A/N: this is a mix of two chapters, Flame and Hope (hence title), only change being Hades does not meet Kore at the bottom of the steps to insure her of his good intentions. Really. Who said he had any? Cheers.
Chapter 6: Flame and Hope
Confusion, as she opened her eyes – for the numbness of the previous night had gone. Kore held still and gathered herself.
A light shone in her eyes. Brighter than a candle it hovered in the air – a small sphere of flame – tracing circles, glowing red then orange then white-blue, dispelling the long shadows of her chamber. For though she felt it to be morning, here in death no sun marked the dawn from night, and the shadows are ever-long.
Kore held her hand to the light; it glowed red through her fingers, but she felt nothing. Even flames had no warmth here. She withdrew her hand, disappointed, and found the note lying on the redwood chest beside her bed.
A gift, it said.
Anger welled up in her again. Kore felt a sudden desire to drown the thing, and was surprised at herself. Last night was the first time she had felt anger – for, with her mother, her ire had never went beyond annoyance.
A cloak of wolf's fur hung at the edge of her bed, and a silver tray lay on a small stool before the hearth. Kore pulled on the cloak for it was cold; she did not touch the food.
The ghost-flame followed her where she walked, and hovered above the food as if expectant.
"I am not hungry," she said to it, feeling the annoyance and anger boiling up again.
And the flame changed, white to orange, at her words, and it passed over the food to rest near her hand. A gift.
"Are you to be my guide, then?" whispered Kore, opening her palm and the fire sat upon it like a small breath of wind, glowing yellow then white in assent.
"Very well," she said.
Nothing stirred in the castle as Kore emerged from her rooms; the great dragon-doors shut behind her, gold glinting dimly from the light of the ghost-flame. A charred patch of carpet was all that remained to show her last night was no dream. At least, she thought, it was a large patch of carpet.
Through a tall corridor she walked, under the grand arch of the dark stone ceiling, her bare feet scuffling softly. Beside her hung great pictures framed in gilded panes, spanning the height and breadth of the hall; she had not the time to notice them last night.
Kore saw that they were scenes of struggle – battles of men, which at the beginning were small skirmishes of rocks and sticks, but as she walked on she saw then men donning heavy wooden shields and glinting armor, riding beasts and machines – but always, always this mass of writhing bodies, a sea of furied faces, a catacomb of eyes, all of them trained on her, following her, as if imploring from her the reason for all their woes. And as she went on she realized it no longer showed the times she knew, but other-times, a world of calamitous seas, towers of strange shapes that reflected the fires in the sky. There men died by the thousands, more than thousands, bursting into flame, barely-registered surprise on their faces as they fell to the ground. And the weeping, always the women weeping, as their children scampered madly through the flames.
Then she passed through an archway, turned right, and there were no more pictures.
Remembering her dream, she returned to Cerberus. But to reach her destination Kore trekked the Land of the Dead by foot, each cold and unyielding inch. Shades saw her and scattered, and Kore had the merest impression of gaunt faces and staring eyes before they gave way about her, spreading like the waves on a still pool broken by rain.
Everywhere the glowing fog, everywhere the grey-brown land. Perhaps the flame led her nowhere, or in circles, and she could walk this place for all the eons of existence and not come to an end, for there could be no end to death. She wanted the sun, slanting in through marbled columns, and warmth and light, and her mother's voice, singing as ripe grain scattered on the polished floor of her home.
Home, it burned in her like a wound.
In the living lands under the sky she could hear each blade of grass humming to the dewdrop at the edge of its blade, each branch of the tree whistling with the symphony of the wind. Here all was silent, for the land and hills and mountains had no words, no memories but for the first darkness and then this – grey.
The air was still but for the sudden breeze that blew in her face as she made her way to farther and farther from the fortress. Kore's nose picked up the faint scent of river and mud and sand in the wind, and each time it passed she seemed to hear – somewhere far away – the sigh of an exhaled breath.
"Is that a new shade, then?" she realized suddenly.
The flame glowed white in assent.
Such were deaths here, a breeze that faded into stillness. Kore remembered how her mother had told her that all things alive are made of that which died or were dead, that a man eating the young ewe on the sacrifice table turned the parts of that ewe into himself – his liver and his skin and his hair. And so each dying thing lived and breathed and died again under the sun, and was no true death – expect when humans died. For they had a little of that which was like the gods in them; not a god, or even a god's toenail, and yet at the same time they were not made entirely of things that had-lived. A little part disappeared from the world with dying, goes to the underworld and does not come back again – yet it was not the part that spoke or walked or caused wars and had children, but something that Demeter could not explain. Kore had thought of them like the green grass broken by the first frost that lie still, preserved in their memories of greenness under a covering snow.
The shades in death were nothing as she had imagined them. It seemed that they knew fear, for they ran from her sight, but little else did they know, gliding blankly past one another unrecognized, blank eyes and thin faces. They were the farthest thing from the living, loving, angry, moving things in the portraits before her door, who prayed at Demeter's temple, dreaming of ripe fields and fertile sheep, of children and prosperous lives, of horrid misfortunes to their enemies.
Mountains sprang suddenly out of the mist, and Kore saw that they were nearing the borders of Hades' lands. Something about those dark crags made her pause. She had not noticed it before, but there was a certain symmetry to them that reminded her of the great walls of men, almost as if the mountains were hauled out of nothingness into being, not by nature, but by someone. Hades? She wondered. Perhaps he, too, tired of the monotony of his kingdom after millennia.
Moving close Kore bent down to brushed her fingers against the grey edges of the cliff, and found that it came away under her touch like loosest sand, falling like dust to the ground in a small shower.
Kore withdrew her arm, startled. The four lines of her fingers scored the side of the mountain. How was it that here in death, where the land was hard and the skies are ceilings of rock clouded over– how was it that the mountains fell down like water, and the hills were but a large pile of gathered dust?
She paused there, staring at the handful of dust in her palm and finally pocketing it. The flame had waited, and now it led her through the tunnel between the towering peaks. Kore walked lightly, careful not to brush against the tall shadows for fear that her lightest touch may bring a collapse.
She smelled Cerberus before she heard him – a scent of warm fur and river and also something else that she could not place. Kore suddenly wondered at herself, coming here to this beast on a dream she could not understand, and unafraid because Hades had said, nothing in this realm will harm you.
It was because Hades had always spoken true, even though she accused him of lying. The danger lay in things unsaid.
Ascending a small slope was Cerberus, his heads poised proudly, his fur gleaming and deep. As she came close he saw her and shook his heads, pawed the ground, doglike. Then to her astonishment he raised his heads and howled – or roared – it mattered little which, only that the ground shook with the noise, and the mountains by him rattled and gave off a great cloud of dust that clouded her eyes and nose.
When it cleared she saw that Cerberus dug at the ground furiously, with paws and jaws, deep into the wet sands by the Styx. The sand flew around him and the heads above ground rolled about, growling in effort. He dug until black water welled out of the hole– the water of Hate, wetting his muzzle and his teeth, and Cerberus grimaced in response, only to bend down again into the large gash in the ground.
At last he emerged, moving half of his bulk out of the pit the earth. His jaws were full of dark wet sand, dripping, and he spat the lot before her feet, sand, water, and all. Looking down she realized it was not some madness that possessed the creature, for lying the black pile were small flecks of white, gleaming dimly, neither sand nor rock. She bent down and picked one up.
It looked – for all the things in the world – like a seed.
The great beast shook his heads, the massive chest heaving, and stared at her.
"Why –" Kore took a step closer, and felt a sudden pain under her foot. She yelped, her leg giving out under her and she fell onto the ground in surprise.
A shard of obsidian rock jutted up where there had only been smooth sand, and had cut her. Kore inspected the cut, a small gash across the arch of her foot, welling with a streak of blood that traced an arc and then dripped off the edge of her heel, into the ground.
Then, from the mark where she had bled – a small dark spot in the wet, hard sand, there sprung an upright branch of green, shooting from the ground and exploding with white flowers.
Asphodel.
The gift-flame hovered above the apparition, and in its light Kore saw with wonder the tracing of delicate veins in the petals, the glossiness of the leaves. The little flowers shone pure under the mock-sun, and Kore reached out to touch one, feeling the smooth life that flowed within – and then it crumbled, flowers, stalk, and all, wilting as fast as it had sprung. There it lay on the beach, turned into sand again.
Kore looked up at Cerberus.
"Things can grow here." she said, amazed.
This place, this windblown home of thousand shades, wrought of the dust of ages, the dust that their master has tried in vain to shape into valleys and mountains and hills and castles – living things can grow here.
For a time Kore just sat upon the cold sand, a small handful of seeds cupped in her palm, watching the dim light on the undulating waters of the Styx. Beside her Cerberus sat quietly on his haunches, two heads looking across the great river, one looking at her. And then Kore started to laugh, laugh until tears squeezed themselves past the corners of her eyes, and then she was weeping and laughing all at once, trying to dry her face on her sleeves and failing. Things can grow here; it was only a matter of finding the right place, the right hill, the right corner of hell, and the seeds - life - would grow.