They lived where the ocean met the shore, where waterfalls fell, anywhere where water met ground and sky to form the music that could only come from the boundlessness that was nature.
They were, above all, beautiful.
To humans, it is said that the Original Three appear as beautiful women with long hair that shines golden in the light, with unblemished skin, with eyes that shift color depending on their moods or whims or vanity. They are, supposedly, the cause of everything, of every forward leap of every civilization from the dawn of time, responsible for all scientific and artistic breakthroughs. And just as humans romanticize knowledge or stories or elaborate sculpture, humans romanticize their origins, allowing them to think of beautiful women or ephemeral bursts of divine empowerment.
But me? I saw them as they truly are. When I walked down the jagged coastline to the place where the water met the air, where waterfalls crashed against the ground, all I saw were shining lights.
Let no one mislead you: the muses are goddesses, but they’re also something beyond that, beyond human comprehension. They are inspiration embodied, beings whose entire bodies shimmer, catching and reflecting the light within and without them like prisms, like magic. Their eyes glow and shift, too, that much is true, but not in the quirky way of blue one moment and then green the next, but rather entire spectrums at once, spectrums beyond language.
Staring at my ancestors, it was abundantly clear to me while fucking me drove human men mad.
Well, at least some human men, depending on how you define “mad.”
They worked loudly, singing and dancing as they washed clothing in the water. They were nude, though long shimmering hair covered most of their bodies, and they didn’t particularly seem to mind their nudity, anyway.
“Child,” they called to me. It came from them, undeniably, but the effect was as though the words came from all around me at once, as though the land or the air or both were actually the ones that wanted attention. “We’re so glad you finally came.”
Their words were music that vibrated through my body, through my bones. They whispered and sang, yet their voices echoed through the entire world. I shivered, the pitches settling into me like ripples in a pond that spread to turn into pure inspiration. I struggled to find the words only because there were so many things I could think to say in that moment, and I wasn’t sure where to start.
“Why am I here?” I asked them.
“Why do you imagine you might be here?” they asked. “Why do you imagine you might be anywhere? Why do you imagine we’re here, or that anyone is anywhere, or that anyone is at all?”
I squinted. I came all this way for... what, riddles? Not that I’d intended to end up here or anything, but I wasn’t even entirely sure where “here” was other than “the land of gods,” and the only beings I had yet seen were speaking to me almost exclusively in questions?
“What...” I tried to figure out how to phrase what I needed to ask. I didn’t want to offend them, but, like, I needed to understand literally anything. “What is the point of sending a muse and a gorgon to 21st century New York City? Were we hoping for a war? For an arts revolution?”
They laughed, and it sounded like wind chimes, and the earth shook. “Dear one, we did not send you. We do not control the world or the world’s fate. But what do you suppose the point was? What do you suppose the point to you is?”
“The point to me is apparently to make hot creative men successful until they go insane, are turned to stone, or both.” I sighed. “My legacy has been bright but brief. Where do I go now? Do I return here?”
They finally—finally—all turned to face me. The one in the center put her hands on her chest, her eyes filling with something that seemed to resemble pity. She shook her head. “You are not to return here. Not at this time. At least, not if my memory of these instances serves me correctly. I’m afraid you are caught in your own liminal space, as is the way of all of us. Of all visionaries.”
“Who sent me there and why, then? What can you tell me about them?”
“Oh, oh, dear child. Dear one.” She appeared as if she were searching for words, remembering something from the distant past, or trying to decipher truth from among a million stories. “I cannot tell you who sent you or for what purpose. What I can tell you is that I do not think they meant you any harm, per se, though if my experiences are anything to go by, it is likely your well-being did not enter their considerations whatsoever.”
“So I’m a tool for unknown ends by an unknown someone?”
She smiled sweetly, and the contrast somehow made her more intimidating. “That is the way of it as far as I can tell, yes,” she said, “but I can tell you my guess what it means. The world is ending and you’re going to kick-start it.”
Prior to meeting with the original three muses, it had not really occurred to me I was actually the descendant of goddesses. Like, obviously I knew I wasn’t human, that much was painfully obvious, but being not-quite-human wasn’t comparable to being actually for real a demigoddess.
Is that what I am? Hm.
Anyway, gazing upon the eyes of the original three definitely gave me a sense of my divine beginnings, and they were more than just “homeless woman with amnesia wakes up almost naked in the middle of New York City on a random day.”
Speaking of, let me tell you about the gods realm.
The first thing you should know is that, as far as realms go, it’s an extremely unstable place. Here on earth things change over time, or there are specific events you can trace changes to that are explained by scientists who know far more than I ever will about those things. But, well, overall, the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, and it will do so around the same time it did yesterday. People maintain appearances over time, aside from aging, but nothing extreme, no growing wings or tails. Things that are thrown fall. A chair doesn’t transform into a lampshade without significant effort and probably some number of tools.
What I’m saying is that, while you may not trust your lover to remain faithful, or for the weather forecast to be entirely accurate, and while you definitely can’t trust politicians, generally the laws of the universe remain constant.
This isn’t the case in the gods realm.
The gods realm is maintained—and likely was even created—by a series of beings with immense power who exist in multiple planes at once. Like the muses, they present differently depending on the person, time, and place. This is why you have multiple stories about what happened to a deity, or why that deity might forgive murder by one person and come down harshly on another for telling an insignificant lie.
Add to that that the gods realm exists in all planes and none at the same time, and you know what you have?
A mess.
A god damn mess.
Literally.
So when I was whisked away, it was fate that took me directly to the muses. Fate or something like it, anyway. When I left the muses to find answers to what exactly was going on, who I was, and why I’d been sent to apparently the end of the world, things were...
Well, tricky.
At first, I stuck to the shoreline. Those kinds of liminal spaces work for muses for a reason, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to stay in one of my more powerful areas while exploring. I wasn’t sure exactly how the laws of physics worked here, whether there was anything I could rely on at all, or how I could affect reality or not in this realm.
I didn’t walk very far, but I passed through deserts and forests, up and down mountains, and along a beach. The deserts felt the longest—the absence of water put me on edge—but even they passed in a relative blink of the eye.
I encountered no one, and that, perhaps, was the most alarming thing of all. As I walked along beaches, I saw dolphins in the distance, and nearly everywhere there was some kind of bird that tweeted or cawed. There were even some lizards in the desert that stared at me from the shadows of rocks.
But actual humanoid creatures? Or even creatures of
more substance that could have carried on some kind of conversation?
None.
Eventually I came to a village, with the exact beautiful huts and cabins one might expect from a world where everyone was both closer to nature and beyond needing silly things like electricity. In the distance, I could see a larger city in between mountains.
Here, the absence of people was far more jarring than their absence in the wilderness. I wondered whether there were more people down below, if perhaps this village had been abandoned for a more refined experience of life. But that didn’t seem right, either; the city did not have the feel of something that had not been cared for, but it was like everyone had suddenly remembered they had something to do in the next room and left it at once: clothing still hung on lines, fires still burned, and I was sure that if I’d glanced into someone’s kitchen, there would still be dinner, half-eaten, with steam rising into the air.
It was eerie.
I knew in my bones this was precisely where I was meant to be. I quieted the voice in my mind that wanted to go explore the shining city at the bottom of the mountain and continued onward, following a path I didn’t know, trusting that in the end everything would be clear.
And so I passed through the town, passed homes and shops and little fields where it seemed likely children played soccer. I put going to the city at the bottom of the mountain out of my mind entirely, forgot it existed as much as I could, and continued forward.
I passed through woods. These, too, felt more dead than usual, and removed from the normalcy of something like a town, they felt ominous. There were no birds chirping, no buzzing of insects flying around my ears, no rustling of snakes or squirrels just out of sight. There was only wind, wind that rustled the leaves on the trees and teased my hair, and it told me I was going the right way.
And so I walked. It became dark, and I kept walking, avoiding the way the shadows seemed to reach out to me, trying to pay no mind to the apparent absence of life but for the distant howling of wolves.
I was not afraid. Not of the deep and scary woods, anyway. I wasn’t afraid of death. Not that I didn’t like the life I’d been building for myself down in the human realm, but being alive was such a vague concept on its own.
And besides, if I was the descendant of gods, maybe that meant I wouldn’t be able to “die” anyway.
Here I am back to the existential questions.
So, anyway, I walked through the probably dangerous woods that I wasn’t afraid of, other than perhaps afraid that they might separate me from my human lovers indefinitely. I’d grown excessively fond of Noah, Ryan, and Jack, and I wasn’t ready to let them go yet.
Also, Jack probably wanted his sanity back and Ryan and Noah would appreciate not spending eternity as literal statues, and I was unlikely to help with that if I transitioned to the immaterial plane.
So I continued onward. I grabbed a stick—a carved walking stick that perhaps someone had forgotten or perhaps fate had left for me—and I poked at the underbrush, looking for... something. I had no idea what I was looking for, not really, just that somewhere around here there would be something that would inspire my next steps.
Eventually I found an area of greenery that looked... different from the areas surrounding it.
You know those video games with secret passages, where the stone is a distinct shade and there’s just the smallest amount of extra cracking in the art to show that the player should spend extra time exploring that section?
Yeah, it was kind of like that.
So I did the sensible thing and explored it more. And it was a lucky move, too, because as I poked it, it moved aside as if by some divine hand.
It probably was a divine hand, really, but who am I to say?
Anyway, it revealed an opening to a cave, large enough I could enter with a slight crouch.
I kept my hands on the ceiling as I walked, using the texture of the stone as a touch point so I didn’t hit my head. The cave was markedly cooler than it’d been in the forest, cooler than made sense, and I wondered if it was the beginning of the evening or if there was some supernatural ambiance happening that affected both the temperature and the light.
Really, any explanation was possible. If the laws of physics don’t apply, if it’s the Wild West for the very laws of the universe, why was I questioning the way things were here?
I followed the path downward, sliding on my ass. The path was, thankfully, smooth, but the preservation of my butt aside, I had the fleeting thought I would probably get trapped down here.
Hopefully it was wrong, but barring that, hopefully it was worth it.
Eventually the path evened out, and I heard voices echoing through the tunnels. They hit me like whispers, like serpentine words that floated through the air and bounced off the walls to infiltrate my mind. I was pretty much over this, to be honest, but, well. Here I was and there was no going back.
Finally, there was light. Not much at first, just enough to cut through the pitch black of the rest of the cave, but it became brighter as I walked. The voices became louder, too, and as much as I tried to proceed with the confidence I was heading the right direction, I had a sense that I would not like what I found at the end of the tunnel and that the light there would only reveal why.
I was right.
What I saw were statues. They were, in their way, beautiful: men of so many types, in so many outfits, with two commonalities. The first was that they all appeared to be warriors, carrying spears, swords, and, in at least one case, even a firearm.
The second was that they all looked absolutely terrified.
They were made of marble, of bronze, of limestone. Some were posed to fire their bows or swing their swords, while others just stood, defenseless, mouths wide open in shock at some unknown terror.
I knew better. Laws of physics be damned or not, regardless of rules of this realm being unknowable, it should have been obvious to me that something here was not okay. But it didn’t occur to me to leave. Fate, or destiny, or whatever you want to call it, meant that my only option was to continue forward.
Besides: I was cold, and the yellow-orange light that danced on the walls and reflected the surface of the statues felt an awful lot like fire.
The whispers had stopped, too, though I didn’t notice until they began again. They were loud, slithering words, and if I didn’t have the sense to turn back at the sight of the statues, I should have when they began. But I was curious, and I needed answers, and there wasn’t much I could do if I took it upon myself to leave.
“Why are you here, musssse?” someone asked. I turned toward the voice and came face to face with a monster.
I don’t use that term loosely here, nor do I mean it metaphorically. I came face to face with a bonafide monster. If Lucy was monstrous merely because her hair was snakes, this was an entirely different matter: The creature in front of me had the snake hair, the reptilian skin, and was further from human than even my lover’s accidental attacker had been.
Her face was halfway between a woman’s and a snake’s, obviously “female” by gorgon standards but bizarre, and she spoke through fangs that reflected the flames. Her fingers had claws much like Lucy’s, except they longer. Impossibly long, I’d think, had they been in a portrait instead of on the creature in front of me. She had no human features on her lower body, just a long snake form that she used to glide across the floor toward me. When she was close, she stood like a King Cobra and towered over me.
I was convinced I was about to die.
“I’m trying to find out what happened to Lucy,” I told her. There didn’t seem to be a point to lying. “Who sent her to the human realm?”
“What doesssss she matter to you?” The gorgon danced over to me, the motion vibrating through her entire upper body, all the way through the length of her hair. It was hypnotizing even to my probably immortal self.
“It seems our destinies are intertwined and I want to understand why,” I told her.
A
second one answered me: “It wasss-”
A third covered her mouth with one claw in warning. “We don’t know who’s responsible,” she began, “we only have theoriesss.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Theories such as?”
The first one answered this time. “We believe it was Erissss.”
“Eris? Like the goddess?”
“Yessss,” the second one said. “Causing chaos for the fun of it. Thingsss were getting boring here.”
“Well, where is she now? Can I go speak to her?”
“She’ssss back on your earth,” the second one said, “playing with New York.”
“She’s in New York City? Now?”
“Yesss,” they tell me, their voices overlapping in an unnerving chorus.
“Just one last question,” I began. “How do I get back?”
They laughed at me, serpentine giggles that coiled around me in the air. “How did you get there in the firsssst place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, there’ssss your ansssswer,” they told me, then laughed harder.
“Thanks for your help,” I told them, and I meant it, mostly.
I left the way I came in, or so I thought. I crawled on hands and knees back up, holding onto a vine or robe I could have sworn had not been there before.
Truth be told I don’t know how things connected. All I remember was climbing upward, sweaty and exhausted, in darkness. At some point, that memory fades out, and I woke up in bed, as if it had all been a dream.
Don’t get me wrong— I really went there. But that ambiguity? Almost certainly intentional. The gods would have it no other way.
Chapter 11
Lucy was there when I woke up from my journey in the gods realm. I yawned. I was feeling a little sluggish; for all I knew, I actually had slept in that time span. The sun didn’t seem to have shifted much in the sky, but it could have been years later, for all I knew, so that didn’t really tell me anything useful either.
Confessions of a Muse Page 9
