Confessions of a Muse

by Edeline Wrigh

  It was nearly impossible; the darkness encompassed her, like a hellish art piece, and as entranced as I was, it made the entire situation extremely confusing.

  “Lucy!” I shouted. All at once, the darkness eased as she glanced at me. I saw just the tail end of the burning of her eyes straight on, just long enough to know for an absolute fact I would never intentionally piss her off.

  She waved, but then turned back, moving back into her power pose.

  I saw our foe as the darkness moved back in.

  Until this point in time, I had never seen a god in person. I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t to be entirely underwhelmed.

  The person in front of me was undeniably Eris. That was for sure. She was taller than one would think, but less like a giant and more just like... an especially tall person. Seven feet tall, maybe eight, I would guess. She laughed wickedly in a way that made the ground shake, in a way that made even me want to pull over structures at random, but if I was being honest, it felt less like I was face to face with a divine being and more like I was facing a parent I didn’t entirely respect.

  I have been told, since then, that my approach to Eris was extremely skewed because I’m an actual-for-real descendant of divine beings myself, so perhaps that was it. But really? She was pretty underwhelming, especially next to Lucy, who looked like she was angry enough to destroy the world.

  I cleared my throat. Loudly. Dramatically. Eris paused in her laughter at Lucy to size me up instead.

  “Ah, my dear friend! I’m so glad to see you again,” Eris started, coming towards me, arms wide as if ready to embrace me in a hug.

  I was having none of it. “What the ever loving fuck are you doing?”

  “Why, trying to hug you. You’ve done such a wonderful job for me. But then, I suppose you don’t remember me?”

  I blinked at her. “I don’t remember anything and you damn well know that.”

  She rubbed her chin. “Yes, I suppose that’s true. But you still did your job admirably, and I’d still love to reward you. Come. Tell me your ideas for this city. Surely you’ve had plenty of time to see what you might want to change? To figure out what kind of new age might be worth ushering in?”

  “What the fuck have you done?” I repeated my question. “This city is already wonderful. It doesn’t need redone.”

  Eris looked confused. “What do you mean it doesn’t need redone? It was getting redundant. Boring.”

  I blinked at her. “Well, first of all-”

  She raised her eyebrows and threw her hands up to mock me. “Oh, so this little muse who’s existed a mere month is gonna school me now? This muse that doesn’t even have a name?”

  “What do you mean I don’t have a name?” I asked. We were getting off topic, and I could tell that this was an intentional move on Eris’s part, and I couldn’t help but get stuck on this detail, anyway. “Doesn’t everyone have a name in the gods realm?”

  Eris shook her head. “You’re not a defined being, muse. You’re an archetype. They crafted you from stories and memories, from lore, not as an individual. Didn’t you figure that out? Didn’t you figure out that you could be anything because you were, in essence, nothing?”

  I wasn’t too taken aback by this, for the most part. I hadn’t quite figured that out, no, but it was there, in my subconscious, on the precipice of me discovering it. I had still been putting two and two together, and in some ways, Eris saying it outright was actually a favor to me.

  But, self-absorbed as I was, stuck on this as I became, there was one large player in this situation I had momentarily forgotten: Lucy.

  Remember when I told you Lucy was the hero of this story? That’s true in several ways. She’s the literal hero, since she’s the one who finally took down Eris and helped my men become okay with everything I was and would ever be.

  But she was also, without a doubt, my hero.

  And here’s why.

  Eris told me I was no one, and to an extent, she was right. But Lucy? Lucy was not having this kind of talk. Lucy had spent her entire time on earth dealing with despair head on, and she was skilled at parsing through its lies and finding meaning in the darkness.

  And she would not let that darkness sink into me.

  Instead, at Eris’s assertion, Lucy became intensely angry.

  “How dare you,” she started, and even I gulped. She radiated with anger, with power, and took slow steps toward Eris. “How dare you tell her she is no one. How dare you tell her she has no name. You may not recognize her as anything more than your plaything, but she has feelings. She may have been nothing more than a muse to you when she first came here, but she has created herself. She has carved out a life in this city. She has given herself a name. And that name is Selene Katrina Carrington and you will say it with kindness and respect.”

  Eris laughed. That’s all. She just laughed as Lucy became angrier and angrier.

  “You’re no one, too, gorgon,” Eris said.

  “I am someone,” Lucy said, “I am a person with dreams and ambitions beyond that which you gave me. I am a person who acts of my own accord and not always as you wish. And my name is Lucy, and you will say it when you address me.”

  Eris stopped laughing and pulled her face into a side smile. “It’s always interesting when my little experiments go awry,” she said, then sighed. “I don’t suppose you would want to join me in creating even more chaos? It could be fun,” she added, as if she were trying to convince Lucy of something, or at least make a show of doing so.

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think you’ve caused enough of a mess? The city is in shambles and the destruction is continuing. And what was your point here, anyway? What were you trying to prove?”

  Eris shrugged, then smiled widely. “Nothing,” she said, “I was just looking for a way to pass some time. So I did an experiment. But I’m done. I’m bored now. You two can figure out what you want to do with the chaos you’ve created.” Then she shrugged, and then she vanished, leaving me and Lucy in the street.

  “So... what do we do now?” I asked, weakly. Lucy was still in full gorgon mode, and I didn’t want to press her too hard, but I had really zero idea how we should be continuing.

  “We clean up this bullshit,” she said. “Guess someone’s got to be the hero. Might as well be us.” She sighed, and while she didn’t exactly turn back into her human disguise, the fire in her eyes—and in her snakes’ eyes—faded, and she put her beanie back on, which was at least an improvement.

  I nodded. I wasn’t sure what exactly that meant here, honestly, and I was having a hard time understanding how giving people more inspiration would get them to go back to their normal routines.

  Because that was the issue, wasn’t it?: I found most of their routines uninspired. While I definitely wanted to help, it seemed like my free sharing of inspiration had been a major contributing factor to this mess in the first place and, well, to put it lightly, I was hesitant.

  I sighed. We had our work cut out for us, that was for sure.

  “Where are my men?” I asked Lucy.

  She smiled. “They’re doing what they do best,” she said, “imagining the future and making it come to pass through their art.”

  “They... they can do that?”

  She smiled wider. “They can now. They’ve been blessed, Selene. Your resolve touched the Original Three Muses, so they elevated your men. It happened while you were gone. So they’re out saving the world.”

  My jaw dropped. This was what was surprising, that Deus Ex Machina I couldn’t have expected, and I said a quick, silent prayer of thanks to my ancestors. “Well, isn’t that something?”

  “It sure is,” she said, “they’re some lucky men. But, look, I’ve got to get these folks back to their flesh and blood forms, so I assume you don’t mind tracking down the black mass of despair and fighting it head on?”

  “Lucy, I don’t know how-“

  She glared at me. Not with her terrible gorg
on glare, thankfully, but with her “come the fuck on, friend, you know you’re making excuses” kind of glare. It stopped me mid-sentence.

  “Yeah, you do. You just don’t know it.”

  “But I-”

  She sighed dramatically. Dramatically enough that I was actually impressed. “Look, Selene, I didn’t want to play this card, but your men are already tracking it down, and they need you.”

  Well, fuck. That was all she had to say.

  I took off.

  As I ran through the streets, retracing my steps to where I’d seen the black goo mass, running past the Bellevue, and continuing forward, following the path of most destruction to find where I was going, it occurred to me how thankful I ought to have been that I had been thrust into being in relatively athletic shape.

  Because I was doing a lot of running these days. Like, a lot.

  I ran past a bus that was sideways, through an intersection with a pile-up collision, past an uprooted tree. And I ran past bodies, so many bodies it was like it was a battlefield, though I tried to ignore them, and I especially tried to ignore the way the organs glittered silver at me when I accidentally glanced at them.

  I also ran past people, people of all types in all kinds of outfits who ignored me, who ignored or fought with or made out with each other, sometimes doing one and then the other in the most nonsensical of ways. I did my best to ignore them, too, or at least to ignore them as much as possible. They glittered with inspiration as it was and they had more than their fair shares of the black goo, and there was nothing I could do, because adding more inspiration to that mess was dangerous. So instead I did my best to avoid them and not to get too involved in what they were doing, which was a challenge.

  Because I wanted to help them. Desperately. And there was only one thing I could do.

  So I just kept that in my head and heart and ran.

  And finally, I found them: my men, standing in a triangle around a blob of black. How they had cornered it like this I wasn’t entirely sure, but I was beyond proud of them.

  And really turned on, but that was beside the point.

  Ryan spotted me first. He glanced over, then squinted, as if I were too bright, like he’d accidentally glimpsed the sun, but then he adjusted and waved. This pulled the attention of the other two to me, and they both acknowledged me too, Noah giving a smile and a head tilt and Jack a smug shrug that seemed to promise something I’m not sure anyone else would have caught onto.

  I wasn’t sure what they were doing, not at first, but as they turned their attention back to the form, I watched.

  Jack sang something in Ancient Greek, and then in a language that was older, and then in a language of the gods. He continued his song, repeated it like a chant, moving from one to another with a level of ease he could only have achieved through extensive practice or through divine intervention.

  Noah, meanwhile, sat, an old school quill in hand and a leather-bound journal, scribbling something furiously on its pages. What, I could never know, and these days when I ask him, he can’t quite recall, or won’t admit to remembering, regardless. But I watched him write, and write some more, flipping pages as he neared the end of them, and then every once in a while shutting the journal, opening back to a first page that had mysteriously become blank once again, and then continuing.

  And, finally, Ryan had his trusty aerosol cans in his messenger bag as always. I cocked my head, trying to sort out precisely why he, of all of them, seemed to be the only one still using modern supplies. He sprayed a design I could not see toward the blob in front of him, and I imagined what it might have been: an image of a creature, an image of power, something else?

  I took a deep breath and tried to figure out what exactly was happening. They had kept it contained, that was clear, but it appeared they weren’t able to fight it. I shifted into muse sight to look at them, and while they all still sparkled, and while everything that was left of the black goo within them seemed to have left to join the mass, the more they worked, the more of their inspiration was absorbed by the mass itself, such that they could not counteract it enough to destroy it.

  I smiled.

  Lucy was right: I knew exactly what to do.

  I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, thinking back to the first day I landed here and met Ryan, and thinking back to the time I spent in the gods realm. I said a quiet prayer to my ancestors, to the earth, to the sky, asking them to help me with my next actions.

  And I opened my eyes.

  I’ve told you how people and things flow with sparkle. In these moments, I learned everything did, that everything that ever exists has its own sort of inspiration that flows. It looks... different, more unbridled, less refined in natural things, and some objects have less of it than others, but, really?

  It’s amazing.

  When I opened my eyes, everything sparkled and glowed and moved with silver, with rainbows, with inspiration. And I attempted something I never had before.

  I repeated my prayer, this time asking my ancestors for guidance, and visualized the silvery rainbow sparkles from the ground traveling into me. They responded immediately, everything around where I stood beginning a flow towards my feet, where the glitter traveled up my legs, past my hips, and into my core. I inhaled with purpose, filling myself more with each piece of oxygen, until finally it was so concentrated I felt it would make me explode.

  I practiced the energy shift, again. I pushed it all into my hands and they glowed like they were stars, shining so brightly it made it difficult for even me to take them in. I extended my arms out, holding the energy like balls in my hands, or maybe like torches, and I finally felt like what I knew, deep down, I was: a goddess.

  I took another breath and the orbs in my hands glowed bright, teaming with vibrancy and ready to explode. So I threw them, like grenades, like basketballs, toward my men.

  They’d nearly depleted themselves as I’d done all of this, but when the energy I sent toward them hit them, they all lit up. They looked magical. Heroic. They even somewhat reminded me of the original three muses, their definitely human status notwithstanding. But they took the energy in stride, glowing brightly, and rekindling their focus on the monstrous mass before them.

  And so it was. And so they were. And so was I.

  I pulled another mass of energy from the ground. Well, to be clear, it was more that I’d been doing so all along, without realizing it; that was the way things were. A goddess I may have been, sure, but I was still not totally in control, and would likely never be. If inspiration was my domain, it was more that I was its liege, and was here to do its bidding.

  I imagined the energy traveling up my legs, through my core, and into my hands once again, but this time, rather than gathering it into balls I imagined myself as a machine, as an endlessly flowing conduit, and let it go in a stream toward the men. They continued their work with vigor, and I watched as the mass continued to absorb it. I focused: Breath in through the nose, and out through the mouth, I told myself, and tried not to worry too much about how long this would take. We’d figure out the next step when it was time, right? Well, I hoped so, at any rate.

  I glanced back at the mass itself. It was dwindling in form, becoming smaller, more see-through, while also changing hue. It wasn’t a dull black anymore, but a silvery mass, like dark molten metal, not unlike it had been when it had merged within individuals. But it was becoming more difficult to contain as it shrank, as it absorbed more of the inspiration, its motions becoming more chaotic, and I had to pull on more to keep the men replenished as we got closer to the end.

  Ryan was the first to crack under the pressure. He was sweating as he worked, vigorously spraying whatever design I could not see, and on one particular downstroke, he tripped and fell. I shrieked, my attention on my task faltering for a moment, and I watched Jack’s expression become more pained immediately.

  That moment had been all the mass needed to get free. With one man down and a distracted muse, it
overwhelmed Jack’s voice, and he went hoarse and then silent, and then it took Noah, his hand dropping his quill to the ground and then clenching on itself.

  I held my breath as I watched it all happen, the form now spinning wildly. When I finally made it out of my reverie, I ran to Ryan, trying to help him to his feet, or to at least sit up. He was panting as if he’d run a marathon, but shook his head at me and pointed at the mass.

  I turned to face it, ready to deal with it head on.

  It slammed into me. The entire remaining form entered my body at once, and it was terrible.

  Have you ever gotten bad news? Like, terrible news, news that made you feel like a pit had opened up in your stomach and would swallow you whole?

  This was like that. It radiated throughout my entire body, as if I’d become a black hole that swallowed my own happiness. I was upset, and I felt despair. It made me want to do a million things at once, and also nothing. The chaos in my head was enough to drive me insane, but I held onto reality just enough to know what was going on. There was nothing I could do but continue to try to pull energy from the earth and my ancestors and hope that it was enough.

  But the part of it I couldn’t quite shake was the thing I’ve never come to terms with, even now, even in this retelling.

  Because when that mass hit me? I remembered.

  I remembered everything.

  Chapter 14

  =

  The unfortunate reality about who I was as a person—or muse—was that Eris had been telling the absolute truth.

  I had assumed she’d lied to me. It would have been exactly her style: make me question my existence so I got so wound up trying to figure out exactly who I was and what I had been through before that I got distracted from the present situation.

  But, no.

  I was no one.

  Before landing in New York City, I had been created in the gods realm, forged near the water where the Original Three Muses had met me. It’s not difficult to make a god or goddess, really, and muses are no exception to this. There is no defined process, as is fitting for a place that has no consistent rules of physics. There aren’t really even best practices. Anything goes, from letting an adult-formed deity emerge from your forehead, to putting some things in a cauldron and seeing what happens, to having a child the human way.