“And did you prevent that ascension? Did you cast his soul into the dark pits of Tartarus?” I yelled, my fists clenched. I remembered my brother’s nothingness, the pain he endured—the pain we both endured while Apollo gallanted free, concocting his strange schemes.
“You know what Erebus told you. He called Rangabes a failure and you believed his words. I said no such thing. Rangabes was cast into Tartarus, but not by me... no, and I’m sick you’d think such a thing. All of you,” he said, tiredly heaving his arms around at the three of us in a weary and ragged gesture. “His heroism those last days in his impossible war was a burst of light, true. But from the beginning, his pure and perfect will towards the utmost glory of the infinite was united to his Hyperborean ancestors in such a way that no mortal has ever been able to accomplish. This balance, this glorified and transcendent focus anchored to eternity and the historical, had all us dying gods watching him from his younger days and onward. Light and dark, far and small, it didn’t matter who or where, all the gods watched his march towards the end with worry and intrigue. Most saw our end in him, and those wily Fates screamed it the loudest, though they relented to the rest of us with quaking terror that even they could not see what he truly meant. Wyrd took a liking to him, which is no surprise. But her guiles belong to someone else, and I merely hope to survive her higher whims.” Apollo sighed as he leaned back against the wall. The black stone didn’t swallow him whole like it had with Rangabes, and so my suspicion remained. Yet, I kept quiet as did the rest of us as Apollo continued. “His life was watched with fear and trembling by the full pantheon of all gods. I trusted in his promise but it could not be ignored that his appearance and destiny was to bring about a final change to our order—an order that had already fallen to some decay. I did not cast him into Tartarus... maybe that was Wyrd testing him for her unknown plans. She never was quite as you wrote. You and your people pictured her wrong: she was always on the other’s side. But I accuse without proof and am not entirely sure who it was that dragged him there. Perhaps if you’d been awake Cerberus, you might have stopped it, but there is no telling who—if not Wyrd. Was it Zeus? He’s been absent and silent for too long. Some other god I’ve never heard of, perhaps? My mad brother Dionysus? Doubtful. He was always on the side of glory for the most part.”
“You spin and spin, be careful you do not get caught in what you’ve spun. You sir, are a dark sun.” Belenus clapped his hands and laughed at his rhyme. I shook my head at the strange god’s jokes. I was in no mood to laugh, but Apollo’s speech certainly had the feel of crafty weaving. What was true and what was trap?
Apollo stared off at nothing, uninterested in offering a retort. Finally, he spoke, “The dark forces that are at work, the bleeding of the mythic realms as they swirl down the drain—it is hard to know who decided to act. Was it willed by his own spirit? He no doubt felt guilty at failing his city, however impossible the odds, perhaps his will weakened at the end. I think his will was wilted with guilt and a sense of failure, and that this weakening allowed for some god to act and interfere with his soul’s release to that eternal light. That interference set off this whole thing. Once he was cast into Tartarus, then I decided to act. These harried plans, this confusion and rush was the result of my own indecision and unforeseen anticipation of what might go wrong. Much has, as you can see from Rangabes not being here and three Celtic solar gods being reduced to swine. But fate has played to a weird tune. Blame her, not me. I do not see what is beyond the setting sun, but I intend for the sun to rise again, whether I am a mere ray, the sun itself, or a distant speck of light—it does not matter. I do not want Hyperborea to die.” Apollo breathed deeply, sighing at the release of such spirit, yet he seemed stronger for it in my eyes. I felt better, but would be a fool to blindly look into the sun and accept its light as harmless. There were questions still unanswered, but for now, it would do.
“Thank you.” I walked over to the slumped god of wisdom while he leaned against the wall with the weary weight of confession on his shoulders.
Cerberus leaned down his three heads and nuzzled against Apollo’s head affectionately, a dark purple tongue lolling out to lick his cheek. Apollo laughed in response, wiping his sopped skin and standing straight, away from the wall. Belenus sat there on the wall, leaning so far forward and with such a wicked glare that I was surprised he hadn’t leapt off and attacked Apollo, the way he stooped like a hungry vulture.
Apollo stepped towards him, squinting up with suspicion. “You come now out of darkness, a supposed god of the sun yet you sow discord and accuse, action belonging to one who works with shadows. I’m a fool for not realizing sooner. Gwydion, why don’t you show us your true form and take us to your pathetic master?”
“I have no master!” Belenus shouted.
His form rippled, breaking apart and bubbling like a sudden landslide as his golden flesh fell off to reveal a small, peevish looking fellow beneath. He was bald with beady red eyes, and thin orange moustaches hanging to his chin. He wore only a loin cloth that was torn and dirty. He was so skinny that he looked like a skeleton haphazardly wrapped in a thin layer of pale, dirt-splotched skin. Like a monkey he sat there hunched and unclothed, a grotesque little god unworthy of the form he’d disguised himself as before.
“The god of trickery and deceit lives only for himself. Where are Lugh, Arawn and the Morrígan?” Apollo said through clenched teeth. His bow was already aimed and at the ready, its gleam of sunlight a fearsome sight that had appeared in a subdued flash I’d somehow missed.
“They’ve become the pigs they always were. An exterior fitting for an interior so swinish,” Gwydion said.
“Take us to Sulis,” I said, my talon raised and my robe aflame with a deep-orange glow.
“Suliiiiiis!” he whined, a high-pitched shriek pouring out of his mouth like that of a bratty child.
The tower above lit up black, and a streak of white light thundered from its peak, soaring down towards us like a missile, yet it landed quietly atop the wall, right next to Gwydion. The light dispersed, revealing Sulis standing there above us with her dark violet dress billowing out around her. Her forlorn locks of red hair were coiled like several fiery serpents, gathered together and contained with a silver crown topped with dagger-like amethyst diadems the same deep purple as her robe. With her face of distinguished porcelain, delicate and angular, royal and haughty, she stared down at us in such a way that revealed she was used to getting whatever she wanted. The way her kissable chin was tilted back and her green eyes stared down her straight, narrow nose: I couldn’t deny her beauty.
“We’re reaching the end now, aren’t we Apollo? The end of your games that is,” her voice drew in all the surrounding sounds, forcing an unnatural silence the way her speech swallowed the air. If not for the flapping of the wind and her still billowing dress, her voice would be the only sound in a silence she commanded. “Rangabes and his chthonic convergence is finally coming to that fine point of solar deceit. Will you take him to your ruined home? Your curse on this wall did the trick and served its purpose.” She smiled and Gwydion leapt up to his feet and hopped back and forth like a jester.
“The wall was his will. Accuse me as you might, you cannot turn my own kin against me. Cerberus and Hesiod saw through Gwydion’s deceit.” Apollo spoke as if he were convincing himself of the veracity of his lies. Again, my doubt bubbled back into my mind.
With such an admission, whether or not he’d realized it, I knew that when the time came, I’d be prepared to cut him down.
I glanced over at Cerberus and he met my eyes with his right head and whispered in my mind, “Apollo is not sure where his own plots are leading. Let it be so, we mustn’t bow to his words, no matter how eloquent or wise sounding. Be on guard.” I clenched my jaw shut and held my taloned hand close to my side, ready to wield it at Sulis and Apollo alike.
Sulis smiled a wicked grin. “Rangabes thrown into a twisted Hel that is not even its pale, Norse shadow. No, instead he
is in some strange Otherworld amalgamation, a wound of myth with Valhalla blasphemously tossed in. You wanted him there Apollo, to win that goblet of truth. You wanted him there because you yourself are not capable of besting such twisted sporting games, an inverted Olympics of blood and dark. Who is the games master? Were you not the founder of your precious Olympics in Ancient Hellas?” She laughed and Gwydion joined in. Apollo scowled in silence. “Well, he won that goblet, but he did one thing you didn’t think possible. He drank it—drank it all. The Stoor Worm’s sacrifice is your death sentence.”
Apollo’s light seemed to dim; the golden god paled into a pallid corpse of himself. For the first time since I’d seen him and known him, he looked utterly lost and shockingly—afraid.
“Does he know?” Apollo whispered.
Sulis slowly smiled, a crooked and haughty grin maiming the delicateness of her face with masculine harshness. She pointed a long finger up and off to the horizon. I turned to look and fell to my knees. There in the sky loomed two giant beings, their bodies suspended high in the heavens and larger than the disk of the sun. Yet they appeared firmly fixed and standing despite being perched on the nothingness of the heavens.
The one giant was a misty silhouette of shadow. A darkness taking on the form of primordial power—the form of a giant rolling up the heavens as if it were a map. The other giant was composed purely of light, a hot white heat that was stronger than the sun and pushed back just as powerfully as the other giant’s darkness did. Beside the giant shadow being there were three other shadows shaped like swine. Like black pig-shaped clouds, they bowed at his feet and snarled at the being of light.
“We can only watch and witness now. Rangabes fights darkness. Whoever wins, decides our fates,” Apollo murmured.
***
The great nothing. Colorless color. Opaque and translucent. Above and below. White light: walls, skies, and oceans of white light. White light. But the white was not white. It was clear and bright. A nothingness where light shined. Was this what black looked like when exposed? I looked down at my calloused hands, mottled in grime and blood from this strange journey I’d been set on. Nothingness had blanketed me more than enough. Yet this nothingness, this was not a quilt I was willing to roll under—to rest in. No matter how warm. No matter how pure.
A quilt. I held up my arms and stared at my scars, my glorious, sacred scars. The bite: two perfect blue dots. The wolf’s head: a branded silhouette, burning red. A quilt. This whiteless white, a quilt. I remembered. The words came back to me as if Kronos whispered them alive again.
Escape Tartarus and you will be rewarded by founding a powerful people, fulfilling Apollo’s mandate. If you look below, one patch of this quilted black is not like the others. The answer is in the past but present.
Had I not already escaped Tartarus? Yet, had I not done so without finding that patch unlike the others? The past but present. Not the relived memory of my Constantinople’s sad fall. Past but present. Quilted black. I stood in quilted white now. Now. The present. The past was a black quilt. The present was a white one. What had the goblet’s truth, its light of pure sacrifice, done? Quilt. The word was there, and I couldn’t unroll it and awaken. No, not yet.
That goblet. It had answered the riddle, solved it for me when I hadn’t known it had gone unanswered. So, a part of me remained in Tartarus—or more accurately in death. As long as I was chained to death, it was an abyss that could not be climbed out of unless the Lord himself raised me up. What was this quilt? The quilt perhaps was an extension of, if not itself, Tartarus. That dark chaos, that dark concealing mist, blinding the light from seeing its own glory. Blinding the living from seeing the sins and power of the dead... that unseen mythic heroic world where light was rewarded, where power was celebrated, where the now could remember the glory of the righteous tyrant and the loving, traditional past.
Did I need to look below? I looked down at my feet to make sure there wasn’t some trick beneath me, but I stood on solid.... solid white light. Not there. When did I look below? When? The past and present. How could I look below them both? I itched my brow and smiled as I remembered. When rowing through the Duat, Hesiod had spoken wisely. But with Sobek’s interruption and constant conflict, I’d never considered his words in light of this riddle. I’d assumed Tartarus was gone forever. I’d forgotten Kronos’s cryptic murmurings.
Hesiod had spoken of a moment, a perfect moment not beyond past or present, but in it and joined perfectly. If I pictured those moments as forming a circle, could this quilt, this answer, lie at the bottom of the circle of the past and present? The moment. The repetition. The eternal being and becoming in harmony, the finite to infinite, remaining pure. My joined will, the speartip as I’d called it to Hesiod. Oh, how I missed my brother who’d been away from me for too long. His words, wisdom, and love would do me well now.
It was Wyrd’s string I plucked—that redeemed mother of Aeneas, a true god-mother of mine in the literal and spiritual sense. I nodded. I’d made the abyss my own. Embraced it by becoming it, yet retaining my all. Reenacting the repetition of power in the every moment of the eternal now. I remembered that. Hesiod had said to look inward and guide my soul like a ship towards the heroic past and my own heroic future. The past, present and the future. I was going somewhere. I was nearing my answer. I could see it, feel it. But there was more to peel back, this riddle a stubborn, impenetrable orange that had me considering swallowing the skin out of a starvation of wits and will.
I chuckled, and narrowed my eyes at the white below me. The speartip. The being and becoming that pierces the shroud... no, no. The quilt! Pierces the quilt of time! The speartip pierces the quilt and catches the flying fish, that single fish, that uncatchable fish! Yes! Eternity in the piercing! And to pierce through such a quilt, to catch a fish, one has to look into the river, one has to aim below. The below... not under, but within. The within. Will directed within, reflected without and back again in a circle of eternal heroism. Pure will. Purity of powerlessness. The great surrender, the great embracing of the all.
One patch of this quilted black is not like the others. The answer is in the past but present.
This one patch—the only patch in the quilt of time. The patch of pure will. The patch over the elusive fish. I’d speared it. I was spearing it. I would spear it. Yes. Yes! My answer. This white quilt of light. That black quilt of dark. Together, folded into one, they formed my patch. I could not grasp it without the goblet thrusting me here. But now, now nothing could stop me. Nothing!
“Do you hear that!” I shouted, my voice a surging siren of ecstatic triumph and vigor. I shivered, my body wavering with excitement. “I cannot be stopped. For I act. I am. And I will!”
My words burned, shouts singed with song. Musical notes imbued them as they crescendoed into the white light, and I laughed as a sudden pleasure shook me. And then pleasure exploded into an ecstasy that ripped through me, searing into pain. It burned my insides then chilled them with ice, only to melt and freeze a hundred times over, all in a moment. The rapture at last released its terrible hold on me and I dropped to my knees, gasping for relief.
“You didn’t think I was finished, did you? Our race had only just begun!” Manannán mac Lir said.
I looked to my left, to face the god. In a flash of white light, cold steel embraced my flesh and I shivered at its sudden touch. My trusty armor had summoned itself to me somehow, perhaps Wyrd’s doing. Perhaps of the magical steel’s own will. Perhaps it was my own. Regardless, I was covered once again and both my faithful weapons were latched to my side. I flexed my cloud-shoed feet and breathed deeply as the tremors of painful ecstasy dwindled. I was the speartip—the point tearing through. Even in this place of perfect light, darkness had bled through too.
“I feast on swine that dies and lives, again and again, just for me! That same cauldron that bubbles their flesh so sweetly, cooked my rotting skin back to this lovely hue. Ruddy cheeks such as these cannot be bought!” He slapped his t
wo cheeks and grinned wide. His hair was long and shining; the man looked even healthier and more powerful than he had in his own sea.
“I drank of the goblet, Manannán. The worm was all too willing to give its life to truth. It took me here. Yet how is it that you’ve followed?” I said.
He shook his head, his grin spreading wider, and I clenched my fists as he loudly laughed, drawing it out like entrails shat from a pig. My mind was darkening next to such a swinish stain of a man in these hallowed heavens. Perhaps it was the talk of swine that was hogging my mind’s pure focus. I clenched my fists harder.
He said, “I followed? My foolish, tiny little friend. I followed? The audacity! That goblet is mine and remains as such. Remember our little game? Lie three times to receive the goblet of truth. The paradox of life in the land of the dead! You lied three times and spoke truth in the same breath. Typically, the three lies break the goblet and render it useless, but your accidental blunder did something else. It... it cracked it and remade it at once. In a moment.”
“I spoke the true untruth. A paradox is required to make sense of it all. Regardless, Ashipattle was there. He led with the questions that I’m sure you no doubt force fed him during his accursed imprisonment in a beast he’d already slain.”
“Very astute. But I’d assumed you’d stick with just untruth and the goblet would be yours in useless shards as I decapitated your ugly mug from your even uglier body. But no. The goblet made into a paradoxical moment, of being made and undone. For one such as me who is always cooked right back anew, your...” he paused, put both his hands beneath his chin and pressed up in pretend decapitation as he made a strange clucking sound as if my sword had been a cock. “Your decapitation freed my life blood right into that cup. Right into those filled in cracks, that unbroken breaking. You fool. You fool! The worm’s sacrifice was for naught. Whatever you stumbled into doing made me even greater. For now, I am in you. You drank me along with the worm. And even the tiniest bit of dark is enough to dampen any light. An absence, eh?”
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