There's this train—and don't ask me when or why there's this train—but there's this train that takes you all the way down to the underland, and there's this story that people like to tell on their way, this story about the gods and the men.
And people like the story about the gods and the men, because it's a good story, and it's old, and people have this way of repeating the things from way back when and imagining them as if they were still new. But it's an old, old tale, and if I hadn't spoken it a hundred times before, I'd have forgotten it by now. Yet this tale isn't likely to escape my memory soon, or presumably ever, as these things rarely do leave the minds of the men or gods who witness them.
For this I am just the man to tell this story. I was there for the downfall of the whole sorry matter.
Well, we take it back to the time of it all—and I'm not so skilled with numbers, but this was back in the hard times, when everybody was hungry and cold, when springs and falls were things of the past—and we've got these gods and these men and all this mess.
We've got the Fates—you know them. Every doubtful thought you've ever had came from them. Every hesitation, every downfall. Say hello. Take a bow.
Now, we've got Erianna Jackson. Some call her Persephone, some call her Our Lady of the Underground. I call her the catalyst of it all. Shortly, my reasoning will become apparent; for now, she is just another character in our story, and a frequent passenger on the road to hell. Most nights, in those days, she was found in the underground, drunk and shivering, while the world above her wilted without her.
But back to this train; this train, which goes only to one place, and has no other stops, leads all the way to the underbelly of the earth, where a man known as James Moriarty resides, still now. Few dared to call him this; that fearsome harbinger of death tolerated little, and not many were courageous or senseless enough to test the impetuous temper of Hades, as he was more commonly known. Here he ruled unforgivingly, a kingdom of bones and gold; for all that was below the earth was his to have.
Despite my practice with it, I nearly forget myself in the telling of this tale, and indeed, it sometimes seemed as though I was making myself purposely scarce. I have been criticized for a lack of action and competence. Let me tell you now, in no uncertain terms, that this matter was much larger than myself, and at every opportunity, I found myself throwing my own livelihood and being into harm's way for the betterment of those two girls; still, I am not infallible, and destiny is a force much more powerful than even a god.
You may call me Sebastian Moran for the duration of this tale, though you may best know me as Hermes, messenger of the gods.
Before I introduce you to this cast of human characters, let me remind you of this: this tale is a tragedy. It is unmistakably, undoubtedly, unquestionably a tragedy. Do not walk into this story expecting anything but ruination and adversity. I, myself, have been guilty of such offense in the past, and indeed have thought that perhaps another telling may somehow alter the outcome; and yet, with each ending, all that is earned is the same repeated beginning.
I stress again just how hard these times were; they were fearful, fruitless, and dismal; there was little to eat, and even the ones you loved would have turned on you for a scrap of food or a warm night. This is, partially, the fault of the aforementioned Erianna Jackson, who had long since stopped finding solace in drawn out summer days, and had in truth relented her struggle against James to keep a regular schedule of visits to the land of life.
With this in mind, I introduce you now to Olivia Moran. Olivia, the sweet girl, was several years my junior, and shared only half my blood; while I am fully god, she was only half so. Our mothers had nearly identical relationships with our father, Zeus: he was a wicked man who could talk most anyone into lying with him, and was exceptionally gifted at making a disappearing act the next morning. I dare not say more about the old bastard, lest he smite me where I stand.
Olivia, who most times I simply called Liv, was abandoned by her other parent much earlier in her life than myself. While my mother, Maia, had stuck around until I had become self-sufficient, Calliope, Liv's mother, had neither the good grace nor the patience to wait so long, and left her very early in her infancy. With much pity for my poor, neglected half sister, I took Liv beneath my wing and raised her until the cusp of adulthood. At that point, there was a palpable shift in our relationship, and I began to regard her as much more a friend than my charge. She was astute, headstrong, and wickedly independent. She had long since proven to me that she was more than capable of handling herself under tremendous pressure, and it was only out of some protective instinct developed over years of caring for and nurturing the girl that I'd kept holding on so tightly; still, she had grown into herself, and was undoubtedly a woman, no matter the way I looked at her and saw that scrappy young child I'd taken in all those years ago.
Liv had inherited her mother's creative wit and skill for song and poetry. She'd taken up the lyre very early on, and was beyond proficient at it. As a young child, she had the dexterity and musician's ear of someone thirty years her senior, and had found much adoration for the songs she wrote and sang with ease. This was enough of a living to sustain the necessities of her life, and on occasion, I slipped her some of the luxuries, although she was too proud to accept them if they were not disguised carefully as something earned; in this way, she reminded me of my own thickheaded foolishness in my younger years, before I had to provide for not just one hungry belly, but two, and learned to take whatever charity might be given to me.
One introduction is left to be made, and this is perhaps the most important of them all; for without her, there would be no story, no tragedy, no absentminded anecdote to while away the time on the way to the afterlife. This belongs, of course, to one Adalia Shonley, a hungry young girl from both everywhere and nowhere. She was a peculiar girl in that way that young women who have had to fend for themselves their whole lives are. She was everything Liv may have been had I not intervened, and in this way my heart both ached for and recoiled from her: I wanted desperately to love her into a better life as I had with my sister, but could not overcome the staggering fear every time I saw her, and so kept her at an arm's length, although in my own recollection I was never cruel or standoffish to her; had she felt any distance between her and myself, she never spoke of it, and never deigned to make an issue of it. This, of course, may have been due to a life lived in quiet assent, out of a need to keep alive. I suppose I may never truly know.
This is our cast of players, of gods and men, in its entirety. The backdrop is here, in a place with a name I have long since forgotten, in cold winter months with little to rejoice for or with.
Thus begins our tale.
semicolon count: 13
