For who could ever learn to love The One who doesn't know love?
By Asso
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Kingdom of Dead
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
White.
All white.
White everywhere.
Dazzling.
Alienating.
White on the ground.
And white in the sky.
White.
Whirling.
Lashing.
In the hissing wind.
White.
Eddying in virulent, never before seen lumps that fidgeted in the impetuous gale.
Impalpable and icy lumps that enveloped you, taking your breath away, preventing you from seeing, obscuring your gaze.
Zeus shook his thick white beard.
He shook his thick white hair.
To try to free them of that new, chilling white that covered their own white.
White.
And cold.
Cold.
Cold!
COLD!
Cold.
Cold!
COLD!
Persephone felt a shiver run along her bare shoulders and back.
Along her nude legs.
She squeezed herself into the black sleeveless, backless, deeply low-cut dress she wore.
The dress she had chosen for going out to discover his world; the dress she felt and knew to be the most suitable for that world, dark and tremendously far away from the chaste rules of her own world, or, rather, from the colourless and flat rules of the life she should have had to live in that world.
The dress she felt and knew he liked.
The dress which said that she was his.
And which said she was - and happy to be so - as she knew he liked she were.
She squeezed herself into that silken, precious garment, made of a fabric that seemed interwoven with the black itself of the darkest night.
Attempting to defend herself someway from that otherworldly cold.
She had not felt it before, in their descent.
Even dressed in the slight, virginal, white tunic that was her habitual gown in the world above, she had not felt that cold before.
She had not noticed it.
Too much engrossed in her thoughts.
In her fear of what she had done.
In the wonder of what was happening.
In the amazement of her choice.
In her fear... and in her yearning.
Her indictable yearning.
But now she felt it.
That cold.
The unspeakable cold of his realm.
His cold.
"It's cold, I know. Mine is the realm of cold. My cold."
His voice.
Low.
And thoughtful.
And gloomy.
And...
Doleful?
Yes.
Doleful.
Doleful!
And full…
Full of her feelings.
Of her thoughts.
A voice... his one...
A voice... words... revealing his capability of penetrating her mind and her heart.
Of giving body to her thoughts.
To her sensations.
To her most intimate thoughts.
To her most intimate sensations.
A voice that no one else - ever - had had.
Something came suddenly to rest on her shoulders; wrapped itself around her.
Something warm.
His cloak.
Persephone huddled up into that cloak.
And into the arms that were holding her, enveloping the mantle all around her.
To shelter her.
His arms.
Strong.
Mighty.
Cold.
With the cold of his realm.
Yet also eerily warm.
Something...
As if they were looking for heat.
"Let's see if I can temper your cold."
A chirping, Persephone's voice.
Blithe. Lively.
And sweet.
"I would very much like not needing your cape to protect me from your cold."
She turned in his arms.
She looked at him with cheerful eyes.
"Let's see if your cold can become my heat."
Her gaze became serious.
"If my heat is really meant to temper your cold."
His piercing gaze was fixed on her star-like gaze.
"Do we go, my Lord?"
His beautiful, glabrous, masculine, gaunt, alabaster visage nodded with decisiveness.
Gravely and confidently.
Yet, someway, apprehensively, too.
"Let's go, Persephone."
The first was Poseidon.
And it was certainly not surprising.
Was he or was he not Poseidon? The mighty Lord of the seas? One of the supreme triad?
Even in the whirlwind of the wind that gave no breath, even in the tempestuous chaos that enveloped and obscured everything, his voice made itself be heard, powerful.
"BROTHER!"
Zeus almost jumped at the force of that call.
"What's going on? Did it happen by chance the Titans to be freed from Tartarus in which you relegated them?"
Zeus sharpened his eyesight in an attempt to see through the swirl of those strange icy soft lumps that filled the air.
His brother's voice, though submerged by the cold and ruinous wind, led him.
"I had to shatter an icy slab covering the entire surface of my kingdom to raise me up to Olympus, to your palace."
There he was. An indistinct figure beyond the palace's columns, covered with a cold white. Standing upright on one of what had been green meadows and now appeared as icy white expanses, barely visible in the whirlwind swirls of those damn impalpable lumps of ice.
"I repeat. What is happening, brother? You are Zeus." And a noticeable note of disrespectful irony resounded in that voice that managed to resonate mighty even in that ruckus. "Yours is the supreme power. You must know."
"And he knows."
Zeus suddenly turned his face.
Hera was next to him.
Proud and haughty.
Like her voice.
Her hand took his.
"Do you doubt, perhaps, Poseidon?"
A voice that was a challenge to Poseidon.
And a support for him, Zeus.
And an imperious invitation.
To speak.
To be Zeus.
And, with a tight to Hera's hand before releasing it, Zeus acted as Zeus had to do.
He proudly advanced a few steps.
His voice rumbled louder than the impetuous wind that enveloped everything.
"Enter my palace, Poseidon."
His gaze ranged all around. Imperious, in his command.
"Come in, all of you o Gods. I command so."
And the palace got filled.
Other Gods had come, all the greatest. Mute and almost indiscernible in that never seen blizzard, they had surrounded Poseidon, supporting him without speaking in his request.
And they now filled the great palace, lined up behind Poseidon.
In silence.
Waiting.
For Zeus to speak.
Persephone felt his waiting.
He was waiting.
For her to speak.
They were beyond the large, long black stone bridge that led to his immense manor.
They were in front of his kingdom.
Of its vastness.
How distant were those mountains on the horizon?
Those mountains whose peaks faded away high above, disappearing in the nothingness of that sky made of nothingness?
How distant was that horizon?
And how much, the nothingness of that empty sky which sky was not?
How vast was that darkness soaked in a light that was made of dark?
Leaning on him with her back, wrapped in his dark cloak, enveloped in his arms, Persephone, finally, managed to make up her mind to speak.
With a faint voice.
A voice that was astonishment.
"But how great is your dominion, my Lord?"
"It has no limits, Persephone."
Persephone twisted her neck and raised her head to look at Hades, from the bottom up.
Her eyes were pure amazement.
He looked down at her, as his arms tightened her even more.
"You could never reach those mountains that seem to delimit the boundaries of my kingdom. You could never come to lose yourself in its sky. My kingdom is infinite, Persephone, it has no boundaries. Its boundaries are illusion."
Persephone turned her head to look at those distant mountains, that distant sky.
And his voice answered her thoughts. Her stupefied, unexpressed questions.
"Mine is the kingdom of the dead, Persephone. Of all those who have been there. And of all those who will be there. Only infinity can welcome infinity."
It seemed an infinity.
An infinity of time.
So it seemed the time that took to him to make up his mind to speak finally.
But in the end Zeus spoke.
And never had his voice resounded so grave in all the aeons that had passed since the advent of the dominance of the Olympian gods after the defeat of the Titans.
Never had Persephone heard a voice resound so grave.
That was not simply the voice of the Lord of the Underworld.
That was the voice of infinity.
"At first there was Tartarus, emanation of Chaos. A bottomless chasm, which starts from the sky and sinks into nothingness, deep down, inside the huge bowels of Gaia. A place-non-place. Dark. Transformed into a prison. The dark and remote prison, with no way out, where your father Zeus relegated Cronos and the Titans who fought together with him, after I, Poseidon and he, Zeus, defeated them."
Hades was silent for a moment.
Then he began to speak again and his harsh and deep voice seemed to resound with the infinite depths of time.
"And Tartarus was the only real existing thing in the formless void of afterlife until I arrived. Until I agreed to be Hades, the Lord of the Underworld."
And Persephone realized.
Hades was revealing her his past, his story. As she had desired, he was revealing his life to her. Who he had been and who he was. She was about to learn everything about him from him. And this was exceptional, almost... almost like what had happened between them. Because he was Hades. The obscure Unknown One. The one of whom nothing else was known except that he was Hades. The Lord of the Underworld.
The grandiosity of what was happening almost risked choking Persephone. No one knew anything but minuscule fragments of truth about the dark Lord of Dead.
And when she had told him that she wanted to know all about him, in reality never she would have seriously hoped that this could happen for real.
And instead it was happening.
And through his living voice.
Through him himself.
Which meant ... which meant...
Which meant that, for him, she was something more... much more than what she had thought - at the beginning! At the beginning, of course! - she could be!
His grave voice pulled her out of her thoughts abruptly.
"When I arrived, I found laments."
Again, Hades stood silent.
His voice sounded almost like a rabid sob, when it let itself be heard again.
"Bodyless voices."
One more time. A pause. Tense.
Then Hades resumed talking, darkly.
"Myriads of shadows, of souls. Young people, old people, men, women, children, vainly swirling in the insubstantial void around the nothingness of the Tartarus chasm. Dead, without a place to stay."
And Persephone perceived.
She clearly perceived the immeasurable strength of the King of the Underworld.
The Land of Nothingness had he been allotted by fate and he…
"I built for those incorporeal voices a place to stay in. A kingdom. My kingdom."
… he had turned that land of nothingness into...
"The Kingdom of Dead."
"The Kingdom of Dead."
Zeus' voice overtopped everything. Low, yet it overtopped everything.
"Over there you must look for the cause of what is happening. "
There was silence.
A chilling, dreadful silence.
It seemed that even the rabid whistling of the wind was turned into silence.
And then the silence got broken.
Poseidon spoke.
With flat voice.
By giving voice to everyone's voice.
"The Kingdom of Dead!"
End of Chapter Twenty-Four
TBC
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
The Kingdom of Dead.
Persephone has begun to glimpse it.
Now matter is she has to see it for real.
And we together with her.
Are you ready, my friends?