Mania

Death

Days blended into days. Nothing stood out- there wasn't spectacular, nothing great. In fact, there was just...nothing. I existed, but I didn't feel like it. After all, what really was an existence of wandering around the lands, cutting the weak souls from the dying? The only people who really notice me are the ones dying and when they get to that point, they would much rather not have anything to do with me.

People feared me. And I could never dream of understanding why. The closest that I could get to understanding was when I met her.

Aileen: the girl who loved life. The girl who ran up and down the hills singing songs of joy, the girl who would sneak grapes from the vineyard and laugh as its juice dribbled down her chin, the girl whose curly brunette hair would have a rough time staying inside its kekryphalos, the girl whose very existence was a burning flame. With people like her in the world, perhaps I could understand why people were afraid to die. After all, who would would to travel into a world filled with only uncharted territories when the maps and the waters here bring them such joy?

Oftentimes I wished that I had met her long before this point. That this break in the monotonous tune to my everyday existence had come sooner. But alas, it was the death of her sister that made our paths finally, at last, collide. Or at least, collide as much as paths could when they were on entirely different planes from each other.

She had no clue that I existed. Of course, she could see my work, it was scattered all around her, buried beneath the ground that she danced on. But she could never see me. And if she was like most everybody else who toiled beneath this bright sun, she never would until she died.

Would she hate me like so many others did? Would she be able to accept her fate, to accept me? Would she be able to realize that I'm the one who's adored for her so long, who may not have watched over every step she took, but with every fiber of his being wished that he could have? Part of me wished that she was going to end up like the very dedicated few who viewed me as an omnipotent God and reverently bowed down in my presence. The people I had found who loved me, lovingly referred to me as Hades.

They erected temples in my names, offered up burnt sacrifices, and built statues in my honors. Of course, constructing a body in my likeness is a bit laughable considering how they had never truly seen me, but the act somewhat amused me nonetheless. There were even stories that they had constructed about me: these epic stories of creatures called Titans, gods, and deadly monsters. A whole tapestry was somehow woven about me without me ever giving directions for how I wanted the needle to be threaded. To add even more to the absurdity: these stories were changing all the time. What had once been an epic became a tale, became a sonnet, became nothing. Facts that they used to cement in my idea were now broken and traded in for new ones. What had once been me is growing is growing into something else entirely.

But then again, considering the fact how it never really was me in the first place, perhaps I never was this "Hades" that they talked of.

Aileen was just as clueless as I was. Unlike all the others, she would eat her sacrifices before she'd place them on the altar, she would never visit any of my temples or bow down to any of the statues. Now she would find the stories amusing, that much I could tell from the way that her eyes would sparkle anytime when they are brought up. But she doesn't believe them. That fact in itself interested me. Yes of course, everything about her interested me.

She was the only thing that interested me. From the way that she talked to her friends, to the way she moved, even to the way that she would have to constantly sniff her nose when the olive trees were in bloom, she enchanted me. While most other females were confined indoors for what was perceived to be for their own safety, she scoffed at that construct. Instead she'd constantly find ways to sneak out of the house: a wild animal that most of the town labelled as crazy and that her own parents were ashamed of.