Cerberus Slept

by Doonvorcannon

  I could see it now, those invisible strands like the thinnest of silk spider webs. It wasn’t for me to say what strand was just or right; it was for me to see the spider weaving it, smile and with my will soaring high, to laugh as I lived and loved as fiercely as I could. Prosper, no matter what. In life and death, with the strength of my spirit soaring towards the divine, I would go. As the walls shook, I snarled not as mere man or animal, but as spirit and will aimed upwards, my mind the bow and my soul the arrow.

  I flung into the fray, my sword a brush as I canvassed the battlefield with Turkish blood. They surrounded me but I kept fighting, sweeping this way and then another. When the circle closed in and I felt my strand at last be snipped, I smiled and let my spirit soar. A heroic end. I was chosen for more. I had chosen the more.

  Returned to the numbness, I breathed easy as the four figures stared at my collapsed form. I stood, pulling myself free from Erebus’s gravestone grip.

  “Man mustn’t forget what makes him great. I am Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. I’m tired of my waters being polluted by Lethe,” the green-eyed woman said, her gaze crystalline and focused. “My lake is sadly forgotten. Those who live and die walk right on by, the river of forgetfulness and its refreshing sparkle providing false promises to those who only look forward and forget to honor their history.”

  “Were you the one that made me remember?” I said.

  “Yes. But you were the one who remembered what you needed to. Learn from the past and with eyes divine, gaze upward as you move forward,” she said.

  “And what of you two,” I said, waving an arm at the pretty man and the blonde-haired woman.

  The woman said, “I am Wyrd. I am the odd Fate who belongs neither in nor out, but above. I pull the string to bring forth the strange. I was very pleased to see your soul sent to Tartarus. Very pleased!” Her voice was buoyant and joyful. Its flow was charming and softened the severity in her icy eyes.

  I glared closely at this beautiful Fate above the Fates. Wyrd. The name I’d already heard mentioned several times. The Fate aligned with my Lord. I eyed her fearfully, knowing the eternal weight she held.

  “How is it that all of this is here? How is it that you and this... and I in its midst are true?” I stammered. The unspoken implication of this proving my understanding of truth false tremored like a tightrope with my faith barely balanced on.

  “I was in His ancient Divine Council. It is in your Scripture. We’ve always existed under His rule and He was glad to listen to us with love and patience. Yet this here,” she said, looking at the gods around her, then back at me, “much of these mythologies have fallen into untruth and unbelief... that is a result of gods darkening into their decadent selves by reflecting the sun like the moon. That is false light. True light belongs to the one who partakes in the sun and does not try to pollute such power by pretending it is one’s own. Be not like the moon, but like the torch. That fire comes from the eternal source and exists as a finite example of infinite glory. The moon tries to claim infinity as its own, but that is only done when it’s aglow with the fire of the sun, not a dimmed reflection.” Her airy voice lowered to a grave tone. Her arched brows dropped and her countenance fell as she stared at me. “It is best for these gods to now fade into nature. Too much untruth lingers in their name. But most of them fight it. Yet do not fear Rangabes, for you do not walk in untruth. Listen to my strange song and you might just see this through. They cannot stop my singing.” At this, her face lightened and her eyebrows shot up as if to fling off the weight of seriousness. She smiled at me, then laughed as she glanced at the three beside her.

  Mnemosyne stared at her with an odd mix of fear and anger curtaining her lowered brow, as if she wanted neither but couldn’t help it. Erebus remained hidden, but even he seemed to shrink back into his mist, his form losing shape at Wyrd’s words and glare. Only the waterlily god seemed unperturbed.

  “Thank you.” I nodded at her. It was clear at least that the others feared her. I wondered how they felt about her song and our Lord. I wasn’t sure myself.

  The Egyptian god coughed to coax the tension away from Wyrd. “And I am Nefertem. I will be taking you to your next stop on this journey.” He extended his arm out in invitation. I ignored it.

  “Who are you and why do you dress and talk like an Egyptian?” I said.

  He smiled a gleaming grin. The man’s warmth and beauty overwhelmed me, making me ashamed at having rejected his arm. He plucked the waterlily from his ear and twirled it between his brown fingers, staring deeply into it.

  “We must rise like my fragrant waterlily greets the great sun, Ra,” he said.

  “I am not leaving here without Hesiod.” I turned to Erebus and stared into his black form. “Where have you hidden him in your darkness? The gods of light have told me he still lives. Your darkness cannot hold him.” Remembering my newfound power, I held my arms out, the ritual marks threatening the dark god with purifying light.

  “He is where you are going. The fires of Tartarus are pillars of flame that hold up this plane of darkness, yet connect it with the others,” Erebus said.

  “I thought we were to rise, Nefertem,” I said, turning to the waterlily god.

  “In a sense. Here it is deeper than Hades. But no, we go instead to the Duat,” Nefertem said.

  “Your land of the dead? I thought one was good enough. Am I to ever escape these regions? Am I to live again?” I said.

  “The weighing of the heart awaits. You must be judged to see if you are as worthy as the Fates fear,” Erebus said.

  “This is the exact kind of pluck,” Wyrd said as if playing an invisible harp, her pale and slender fingers pulling at silent, unseen strings. “The exact kind that I would play. Perhaps it is I. But you must go. There is no other way out of Tartarus. To leave this hell you must go to another.” She clapped and, in puff of violet vapor, vanished.

  “Do not forget. You mustn’t.” Mnemosyne looked at me forebodingly, her eyes bright and terrible. She turned away and a door of polished emerald shimmered into the air in front of her. Her divine body stepped through, and the beautiful goddess of memory and her strange door disappeared. I would not be forgetting her.

  Erebus said nothing more. He simply collapsed on himself and swirled around my ankles before pouring back over the cliff and resuming the form of enveloping darkness below.

  Nefertem placed his waterlily back behind his ear. He rolled his sculpted shoulders and once more extended his arm. I nodded and took his hand; the air shattered like glass and new surroundings flashed before me. A wide and dark river calmly snaked its way in a bend around us. The sky here was clear and midnight. Ridges of cloud drifted by in splotches of purple that shimmered like a raven’s feather struck with light.

  The surrounding landscape was flat and wide. Crystalline, turquoise trees that shined like lamps lined the river. In the distance there were several large black and murky lakes. I could see a lake made of fire, burning terribly and thankfully distant. There were pyramids scattered about, some golden and larger than others and some of silver and quite smaller. The river seemed to slither endlessly—or at least it appeared to from my vantage point on its banks. This was a strange land, as foreign to me as were its people. Still, at least the air was merely balmy and not at all as painful and wicked as that of Tartarus.

  “Let us move forward,” Nefertem said.

  I looked down at my still-exposed form, draped in ribboned rags for bottoms and nothing else. “Do you have any armor, or form of protection?” A foolish question to ask a god who wore only a layer of cloth on his bottom half, but I had to ask. As strong as I was, I didn’t see how I could withstand a lake of fire like this and whatever else this strange land had to throw at me.

  “A man is worth only as much as his skin. Prove your worth as you are.”

  I nodded. He was correct. “And where is Hesiod?”

  Nefertem smiled. “He is right there,” he said, pointing behind me.

  I turned
and blinked at the sudden appearance of a long wooden boat approaching with a lone oarsman paddling it ashore.

  “Hesiod!” I yelled, jumping onto the boat, shaking it and nearly throwing us both off.

  “He will be your guide the rest of the way. Now go!” Nefertem said. He pushed the boat off shore and forward.

  I clasped the poet’s arm and embraced him. He laughed as he warmly hugged me back. Despite it all, I at last felt at home.

  Book 2

  Branches of Blood

  I was still smiling at Hesiod, sitting beside him as he rowed. Even though Nerfertem had since faded from view, I still couldn’t get over how much I’d missed this man, despite knowing him for such a short time. The poet’s face was set and determined, and the way in which his jaw was clenched and brow bent made me grin till my face hurt. He looked to be intentionally losing himself in his rowing to avoid acknowledging my mirth.

  “Hesiod, do you not have any words about how you came to this realm? The last I saw of you, you were nothing but ash.” He kept rowing as if I hadn’t said a word. “Or how is it that you have come to acquiring this boat and rowing it so masterfully right to where I happened to be? Do you have a god guiding your movements?” I paused and chuckled. “Are nefarious forces driving you?”

  “Ungrateful fool,” Hesiod grumbled, “I’ve had my body burnt to crisp. My ashes were sifted by Hades himself who only after some deliberation agreed to hand me over to that waterlily god. Hades was all but forced to when Ra, the birdlike Egyptian god of sun, threatened to burn him to a crisp. The fact that you have the gods from different mythologies warring against each other for your soul says enough!” Hesiod harrumphed. He stopped his rowing for a moment and turned to me. “I know that you are Hyperborean. I know that Wyrd watches and Apollo sees you as kin. The solar gods, those bright and shining deities, welcome your ascension. At least some do. I was appointed to guide you on this path of flame. As your guide, I first had to take that step into that infernal pillar of fire in Tartarus. But I did not bear your marks. I had to be burned. Whether it was a message from Apollo to my intellect, divine revelation, or simple intuition, I suddenly knew what I had to do.”

  I stood up and grasped his forearm, pulling him towards me and embracing him while he still awkwardly clung to his oars. “I would be lost without you, friend. But how is it that you survived the flame? How is it that not even Hades could hold you hostage?”

  I let go of Hesiod and stared at his dark eyes that were suddenly coated in unshed tears. He ran a hand through his unruly bangs, flattening them out as he placed the oars on the boat floor.

  “We are both Greeks. You a Roman one and I an Ancient. But there is more that runs through these veins,” he said as he held up his wrist as if it were an offering. “We come from the same line. Not simply as Greeks, but as a people set apart, with the light of the sun illuminating our minds, and its blaze the furnace that fuels our hearts.”

  I extended my arms to show Hesiod my marks and he took them sacredly, leaning forward to breathe on them as if adding new life. Then he kissed each mark.

  “Hyperboreans, through and through. Our line may have changed much over the millennia, but the spirit of such eternal blood remains. A repetition, reviving itself in those bearers of heroic eternity. It needn’t be a degeneration, no, it shouldn’t! We must increase. Much has been entrusted to our kind and to forego such glory is to wither and fade.” Hesiod’s eyes shined as he stared up at the strange, violet-streaked sky.

  “Then, as brothers, we will see this through together,” I said with my hand on his shoulder.

  “In this unliving world, yes. But the realm of life belongs to the living. My words remain but my body does not. I do not see me making it through. This is no word from a god or Fate. It is a feeling.” He sighed and lowered his gaze to look at me.

  “But if I have died and will return, why should you be prevented?” I said.

  “My sun has set. Yours hasn’t yet risen.”

  “Then let us finish this as one.” I let go of his shoulder and looked around us. “What is the goal here in this strange Egyptian underworld?”

  “We are in the Duat and it is our task to move through the hours... the twelve hours like Ra. We must follow his fiery trail until we are worthy of his path. There are many monsters and trials here that need overcoming. You’ve done well to pass through Tartarus, but this realm will be all the harder. You must be found worthy of eternal weight. Only with such power and approval can you move on to life. The weighing of your heart is at the end of this river. Those scales must be answered. If you have a true ‘yes’ as an answer, then you may continue in this Hyperborean song—singing it into a new land and people.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Let’s,” he said, picking up his oar.

  “Can I not aid you with your rowing?”

  “Trust me, you’ll need your hands free to face what we are about to face.”

  With my mind now untethered from the unknown—at last coming to grips with a semblance of a why—I stared up at the sky in search of this Ra. Purple streaks skimmed over a blank black backdrop. A far different feel from the gray smoke of Tartarus that had been like the color of a nameless tombstone. The sky here was oddly imbued with a lurking sort of violet life that demanded the dead stay in the dark black. I would be like those flashing clouds then. I would live through this dark around me.

  Our boat coasted through the river, and there was no noise but for the constant slosh of oar digging in and out of water. The air here was heavy, not quite tropical in its humidity, but oddly banal in how it hung there as a sort of oppressive nothingness. The whole realm felt fuzzy, as if left unfinished and lacking a sharpness of spirit. I breathed the empty air and sat back down on the boat, watching Hesiod work.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to switch with me?” I asked again after some time. “It’s not as if we are in any immediate danger.”

  “We haven't even passed the first hour. No, no... I am fine. It is good to use my body once more. I spent enough time bodiless in Tartarus since my death. To be rebuilt of ashes from Hades made me realize how much I enjoyed being human.” Hesiod hadn't even turned from his rowing to answer me. His head swiveled about, searching for danger that wasn’t there. A lurking shadow in the water made him squint harder, but he relented and focused once more straight ahead.

  I sighed, leaning back on the cool wood edge of the nicely carved and surprisingly roomy rowboat, and contemplated why it was that I was here. How had I, a soldier in the service of the esteemed Emperor and eastern half of the Roman Empire, been chosen to play the protagonist in all these foreign myths? There had to be some sort of truth tying it together. I knew of Wyrd. And I knew Christ was Lord. Yet He remained silent and Wyrd strange. Riddles and half answers were all I’d received. Was I willing to found a new nation of Hyperborean spirit? Of course. Yet I couldn’t help but feel as though I were a mere puppet to be yanked about by the unseen. What was it that I could see? Was this really me?

  “Do you think I was chosen or that I chose this myself?” I said.

  “Who did the willing? Was it your will or was it decreed by the Fates? I’ve already told you that even the Fates cannot see your clouded future, and for that they fear you. It was not they that set you on this path. Wyrd aids you against the jealous gods, yes. But she only helps as the Lord sees true. I believe your will is what will see this through, one way or the other,” he said.

  “Many brave men have died better deaths than I. Even if I bleed the blood of ancient Hyperborea, my soul being yanked into this dark game seems suspect.”

  “It is you, for whenever you decided you would pursue the utmost glory possible, this decision was what willed this afterlife rebirth. A pure will powerless alone, but this joining of purity and single will is what brought you the power of your Lord. He smiled down upon your right-seeing sight. This sort of power is the way to ascend Olympus and become a god, becoming divine. Your will was e
ntrenched with divinity; your unadulterated focus willed this into being. A mortal made immortal by purification of self-tyranny. I focused my entire being on this when I walked the earth alive. Whip out the weakened will by beating away the chaff of distraction. Proper will directed at pure power is possible. It is why I too have joined you. We are both worthy of our wills. It is something I thought much of in my prison of darkness. And now we stand together on this one path.” He quickly glanced back at me and nodded, and just as quickly turned back to search for unseen dangers.

  “But how? I would be lying if I said I’d been planning this, or really thinking of the future at all. It was always the present, the moment I lived in. I kept my focus on that strange slot of time... that semblance or, perhaps paradoxically that, equivalence of eternity.” I scratched at the etched swirls on the boat’s edge. Tracing my finger along the carved path, I tried to connect this theory of time, this strange existence I now led, to what it was we willed—if it was we who had done the willing, as Hesiod claimed.

  “As a potter molds clay, so you sculpted your being with the excellence of living as one finite in the infinite pursuit of glory. Your glory was pure because you pursued it without longing for some distant and unknown future glory, but you pursued the always present—that which remains eternal as being and becoming united in one,” Hesiod said, never breaking form from his consistent rowing.

  I dug deeper at the intricate lines in the wood and squinted. “So, my being was directed perfectly towards becoming, the two joined together in time as a speartip directed towards glory? Is that the correct analogy?”