Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.
Note: This story's present takes place concurrently with the battle against The Sorcerer's Apprentice in Storybrooke in "The Outstanding Balance of Morality".
CHAPTER FOUR
INTO THE BADLANDS
"Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war!"
"Another incantation?" Merlin inquired from his bunk across the narrow cabin.
"Not from our world. Or this one," Neal replied, missing intensely this drab existence in New York right then. If his father had given him one gift with all of the curses, it was literacy, and he'd fallen in love with many works from his adoptive home world that were now just lines in his head, just memories like people he'd loved.
"You're thinking of Emma."
"Are you ever not intrusively observant, man?" Neal groaned.
"Sorry. Nimue did used to get on me about that," Merlin apologized. "I tried to shake it, but being a tree for centuries, I suppose I regressed a bit into old habits."
"It's fine. You're right. A day's never passed that I haven't," he sighed, running a hand over his face. "Got many more thinking of her than being with her. The weight of it never lifted. Probably never will and assuming we're not obliterated into nonexistence shortly, I'll have an eternity of who knows what to keep on baring that weight on my soul. Or, you know, might still be nonexistence."
"I understand."
"I guess you do."
Merlin reminded, "But heavy as that weight feels, the last day you did spend with her, you both embraced your love, bared your souls, and even if you had only moment, it was true and that runs deeper than many get who live their whole lives in one anther's company. Emma will carry that with her in this battle and on through to the other side of it. And it will free your soul, to move beyond the reach of the gods, to be at peace until you are at least reunited, whole."
"You really believe that?" Neal asked, rolling onto his side, "that there is something beyond this? That the gods weren't just trapping us all in their immortal dreamcatcher before our souls got vaporized into star dust same as if this kook succeeds?"
"I believe that some things happen by a design older than the gods," Merlin answered. "I believe that love came before them and exists beyond them."
"I wanna believe that.. But every time we've gotten reunited we've been ripped apart. Just seems hard to believe the universe'd be that cruel and then just be like 'here, you get to be together now forever in eternal bliss!'"
"Life is suffering."
"Now you're just quoting The Buddha."
"I feel a special bond with that acetic from the Land Without Magic."
"The tree thing?"
"Yes, the tree thi-"
The ship suddenly pitched to port and a howling sound echoed around the hull.
"Guess we've arrived."
It wasn't long before a glowering Liam Jones informed them that his ancestor requested their presence on deck. On the way they passed much of the crew who'd taken shelter from the ferocious winds above. Jones himself stood in the limited shelter provided by the deckside entrance to his quarters.
Hurricane force winds buffeted the ship, though magic kept the sails from becoming more tattered than they were and the ship itself from rocking terribly where it had weighed anchor in a narrow channel that cut through a vast and parched valley. The mountains they'd encountered at the edges of the salt flats were distant silhouettes, barley visible through the churning dust save what looked like a burgeoning eruption from one of the volcanoes there.
"This is where we part ways, gentlemen," Jones told them. "Geryon can take you further in."
The Howling Plains held true to their name. With the relentless wind came a continual howling sound, like pack of wolves baying over a kill. This was the final fate of the uncommonly and obsessively lustful, of adulterers, ambitious whores, individuals with truly deviant fetishes. and those who used sex and sexuality to seduce others to their whims either for personal gain or simply for the fun of it.
Neal considered that mother might have ended up here if she'd been sentenced, for while it didn't seem that lust was her primary reason for leaving her family, she had used it often to find temporary escapes from her marriage, used it to seduce those who could give her that escape.
There was no escape for those sentenced here, to the seemingly endless refugee-like camp of flimsy shelters being blown about by the vicious wind.
And his mother's sins did not mean she was here. The Styx wouldn't necessarily despite its accidental souls where their sins would have taken them, particularly when many here had committed a number of grievous sins. That's why it was up to the Justices - or Zeus - to determine which merited the eternal punishment, which torment would be the most effective. It was a place to start, however.
Neal gripped his scarf while Merlin held tightly the hood of his cloak and they ventured into the battered camp, seeking the one here who could offer information.
They found her in a tent indistinguishable from the rest, a woman who resembled more a starving Dust Bowl farmer's wife than the beautiful young royal who'd seduced two kingdoms into war.
Helen of Troy was also the first to cast a sleeping curse on another mortal - using a golden apple from Aphrodite. But the war thing was more serious, obviously, and for the fun she'd had using her beauty and guile she was now a withered woman trapped in this hellscape.
After introductions had been made, she cluttered a cup of tea in bony hands and told them, "We've only had one nomad come through here. An arrogant young man who attacked several of my people with his sword until his old mistress, a rather sadistic whore herself, stabbed him and pushed him back into the river. Seems he'd killed her to take the fall for his committing genocide, destroying the last of the good Giants to take their gold for his kingdom's coffers. The rake is rather lucky his brother pushed him in your realm before he went to trail," she said to Neal.
"Yeah, probably," he agreed. The gods had sentenced most of the Giants to Tartarus. The ones James killed were a small splinter group who wanted peace instead of war and had abstained from involving themselves in that long-ago battle. Even if they hadn't sided with Zeus, the gods had afforded them some respect for not fighting against them. Killing anyone respected by the gods did not generally end well and if Hades hadn't needed James to distract David, he'd have probably been tried quickly and long gone from The Underworld by the time his brother arrived.
Hades had complicated the fuck out of things. Dorothy's aunt shouldn't have been there long at all. Sure, she'd not had the most supportive of responses to finding out her niece was gay, apparently, but she'd used that phone to try and send her apologies to the young woman, to make peace with things. She should have been encouraged to move on. That was how it was supposed to work. But instead the former Lord of The Underworld had lapsed in ensuring that certain souls who'd finished their business got ferried out of there and Zeus was just too arrogant and out-of-touch to realize that his little brother was plotting against him again.
And so here they were somehow enticed into cleaning up the gods' mess, because it wasn't like Zeus or Hera or any of them really cared that a few mortal souls got misplaced, not even the good ones that definitely did not deserve to be in the depths of hell.
Before they headed out, Helen tracked down "Jack", the once vivacious and vicious mistress of Prince James. She was still vicious, but like Helen had lost her beauty.
"Find him," Jacqueline hissed, "and stick him in the pit he deserves. I may be a thief and a whore who seduced and lied my way into the bed of a prince for my own gain, but I never betrayed anyone I pledged loyalty to, gave my heart to. That prick knew I was with child when he led me to my death. I know that I was neither the first, nor the last mistress he knocked up and then disposed of. I don't care if he has a blood curse to blame for being a murderous bastard. I want him to freeze. I want demons to shatter his balls and leave him a castrated little fuck lamenting all his failed conquests."
"We'll... ah... do our best, madam," Merlin assured.
As they walked back toward the river the wizard remarked, "Sounds like your father-in-law has quite the... colorful brother."
"He's not my father-in-law," Neal reminded. "But, yeah, my kid's family is kind of fucked up from all sides."
Once they reached the river, Neal took a small dagger from his belt and sliced his palm, letting a few drops fall into the water.
It didn't take very long for the water to boil and a beast to erupt from the surface, raining down droplets that sent the few sinners nearby running in terror.
Neal and Merlin, unlike the other dead, stood their ground and watched the mutated Giant flap massive dragon wings and land with surprising grace on the dusty ground.
"You summoned me, My Lord," Geryon growled, shaking a head of lion-like golden curls and twitching a tail tipped with a scorpion's stinger.
"We need to go in deeper to find the Lost Souls," Neal told the monster. "Will you take us?"
"It would be my pleasure," answered Geryon. "But beware that not all is as it appears to be. Even gods have gotten themselves chained down here for lack of vigilance."
With that, the two men climbed onto Geryon's back and the beast took flight, tearing off into the howling winds, leaving behind the land of the lustful, heading straight into the heart of a raging storm.
AN: Neal's incantation is a line from "Howl" by Alan Ginsberg, a beat poet and friend/lover of Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac. Every time they mentioned "Moloch" on Sleepy Hollow, I always thought of that poem! Geryon is a character from both Greek mythology and Inferno. I will be mashing up both versions of him here.