Cerberus Slept
By Doonvorcannon
Table of Contents
Chthonic Sun
Branches of Blood
Snow Pure
Endless Circle
Over the Moon
Farther North
Preface
Erato sings to me. She found me at the edge of the abyss, barking at the fools hurling themselves into decadent decay. Through my howls at the hopeless herd, she sings louder and purer than any Siren of the deep. She, the erotic love of those romantic poets. She, the ancient Muse so many adored. Her passionate dancing has frenzied me with fervor. I must write this!
I, Doonvorcannon was tasked to write down this epic, burning my words deep into the hopeless hollows of today. This is written in love and for the love of what we once were; this is for the love of what we need to be. The Muses have come to me. I howl no longer at the moon, but at the sun, for it is our day. The night of modernity is burning away in the dawn of rekindled righteous tyranny.
And there, Polyhymnia descends and sings of the sacred solar. Alight and listen to the Muse’s holy hymn! The abyss is not so deep that it cannot be filled. Alight, you sacred angel and give me wings so that I might save those sinking souls that were meant for the sun, but have forgotten their past!
Calliope soars out from the sun’s rays and heaves its warmth over my skin, radiant and buoyant as a lover’s sigh. Her harmony is ecstatic with an eternal eloquence; how could I not lay down these words atop one another and attempt to build up to her heights? The rest of the Muses dance, encircling me with wisdom. I must tell this tale.
But why, you ask, why has old Greek mythology come to me? Why those Muses? I simply ask you this: have you read Hesiod and Homer? Have you read Virgil and Dante? And what of Shakespeare and Milton? Our forefathers, those giants of the sun, they heard these Muses cry out to them. And the return of the Muses is much needed! I weep at the blessings heaped onto me from their tragic songs. The old has been forgotten but the Muses sing to bring about the tale of what brought a remembering new. The new that is ancient, but forward moving. This is what they sing, and I listen and write to their song as swans soar above me in a cloud-like dance. The majesty and tragedy of such power forgotten!
You may have heard of my fabled Rangabes in the past. But now, with the mythic inspiration of the Muses, I write of his true journey through the land of the dead, to the land of the living, to the land we have lost, and to the land we now inhabit. This is no fable. Before, I barked as best as I could but I only dreamed of his true form. Then, it was but a desperate howl into the long-labored night. It was a shadow of the true myth! Now, I howl at the sun as the dawn of a new day quickens. Read this tale and become as the gods; live it again through their eyes.
May the epic of great Rangabes bring about a rapture, for only those of power and the mythic heroic can withstand the glorious glow of righteous tyranny. Can you hear the Muses’ song? Their singing lifts our souls. Ascend!
Book 1
Chthonic Sun
My soul, my soul, forsaken and forgotten in soulless solitude. In a black pitch I hover without a throe to give. My throes have been thrown in every direction, but in this cursed abyss, direction has died. My body is no more and my soul a mere husk filled with searing shame. Why couldn’t it be Valhalla? Why couldn’t it be the Inferno? Even Dante’s underworld allowed for action—a kind of moving that is a something, however circular and tortuous. I’m forced to float forgotten in burning tar with the silent, black air pressing against my skin and whispering that all is untruth—that all is and has always been a nothing.
Suspended in this endless realm of empty nothingness, I’ve fallen into the blank forever of a starless night. My tarring is finished but oh how I long for feathers, if only to be deceived at the possibility of an absurd flight. The foolish lie would at least give me a direction in this directionless blanket of eternal night. I cannot tuck myself in for it appears as though my lot is cast, for those lost in this heavy black have failed. I have failed. I cannot see, hear or eat here. I’m not even sure if I can speak. I am too afraid to call out into the deep, not knowing what might be lurking.
Tartarus.
An answer? I mustered up my strength and called out into the darkness. My voice fell dead in the air, swallowed whole. Echo, the sad and lovely woman, could not be heard. Why was I here? Tartarus—the abyss where the Titans were kept, at least in Greek Mythology. The underworld. But I was Christian; this fabrication made no sense. I did nothing to deserve suffering such a miserable, impossible fate.
A test.
“Test?” I whispered. My voice fluttered free. It at last existed apart from my tortured thoughts. This foreign voice that spoke from the deep was a something, and it had brought me a semblance of being, however small.
Escape Tartarus and you will be rewarded by founding a powerful people from Apollo’s blood. If you look below, one patch of this quilted black is not like the others. The answer is in the past but present.
Apollo? Founding a people? What was this myth? What was truth here? And there were no patches that I could see; there was still only the insufferable total and uniform darkness. This quilt of night was expertly stitched together. I waited as a nothing in the dark, and thought back to my past. Perhaps a clue could be excavated from my memories. There was nothing else I could do, at least in my current state. But Tartarus. I was in the great black abyss. Greek mythology made real. Was it therefore not myth? Tartarus… the third deity of Greek legend, preceded only by Gaia and Chaos. The abyss.
A murmur swam through the lifeless air. A poet’s voice rang out and sang, "First Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth.”
“Hesiod?” I called out to no avail, my voice nothing but thoughts without release—surging water beaten into a pooled submission at the thick walls of a dark dam.
“Rangabes! Failure of a Roman soldier. Your city of Constantinople is conquered. You deserve no escape. If Typhon arose from such loins as these cold depths, how might you hope to burst free? Can you not feel that frigid fear in this nothingness? Tartarus is the void that all succumb to, if they choose the comfort of eventuality. To cease to move is to accept the pull of the forever falling anvil.”
“You said nine days,” I mumbled. I’d read Hesiod when I was young. I knew his words and worth. He was not wrong.
“Quite the scholar, I see. Nine days it fell from heaven to earth. Nine more days it fell from earth to be swallowed in Tartarus. What is done in life will be swallowed in death, equaling all the feats on earth and heaven above. The anvil never stops falling and its force draws in the masses. Smoke ascends from its old bronze in tails of gray; tendrils snaking about while the herd eagerly allows its serpentine heads to bite their heels and drag them down. An anvil that is an anchor designed to sink the ship.” Hesiod’s voice was clear and crisp. Even in the nothingness he still spoke as if he were carrying his laurel staff—a poet gifted by the gods and worthy of song.
I tried to smile. I tried, but I was still a nothing. But Hesiod! Here with me. I’d pinch myself if I had a self to pinch.
I said, “I died a hero’s death. I belong amongst the warrior-saints. I belong amongst the gods!” My words were returning somehow, yet my body remained void. My speech sounded as thought spoken from an echo. I was that echo.
“Wait till you meet Erebus and then tell me why you might be here right now.”
“But why are you here, ancient poet? Why speak to me, and how can you in the first place? You are trapped as well. Have you been tasked by the gods to spout your myths and judgements as if Muses sang only to your black
heart? Are you Tartarus’s jester? I thought more of you—that you’d be in a place of honor in the underworld. That Christ might forgive your sin out of respect for your worth.”
“The anvil I dropped from Olympus has smashed through my body, and in the wreckage of my soul it pulls me always away like a falling star trapped in orbit.”
“So, your own myths were too much to overcome. Your own writings your guilt. The weight of your creation has you lost in the chasm of the sea. Why should I listen to you, lonely poet?” I said.
“Because I want to leave. Because light came to me in this darkness, and in its blaze I saw your face.”
The thought of light pulsed in my imagined temples; such a concept whispered holy into my vacated body. I reached with invisible hands and felt for a way up, or a rope to hang myself with. Eternal darkness made me want to tear myself apart. Only, my flesh was gone and whatever self I was now was imperishable.
“All of this black here is a flawless blanket. Below me and everywhere else, there is nothing but that same cold black. Where am I supposed to find a difference?” I said.
Who never wears the quilt of night yet always lives in darkness?
The same voice from the deep torrented through Hesiod and I. I didn’t want to know who such a stampede of a voice belonged to. It threatened to trample our nothingness into something even less existent. I shuddered at the impossibility of such a concept. I tried to focus on the words themselves and give answer to this strange riddle.
“If this is the land of myth, and the untruth speaks as though it were true—is this riddle requiring an answer from your mythos? If so… and I suspect it is, I’d first guess the god of sleep, the dreaming god Hypnos?” I said, stopping to consider. “No, no... that can’t be it. He always is covered with such a quilt in the depths of his dreams.” I stopped again. If Greek mythology was somehow based in actuality, could other pagan gods be counted too? It was worth trying. “Ptah? The Egyptian god my dear pagan friend Belen worshipped so strangely—the god of the sun at night. But to be the sun, no matter how dark the surroundings… that is not living in darkness but sitting outside of it with resplendent fire serving as a beacon of light to scare the shadows away.” I paused again, ceasing my scholarly musing to think deeper of the mythologies my father had taught me so well. I felt oddly in control, my fright at the fearsome voice frozen from the frost of my reason. “Or is it Selene, the goddess of the moon. She does not sleep as the moon is always somewhere else, so she never quite abandons her chariot. If the quilt of night is sleep, then it must be Selene.”
No.
“No?” I said, my thoughts evaporating into a sigh.
It is I.
“And who might this I be? My own eye cannot see, so you’re going to have to give me something more. Perhaps a name?” My bodiless mind grinned, pleased at my own mirth in such dire straits. Tartarus couldn’t darken my soul. I wouldn’t let it. But the thought of eternity pressed itself into my being. I lurched but forced myself to hold strong. Losing myself would only make forever that much worse.
Kronos.
The voice roared stronger than Zeus’s thunder ever had. Fitting that only the father rumbled louder.
“You are in darkness here with me. But do you not wear the quilt of night? Do not all who dwell in Tartarus wear the same quilt?” I said.
Wild white eye balls appeared inches in front of me with irises and pupils missing. But no... I peered closer to see two perfectly fine eyeballs, only they were rolled backwards and quivering there. The eyeballs were surrounded by a face with cold white skin that was concaved and sunken. A wild black beard enveloped half of this madman’s mien. Long, knotted black hair hung in tatters like the rags of a beggar. And then the eyeballs rolled forward and fixed their auger pupils directly at my soul, unmoving and unforgiving.
“There is no sleep here. There is no night. There is no anything. It is only this expanse of nothingness,” Kronos said.
“But Zeus has long since fled after being forgotten. Why are you still here imprisoned? Have you forgotten that Olympus once was yours?” Hesiod spoke, but Kronos didn’t react as he stayed staring at my nothingness. I shivered.
“But the quilted black not like the others! Why say such a thing if you’ve never managed to find it? Who even told you that?” I said.
“Moros gave you his signs. Your Holy Mother wept in her flight and your angel turned his face. Your cathedral lit up with a fire that fled, leaving your pathetic city behind. She loved you, but you did not love her back,” Kronos said, his face tremoring as it floated before me, its gaze still fixed upon my soul.
I swallowed my spirit, my mind flexing with a sinking gloom. I remembered it all too clearly. At the time I had scoffed at the peasants’ superstitions. They had all claimed that the suddenly glowing cross atop of Hagia Sophia and its strange fiery light flying away, was the Blessed Theotokos leaving us to our dismal fate. I thought it merely a trick of the light. I should have heeded the warning. But in a city’s last days, all signs become apocalyptic.
“Moros, the god of impending doom. But how were you aware of such things down here, Kronos?” Hesiod said.
Kronos remained staring at me, his mouth spreading into a sick grin that bared his gray teeth. “He brought down his own broken flame here and let it consume him to ash. Moros died in fear. He died a failure. The only thing that can kill a god is fate, and when the god of impending doom seeks his own doom, he can find a way to make fate his own.” He smiled even wider and his eyes darted in spasms. His mouth propped open and his beard hung over his wicked maw like a spider’s pincers. I shivered as I thought of what this terrible Titan had done to be sent here in the first place. The child eater. “We’re here because we failed. I failed to defend my mountain, my throne. You, Rangabes, you failed to defend your city. And Hesiod failed to defend his mythos. He failed to create one that would endure as truth and not as mere children’s stories seldom read by those of today.”
“Yet you are here speaking to us both. The unbelief of the world is not my fault,” Hesiod protested.
“It is the fault of Rangabes and all like him! They trusted truth, and our untruth condemns us to a dispersal into the nature we once broke free from. Rangabes is weak! Rangabes is dead!” Kronos grunted and snorted at me, his head snapping back and forth.
I burned. I hated. The rambling of this sinner was awakening something inside. This mad, pathetic beast was beneath me. My fear frothed into a fury that stormed in surges of fire. As if my blood had returned, I felt a solidity in my being as my rage and wrath quickened in fervor. I struck Kronos in the face with my fist. I was still flesh after all, or at least becoming so once again—if the satisfying sound of bone crunching bone was to be believed. Kronos cackled, opening his mouth as if preparing to swallow my arm. I struck him again, cracking his blackened teeth, his blood foaming in his decrepit mouth. I hammered both my fists into his eyeballs and they burst like rotten eggs, spewing foul blood and gray liquid.
“The flame! Moros, allow me your fate!” Kronos sputtered, his beard blood-soaked and his eyes black geysers. His two gnarled hands grabbed me by my shoulders which had apparently sprouted over my soul, and as my body became whole once more, Kronos pulled me towards him in a maniacal and sputtering embrace. “Burn me! Burn me! It is too cold, the darkness!” he cried.
I tried with all my might to push this foul creature away, but he wouldn’t budge. His black blood was cold and it seeped through my skin, chilling my core. I shivered, writhing in his embrace with nothing but anger fueling me. I did not fear such a pathetic wretch as this degeneration of divinity. As I struggled, I realized that I once more could see the entirety of my limbs. And then my flesh started to smoke as Kronos’s blood cascaded over me and he held me still. I screamed as my skin scalded into a reddish gold, and in a sudden eruption of light my body was covered in flame. Beams of glorious sunlight burst from my soul, my being sending out its rays and banishing the darkness of Tartarus.
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nbsp; I slowed myself down and took deep breaths as I no longer felt the fallen god’s cold hands upon me. He was no more. My body was clothed in a filthy robe that had faded to a stained brown and hung useless at my waist in tatters, leaving my torso uncovered. My skin was a healthy honey-white, the color of the Greek sun I’d left behind. I ran my hands through my untamed red-blonde mane, inherited from my Varangian grandfather. It parted on the left side and swept back as if the wind had forced it into a perpetual retreat. I rubbed my green eyes and pulled at my curly beard that was as wild as my hair on top and connected in such a way that a continuous flow of wavy locks threatened to drown the rest of my face in ferocious follicle flame. I reveled in the return of my body, feeling my face as if I were a blind man. I rubbed my sloped nose’s slightly bent bridge, crooked and sharpened from my many fights as a soldier and still as aquiline as ever.
I curled my toes and clung to the soil I now felt. My heart beat, its sudden return like the comforting whisper of the Almighty’s still, small voice. Grinning, I allowed myself to appreciate every crease and fold in my skin as I stretched and moved, alive and flesh again.
“Look around you. You are dead.” Hesiod’s somber words matched his dark brown eyes and sullen yet stoic demeanor. He wore long, gray robes that bared the right side of his torso. His long, brown locks of hair were gathered messily over his forehead in a clump of bangs.
I breathed the stale, sulfurous air and gagged, happy to smell despite the stench of decay and rot surrounding me. Then, I forced myself out of the revelry of the life of flesh, and looked at my grim surroundings. In bodiless darkness, Tartarus was hopeless; in the pale light of right now, it was Hell. Pillars of fire shot upwards, lava surging up to the smoke-covered heavens. The iron gray of the ocean of smoke above cast the realm in an eerie, dusk-like gloom. This was the eternal twilight. This was what was hidden in the darkness. Yet, this volcanic tundra filled with burning red rivers of fire and boiling blood somehow remained impossibly cold. This was the fire that froze. This was the heat that halted. I shivered, no longer reveling in the chill of my recovered flesh. Tartarus. I was dead.
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