It started when she agreed to follow him down into the bowels of the opera house—no, when he came to her in the guise of the Angel of Music. From that time on, she was doomed to eventually go down with him, and to make the rash, foolish decision to remove his mask to satisfy her curiosity.
He was right when he shouted at her while covering his face with a hand, "Now you cannot ever be free!" When he brought her back to her dressing room she felt happy to be free of the dark place, but as the months wore on, she began to miss it. Its labyrinthine passageways, the music that seemed a tangible part of every room, the man who lived there all captured her imagination in the brief time that she was down there.
Her reasons were innocent enough, to be sure, but the repercussions were devastating. The week after she returned to the room, she waited by the mirror for him to begin her voice lesson. The angel didn't arrive at his normal time, nor in the three hours she waited afterward. Sometimes, at night, she crept out of her bed and sat in front of the mirror, waiting desperately for her angel to come. She placed a hand on the cool glass, humming, and then, when nobody caught her, began singing softly. He never came.
And as time passed without so much as a whisper from the angel, she longed to hear his voice again, to be taught again. The separation ate at her, turning every shadow on the stage into the one who should be watching. Eventually, it drove her to seek him out.
One night, after rehearsals were over, she crept through the mirror and down, down to the world she knew waited below. Her teacher's presence no longer made the trip magical as it had been the first night, but this time she noticed the posters of operas from before she was even born. She was wise enough to know she could not possibly manage the gondola, though he made it look easy, and skirted around the lake by means of the rocky shoreline.
At the little house by the lake, she continued her search. She found him at his piano in a large music room. He turned around, surprised, and asked, "Christine—what are you doing here?"
"I needed to see you. You haven't come since I left. I miss you! Don't you want me here, angel? It's been too long…" Her eyes, those wide brown eyes he knew so well, lingered on him, savoring the sight of him sitting before her.
He looked pityingly at her. "I suppose it's true. Once you have tasted the fruit of the underworld, you can never truly leave."
She looked at him in confusion. "What do you mean?"
Erik's eyes locked with hers. "Oh, Christine," he said mournfully. "Can Persephone ever forgive her Hades?"
This is one of those I wrote when I was twelve or thirteen, when I had virtually no concept of how to write anything decent, but it's undergone major editing over the past few weeks. However, I think if I fiddle with it any more, I'm just gonna hurt it, so here it is. Let me know what you think. :)
Thanks for reading!
~ange
