Title: Solstice
Disclaimer: Not mine
Character: Calypso
Rating: mild PG (language)
Summary: In which dark plans are made at a witching hour...
With Thanks to pink_siamese and rexluscus on livejournal for their ever-helpful beta-reading.
Author's Note:
This was supposed to be a New Year's fic, but, well, it didn't get done for New Year's. I had an idea that the best time to do some great work of divining would be at midnight at New Year's, since that's a sort of in-between time. Calypso seemed the logical person to be doing something at such a time, and an explanation of how she came up with her plan to get her godhood back seemed like a good idea.
And, as it turns out, you can find out LOTS of stuff on the web. LOTS and LOTS. Like the exact times (UST) of all the moon phases for the last 6,000 years. And then, I realized, it couldn't be New Year's, because almost every culture has a different New Year, so I decided to look up the solstices. And you can find historical solstice times on the web, too. It turns out that the new moon and the Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice came within two hours of each other in 1737. Which fit VERY neatly into my timeline. And, of course, any Ritual of Great Import has to be done at midnight, so I had to turn to a map of the time zones (thank you, Google!) to find out where it would be midnight when it was 15:20 UST. And that's roughly UST+8, for those of you playing along at home, which puts us in the area of 130 deg. E longitude, aka Korea, in the Northern Hemisphere.
Or eastern Russia, as it happens. Because if we're going for the place that's furthest from the sunlight, we have to look at 66.5 degrees latitude - the Arctic Circle. (The sunlight, you see, would be hitting the Tropic of Capricorn directly on this solstice, which is opposite the Arctic Circle.) I wanted it to be over water, since she's a sea goddess, and the nearest water to 66.5 N 130 E is the Laptev sea, or, as it was known in the 18th century, the Siberian Sea.
To sum up: I am a great big fucking nerd.
Winter Solstice, 1737
Endless take it, this place is fucking cold.
Tia Dalma trudged on through the snow, over the frozen Siberian Sea. The howling wind cut right through her like a blade. Even the Yupik would be holed up someplace warm tonight.
She stopped when she felt the ocean underneath her give way to the earth, and took stock of her surroundings. The ice sheet stretched away in all directions, swelling gently over the hidden rocks and coastline, but otherwise as featureless as a desert. Drained of all color, the monochrome landscape made her preferred homelands seem like a ludicrous impossibility; that the warm, fecund greens and blues were nothing more than cruel hallucinations. Everything here was black and white, cold and heartless. The dispassionate stars sparkled above her in the cloudless, obsidian sky.
And by the universe and all of existence, yes, this place was really fucking cold.
Tonight was the longest night of the year. The moon had turned her back to the earth. She stood on the spot that, in less than an hour, would be the farthest place on the planet from the sun's direct rays. Everything would be in a state of flux: there would be no better time and place to ask a favor from those who guarded the boundaries.
Or, at least, this was her best bet for the foreseeable future. The solstice and the new moon weren't quite simultaneous, but they'd be close. (They had only coincided exactly a couple of times in her memory, and it was on one of those nights that the last of the Great Magicks had been accomplished by men.) And while she ought to be standing ten degrees further south, this was the closest place over water, and she needed to be near her native element.
It would have to do.
She began to mark the circle. It had taken her seven years to collect the physical components, at a staggering cost. She drew the arcane sigils in mermaids' tears and vampires' blood, and marked the compass points with a kraken's tooth, a blood-red pearl, a bird trapped in amber and a shard from a roc's shell.
In the center, she placed a lodestone circle as her altar, and knelt before it. There was still time before she must begin.
How she loathed these stupid rituals, these pathetic mummeries to coax forth the powers that ought to have been hers by right! Even her physical preparation had taken ages: she'd bedded no-one for an entire year (a harder feat than she'd initially imagined); she'd eaten nothing and drunk only water for a week; she'd slept not at all for three days. And now, suspended in this state between collapse and euphoria, she felt the moon reach her ebb, and she began to chant. The wind seemed to still as she called forth the ancient words, and an eerie silence fell as she finished the recitation.
An instant crawled by in which she feared it had all been for nothing, but then the raw power surged through her – an agonizing glimpse of what her old life had been like – and she suddenly saw what she had to do. The world dropped away from her, and she beheld it as a blue-and-green playing field, the sphere on which her scheme would be played out. From this perspective, it seemed so simple; the machinations of men could be manipulated as easily as threads on a loom.
And no game was complete without the pieces, which now glowed a brilliant red on the terrestrial globe. One by one, she plucked them out of their lives to place her vodun, and, though they would never remember it, they examined her in return. There was an imperious midshipman, tall and proud in blue-and-white-and-gold, who appraised her calmly and executed a precise bow; a careworn buccaneer, determined to reverse his misfortunes, who swaggered an insolent reverénce; a younger sailor-turning-pirate, desperate to shake off the chafing bonds of family and responsibility, who tugged his forelock nervously; a carefree gamine, bursting with innocent curiosity and a lust for adventure, who gawked open-mouthed before making her curtsey; an arrogant lordling, pulsing with dark ambition and a darker heart, who just stared.
Almost finished, her hand reached for the second-to-last unmarked figure, and she paused. He grinned up at her and, against her will, she grinned back. Her heightened senses saw so clearly: he'd been born under the auspices of the Trickster – if he'd wanted a peaceful, quiet life, it had been ordained long since that he wasn't going to get it. She set all these figures back in their respective places with nary a thought, and then reached for the last.
She nearly dropped him. The small boy burned her hand like a hot coal. She saw his future, and the terrible price that her freedom would exact from him. Had she the right to do this?
The pirates and that sailor… she didn't care. They'd given their hearts and souls to the sea, and so both were forfeit to her, to do with what she pleased. The girl hadn't, but that circumstance sprang only from lack of opportunity. That greedy young climber? Let him burn.
But this boy, who played on her hand with a wooden sword… he did want a placid life, and if she refrained from marking him, would happily take his place in the gentle progression of the generations. It wasn't fair, what would be asked of him.
This spasm of conscience, however, was short-lived, and she shook it off as soon as possible. Fair? What was fair? Was it fair that she'd been bound to this pathetic hominid form? Was it fair that she'd been stuck in this festering, stinking body of nearly-rotting meat that shit and pissed and bled? She'd been consorting with these jumped-up apes for too long, and their bad habits were rubbing off on her.
Remorse, after all, was not a Divine emotion.
She lifted him up to eye-level. He cocked his head and stared right back.
Without a further thought, she laid her curse on him and slammed him back into place. The circle exploded in a bright light as the universe rearranged itself around the new information. Caught in the blast, she covered her eyes and prayed to anyone who might hear a goddess' prayers.
The light vanished as quickly as it came, and she keeled over, back on earth.
She tried to hold in her thoughts all that she'd seen, but the images started to slip like sand through her fingers, as her human brain started to scab over the memories of that which the mortal were never meant to see. She tried to remember the people and their fates, and how they were entwined with her own, but she couldn't. She could only trust that she would know her players when she saw them, and what to do when the time came.
Pah. Magic.
She picked herself up out of the snow, shivering, and inspected the damage. The sigils had burnt straight through the thick ice floe and into the ocean below. Nothing remained of her costly treasures but cinders in the frost.
But there was something on the altar that she hadn't placed there. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands, and her brain released the memory of what it was: the lynchpin for her plan, called forth from the æther.
A compass.