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".
Note: Minor changes made to Chapter 5.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HEART OF DARKNESS
Nimue had existed long enough not to wonder about much of anything. And she had existed in a state nearly equivalent to some tortures that existed here in Tartarus for most of that time. Her soul had been fractured, fragmented into a sort of parallel existence in three different states of being, tormented by being incomplete more than being in The Vault of the Dark One, the mind of a Dark One, or The River of Lost Souls from which she'd been unable to escape even to Hell, trapped like all the other Dark Ones in unsatiated madness, trying to pull in those who traveled upon the water, tearing at the corporeal forms of those that took the plunge until the other parts of her combined with that pitiful shade and she traveled over the falls and was spat out deep the bowls of the realm of the gods.
She was free now, even if she was still a monstrous thing. But she'd learned to live with that. Just as she was learning to live here surrounded by greedy fools and vicious monsters. Not much different than life after her first death, really, Nimue thought with a grimace.
She'd sent the three-headed hell hound off to lick its wounds. It would be back. Perhaps it would get distracted by the fat louts that were easier to catch and required chasing for awhile, but it would return as it always did to hunt her and her companion. It was good to have one of those again.
Nimue's heart ached for Merlin, her friend long before they became lovers and intended to wed. They'd had one another's backs when they were just lowly enslaved mortals. Then they were enslaved by magic that turned them against one another and she was certain the gods had a good laugh over using two ignorant slaves to enslave entire worlds.
She didn't blame Merlin for re-forging the Grail into Excalibur, the sword she now wielded in its undead form, still blackened from the darkness it had pulled from two new foolish lovers. He hadn't known that the sword would fail to defeat her or that turning its broken tip into another weapon to bind her while sealing the sword in stone would mean an unbroken line of evil. That it would pass down through the ages was something kept hidden from his "sight" until the blade was fashioned, and then there was nothing to be done about it but train acolytes to try and steer the darkness toward those who would either burn out quickly or could contain it without trying to burn the worlds. And all the while fighting against the machinations of the gods who had their own minions, who sometimes even interfered themselves in disguise.
Those immortal fuckers didn't come down here, at least. Yes, they were left to rot, but it was probably better than what sick pleasures they might inflict on the already damned if they did more than lazily masturbate in front of a magic mirror or crystal ball to their favorite pit of carnal sin before heading off to an orgy.
As Nimue dipped the sword in the foul lake to wash its accursed blade everything seemed to tremble for just a moment and the echoing screams of the tormented were briefly silenced.
"What was that?" Milah asked in the space before the screaming renewed.
"Order fighting chaos," Nimue answered with a grimace and amended, "Phlegyas said a prisoner intended to be sentenced here after interrogation escaped back to the mortal world after killing Thanatos with his own sword and may be planning to take the ancient curse that your former husband reshaped into a passive form of inter-dimensional transport and unspin Rumplestiltksin's magical threads binding it to restore to its original form of pure destruction and unleash it through a portal so as to destroy all the worlds bound to the gods, possibly causing some damage to Mt. Olympus itself if the gods do not unbind them before he succeeds."
"You didn't think to mention that?" Milah sputtered.
"I thought patrolling while you prepared the meal and then eating before that mongrel or a mob of hunger-mad idiots trampled our camp was more prudent," returned Nimue. "And probably has little baring on here. Whatever destruction may flow down through the rivers can hardly be worse than what is already here. If it vaporizes a few monsters and mass murderers, then what is the harm?"
"My son is bound to Zeus!" Milah reminded. "Your lover was in The Underworld before I was tossed down here, and I doubt he has moved onto green pastures. The nexus of those rivers is in The Underworld! You're saying this lunatic could destroy the place! What would happen to the souls there?"
"Obliterated, I suppose?" shrugged Nimue.
"How are you so calm? So nonchalant?" Milah hissed.
"Merlin would know the risks. He could choose to move on, move beyond the threat or not. That is his choice to make," Nimue returned. "You son is bound to the gods. He would not be left to suffer there. The rest? I spent too many years being utterly apathetic to the suffering of strangers to find it in me now to care when it serves no purpose but to increase my own suffering.
"This is where we are, Milah," she told the other woman. "We may not have been sent here shackled by Furies, escorted by Charon or Davy Jones to rot eternally in this swamp or a desert or river of boiling blood, but it's where we ended up. We killed and lied and betrayed those we loved. We were selfish, prideful, greedy, and lusted for power."
"And I paid my debt," stated Milah. "I worked for centuries to become a better person, Nimue. I despise the person I was in life, the choices I made. And it amounted to nothing!"
"It amounted to cleansing your soul," Nimue argued, "and this place cannot take that away from you. I would rather have been given the chance to atone for my sins and tossed in that river than never having gotten that chance. But I never even touched the shores of The Underworld and now the same darkness that is in this blade will forever taint my soul. I could venture to the very center of this wasteland and plunge naked into the frigid waters of Unmindfulness and it would not strip away my darkness to mingle with the sins of those happy few freed of their burdens and sent across it's more pleasant waters to Elysium. I lived as a monster, I died as a monster, and so that is what I am."
Milah looked sadly at the other woman who hid her reptilian skin under a deeply hooded cloak. The gods were cruel to have tricked her, exploited her weaknesses, and then by not having a thorough plan for what to do if their Grail was destroyed just have all the souls bound to it thrown into Tartarus. She hated her ex-husband, but she wouldn't have wished Rumplestiltskin down here, not when he had done some good in his life, even as a Dark One, like protecting their son... even if that ended up failing spectacularly because of that redheaded bitch. If only she'd been sent here! With Hades gone, Milah would have been freed to take Nimue's sword and eviscerate the whore over and over and over-
"As fun as cutting the green bitch would be," Nimue cut off her thoughts in that creepy way she did, "as she did doom my lover to your ex-lover's homicidal mania, we'd best find drier ground. If the barrier between realms is destroyed, I'd rather not get sucked back into this foul soup and spat out in a worse place."
Nodding in agreement, Milah gathered her small pack of supplies and then laid her hand on Nimue's sleeve. "Looking like a monster doesn't make you one. It seems to me that some of the kinder souls stuck down here are the ones with scales and pointy teeth, so maybe you don't need regimented trials or some special magical spring to cleans your soul. You just need to have more hope than fear."
"Perhaps," Nimue considered as the icy rain poured down more fiercely.
But there was little of that in Tartarus. Hope was a scarcity that not even Pandora could find in these depths of eternal misery. Fear, however, was everywhere.
AN: If Neal/Merlin is a bromance... would Milah and Nimue be a hoemance? They're not exactly the purest of souls!
