The story of her open heart and innocent nature mirror the ENFP’s, idealists who may find themselves in the sad position of loving those who cannot love them back.

IV. THE GUILTY

Follow Me, Pt. 2 - INFP

Should I listen to men who would tear me apart? / I’m sorry, my love, but your face isn’t worth my heart

Orpheus’ song depicts his devotion to his art and ideals, and how that extends beyond his devotion to Eurydice. The fiercely individual and creative INFP needs to balance their focus on ideals with reality and relationships, which Orpheus has unfortunately failed to do.

Visitor - ESTJ

Hera saw it in your heart (she held it there herself, you know) / And so she knew how it could stain your darkest clothes

Heracles’ song is about the demigod’s disproportionate strength and rage, and how Hera manipulated both to cause his life harm. ESTJs are strong-willed and tough, and need to be careful of allowing their rigid tendencies to break the softer world around them.

Doomed - ESTP

Sitting on the head of your father’s coffin / Sitting on the bed while your mother’s watching

Oedipus’ song tells the story of a man told of his dark fate, who fulfills it in his effort to avoid it. ESTP individuals are bold, which can come at the price of taking opportunistic risks. Like Oedipus, they could end up acting on something with unexpected consequences.

To Cower, To Covet - ENFJ

Theseus, do you think of your friend in the pit? / Pirithous — condemned, while you got away with it

Theseus’ and Pirithous’ song shows the double standard of condemnation when a slight is personal rather than impersonal. The ENFJ is an idealistic leader who may, like Hades with these young men, hold others to a high standard - but who also may be too hard on themselves.

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mimiplaysgames · 3 years ago

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Terraqua Week Day 4 (Legends/Tales)

Summary: Someone calls for help from the deepest depths of darkness. Terra and Aqua trace the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. || Word Count: 8,983

Read on AO3

A/N: @terraquaweek hooooo if you thought yesterday’s was angsty dkfjdkfjdk So everyone and their mom compares Terraqua to Orpheus and Eurydice (Orphydice?) and I totally agree. It was time to officially jump that wagon. This one was difficult though - originally, I was going to have them sitting near a fireplace and talking about fairy tales over drinks, but I think I did the sit down apology fic way too many times and needed something different. This one was a huge challenge in such a tiny frame of time though. It took me the longest to write (a whole week, when I normally take months), so I couldn’t clean it as much as I would like to. I hope you like it anyway! <3

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Long Way Down ~ no further debts to be paid

Aqua has been dragging him all over town, following a call—this gut-wrenching feeling that something is wrong and someone is crying but she doesn’t know who or where. Except here, wandering around Thebes, though Terra doesn’t mind at all. Keyblade wielders are supposed to follow their hearts. Terra will follow hers anywhere.

What he does mind, though, are these screaming fangirls.

He collides head first into a neglected booth of rugs, scampering away from a group of young women who were trying to rip his left arm out of his socket, seeking pieces of his armor. They squeal, they cry, they sigh with all the fever of delusion. Champion! Terra! You’ve come back! You’re more beautiful than the gods!

Aqua strides by him, hiding an amused smirk behind her elegant fingers. “You picked a good hiding place.” She straightens a bent rug and rolls it tighter, letting it lean on its side by the wall.

Terra knocks a rug off of his head. “I did nothing to deserve this.”

“I nearly forgot,” Aqua says in a way that means she didn’t. “You won a championship.”

“Years ago. Once.” He kicks the pile on his back and crawls out. Zack and Hercules would never let it down if they hear about him hiding from harmless girls like he’s a mouse. “I’m no celebrity.”

“I beg to differ.” She unfolds a tapestry. Weaved into the fabric is a figure of a man armored in golds and burgundies, tall with dark hair and wielding a giant key. “You’re a story they share. Be grateful for your adoring fans.”

The only thing he’d be grateful for is the attention of the person standing right next to him. He never thought about the Olympus Coliseum championship while he was possessed and trapped in Darkness, not once. He thought of her every day and night.

“I think you’re jealous they’re chasing me and not you, Master Aqua.”

“Well, I would handle it with more grace.” She beats dust out of the corner of a rug with her hand.

The way she jokes with him is instinctual, natural, but the way her eyes wander is not, like she’s not paying attention. They’ve searched Thebes for hours, and while the city-state’s stairs for hills and elaborate gardens are impressive, they’ve found no lead as to who Aqua is looking for. She unrolls another tapestry like she’s reading a scroll. She doesn’t even have a name, just a dream that spoke to her one night: Find me, please.

“There’s nothing here, either,” she mumbles.

Terra doesn’t know how to lift her spirits. “Maybe the answer is not in Thebes.”

“We haven’t searched everywhere.” She pulls out another tapestry that he’s sure she’s already deciphered.

How many times are they going to circle the marketplace? Terra sighs and risks peeking at the main street from the alleyway. If he stays close enough to Aqua, the fangirls stay farther away, as though she’s a repellant. Who knew Aqua makes for a good shield.

The marketplace swarms with chatter and dust pickup from sandals and wheels. They’ve been through every store on this block. They’ve been through museums, they’ve listened to storytellers on the streets, met with sages and fortune tellers. There’s not much to deduce out of a whisper from a dream.

A high-pitched scream breaks through the loud talk of shopgoers, and Terra summons his Keyblade, watching for Heartless.

It comes from a girl, pointing a finger at him. Everyone else gawks. She shivers from head to toe. “Terra!”

At the sound of his name, like mockingbirds for sheep, they call out. “Terra!”

“Damn the stars,” he mutters and sprints back into the alleyway, a stampede behind him. “Aqua?” She’s not by the rugs. “Aqua!” He turns the corner of the empty alleyway, stuck between choosing a direction in a crossover. There’s no sign of her, no sign of his star in the darkness or his shield.

A hand waves at him through a window.

“Terra!” the girls squeal.

He dashes, throwing himself through the window. He lands on his back, on hard concrete. Aqua cradles his head on her lap and keeps low beneath the windowsill, a finger to her lips as the wave of giggles and cries ride past them and fade away.

“You were gone,” he whispers.

Aqua brushes her fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry,” she says, but she offers no explanation.

They’re in what looks like the back room of a pottery shop, half of them unpainted with the clay still slick, and the rest completed but possibly not inventoried yet.

“We’re breaking into people’s homes now?” Terra asks, grunting.

“You needed a hiding place,” Aqua says. She sounds unlike herself. Too tone-deaf, too distracted, her heart in the right place to help him like she always does, but she’s disregarding the consequences she’d normally consider before making such rash decisions.

“Why are we here?”

Aqua looks at him with a blank expression. “I don’t know.”

“You just waltzed in here?” He sighs. The shopkeeper is lucky Terra hasn’t destroyed anything when he crashed. He sits up and holds her chin, checking for vital signs of injury. “Are you feeling alright?”

Aqua grimaces. “Maybe we’re in here for a reason.”

Or maybe she’s lost her mind.

“Is it too early for me to say that I’m worried about you?”

“I’d say so.”

Terra scoffs and stands up, his knee hitting a table next to him. The vase on the surface rattles and spins. Aqua catches it.

When she glances at the artwork, she glares. “This one.”

“Huh?”

The vase is stamped with an image in black. Two figures, a man and a woman, reach out for each other, but there’s a wall between them.

“You recognize this?” Terra asks.

Aqua waits before she answers. On the man’s side is a lyre. On the woman’s, wisps of smoke. “Not really. But something about it is so unpleasant.”

It’s not much, but her reaction is the closest they have ever gotten so far.

She takes the vase with her and heads out the window, the door to the rest of the shop locked. “I’m borrowing it.”

“Aqua—”

“I’ll bring it back.”

Out in the alleyway, Aqua cradles the vase gently in her arms, desperately looking around for someone to talk to.

As much as he doesn’t want to, he says, “We can head back to the marketplace.”

The shuffle of feet approach them from behind the building next door. A lost girl blinks at them, her makeup smudged and running as though she’s been crying, her lip color smeared on her teeth. She recognizes Terra—

—Terra casts Silence on her and pulls her aside, up against a wall. “Shhh. Please don’t yell, please don’t yell.”

Without her voice, her squeals are replaced with gasps. She throws her arms around him.

“Hey!”

Aqua runs up to them without acknowledging how Terra is peeling this girl off himself. She points to the vase. “Do you know who this is?” The girl stares back. “Can you tell me? Please?”

As much as he really doesn’t want to, there are miles he’s willing to trek just for Aqua. “If I remove my spell,” Terra tells the girl, “and you answer Aqua, very gently, who this picture is supposed to be of, I’ll let you hug me again.”

The girl’s eyes go wide and she nods.

He recants his spell, and the girl suppresses her squeaks.

“Oh gods, it’s really Terra.” She hops, pinning her hands in between her legs. “You smell so good. I love you, Terra. I mean, um…” Instead of speaking to Aqua, the girl just locks her eyes at him. “That’s Orpheus. Everyone knows who that is.”

The look on Aqua’s face tells Terra that her heart is stirring.

“What’s his story?” Terra asks.

The girl is happy to oblige. “He sings the saddest ballads, all about the death of his most beloved wife.” She twirls a lock of hair. “Lost her to a snakebite. They say he went to the Underworld to find her, but he lost her along the way. He wasn’t a strong person.” She stands on her toes. “Not like you, Terra. You wouldn’t leave the one you love in the darkness, would you? You’d save them?”

Terra steps back. The onslaught of such specific questions makes him sick to his stomach.

The girl leans forward. “Can I touch your hair?”

“No.” He slaps her hand out of the way.

“Where can I find him?” Aqua asks, completely serious.

The girl rolls her eyes this time, as though it’s such a rude interruption. “If you trek up Mount Olympus, you’ll eventually cross a forest. You can find his head there.”

“His head?” Terra says.

The girl steps up to meet him face to face. “They say he still sings—that’s how Death came to meet him. Anyone who hears his songs will be instantly enamored. Man and beast alike. Even the leaves and the stones will move just to be near him. That reminds me of you, Terra.”

Aqua—already sprinting back toward his direction from the pottery shop after leaving her borrowed vase at its windowsill—cuts between Terra and the fangirl, pulling him away from her by the hand. The hug he promised this girl is cancelled, and Terra is grateful for it

“Thank you!” Aqua says, not breaking her speed. The girl is left behind, dejected.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Thebes is now a miniature, a toy town of red roofs and sandstone streets, that disappears from view as soon as they cross over a cliff, where the face of a forest is tucked away. The quiet greets them, a chirp of a bird here and there.

Terra follows Aqua, not knowing where she’s going.

“So we’re looking for a severed head?” he asks.

“According to the girl, yes.”

“Isn’t that a bit gruesome?”

“I think what she was hoping to do to you may be worse.”

Aqua skids to a stop. She looks over to her left, and runs in that direction. The treeline gets thicker, casting a dim filter over the ground. Aqua stops at a short, stone monument—a statue of a head on a pillar. The man’s face is carved with an open mouth, like he’s singing an opera. The trees sway in the wind.

“That’s Orpheus?” Terra asks quietly.

Aqua frowns. “I don’t hear a song.”

“I don’t, either.”

“But I feel so sad.” She holds a fist over her heart, her eyes watery.

Terra places a hand on her bare shoulder. She feels cold, and he has a sickly feeling that she’s getting worse. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know, yet. There’s not much I can do here. There’s no text, no clues.” Aqua walks, scanning the ground for a hint.

For a mural, there are no words or poems honored to Orpheus, no maps or glyphs that lend to any guidance. Terra touches the head of the pillar. He feels nothing. Keyblade wielders can be invulnerable to certain spells, but this is supposed to represent grief, and grief is Darkness. How he isn’t affected is an enigma to him—how he is spared and Aqua is not, is worrisome.

“You know what I think?” he asks.

She’s no longer there. Terra steps away from the statue.

“Aqua?”

No answer.

He jolts into a sprint, passing tree after tree with no sign of blue, none of her sashes flowing in the air. How did she get so far away?

Terra shouldn’t be so worried. The Heartless population here after the Keyblade War is minimal, and Aqua is more than capable of taking care of herself—but how she’s coming in and out of reality is more than Terra can bear. He can’t lose her. Not ever again.

“Aqua!”

Terra cries out in relief. She’s standing in a field of red flowers. Lilies, by the shape of them, speckled in the color of raspberries. Their stems curve over, swaying like bells. They’re not stretched towards the sun but hang towards the ground, as if they’re watching for fingers to climb out through the grass.

“I thought I lost you,” he says when he approaches her.

Aqua crosses her arms. “There’s something here.” When she inhales, she turns around like she just realized he was there. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you.”

Terra fights the urge to hug her. He loses, taking her in his arms. “I think I’m going crazy... I’m so glad you’re okay,” he says, though there’s so much more he needs to tell her.

“What a little, perfect, crispy portrait of a love story,” a heedy voice says, pronouncing every syllable with sweet spite, exaggerated by hand movements. First is the creep of black smoke over the grass. A shadow emerges from behind a tree, bald head with blue fire for hair, a long black cloak wrapped around his body. “Really, it’s a photo op, an exhibition, a grand spectacle.” He frames them with his fingers. “Bluebird and the Waste of Space, classic. All the children will hear about it.”

“Of course you’re involved in this,” Terra spits, letting Aqua go. He keeps his Keyblade near, in case he needs to summon it.

“On the contrary, I’m the victim in this case.”

“Hades,” Aqua says, an icy chill to her voice. “These flowers...”

“You like them?” Hades flashes a grin, teeth sharp as needles. “A specialty from- you could say a good friend. They’re called eurydice, funnily enough.”

Aqua freezes.

“What’s so funny about that?” Terra asks, stepping in front of Aqua so he’s a barrier.

“I forgot you’re not the sharpest rock in the canyon,” Hades mumbles, before animating his hands, presenting his words like they’re a marketing technique. “Eurydice, the pride of the forest. A muse, a sprite, a dryad.” He motions quotation marks with his fingers. “‘She’s not like other girls,’ whatever you want to call her. A gold prize.”

It comes to Terra like the dawn. Orpheus’s wife.

“What is she to you?” Aqua asks, defensive.

“Well…” Hades casually places a hand on his hip and relies on the other to tell his story. “The Underworld is a vibrant culture of flora. There’s still some Heartless mucking about in the crevices, little maggots, doing Zeus knows what, but…” He pinches the air with his fingers. “There was a teeny tiny leak, a blemish in the system.” He shrugs. “And she slipped. You want to save her, and I want her back in my perfectly packaged Paradise. We work together and we both win.”

Terra scoffs. “You lost a ghost in the Underworld?”

Hades bites a breathy laugh, flicking lint off his robe, a gross smile stretching across his face like he knows a dirty secret. “My Underworld is a tight machine. No. She went somewhere darker.”

Aqua is the first to speak after the silence. “I see.”

“You see what?” Terra says.

Aqua casts her eyes downward. She usually never breaks eye contact in the presence of an enemy. “She’s in the Realm of Darkness. That’s why I’m connected to her.”

Aqua has often said that she thinks a piece of the Darkness will stay with her until her final day, a single thorn growing out of her heart.

“It’s not a place for the sensitive.” Hades scoffs with false modesty.

This is something no one has the right to ask of her. “We’re not bringing Eurydice back to you,” Terra says.

Hades disappears in a blink, reappearing by Terra’s shoulder, his hand a warm pot on the stovetop. “You, my friend, are the last person to bargain.” He disappears again and bursts into flames by Aqua’s side. “Aren’t Keyblade wielders supposed to keep a world��s balance at the tip of their fingers? There’s only one place everyone ends up in this world. Who says you can take the dead away from me? Where else would they go?”

Aqua won’t give him the merit of a look. She swats his smoke away like it’s a fly.

Hades continues, “You see, the living owe a debt. You borrow life to breathe here for a few short happy years, and when you’re done, you return back to where you came from. And if you borrow, then you owe.” He flashes the teeth. “Therefore, she’s mine.” Hades flicks a finger on Terra’s chest. “You—both of you—have cheated. You’re thieves, you reek of it. Talk about privilege.”

Terra stammers.

“We’ll do it,” Aqua says.

Hades taps all his fingers together. “I’m glad we came to an agreement.”

“We didn’t agree to anything,” Terra says, his eyes begging Aqua for an alternative way to do this.

“Down boy. Your bite is just as intimidating as your bark.” Hades turns over his shoulder. “Oh, and one other thing.” He raises a finger, and addresses Terra directly. “Have you ever worked with ghosts before? Miserable company. They’re mopey, they babble too much about nonsense. Not the guest you want to invite over for dinner. They’re confused, it’s part of their nature. Being connected to one isn’t the most sane habit. If you’re not careful, they’ll infect you with their pain.” Hades winks, and nods toward Aqua. “You might want to keep an eye on her.”

Terra’s heart strikes his chest like a hammer to the blood vessel, and he swallows bile. Aqua doesn’t seem fazed.

“Well,” Hades says, “it’s a long walk down. Stay healthy, drink water, don’t go crazy.” With that, he vanishes for good this time, leaving the wind gliding through the flowers, all looking for someone below.

“She’s nearby,” Aqua says, her voice breaking a silence that doesn’t want to be heard. Like poison to be drunk, denial to be told the truth, there’s no ignoring this. “I can open a door here.”

“You’re really going back?”

“I can’t let her continue to suffer,” she says. “But I won’t put you in danger, either.”

“Wait,” Terra says, getting in her way. “I’m coming with you.”

“It’s dangerous.”

“I don’t expect it to be anything else. Danger doesn’t scare me.” Terra takes her face in his hand. “After everything you’ve been through, you can’t ask me to let you do this alone.”

Aqua opens her mouth as if to refuse but she grimaces. “I admit I would like the company this time.”

Terra’s heart thumps, stroking her cheek. “I’ll never turn my back on you again.”

“A shame. You look taller from behind,” she says, and he snorts.

When she moves away, he feels hollow, a sudden need to hold her again invading his body. He shrugs the feeling off. “I’m texting Ven.” He pulls out his Gummiphone. “He’ll need to open a Door to Light for our return.”

“Yes.”

“Any tips for how to survive?”

Aqua summons her Keyblade and points to the ground. “The Realm of Darkness wants you to feel hopeless and scared. It feeds from your mind.” She looks at him. “You can’t trust what you think or feel. You won’t be able to tell the difference between you or the Darkness.”

“Then how are we supposed to find her and come back if we can’t even think?”

Aqua lifts an elegant shoulder. “You keep your head up. That’s your best defense. The Realm will do many things to make you want to give up, to make you doubt yourself. You have to choose your battles. Even if you feel like you’re being followed, don’t look back. Don’t give in to its tricks.”

It sounds like hell. It feels like a knife to the liver—Aqua has suffered so much. His biggest regret is not having the strength to break out of his prison and do something about it.

“Are you having second thoughts?” Aqua asks.

“Not at all.”

The way she smiles this time makes her look like herself. “You know, I feel better now. Much clearer.”

Terra hopes that’s a sign of sweeter things to come. The smile he gives is weak when she summons a Door to Darkness.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Realm of Darkness is a dirt path in a forest that sprawls under patches of stars, as though someone has taken photos of different skies and pasted them together in a collage. Few lanterns light the way, smokey as if caked in fog. It would be similar to a romantic walk on the mountain in the spring if not for what it really is.

Terra trails close behind Aqua, the cape of her armor bouncing in the air. She jogs with such confidence despite that they have no map and have never been here before—well, Aqua has, but not here. According to her, the Realm of Darkness never stays the same. There’s no path back the way they came.

So far, it’s lacked excitement, a still silence as though this world’s heart has stopped beating.

“How do we find her?” Terra asks, his voice loud enough to make him worry if something hidden behind the trees has heard him.

“We keep going.”

A sudden clank, metal on metal. Terra sprints to her. “What’s going on?”

Aqua has stepped onto a metal surface, a sudden cutoff from the forest like mismatched puzzle pieces forced together, spreading beyond what they can see. When Terra steps on it, the boot of his armor reverberates from his weight.

“I don’t like this,” Aqua says.

The river is black and made of torn iron, shards that jut out like shredded waves frozen in time. Lanterns from broken boats wedge into the collisions, a ship graveyard where they all crashed into each other in a hurricane.

“What now?” Terra asks, hushed.

She turns to face him, her helmet obscuring her expression. “We keep going.”

Their only direction is forward. There’s no compass, no horizon to see where they’re going. They curve around mountains of broken war and cruise ships and melted steel, like hills to climb and descend. Whether they’ve trailed a huge arch and are going backwards, Terra can’t tell.

Then again, Aqua has said there is no backwards in the Realm of Darkness. But what if this river doesn’t have a shore?

“Those aren’t lights,” Aqua warns.

Some of the lanterns bob up and down, blinking.

“Stars,” Terra curses, summoning his Keyblade. Aqua has already conjured hers and is throwing a blast against a group of eyes hiding inside half of a ship, its inner scaffolding exposed like bent needles. The impact combusts.

Heartless swarm up and rain on him. They’re stronger here, these small Shadows more resistant, withstanding his powerful swings when they’d normally be thrown far back.

A huge crash rumbles behind them, and Terra is knocked onto his knees. A ship sinks as its bow breaks off. It sounds like a building caving in.

Aqua grabs his elbow. “Forget it,” she yells over the clamor. They run past hordes of Heartless materializing from the metal as if they’re being born, more and more and more until the sea behind them is a mass of yellow eyes. Terra relies on nothing but his two legs, pushing and pushing them despite the strain to catch up to her. Ships and boats disintegrate, about to swallow them if they can’t find solid ground.

They step onto dirt, a slab of earth suspended in space. They’re blocked by a huge stone gate without walls.

Aqua turns and slices her Keyblade across, light thrusting forward to cut through the first wave of Shadows.

Terra grunts when he jabs his Keyblade, a beam striking the gate in the middle. He summons a keyhole, a plea to enter.

The gate opens.

“Come on!” He grabs her elbow and bolts inside. Terra immediately pushes his weight against the gate, Aqua mimicking the same—a desperate slog at first, his breath hitched and pulsating at his temple, until they build momentum and shut it. At the slam of the door, dust drops from the ceiling and lands on their shoulders.

Behind them is a dim hallway of two choices: left and right. The little light they have here comes from nowhere.

Terra sighs, breathing heavily. The air inside his helmet doesn’t smell fresh. “Well, your heart, your pick.”

Aqua chuckles, her voice muffled. He wishes he could see her smile. “Enjoying your stay?”

“You’re sick.”

“Remember not to get too affected by what you see, Terra.” She holds his shoulder, her glove clunking onto his pauldron. “The Realm will probe your mind until it finds what it can use.”

She leads the way right, her steps kicking up clouds of dust. The entire floor is sand, sinking the sound of their steps. The hall turns left. It turns left again.

Terra can’t shake the feeling that they’re being watched. He eyes the ceiling where the crevices that meet the wall are at their darkest, where he anticipates small, yellow eyes blinking at him.

He thinks he hears something, but shrugs it off.

No, he has heard something. Growling.

It thrums louder and Terra is walking slower, growing a distance between him and Aqua who hasn’t noticed yet.

The growling is coming from behind.

He turns.

There’s nothing.

“Aqua.”

“What is it?”

“I’m hearing an aggressive dog.”

“There are no dogs in the Realm of Darkness.”

“But it’s following us.”

“Trust me, there isn’t anything behind you.” She waves with her hand. “Come on. The Realm wants you to worry. The moment you start to believe it is when your heart begins to falter.”

At another two-way junction, Aqua chooses left—they’ve just gone in a circle. Terra expects to come back to the stone gate—but as though the Realm has heard him and is laughing at his assumptions, the hallway opens up into a path of eight directions. One of them a stairway up, one a stairway down. The opening next door is blocked from a staircase turned upside down, and the one next to that leads to a staircase that twists and leans on its side.

Aqua chooses the way straight ahead, a long uncomplicated hallway.

The hallway turns right. She’s no longer there.

“Aqua!” Terra dashes forward and the hallway turns dark, like the twist of the knob on a lantern, a flame fading.

He turns over and heads back. “Aqua!”

They went left, left, left, straight. All he has to do is trek that backwards.

When Terra arrives at the large expanse of eight directions, Aqua comes in from behind him. “Terra!”

She runs into him when he halts and spreads his arms, their breastplates colliding. “Where did you go?” he asks.

“Down the hall, that’s it.” Her voice trembles. He’ll have to do better to be braver, for her. Aqua pulls away to look up at him. He wishes he could see her eyes. “What did I say about giving in?”

He licks his lips. “Don’t go back.”

Aqua swallows as if to stop a sob. “There’s no going back in this place, Terra. You could have gotten lost. The Realm wants you to doubt yourself.” She nods as if to make a point, her voice thick as if to mask how terrified she is. “Do you understand now?”

No. “We keep going.”

“I’ll stay close to you this time.”

“Please.”

“I-I can’t lose you. Not again.”

“You won’t, I promise.”

She points to a hallway different from the one she chose earlier, and walks by his side this time, step by step. Down this way is brighter, the stone newer, the sand thinning until they step on cobble. The walls shrink into a tight foyer framed by fully lit torches, parchment and paper scattered all over as though a storm blew through a library.

Terra bends to pick some up. They’re all blank.

“Love letters and songs,” Aqua says, reading through empty pages, “that Orpheus wrote to her.” She shakes her head. “The stories I grew up with were so stupid.”

“Which ones are we talking about?”

“Those books I used to read when I was a teenager.”

Terra grimaces. “About true love.”

“I believed them until the end.” She sighs. “They seem so silly now. That you could be in love at first sight, without ever bonding with them—without ever knowing the ties you create with them and how much it pains to have those cut. It’s improbable. How does anyone expect them to be willing to pluck their hearts out of their chests and sew them together like that? How is that supposed to be ‘true,’ or ‘pure?’ The trials they’ve gone through to prove themselves in the name of that love—so small in comparison to some.”

“You mean in comparison to what Orpheus tried to do.”

Aqua swipes her hand over a page to flatten the bends. “I can’t imagine how brave he had to prepare himself to be, and how little he cared for his personal safety. That he would descend so deep into darkness for her. After everything I’ve been through, I could say—that is love. The fairy tales I’ve read don’t come close.”

Terra watches her stack parchment together, tapping the edges so that they align, her movements stiff due to the armor. There are no written words to be read on the pages, but there’s not a single word that could describe the epiphany he’s having. That she is sitting next to him, that there are things neither of them uttered a sound for, that she is the same person who fell to the depths just to save him, that she is not the same child who used to sneer at his essays. That day, he only had a feeling that he was being hugged until he went to sleep, then he woke up twelve years later.

“You love me,” he says, part question, part certainty.

Aqua pauses. Her visor reflects his. “I do. I have for a long time.” She scoffs softly at herself. “You know, the Realm has brought you to me in lucid dreams. Five times. The first three, I told you how I felt. And you smiled. Then you were gone. I got fooled each time.” She hangs her head. “It was the fifth time that it was really you.”

“I remember,” Terra whispers.

“I couldn’t say how I felt, but you took those precious few seconds we had to tell me not to give up. I realized later that I needed that more than saying anything.” She sighs, her breath parched from the helmet. “I never expected to say it again, here, of all places, but now… Now you’re here. And I love you.”

Terra leans forward, bracing her arm, the cusp between her shoulder and neck. He feels the inner padding of his gloves. They can’t take their helmets off, not here, but a swelling of solace fills him. For a moment, he forgets where he is, his imagination only seeing her face, his heart asking to break the metal and touch her.

“Do you have any idea how important you are to me?” he asks.

She breathes like she’s laughing. “I have an inkling.”

He leans his helmet against hers. “With all my heart,” he says.

“I thought so.” She squeezes his gauntlet.

When they get out, the first thing he’ll do is take her in arms.

“I think we’re close,” Aqua says, talking about Eurydice.

They have to see the light of day first. When they get out, the first thing he’ll see is her smile.

“Let’s do it and get out here.”

Beyond the next archway is a new place: a cavern maze, the walls roughed up by raw mineral, crystals glowing pastel colors in the dark. It’s beautiful in its own expression, a small memory of whatever the Realm took and couldn’t digest. The single paths here are disorienting, the walls littered with natural dips and holes to take shortcuts.

The cave opens up to a jagged, rocky clearing, its natural structure much like a coliseum. He and Aqua stand at the top. The boulders cut off a clear sight of the path below, a single star in the sky and a single fig tree at the bottom, its exposed roots dug into a pond. Terra and Aqua descend, the rocks down here taller.

“Prepare yourself,” Aqua says, taking the lead.

Terra summons his Keyblade too, bracing himself for Heartless. A shadow moves near the tree, hiding behind one of the roots.

A surprised shriek comes from the tree, like it’s been woken up, and it shifts. The roots straighten out, the branches curl over and sharpen like claws. Cut through the trunk is the shape of a heart, empty and black inside. No yellow eyes.

“What is that thing?” Terra yells before dodging. The tree slams its branches between him and Aqua.

Terra trips. A tree root chokes his ankle, pulling him from under the dirt.

Aqua doesn’t see it happening. She scrambles and ducks behind a boulder before the earth behind her collapses into a sinkhole. She climbs the boulder and jumps onto the canopy.

The tree rocks viciously to knock her off but she stabs the bark with her Keyblade to hold on. It digs its vines and branches into the ground. A flash of purple lighting cracks the boulders into halves.

Terra cuts himself free. The root shrivels, and the ground it touched caves into nothingness. He dashes, taking fast cover behind boulders. It’s hard to tell if he’s effective since he doesn’t know whether the tree has blind spots.

When roots shoot up to throttle him and fail, they punish the earth instead, ripping away respites and hiding spots. If enough of the dirt sinks, the boulders fall with it.

Terra can only keep running.

The only signs that Aqua is okay are the flashes of light from her Keyblade, spellcasting and waves of reflective blues crushing the tree. Stuck on the canopy, Aqua doesn’t have much room to escape when the ground is collapsing at random.

Terra yells and charges towards the tree, calling upon his Keyblade to transform into his glider. He slams into the roots, all of his offense and magic building up and combusting against the bark.

The tree tumbles and Aqua lets go.

Terra catches her and flies up. He hovers a rock that is still holding on at the edge of a newly formed cliff.

A dark lightning bolt strikes from above and Aqua summons a barrier to protect them.

“It’s her,” Aqua says, straining to keep the barrier intact.

“That can’t be possible.”

“We don’t know what the Darkness can do to the dead. We don’t know anything.” Aqua chokes on her words. “But that’s Eurydice, I know it.”

The tree scratches at nothing and wails, its roots crumbling hard onto the ground with every step it makes. Eurydice sounds like anger, a need to make sure everyone else suffers with her.

“The hole in her trunk, where her heart would be if she wasn’t dead.”

“Terra—”

“Say no more.”

He revs his glider and charges towards the clearing, now a gaping hole sunk down the middle with no bottom. Terra sticks to the cliff sides. Aqua jumps off from the back, high into the sky, waiting for his next move.

Terra lets go and holds on to his Keyblade’s grip. It stretches and transforms into a whip. He slaps one of the branches where it hooks, and slams his fist onto the ground. The tree careens. He keeps pulling, forcing the tree flat against the ground.

From the sky, Aqua points her Keyblade towards the trunk and calls. A beam of light strikes through the heart void, glowing.

The tree shrieks and thrashes. Terra is thrown off and the tree slaps Aqua out of its way. Aqua lands on the side of a cliff, climbing up. The tree stampedes towards her with the motion to crush her.

Aqua yells and yanks herself over, rolling onto her back, pointing her Keyblade up again. Her light blinds this time, a force that shocks the air and pushes everything with swept pressure. As though Aqua has summoned water, Terra is thrown, the currents taking him away.

He lands and rolls. It’s quiet.

His muscles ache and sting. He’ll have bruises but those don’t matter. Terra stumbles when he stands, leaning on a boulder near him. He peers over, praying for the image of Aqua climbing over the hole, but what he sees is a picture from before the nightmare: the clearing back in its original state, as though he has hallucinated everything. The rocky exterior makes it hard for him to notice anyone. If she’s crouching due to pain, if she’s stranded somewhere, knocked out…

His knees give out when he runs, and he tumbles down the hill. Summoning his glider, Terra asks it to carry his slacked weight. There is no puddle at the bottom anymore. He keeps himself up high where he has a vantage point, calling her name. There’s no sight of her.

“I won’t be fooled. You’ll take me to her,” he tells the Realm. He scans. No sign of her. What if she’s buried beneath the earth...

A pale glow flickers between rocks.

He drops.

Aqua isn’t here. In her place is a green, ghostly apparition of a woman in a simple, flowy dress that allows for dancing, her long hair swaying to zephyr. Terra doesn’t need to ask for her name. His voice croaks. “Where is she?”

“Of whom do you speak?” Eurydice says. The ghost has no voice but a loud breath, as though she is whispering right into his ear.

“Aqua!” he calls but he gets no answer. No sound of the pebbles crumpled by her bootsteps, nor the clank of armor.

“Ah,” Eurydice sighs. “The one who looks like a naiad. A water nymph.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“In the labyrinth.”

Terra turns over his shoulder and starts up the hill. Where is the entrance they used to get here?

“If you enter the labyrinth, you will lock her inside, Keybearer.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” His helmet feels tight. “How do you know about Keyblades?”

“The body is an entrapment, a vessel designed to define concepts that we can’t understand. What we call prayers, offerings, angels, the Light, the fountain of the gods, Keyblades, Kingdom Hearts, Paradise, Mount Olympus—all bear the same resemblance depending on the language we use. Without a body, I am not burdened by any of those barriers.” She holds her hands together with reverence. “Your armor glimmers like a star.”

“Can you feel her then? Is she hurt?”

“She is with you.”

That’s the same thing people say to him about Eraqus. Your Master will always be with you, no matter where you are. You just need the faith to know he’s there.

I’m sure he’s proud of you.

I’m sure he knows how much you love him. He’s with you.

“Aqua!” Terra bolts into a run, picking whatever direction because this clearing is a circle and there is no exit. He’ll have to break one open. His helmet presses on the pulse in his neck. He’s losing oxygen. He’s gasping. He’s removing his helmet, collapsing to his knees, yelling at the most his lungs could give him, now that his voice is no longer muffled by metal. “Aqua!”

His throat throbs.

“No panic, no haven for panic, Keybearer.”

Terra stares at the dirt under him—cracked from drought, a single pebble and a patch of grass. “You should have taken me,” he wheezes.

The ground rumbles and he snaps up, dying to see if it’s her. A giant hand pounds towards him, attached to a giant body with beedy yellow eyes and tentacles for a face. A Darkside, towering over him, watching him like it’s going to grant a wish.

“Keybearer,” Eurydice warns.

The Darkside digs its fingers into the dirt like the roots of a tree. A black puddle opens up a pathway for the sprawl of eyes to crawl out.

Terra would summon his Keyblade but he’s slow and tired. Numb. His skin is exposed to the Realm, and it seeps into him. It lulls him, it quiets him. There’s no sanity better than the world the mind makes up.

The Darkside grabs him.

Terra is tired, watching for a hint of blue when he sees black.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Terra.

“Aqua.”

Terra wakes submerged in an ocean. He reaches for her but grabs air.

He’s gently sinking.

So he’s lost her. He’s failed at his duty of protecting someone who needs his help. This is why Aqua is stronger than him. Terra could never survive in a place like this, he could never withstand twelve years of this torture.

“Aqua, I’m so sorry.” He wants to cry but he can’t. The Realm won’t let him, anesthetizing the fall of tears.

What is in the ocean with him? A monster he can’t see? Will it have teeth? Will it swallow him? Or will it watch him float here, waiting for him to turn so he could become one with it? Terra could let go here—

—but a faint glow hovers near, like breath to a limp body, like a light at the exit. There’s still time and a chance. If he can open his eyes, then Aqua could, wherever she is.

Eurydice watches the amoebas in the water, floating by herself.

Terra swims to her.

“‘Twasn’t a long wait,” she whispers when he approaches.

“I’m sorry for turning my back on you,” he tells her. “I’m glad you’re alright.”

Eurydice smiles at him. She looks sickly, hollowed cheeks down to the lines of her skull. But if she was healthy, she would be the beauty that captivated people in the forest.

Terra takes her wrist and gravity takes them. They gently land on solid ground, in the black, in the middle of nothing. Endless dark, endless shadow, endless lack of everything.

“We can’t go anywhere without Aqua. We have to find her first.” Though Terra doesn’t know where he is or which direction he should take.

“We are everywhere, she is nowhere.”

“What does that mean, though? She isn’t here? Then where is she?”

“Below. Nowhere and the end. At the beginning, where you can’t see.”

Terra jerks forward to beg, but a ghost is the last person to ask for answers. He trembles.

“You have a kind face,” Eurydice says. “The bards would have sung in honor of you.”

That’s no consolation. Terra sobs but it’s dry.

“Beware, Keybearer.”

He hears the sloshing of water. His ankles are sunk under.

If he despairs, the Darkness will take him. If he stays calm, he’s betraying her.

“Aqua, what do I do?”

“I called to Lady Aqua because I saw her Light,” Eurydice says, nodding slowly. “The only star in the dark. I would trust her choice, always. I believe in the Fates.” She brings her hand to her chest. “I believe she brought me you.”

The truth stings, a slap to the face, the swallow of a knife, the burn of the tongue with a lighted match. He can’t bear it, but he has to. Aqua would trust him with anything.

“I…” He is such a horrible person, looking at the face of the needy and the hurt but thinking about someone else. He can’t do it. He has to. “I was supposed to hold her when we got out.”

“We were to be married.”

Terra feels as though a pail of water was dumped on him. He takes a hard look at Eurydice, at how she’s trying to warn him with bulging eyes, distorting. Ghosts are emotional. “What happened to you?”

“I died. Vipers are the most unpleasant.”

Terra doesn’t want to ask, afraid of where this conversation will go. “And Orpheus?”

She brightens up, washed over by nostalgia. “He came for me. With his gift of song, he moved Hades enough to agree to be charitable. Hades granted me freedom so long as Orpheus accepted the terms.”

Of course, Hades and his contracts.

Eurydice’s face ashens more than it possibly can. “I was to follow. Orpheus was to lead me to the sunlit earth, so long as he did not look back at me while I was in the dark.” She pauses, as though her lips are sewn together. Talking about this hurts her. “So Orpheus led with much enthusiasm. So much at peace. I was to finally be with my beloved again, to smell the pomegranates and taste the olives.

“Love is powerful but Death more so. Every step was a moment to rethink. He could not hear me behind him, for I was a mere shade. Orpheus could not trust Hades. I could feel his anticipation, his desperate need to hold me dearly, his doubt that he was being played.”

“I can’t blame him.”

“At the end, right as the light was about to touch us, Orpheus lost his faith. He looked back to see my face.” Eurydice hugs herself. “I gave him my farewell and kind regards, then I was whisked away, back into the Underworld.”

“I’m so sorry.” Terra swallows, not liking what this is supposed to mean for him. “Aqua would have chosen to help you.”

“Will you set me free?”

“Yes, of course but—” He inhales. “How could I leave her?”

The look on Eurydice’s face stops him. “I did what was asked of me. I followed him. I kept close. I was loyal. I spoke to him though he could not hear me. And yet he turned and tore us apart. I have yet to understand what I did wrong to let him doubt me.”

“He didn’t doubt you.”

“Then why hesitate to trust Lady Aqua?”

Like a knife to the throat, Terra falls to his knees and grips at his chest, the guilt inside so heavy and thick that he wants to rip his armor off and cut it open, dig it all out so he could finally breathe.

If she were here, Aqua would have told him to save Eurydice. There’s no denying that.

“I’m sorry,” he says, hoping Aqua could hear him. “I’d give you my whole heart if it meant you were here.” He swallows. “I’m so sorry. I’ll be back, just wait for me.” He doesn’t want to stand up, for that would mean that he’d have to walk. But he tells himself that there must be ways around this. There must be an exception, a line in the fine print. “Wait for me, I’ll come to you. I swear with every will I have to live.”

Terra stands. He summons his helmet. When he wears it, he finally cries, soft tears that feel warm then cool, muted because they’re delayed.

“Okay,” he tells Eurydice. “Let’s go.”

He wades across the water, ripples that fan out and reflecting light that isn’t there.

Eurydice floats by his side. “I’m grateful. The vipers are the most unpleasant.”

Terra stops a chuckle. “Yeah, you told me.” Repetition is a symptom for the eldritch, an obsession with what life was. Eurydice deserves so much better. “Do you have to go back to Hades?”

“Orpheus is with him. Once we reunite, we will walk the Underworld together.”

“But it’s a prison.”

Eurydice glances at him. “Man and god are the same. They associate death with misery and see the Underworld as nothing else. But we don’t see what you see.”

“The thought of Hades hating his job is satisfying.”

“He makes for an upsetting neighbor.”

Terra scoffs.

“But I shall be content. Death is powerful but Love more so.”

Terra doesn’t know how to respond, but it spells for him a kind of peace. The Realm numbs everything it touches. As long as they play by the rules, it’s not so bad. Aqua is the only balm he’d need.

“How shall we escape?”

“Ven—my best friend—is waiting on the other side. You see that light?” Ahead of them, far in the distance, is a star. “He has a door open for us.”

“But we’ve been walking for so long and yet it does not come closer. Are you not looking forward to seeing him?”

“Of course I am.” Terra slows to a stop. The water has reached to his waist.

Eurydice studies him with sadness. “You mean to stay here.”

Terra doesn’t answer Eurydice’s remark. “I mean to see you free and happy.” He holds out his hand and she takes it.

Nothing is truly ever following Terra here, for the Darkness wants him to think so. So he will stay, walk forward and walk far without a map or a compass. Eventually, he’ll have to cross paths with her. There is no other place he’d want to go, and any world without her is a world behind him. With that vow to himself, the star finally comes close, the black fading into gray.

“Ven?” Terra calls.

“I have always wondered what it would be like to cross over,” Eurydice says.

Heavy, loud footsteps approach them. Ven appears in the light, in a box colored in white, his armor worn. “Terra? Finally, I’ve been—” He jerks his head towards Eurydice’s direction, the sharp rabbit ears of his helmet tilting. He leans forward as if to peer inside. He does not have a reflection in the water. “Where is Aqua?”

“We are everywhere, she is nowhere,” Eurydice says.

“You don’t see her?” Terra asks, his voice brittle. A tiny part of his heart was hoping he was wrong.

“Dude,” Ven says, “I can barely see you. You’re like an outline.”

“That’s proof enough.”

“Such lies,” Eurydice says.

“What is the ghost talking about?” Ven asks.

“It’s okay, Ven,” Terra says. “I’m going to find Aqua.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“She’ll never forgive me if you follow.” Terra hangs his head. “Please don’t ask me to leave her.”

“That’s not—”

“I’m not afraid of the Realm of Darkness.”

Eurydice turns to Terra. “Such bravery yet you are frightened to cross the threshold for her. Is it natural that faith betrays you? Don’t do this to her. Don’t punish her.”

Ven looks at her, looks at Terra, looks at her.

Terra says, “Once I find her, I’ll be okay.” He moves to turn.

Eurydice holds his shoulder. “Many don’t know how to love. They only know the fall, and they fall, waiting for peace to replace the ecstasy and despair. But it will not come if you do not beckon it. May you listen to your heart?”

His heart aches.

Ven grabs his forearm. “I’m going to listen to the freaky lady. She knows more than you.”

“Ven—”

“I can’t lose both of you. We’ll figure out an action plan, and”—Ven uses all his weight and both of his hands to try to pull Terra over—“you’re coming with me.”

“I can’t leave her here.”

“We’re not! Come on, man, she’s strong.”

“Step forward with me. The vipers are most unpleasant,” Eurydice says.

Terra holds onto the doorframe. The sun hits his gloved fingers, baking them. Aqua, what do I do?

Terra, please.

That’s Aqua’s voice, far away. For the Darkness wants him to think nothing is following him.

“You promise me we’ll come back?” Terra asks Ven.

“Of course. Anything for her.”

Terra doesn’t sob when he wants to. He doesn’t make a decision—he leaps, stepping forward into the light. Eurydice follows.

But a heavy ton, the Darkness, drags him back. Hands from the water grab his cape into bunches and pull on his neck. They hold onto his legs and bend his knees, desperate, like beggars that need his help, need the stars that glimmer in his armor.

One hand grabs his forearm, metal on metal, like it’s telling him not to forget something.

Terra gasps.

He grabs that hand and throws himself forward with a yell, ripping away from the Darkness begging him to stay, knocking Ven out of his balance, and pulling her out.

Terra lands on his back and hears her gasp and whimper out of shock, relieved. He throws his helmet off.

“Aqua.”

Aqua’s blue armor stares at the grass while she takes in the scene, her sobs controlled and hushed.

Terra pulls her helmet off to look at her face, stained with tears and tired smiles. “Aqua.”

“You didn’t hear me?” she asks, crying quietly. “No one heard or saw me, I was there the entire time.”

“I’m an idiot.” Terra weeps with her. He dispels his armor and touches her pauldron to dismiss hers. He holds her tightly. She’s warm and sweaty, small in comparison to him, folded into his chest like she fits perfectly. “Call me an idiot, I deserve it.”

Aqua’s cries tremble into laughter as she buries her face in his neck, twisting his suspenders in her fists. Terra lets her weight pull him onto the grass. “That girl was right. You smell good.”

“What are we talking about now?” Ven removes his helmet and brushes through his hair. Terra is so happy to see that chubby face. “Everything’s so confusing.”

“These girls have been chasing Terra. They’re harpies.” She looks up at him and smirks. “I don’t think they’d be pleased if they saw us like this.”

Terra chuckles into her hair. “I don’t care.”

“Wait,” Ven says, scoffing. “Now we’re going to be murdered by rabid fangirls? Ugh, Terra, why are you always inviting trouble? We don’t need it.” He slams his helmet back on. “Stay here, I’ll scout to see if it’s safe. I’m kicking your ass when we get back home.”

That’s fine. Terra will hold onto Aqua here, stroke his thumb on her cheek, wipe her hair off of her face, massage his hand over her exposed back, under the straps. It’s overcast, the clouds a respite.

Flowers named eurydice watch over them, their anthers hanging close.

“She’s okay,” Aqua whispers, sighing. Her body relaxes. “Thank you.”

Terra kisses her forehead and brings her waist closer. His star in the darkness. She blinks from behind blotted clouds.

#terraqua #terra #aqua #terraqua week #kingdom hearts fanfiction #orpheus #eurydice #AHHHHHH omg i finally finished this monster #the longest piece in the collection for sure #my fic

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onwesterlywinds · 3 years ago

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PROMPT #25: Silver Lining

"Sappho! Please come quickly!"

For Venat to intentionally disturb her at her desk meant a matter of some grave urgency. Sure enough, when Sappho looked up from the line of her latest epic - For why would the hero have thought to look for the villain in her own shadow? - her lover's face was horrifically pale beneath her mask.

"It's Eurydice," said Venat, and fear gripped Sappho's heart. "She's... something's happened. We must go to her at once!"

Sappho would pause the hard-won pursuit of her craft for very few occasions; the endangerment of her young friend was one of them. She left her desk and sprinted out of her apartment, down each flight of stairs as fast as her legs could carry her, before she could even remember that she had forgotten her mask. Such things no longer mattered, not now, and precious few remained in Amaurot who cared enough for her reputation to chastise her.

A crowd had already gathered around the Bureau of the Architect, most of them murmuring and milling about. Sappho, too, could make note of the oppressive aether that had gathered within the walls, a cloying presence on the edge of her senses.

"Where is she?!" she called. "Where is Eurydice?!"

"She's still inside!" shouted one of the attendants. "She's the only one not accounted for!"

Sappho did not ask if anyone had already gone inside to help: she knew the answer, and to bring it to life would only dull her purpose with rage. Rather than dissuade her or try to hold her back, the crowd parted to clear a path for her, the only maskless figure in an anonymous sea.

"Give me ten minutes," Sappho said to Venat, and she nodded. "If I do not return by then-"

"Find Orpheus," she finished, "and go in after you."

At any other moment, Sappho might have kissed her, but she dared not waste another second. For the first time in all too long, she rolled up her sleeves and spoke a quick word to summon her trusted sword and shield. Thus prepared, she charged alone into the Bureau of the Architect.

The moment the doors closed behind her, Sappho stood in a deeper darkness than any she had ever known. And yet it was achingly, intimately familiar - as if the sun and all the stars had been blotted out from the sky.

Her heart clenched as a cold wave of understanding gripped her.

The darkness roiled at her coming, for it knew her as its maker. Sappho could not hope to oppose it yet, not in this omnipresent gloom; she could only hope to plunge deeper into it, until she discovered Eurydice or some other trace of its source.

She heard the girl before she saw her, all the way from the other end of the entrance hall. Eurydice was weeping, lashing out impotently with her dagger at mere wisps of shadow that had confined her to a small corner.

"Eurydice!" Sappho called. She hurried in and spread her sword wide, generating a flash like the lighthouses on one of the coastal cities she had visited throughout her travels. The shadows writhed and squirmed and faded back into the abyss, though their defeat offered no relief from the darkness.

Eurydice sank to her knees in relief. "Sappho? Sappho, is that you? I can't see you, I'm... I'm so sorry!"

"Later," she insisted. She knelt down and placed a hand upon the girl's shoulder. "For now, we must bring everything we have to bear against this concept." Eurydice was no fighter. For this, just this once, it would not matter. "It will be difficult, but not impossible - and no matter what, we must not give in."

"But-"

"Eurydice. I wrote the words you spoke from a place of great despair - at a time when I lost everything." Her title, her purpose - and most of all, her adventuring. "But I am still here. I have Venat, and I have you. And together, we will leave this place, and we will find Orpheus."

Eurydice burst into tears anew at the sound of that name. "I was so stupid! He doesn't love me, he-"

"Orpheus loves you like no one has ever loved a girl before. And his love may not be the love you need now, but it is real - and if you have any desire to claim it, it will endure." She helped Eurydice to her feet, dusted her off a little, and placed a kiss upon the top of her head for good measure. "But whether you leave this place for his sake or for your own, make sure you leave it."

The words emboldened Sappho as surely as they emboldened Eurydice - yet on the far end of the hall, as if to rise to the challenge, a being manifested from out of the gloom.

It spoke to Eurydice's gift of construction that the summoned form resembled perfectly the darkness that had prompted Sappho to put her quill to parchment: an all-consuming emptiness, a despair that wore her own face. The cloud of darkness floated far above the floor of the grand hall, wearing nothing upon its body but lines of ink and blood, and from its hideously perfect form streamed forth barbed tetrameters, coiled like serpents.

Selfish, stupid, slothful sinner.

"Keep behind me," she murmured, and Eurydice obeyed at once.

The darkness fixed its eyes on Sappho and smiled in recognition. It raised one hand and summoned a single burning orb to throw at them both. Sappho deflected the blow with her shield, wincing as the jolt sent a shock all the way up her arm.

You help yourself and fail the world.

"Ignore it," she muttered. The words were as much for herself as they were for Eurydice. "Whatever it says, ignore it; it means to make you forget yourself."

She shone another light from her sword and the darkness recoiled.

"I do not need to defeat you," she said to the darkness. "I need only to keep you at bay."

***

Sappho and Eurydice walked out from the Bureau of the Architect side by side, with their arms around each other's shoulders. The crowd that had gathered near the building had since doubled in size, but Sappho could still make note of Orpheus at the very front: his lyre slung over his shoulder made him difficult to miss. Eurydice rushed to greet him, and Sappho gladly saw her to the safety of his arms.

Emet-Selch, too, stood at the rear of the crowd, distinguishable at a distance only by his red mask. Without a mask of her own, he could see every expression to cross her face in full; doubtless he could read her irritation as deftly as he read her epics.

"Sappho," he said by way of greeting. It was the first he'd called her by her name since she had given up the title "Azem." "I had thought you were meant to surrender all weapon concepts upon relinquishing your role."

"Are you going to hold me in contempt of the Convocation?" she retorted.

His wry smile only widened. "No," he admitted. "I mean only to praise you for a swift rescue."

"Save it," she snapped. "A girl nearly died bringing one of my works to life. Is that what you wanted me to say?"

He was raising one of his stupid eyebrows under his mask; he had to be. "And what is it you want to say, Sappho? It's been nearly a full year since you began working on your magnum opus."

Venat's hand took hold of hers; at her touch, Sappho relinquished whatever harsh words she might have later come to regret. "You'll see for yourself," she replied, and set back off toward her apartment. "When I've finished."

#FFXIVWrite #FFXIVWrite2021 #Sappho

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alifeintension-blog · 3 years ago

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Orpheus & Eurydice

Excerpt from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book XI

Translated by Allen Mandelbaum

But Hymen had to leave the isle of Crete. Clad in his saffron-colored cloak, he cleaved the never-ending air until he reached the home of the Cauconians in Thrace; for he had heard the voice of Orpheus, who was to wed--who pleaded for his presence. He came--but came in vain. He did not bless the rite with sacred utterance; his face displayed no joy; he brought no hope, no grace. Even the torch he held kept sputtering: eyes teared and smarted from the smoke; no flame, however much he shook that brand, would blaze.

The start was sad--and sadder still, the end. The bride, just wed, met death; for even as she crossed the meadows with her Naiad friends, she stepped upon a snake; the viper sank its teeth into her ankle.

Orpheus wept within the upper world; but when his share of long lament was done, the poet dared to cross the gate of Taenarus, to seek his wife among the Shades consigned to Styx. Among the fluttering clouds, the phantom forms of those who had been buried, he drew close to both Proserpina and Pluto, he who rules the dead, the joyless kingdom’s king. Then Orpheus plucked his lyre as he sang:

“O gods who rule the world beneath the earth, the world to which all those of mortal birth descend--if I may speak the truth to you, without the subterfuge that liars use, I’ve not come here to seek dark Tartarus, nor have I come to chain the monster-son Medusa bore, that horror whose three necks bear bristling serpents. This has brought me here: I seek my wife: she stepped upon a viper, a snake that shot his venom into her young body, robbing her of years of life. I’ll not deny that I have tried: I wish that I had had the power to resist. But Love has won; to him I must submit. Within the upper world, he has much fame, but I’m not sure if here that god has gained renown--though I do hope so; if the tale they tell of an abduction long ago is not a lie, why then you, too, do owe your union to the force of Love. And now I pray you, by these fearful sites and by the silences of this immense abyss, reknit the severed threads, restore the life-- undone too quickly--of Eurydice. For all of us are yours to rule by right; or stay above is brief; when that is done, we all must--sooner, later--speed to one same dwelling place. We all shall take this way: out final home is here; the human race must here submit to your unending sway. She, too, will yet be yours when she has lived in full the course of her allotted years. I ask you only this: lend her to me. But if the Fates deny my wife this gift, then I shall stay here, too, I won’t go back; and you can then rejoice--you’ll have two deaths.”

The bloodless shades shed tears: they heard his plea, the chant the Thracian had accompanied with chords upon his lyre. Tantalus no longer tried to catch the fleeing waves; Ixion’s wheel stood still--entranced, amazed; the vultures did not prey on Tityus’ liver; the Danaids left their urns; and Sisyphus, you sat upon your stone. It’s even said that, moved by Orpheus’ song, the Furies wept-- the only tears the Furies ever shed. Nor could Proserpina, nor he himself, the rule of the lower world, refuse the plea of Orpheus of Rhodope.

They called Eurydice. She was among the recent dead; as she advanced, her steps were faltering--her wound still brought distress. The Thracian poet took her hand; he led his wife away--but heard the gods’ command: his eyes must not turn back until he’d passed the valley of Avernus. Just one glance at her, and all he had received would be lost--irretrievably.

Their upward path was dark and steep; the mists they met were thick; the silences, unbroken. But at last, they’d almost reached the upper world, when he, afraid that she might disappear again and longing so to see her, turned to gaze back at his wife. At once she slipped away-- and down. His arms stretched out convulsively to clasp and to be clasped in turn, but there was nothing but the unresisting air. And as she died again, Eurydice did not reproach her husband. (How could she have faulted him except to say that he loved her indeed?) One final, faint “Farewell”-- so weak it scarcely reached his ears--was all she said. Then, back to the abyss, she fell.

And when that second death had struck his wife, the poet--stunned--was like the man whose fright on seeing Cerberus, three-headed hound enchained by Hercules, was so complete that he was not set free from fear until, his human nature gone, he had become a body totally transformed--to stone. Or one might liken Orpheus instead to Olenus, who took the blame himself for his Lethaea’s arrogance when she-- unfortunately--boasted of her beauty: Lethaea, you and he were once two hearts whom love had joined; but now you are two rocks that Ida holds on its well-watered slopes.

But then--when he had found his speech once more-- the poet pleaded, begging Charon for a second chance to reach the farther shore; the boatman chased him off. For seven days, huddled along the banks of Styx, he stayed; there he shunned Ceres’ gifts--he had no taste for food; he called on desperation, pain, and tears--with these alone he could sustain himself. But after Orpheus arraigned the gods of Erebus for cruelty, he left; he sought the peak of Rhodope and Haemus’ heights, where north winds never cease.

#ancient greece #ancient greek #mythology #greek mythology #greek myth #orpheus #eurydice #orpheus and eurydice #ovid #metamorphoses #poem #love #love poem #love story #sad

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alexseanchai · 4 years ago

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Fanfic 2020 in Review

I got tagged by @kasienda @noirshitsuji and @marvelousmsmol and I am tagging whoever wants to play!

1) List of fics completed this year in the order they were finished:

*filters own works to complete and updated in 2020*

1 - 20 of 57 Works by AlexSeanchai

nope. *adds filter to include only works of at least 1000 words*

unless otherwise indicated, these are all Miraculous Ladybug:

“don’t bake it lying down”, post-reveal Marichat vs Felix Graham de Vanily

“veracity”, canon divergence from “Ladybug” featuring Mister Bug and Verity Queen (so also Marichat, I guess)

“(no request is too extreme, if) your heart is in your dream��, in which Hawkmoth wins, for the thirty seconds or so before Emilie saves Ladybug and Chat Noir’s lives

“tell me you love me and make me believe it”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire ropes Ladybug into helping plan her civilian self’s escape slash social transition

“kingmaker, oathbreaker”, in which Hawkmoth wins and Emilie watches her son remove himself from the family

“stay and let me watch you break it down” (Twelve Dancing Princesses), a modern setting

“set a course for winds of fortune”, in which trans girl Chatonne Noire has already escaped and Gabriel and Nathalie are trying to bring Gabriel’s son home

“we ground love in a hopeless place”, in which post-reveal Marinette’s attempt to remain resolutely not in love with her partner dissolves like sugar in coffee when they start a pun war

“ring the bells that still can ring”, in which Alya is deeply confused about why Adrien and Marinette are planning a wedding when last night both were single

“burning wishes at both ends (the cold wind and long loud wail remix)”, in which Gabriel made a monkey’s paw wish and Emilie makes another

“words cannot espresso”, in which Marinette’s OC roommate is justifiably worried for Marinette’s safety, and meanwhile Adrien takes care of Marinette

“the compromise of truth” (the chronologically second-earliest part posted to date of nine lives, snake’s eyes), in which Adrien tells his friends how he won some freedom and respect from his father

“At The Present Time”, the Ladrien/Ladynoir marriage proposal follow-up to @art-deco-shrimp‘s “Your Presents Required”

“j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”, in which the events of canon must just have been a series of dream sequences, Marinette and Adrien both think, until they both arrive at Chloe’s Halloween masquerade dressed as themselves from the dreams

2) Number of words written:

ahahaha no. I am not counting all my scattered fic drafts and trying to figure out what I did and didn’t write in 2020. I refuse.

AO3 says I posted 162K in 2020. it is counting all of keeps you guessing (like any real love), which (a) I started posting in 2019 (b) is co-written by @galahadwilder; it is counting all of my meta snippets collection, much of which was written in 2019; it is counting the Vimeo passwords for my vids. but I probably cleared 150K by a safe margin.

3) Your most popular fic:

“veracity” has a four-digit kudos count, wow, when’d that happen? this is also the 2020 work with the most hits and the most bookmarks, but “tell me you love me” has four-thirds as many comments as its nearest competitor.

4) Your personal fav:

“cannot break us, not with a thousand swords”, no question about it. this is the one in which Ladybug proposes marriage to Chat Noir via Princess Bride meme on Tumblr. (if you intend to download the work or otherwise to consume it with creator style off, you want the accessible version instead of the primary version.)

5) Your fav scene:

aaaaaaaaa

—okay so this is cheating and I know it, since Uncertain Humors (the one where Marinette/Adrien is both Orpheus/Eurydice and Theseus/Ariadne) is nowhere near finished, never mind posted (maybe I'll get “Sanguine” done to post on my birthday?)

but it is still my favorite of the year. as you might guess from that description of the story, this scene has content notes for character death:

Hell is a maze. Marinette walks.

This acrid passage has little to see but damp stone, seeming blood-stained in the dim carmine light. At about the height of her heart, the faintly glowing thread cuts through the not-clammy air; it ought to be pulsing at the same rate as the heart it's bound to. She might be able to see her own reflection if she looked down at the open sewage pipe, or at one of the puddles that now and again she splashes through, dampening the canvas of her shoes. She might see reflected what's behind her.

She remembers Mme. Mendeleiev lecturing on human physiology. In healthy humans old enough to have learned how, urination is a voluntary action: one may not know which muscles one tenses and relaxes in order to do so, and probably isn't paying attention to those details when one is doing, but one has conscious control over whether one does. Usually. Stress and anxiety mean some people are unable to relax the relevant sphincter muscle and others are unable to stop themselves. It's voluntary for cats, too: it's one way they mark their territories. Cat-boys have other ways.

There is a moment in every human life when all one's muscles relax at once. Some Parisians have had several such moments.

The thread is braided with itself around her left fourth finger, rows of tiny red half-hitch knots, and falls loosely over the back of her hand to loop twice around her wrist. She holds it wrapped between the fingers of her right hand to keep it at a constant tension, as though knitting with this insubstantial thread, so fragile for something two (two dozen, two million) lives hang from—too thin to sew with, no thicker than one strand of his hair. As she walks, she winds it around and around and around her wrist.

Between her ring finger and her right hand, it loops twice.

Marinette's shoe lands in a puddle she didn't see. The rainwater splashes soundlessly onto her bare ankle and on the stone.

(With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal— It's a very loud song.)

She walks on.

6) A fic or scene that challenged you:

where the firelight fades, no contest. this is the second story I’ve ever been able to stick with more than a couple hundred words past the 20K mark, but it’s easily the twentieth novel-length I’ve begun. (though also, you know that kedreeva post? well, 90K later, I’m less than 15K from completing this 10K fic! I think.) and I have been learning so much about long-form fiction.

there has also been a lot of weeping and tearing my hair. case in point: I just trashed the chapter 15 draft because I figured out the reason it wasn’t going anywhere! I can probably keep the first few hundred words of that draft without any editing, and another few hundred with some revision...

7) A line of writing you’re proud of:

from “j'ai rêvé (so I don't have to dream alone)”:

Everything about their partnership is fragments of sentences in the dream diary Adrien writes in ultraviolet pen. Disjointed flickers of thought even when examined under the black light he hides in the snack cabinet under packets of Super Yoyo sandwich cookies and bags of cheesy Monster Munch potato chips and boxes of petit écolier butter cookies (chocolat noir)—none of which explains the gym-socks smell. All fleeting incoherent flashes, invisible between the mundane lines of La Modification shelved at his bedside between Leroux and Dumas. None of it is solid. Adrien has more proof his room's haunted.

okay let me break this down for you!

* Adrien started a dream diary to make sense of the memories

* in invisible ink, in a book that (according to Wikipedia) is thematically appropriate and won’t (if Gabriel sees it) look like anything other than Adrien developing an interest in French literature

* shelved between Phantom of the Opera and The Three Musketeers

* look I didn’t come up with the name “black light”

* or “chocolat noir” for what English speakers call “dark chocolate”, or “petit écolier” (that is, “little schoolboy”) for that sort of butter cookie

* also not my fault that “chocolat noir” sounds remarkably like “Chat Noir”, which, attentive readers may have noticed, is not a name that appears in the story after the header and before Miraculous Cure

* I found the website of a store in Boston, Massachusetts that caters to French expats, and the yo-yo cookies and the monster chips were right there in the photos, y’all

* the snack stash and the black light live in the cabinet where, in canon, the Camembert lives; yes, that cheese smells in the real world like gym socks

* this story’s akuma was not able to affect anything but squishy human memory: nobody affected remembers anything about Ladybug or Chat Noir or Hawkmoth, not in any solid way, not even when they read news articles about the subject, and this includes Marinette and Adrien not being able to see or hear or remember their own kwamis—but you know what Adrien’s Insta post about his poltergeist and Adrien’s Insta post with the floating sock don’t show and don’t explicitly refer to?

* I love this paragraph so much (my housemates may have been lovingly mocking me over it)

8) A comment that touched you:

there are people (y’all know who you are) who said y’all are studying my style. I ded of blush.

9) Something that inspired your writing:

by volume of fic drafts that can be blamed on any particular person, the winner is probably @norakwami

10) Your proudest accomplishment (that one scene; finally finishing that one fic; posting your first fic; etc):

so that longest-story-ever-written record I set in 2007 with the 89.5K story that, till where the firelight fades, was the only story I’d gotten much past 20K?

I broke that fucking record!

and then I deleted the draft of firelight chapter 15 😭

11) Do you have any writing goals for the next year?

I’m starting work on a fantasy novel, a Sleeping Beauty retelling in which I explore (among other things) the economic consequences of the king’s ordering all the spinning wheels burned, and I want to make significant progress on that. and I want to not make my hands any worse; I kind of need those!

(breaking news alert: bodies fucking suck. so does giving yourself repetitive stress injuries in doing one and a half to two people’s worth of work for an organization that was never ever going to pay you more than one person’s worth of pay.)

#by alexseanchai #miraculous ladybug #tag game

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