I am weary.
I gaze, as best I can, across the fields of the dead, mindless-shifting-smoke-illusion, warping in and out of my vision. Their masses are grey and writhing under the colorless sky of Hades.
I am their queen. Or rather, I am enslaved to their king—I am Death's consort. Stolen from the light and world above, chained here for a season every turn of the sun.
I was more, once...but I can't remember now.
Day and night have no meaning here. Inexorable, the spirit-corpses over whom I reign mutter and moan, never resting. They surge toward me in a morbid wave, and then retreat just as quickly. Despite my fatigue I startle—Hades mocks me when I tremble at them, he says they will not touch their queen and waves off my fear, but I am terrified of them. Most of all, I think, of their emptiness. They are devoid of all that made them what they were before, all spark, all trace of happiness or anger or lust or anything at all. They are nothing now—shells, faceless and murmuring. I don't get close enough to find out about what.
I remember feeling, remember it as I remember the tart sweetness of the jewel-bright seeds—the vessels of my seasonal imprisonment in this place—but now sensation is little more than whisper of thought, an image-vibration wrapped in webs. The visceral knowledge of feeling anything other than rage or fear lies just outside my conscious grasp. And Olympus knows I cannot reach it in my dreams.
I shiver in the hot, whistling wind.
I..I want to feel again.
A servant approaches through the mists with a tray of something rotting. I turn my face to the being and wave it away, for all I see of it is alternating flashes of skull and scabbing flesh—and the leftover footprint of the soul he or she was. Mournful. Ended. Resigned.
I scream. Scream into the wind, but it goes unheard, or, if Hades hears it, wherever he is among the dead, he cares not. Mine is another scream of millions. Another torn soul under his dominion.
My dry gaze (I don't weep anymore) turns to a table beside me. A vase, worked of bone, with three horrible Asphodel blooms sitting erect, brown stems and wilting, rotting petals shrinking from whatever they call life.
Flowers. Zeus, but I miss real flowers.
And suddenly, unbidden but fresh as true air—a gold-green, shimmering memory. A field, with real wildflowers and the sun bright on the pale of his skin...and laughter.
I gasp. I cannot remember his name, but I remember...him.
Yes...yes...h-him...I need...him...
But could he find me after all this time? Would he still...know me...with what I am now?
I must try. I lean into the ether and feel for him, for his flicker in the fabric of creation. I pull toward him, wherever he is, stretching my essence to him, imploring.
I find him, a shining star in the blackness. I feel him turn toward me. A vibration, a whisper down a ley line. He feels me. Is coming.
I draw back, the exertion of the contacting almost pushing me to my knees. I lean on a statue which once horrified me—a writhing, damned soul, look of horror upon its marble features. I now barely perceive it through my fog. I take steps toward the balustrade. I don't know how long—
And my fogged vision is blocked. A pair of hands have formed from the ether, over my eyes, and a cool body is behind me, pressing into me. I shiver from the contact, but lean into him, relief washing over me.
