Eurydice.
She gave him music.
What there had been before was beautiful, but empty.
Before he met her, Orpheus could play. From his lyre came shadows, portraits in the ink of ignorance, made for the sake of fleeting beauty.
He entranced the world. He was the singer who sang fair words for his listeners, but when the song was over they walked away, remembering the sweetness of the notes and not the words behind them.
He could sing of love. He could catch hell and heaven and humanity and set them to dance with his swift fingers, his voice like rising joy.
But he could not keep them. They ran away, over, done, and the soul walked unscathed.
When he met Eurydice, Orpheus loved. And he was not mute as other lovers had been. He played his love, he played his joy and his wonder and the taste of a kiss and the perfection of the moment, and he was heard.
When Orpheus loved, the world listened. For a time, the listeners loved also, and when the music ceased love itself was graven on their memories.
But such things too were fleeting. Strife remained, and sorrow. Who is this man, whispered the people. He is a harbinger of joy, but death crouches on our doorsteps. There is more than beauty in the world.
Orpheus was left without his listeners.
But he was uncaring, for he played for his wife and the world and the trees, and that was enough.
Then flight, and poison, and Orpheus the singer learned that death is colder and darker to those who the dead must leave behind.
He learned of terror, and rage, and the bitter taint of regret and the wasted color of hope turned sour, empty as a dead girl's eyes.
And Orpheus, desperate, threw his shock aside and shoved down grief, imprisoning the coming tide behind cold doors and burning memory.
He traveled, a man alone with a lyre in his arms and none to walk beside him.
And when he reached the dark river, where all hope is cast aside, Orpheus did not pay the toll, the coins and the aspirations. Instead, he kindled hope itself in the ferry man, hope and memory, so that Charon, who had turned aside the souls of children and shut his ears to their cries every day for an eternity, wept to hear the music.
The tears of Charon fell down into the black water as he rowed Orpheus across. The Styx has been repository for many tears, over the centuries.
Hope strikes hard. Your heart can break with hope.
To the great dog Cerberus, to the ghosts and the monsters and the lost Orpheus sang of love and hope and the colors of the world. He gave them what they had left behind, for a brief while, and left them with the memory.
They listened, and did not turn away.
When empty death is all you have, you don't want love and sorrow to stand together, no matter what is real.
They listened.
When Orpheus came to the hall of the dark god, the dead followed behind him.
He did not fear. There was nothing left to lose.
Before the twin thrones, the musician knelt. His long, graceful harpist's fingers shone with unnatural living color in that place of mist and gray.
To Hades and his flower bride, Orpheus played. And for the first time in his life, Orpheus did not speak what he had heard before. He sang his own soul for the lord of the dead, he sang his love and his joy and his music and he followed them with shock, horror, sudden aching loss and terrible, burning desperation.
Finally, to the sound of Persephone's tears falling to cold stone, staring into the black eyes of her impassive husband, Orpheus sang of hope, and what Eurydice had been, and what life she had had, and how he was only standing here, having passed through hell and oblivion, because that life would be wasted if his own hope was not fulfilled.
The dead do not weep. This is a true thing. They do not weep, and never have, but for once when the young musician came to plead for his hope back, and sang life for them to hear again, they who had thought all life long lost and too far out of reach to ever grasp again.
Only memory, clear and bittersweet, can make the dead weep. Orpheus gave them memory, for a little while.
Hades looked out on the souls, and looked to his queen, so delicate and sweet, here in the dark, and he knew that although he had abducted her and kept her here for six months of every year it was the refusal of Orpheus that Persephone would never forgive him for.
You know the story.
She will follow. For the sake of my queen, she will follow. But do not look back, or your wife is mine forever.
Do not look back.
But that was impossible, and maybe Hades knew it, when he gave his stern command, made his bargain with its warning, and looked out of the corner of black eyes to see the tears of his young queen cease, her eyes brighten.
Impossible.
Think; think for a moment, of Orpheus. Of his hope, bright, growing stronger, the only thing keeping his from the terrible, all-engulfing grief that had threatened him since Eurydice died. Without that hope, Orpheus was lost.
He had to look back. He had to be sure. He did not think, did not remember anything in that moment of fleeting doubt when there was nothing but silence behind him, except how terrible that grief was, and how much he needed hope.
He was in sight of the way out, when he turned around to look upon Eurydice. We who are human can continue through the dark unfaltering. It is in the first rays of dawn that we fall prey to fear and doubt.
For one moment, she was there. As she had been, as she would have been, through all the years of their life together. All the promise existed again, for a second, for an eternity.
That, when she faded to smoke and vanished back into the dark, was what broke Orpheus's heart. He had held in his hands joy, lost it, done the impossible to get it back, and had it all again only to stand bereft at the mouth of hell, wanting nothing more than to run, return there, follow Eurydice, lost to him again.
But he did not run back. And even to this day the name of Orpheus is a word the same as music.
Because Orpheus went out into the world, and he sang of love once more. But this time, he also sang of grief, for it was his, always, perching in his heart where the wings of hope had once fluttered, hope that has been called a feathered thing.
The feathers of grief are not black, the mourning shade. They are of no color at all. They are empty, and stick to your clothes, your hair, your lips, almost impossible to brush off and leave behind.
Orpheus, who had lost hope twice, had nothing left but his grief. He did not banish it. He claimed it, made it his own, possessed it as he had once possessed love, and turned it into something beautiful.
There was everything, in Orpheus's music. All the vast pantheon of humanity, piercing and soft and deep as a heartbeat, and at last he played it truly, because now it was his.
Orpheus was a man, a man with a broken heart and the voice and music of a god, and he showed those who listened to him humanity, quickly gone and sometimes wasted, grasped and slipping away forever into darkness.
For his first listeners, Orpheus had played what he saw.
For the ferryman and the dead, he had played what they had felt in life, and played what they wanted, which was life also.
For Hades and Persephone, Orpheus had played his love for Eurydice, and its promise, and the pain and joy it had given him.
Now, alone, his wife dead twice over and tears in his eyes, Orpheus played it all. And it rang true, for he had felt every note of it, and knew what it was, down to the core.
The music of Orpheus was now not only beautiful but true, and those who listened to him walked away and never forgot him, even in despair, even after death, because Orpheus, by grace of Eurydice, had taken humanity and made it his own, and shown that all of it was real and worth the suffering.
Those who listened saw themselves in Orpheus's music.
It was Eurydice who gave it to him.
Maybe, in sight of the way out the test was over. Maybe Hades was just trying to be feared, and would have let them go, even if he knew Orpheus would look back, and had warned him against it. Maybe he would have let them go, to try without a song or a musician's voice to give Persephone a little hope.
Maybe, when Orpheus turned around and faced what might have been, Eurydice too saw something.
She saw what death was, and what life was, and that there is a bond between the two. She saw that loss is just as real as joy, and sometimes things are just wasted.
She saw that no plea, however beautiful, should be able to bring back the dead. Other lovers, whose voices were not so sweet and whose fingers were not so nimble on lyre strings, could not plead, and had to bear their grief. Why not Orpheus too?
It was, perhaps, unjust that Eurydice died when and as she did, but would it not also be unjust to bring her back?
And maybe she saw the kind of music that Orpheus could play, if she let him go.
She gave him music.
Because she died, Orpheus gave that music to the world, and the world was moved to awe, hearing the sound of mortality, swift and sweet and oh so bright, fairer and harsher than the roars of demons of the soft rustle of angel's wings.
She gave him music.
And Orpheus who played with such beauty and such truth that the souls of the dead and the souls of the living both could listen is remembered. Eurydice is remembered. And the tears of Charon fell into the Styx, and mingled with the tears of the rejected who he had been forced to turn aside, leaving them neither living nor truly dead but only lost.
She gave him music.
Maybe, just maybe, Eurydice thought dying was worth it.