HOMESTEAD 1.3
Learning how to cope - both generally and in-the-moment - had been something of a required skill in her past. As much as using her bugs as a crutch to shield her reactions had been helpful, the years she had spent in the Wards had come with a requisite amount of therapy, and from that she had built methods to handle things. Breaking down had always been the worst conclusion to any given crisis—it was not a privilege she had been allowed, not with the end of the world ticking like a clock in the near future.
It wasn't a privilege she'd let herself have now, for that matter.
The red pool behind her sloshed as she achingly dragged herself free. She felt the red liquid sluggishly drip into the pool below, leaving no trace of itself on her skin.
This was real.
The thought still didn't
feel particularly convincing, despite everything. It bounced off of what she had come to see as logic, with the statement accompanied by a hundred possible avenues or ways it could all be some grand smoke-and-mirrors display. Tinkertech could do so much with so little explanation for it—powers like Labyrinth, Ziggurat, they could achieve similar things, but never on that scale.
Death should feel like little else but the fragile biological machinery that makes up every person suffering a catastrophic error.
But it had been so much more. She had felt herself sink down into the earth, felt something grab tight around
her, around the mass of indistinct feeling that she had become. She had felt herself get dragged along and down, ferried on by currents she could neither see nor completely feel, and then she felt herself return. Alive.
It had been spiritual, utterly incomprehensible, and it was real.
If it wasn't, then what was the real separation from reality? All of this was
real, bitingly so, the sheer size of everything dwarfed what she thought was possible and the experiences she'd just undergone had felt as real as any day back on Earth Bet ever had. If this was all a fabricated illusion, all some sordid, highly-specific Master/Stranger situation, it was already so real that separating it from reality was pointless.
Taylor took in a breath, much shakier than she should've allowed. Let it out with almost clenched teeth, air whistling over her bottom lip. Her ears started to ring, a low drone of warning, the onset of something like panic or anxiety. She focused her attention elsewhere, away from her thoughts, opting to instead watch her fingers. She twitched each digit, one-by-one, and felt the fluttering noise that precluded a mental breakdown begin to recede.
It was so much harder without her bugs. They had offered tangible distractions, a thousand tiny things to preoccupy herself with or immerse herself in. Without them she felt more naked than ever, more vulnerable, in less control of herself which, for all intents and purposes, was an utterly
sick bit of irony. She had worried so much about her passenger being responsible for her worst habits, and even if she had found some peace with it, the notion had never truly left her mind.
Especially not after what she could remember of the fight against Scion.
But now her passenger was gone. It was a truth she'd probably known since she'd first arrived here—the complete absence of her powers had never been so stark, not under any amount of power nullification. It was gone, and with it a fair portion of the shortcuts to keeping herself calm. She knew the strategies, knew the coping mechanisms, the way to keep the panic from fully taking her, but they were
slow, clumsy, instincts she had never bothered to develop.
The keening finally receded, and with it Taylor felt herself regain some sort of balance. A tenuous one, one she didn't want to risk upsetting, but enough that she felt like she could begin to process. The experiences she went through played out on a reel in her head, the sharp echo of pain, the death, Zagreus himself—would he get on okay, without her there?
Probably. At the same time, it wasn't like she should be worrying too much about him. She had her own problems to deal with at this point.
What else did she know? Bits and pieces, enough to paint something of a picture. The Greek afterlife was, apparently, real—with gods of the dead around every corner. She had emerged from the Pool of Styx - the one she had just presumably climbed out of right now - and nobody had good enough answers for
why.
Was she even in her own dimension, anymore? She... doubted it. Or if she was, she was about to like the bulk majority of the gods
significantly less than she already did, considering the lack of intervention when the planet was at risk of being destroyed. No, it was probably best to think of this as a clean and thorough break; past logic might only muddy things, make her take on wrong assumptions. Things worked differently here, and she would just have to adapt.
Reaching out with her hand, Taylor scrabbled against the hewn rock wall and valiantly tried to pull herself to her feet. Her knees buckled the second she tried to put any weight on it, accompanied by a flare of disorienting pain that brought her back down to her hands and knees, nearly toppling face-down into the floor before she could slam her hand down beneath her torso. She breathed in again, easing herself over onto her hip and thigh - where the pain was less and she wouldn't have to be stuck mid-push-up - and reached down for the hem of her toga. It took a few tugs, but she rucked the fabric up to the point where she could stare at her lower legs.
Lurid, violent purple bruises licked and swirled along almost every surface of it. The bruises painted themselves in starbursts, exactly where she had been hit the hardest by the explosions, and despite not being able to, she could guess they reached up to about mid-thigh. Even more bizarre, beneath her gaze, they were fading, purples receding back into just reddish, angry smears, though the skin around her ankles and calves looked like it would take a bit longer to heal.
Regeneration, then. Was it a property of the pool, or just her? She'd have to find out, but later.
She glanced down the hallway, trying to find her bearings. It was quiet, a little too quiet—Hypnos certainly hadn't been waiting for her upon arrival, and the hallway was absent of even a single shade. At the far end of it, she could see where Hypnos was, and though it was too far out to make out his features, his cowed posture and the fact that Hades was looming over him, something gripped in one hand, made it clear he probably wasn't in the best place.
Taylor pressed the hem of her toga back down her legs, ignoring the way the fabric now settled overly sensitive against the skin of her legs. She grit her teeth, called on all the stubborn willpower she had, gripped at the wall once again, and forced herself painfully to her feet. It was a struggle to do, with each pound of weight making her knees shake for a few moments before adjusting, but by the time she was upright the heady ache had faded into the back of her head as more of a persistent stinging, like very acute pins and needles.
She reached towards her hip, not thinking too much about it, and her fingers met fabric. It took a few moments, the cogs in her brain clicking and stuttering as it tried to reconcile the lack of baton holster with the fact that she had been very much armed when she'd died, and presumably if her toga of all things had gone with her, so should the weapon, right?
It would seem that she was wrong. Had she dropped it? The explosions had been quick, one-after-the-other, and she couldn't really recall much of the incident itself. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch for her to have fumbled it, all things considered, but its absence was both worrying and not helping her feel any less vulnerable. She hadn't exactly felt
safe carrying around that sword, but it had been better than this.
Hopefully Zagreus would pick it up, or that it had just relocated itself somehow. She didn't want to be the one responsible for losing one of the Prince of the Underworld's personal items.
Using the wall as a crutch, Taylor started to make her way down the hallway. Each step came easier than the last, with more strength and less weakness, but the first couple of paces were a fight. The closer she got, the more of Hypnos' demeanour became clear. His face was twisted up in sheer discomfort and mild terror, his lip bitten firmly beneath the top row of his teeth, with both hands white-knuckling the edges of what looked to be a box of scrolls.
"...all of it,
redacted?!" Hades' voice finally reached her as something more than angry, unintelligible noise, nearly a roar. "Who—Nyx? But, no, she wouldn't be so
brazen. You could find nothing else?!"
Hypnos jolted as Hades' attention pulled back to him, his head bobbing wildly in a nod. "Yes, Lord Hades, sir! Nothing, it's all, uhm, redacted! Who brought her into the Underworld, who killed her, time and date of death—lineage, everything!"
Hades' fist met the surface of his desk with a ringing
bang, the noise bouncing around the hall like a thunderclap. "How?! I am the highest authority in this place!"
Taylor's fingers left the wall, startling her. She'd been caught up enough in the conversation not to notice that she had reached the end of the hallway and was now properly transitioning into the main area itself. Almost as though in response to her passing through such a threshold, Hades' eyes snapped around to her, gaze just as heavy as it had been the first time.
"You!" he barked, sounding utterly furious. "Come here this instant! Let me show you something!"
Taylor flicked her gaze across the hall. Cerberus was still tucked up beside Hades, utterly disinterested in the racket, Nyx was nowhere to be found, neither was Megaera or Dusa. It was only her, Hades, and Hypnos.
Keeping the trepidation off of her face, she approached, closing the distance between herself and a desk that was easily nearly as tall as she was. She watched Hypnos out of the corner of her eye, the floating god looking nervously between the two of them.
Coming to a stop just before the desk, Taylor stared up at Hades. Wordlessly, he thrust his arm out, a slip of paper held tightly in his hand, wrinkled and deformed from where he had clearly clenched down. Taking it into her own hand, she smoothed her thumb out over the wrinkles and stared down at the text scrawled across it.
It was in Greek, presumably ancient, not that she knew if there were noteworthy typographic changes between the two. Ancient Greek which she could, as far as she could tell, perfectly read as though she was fluent in it.
Which she wasn't. Or hadn't been, she supposed, considering she was now.
DEATH LOG #1
T̶̡̺͂À̴͕͈Ỳ̷̱́L̶͍̈́͗ͅŐ̷̪̯̋R̴̲̓̐ W̵̛̞͎̤̝̣̣̬̱͊̐̋͂̓È̸̡̻̜̤͚̣̮̭͛̐̽͒̈́͗̽̾͘Á̷̘̻̖̞̮̥͖̦̝̅͋̈́̈́̊̃V̴̛̬̺̲̊̉̆͜Ȇ̸̫̣́R̴̛͓̠̟͈͗͘͜ S̷̳̖̭̹̻͔̝̩̊̄̐̄̇̿̍Ķ̷̲̝͑͗̾̈́I̷͚͕̅̆̀̄͝T̸̛͍̖̫̬̈́̋̃̊̽͐́͜ͅT̸̛͓̫̦̈́̓́Ę̷̣̥̫̣̖̟̊R̷̲̭̖̿͆̃̌͘͠ K̶̖͇̖͔̠̓͛͌̽͌̀̔́͊̈́͘H̵̡̡̛̥̻̮͈̙͕̥͙̠̠̼̹͓͒́̈́̃͋͊̈́̐͜Ẽ̵̦̭͇̪̯̟̙͕̘̒̎̓̾̑̈́͆̐̈́͘͘͘͠͝͠ͅP̶̨̛͉̯͍̪͈̤̪̤̯͎͎̘̽̊̽̓R̴̢̰̠̩̹͚̯̀̈̈͝I̴̹̘̾ Ȟ̵͉͉È̵̝B̸͇͝Ȩ̶͉̊R̷̦̰̿̊T̷̝̾̎
DATE OF DEATH: [REDACTED]
CAUSE OF DEATH: BRAIN HEMORRHAGE DUE TO FOREIGN OBJECTS PENETRATING THE SKULL.
KILLER: [REDACTED]
GUIDE: [REDACTED]
DATE OF BIRTH: [REDACTED]
PLACE OF BIRTH: [REDACTED]
LINEAGE: [REDACTED]
"Is this supposed to be mine?" she asked, glancing back up towards Hades.
"Do you, perhaps, see any problems with it?" Hades seethed, his eyes focused wholly on Hypnos.
"Everything's redacted," she remarked plainly, dragging her eyes back up to where her name should've been. Five independent collections of letters and shifting characters that occasionally flickered to form names she had been called by—Taylor, Weaver, then back to Taylor, before jumping to Khepri. It was never consistent, and reminded her of a small swarm of ants in the way the text shifted and churned.
"
Quite," Hades spat darkly, eyes finally turning back to her. He held out his hand wordlessly, and she placed the sheet back into it, each meaty digit of his hand clenching down tight enough that, for a time, she thought he might just ball it up and throw it away. "Someone has superseded my authority to conceal your nature from me," he continued, voice growing darker and darker, more affronted with each new word. "They should have simply declared
war on me, if that wanted my attention so much. There are only so many people who could do something like this, and I
will find out who did this. If not for the war, I would scour the realm this very instant!"
"The war?" Was she still in her dimension?
Hades' gaze turned flinty. "A long winter has destabilized the mortal communities on the surface," he informed her tightly, and something about how he said the word made her think that he was withholding something about it. "They fight wars over dwindling grain and liquid water, and with each day we become more and more inundated with the dead. It's an unprecedented amount of death, and has left the Underworld...
swamped, especially with the inclusion of the foolish boy's obsession with escaping, taking important resources away from processing fresh souls."
There was a loud, sharp
clap from somewhere behind her.
"You called?" Zagreus yelled, voice carrying. Taylor swivelled to find him jogging up towards them, the red fluid of the pool still dripping from his clothes.
"What are you doing back?" she called out, frowning at him.
Something almost sheepish crossed over his expression, his jog faltering into a more sedate walk. "
Well, when you died, I was worried?" A short, awkward laugh escaped him, mostly under his breath. "It looked really painful, and you took such a long time to fully be taken by the Styx. So I got revenge for you on the bombers and, er..."
"Let yourself die," Taylor finished for him, her thoughts grinding to a sudden halt.
"Right!" Zagreus said, beaming her a relieved smile.
Why was he like this? He just... got killed, endured all of that pain and misery, just to check up on her? What sort of person just
did that? Sure, death might mean very little considering it didn't seem to particularly stick, but
still, he had just... given up on his attempt? Committed assisted suicide with help from the hostile dead?
He was insane. Utterly detached from reality.
But then again, maybe she was too.
"If you're
done," Hades grumbled, leaning forward to loom more completely over both herself and Zagreus. "I believe it's pertinent we discuss what we'll be doing from here."
"What's to discuss, Father?" Zagreus shot back, pulling his arms over his chest as he did, already looking defensive.
Hades
sighed, a sort of exasperated noise that seemed to vent a not-insignificant amount of his previous tension. "Between your futile
flailing, the war, and other, related problems I've been dealing with, it would seem I must conscript help to identify the source of...
Taylor's"—and he said her name like it was foul on the tongue, spoken with an odd inflection, like he'd never heard it before—"origin. In this case, I am bestowing that duty onto the woman herself."
Taylor blinked, opening her mouth to interject.
"You may accompany Zagreus on a more permanent basis," Hades interrupted, eyes narrowing at her. She shut her mouth with a click, keeping her silence. "Hopefully, when he ruins some other
priceless fixture, it may give us answers, both to your origin and your nature."
"That was
once, Father," Zagreus grit out, sounding annoyed. "It was
one pot!"
"And what of the countless others you have broken since?" Hades cut in, voice dry and unimpressed.
"Surely you aren't comparing a pythos made by
Daedalus to the darkness-knows-how-many decorative pots you clutter the place up with?" Zagreus retorted glibly.
Hades' expression curdled into a sneer. "You understand the value of
just one pot, then?" he said, and out of the corner of her eye Taylor watched as Zagreus came to realize the corner he had put himself in. "That it was priceless, that
you broke it?"
"I was a child!" Zagreus responded, flustered.
"You should have known better!" Hades barked, slamming his fist back down onto the table.
There was no clever retort, no response, just silence. Zagreus stared long and hard at his father, shifting back on his heels after a moment, his breath guttering out of him in a sigh. "Right," he said, tone callous. "Always should know about things you refuse to teach me. I'm not putting up with this—I think I need to vent some of this by trying to escape again." He turned his head towards her, staring her dead in the eyes, the easy-going persona he wore like a shield now absent, leaving only someone weary and annoyed. "Want to tag along? Seems like it's your job now."
"You'll have to do this one
alone, boy," Hades growled out, forestalling Zagreus' argument with a raised hand, palm outward. "The contractors have finished with her room, and she needs to acquaint herself with it. You may drag her along to watch your folly sometime
else, when her duties do not conflict with
your foolishness."
Zagreus raised an eyebrow her way, as if questioning if his father was telling the truth.
Taylor just shrugged, not sure of it herself.
"Fine then," Zagreus huffed, turning around.
"Did you get the sword?" Taylor asked before he could go.
Zagreus glanced back her way. "Well, no. It returns to the, uh, pavilion whenever I die, and I'm assuming the same here? They just find their way back home, and they can't come with us since there are no weapons allowed in the House. At least not for most people, anyway." He turned again, glancing down the long, horizontal hallway that connected to the lounge, Zagreus' room, and at the very end, what looked like a small, untended garden, blockaded by a metal gate. "I'll see you later, mate!"
Then he was gone, fiery footprints left in his wake.
"I worry about his future," Hades grunted without much heat.
Taylor bit back on the urge to remind him he certainly wasn't helping his future prospects, swallowing the words before they could slip free of her tongue. "My room?" she requested instead, swivelling herself around to look at Hades, his oddly-braided beard, the flinty eyes set beneath bushy eyebrows. Even if he wasn't the size of a giant, he would still be intimidating in a sort of 'mountain man' way—roughly-built, with just a little too much mass and untended body hair to be what people thought of as civilized.
"Dusa will guide you to the Eldest Sigil in the Administrative Chamber, which you have now been allowed access to. Do not touch anything there other than the sigil, which has been adjusted to transport you to your new lodgings as requested." Hades trailed off, glancing towards her, his gaze heavy, but not particularly angry, not as it had been. "Otherwise, obtain a new name for yourself."
She couldn't help it. "
Excuse me?"
His stare darkened, features twisting. "I will not tarnish the status of godhood by allowing someone with as barbarous a name as
Taylor into our ranks. Find a fitting name, or I will find one for you."
"It's my name!"
"It is the name of a dead woman!" Hades snapped, nearly rising from his seat. "You were once a mortal, we have established as much. I know not what you experienced in the world, I do not know what drove you to assume this was all smoke and mirrors, though from the way your own essence has settled, it would seem you have started to accept the
reality of your situation. Furthermore, I
do not care, you are no longer a mortal, and you will
act like it!"
"Lord Hades?" Dusa's voice was wary, nervous, and located above her and to the right. Taylor glanced up, finding her glimpsing down at them from up high, not quite in the rafters but close enough that she could make a valiant effort to rush towards them if something was thrown at her.
...She would have to apologize to Dusa about how she behaved, wouldn't she? She'd been... too distracted to consider the lives of other people in this place. If this was a cult, was Dusa a victim or an enabler? She acted in her capacity as a servant, but she hadn't let herself consider the ramifications of it. She had been dismissive, because it had been easier than considering the lives of those who she thought were brainwashed in the first place.
"Both of you," Hades began, shifting back into his seat with a throaty huff. "Get out of my sight. Dusa, show
her to her room. Otherwise, you know what I
expect out of you."
Dusa fluttered a bit before diving down, coming to a stop just an arm's length away from her head. Hades had already glanced away from them, treating his dismissal as tantamount, and it probably was. She could still remember the pressure he'd exerted on her, the way it had made her buckle, and the fact that it was an experience she never wanted to endure again.
"Al—alright, uh, Miss Taylor?" Dusa babbled, glancing her way as she started to strafe forwards and towards the hallway opposite to the one leading towards the lounge. "If you could, uhm, follow me?"
If this was her new reality, she was going to have to deal with it. Work with it like she had the Wards, try to make connections. There was no apocalypse that meant she could justify avoiding relationships with, no grand problem she had to direct most of her focus to. This was, as far as she could tell, eternal.
Breathing out through her nose, Taylor started to make her way towards the archway, forcing a tired smile to her face. "Alright, lead the way, Dusa."
Dusa puttered on ahead, with Taylor keeping close behind her. They left the open area for another hallway, and almost immediately she spotted a blonde man dressed entirely in green, a spear held at one side, standing across the hallway from them. He wore an outer cloak of some kind that covered the majority of his body, but what she could see of it was thoroughly muscled, not quite heavy-set, but muscular to the point where it's the product of something more serious than a lifestyle choice. It was something he would've had to work to obtain, which did raise the question of whether the dead could meaningfully exercise, or if they were just physically static.
It was a small blessing that, one way or another, she had died in peak physical condition.
He smiled politely towards them. "Good evening, Dusa," he said, voice surprisingly gentle and light, carrying across the distance between them.
"M—mister Achilles!" Dusa flustered, a sheer, blotchy flush crawling over her face, which made up the bulk majority of her. "Good evening!" She fluttered forward, closing some of the distance, and Taylor obligingly followed behind her.
Wait—Achilles?
That Achilles? He did look the part, if nothing else, but it still sent her reeling to realize she was looking at the man primarily known for being near-impossible to kill. She had
read the Iliad for English during her graduation year, and for the most part it was just that, a
story. A lot of make-believe, embellishing what was likely an otherwise utterly mundane war.
Yet, here he was. Smiling politely at her. Completely and utterly real.
His eyes flicked to her next, accompanied by a curious tilt of his head. "And is this our newest resident I have heard so much about?"
Dusa's snakes trembled with excitement. "Yes! Thi—this, this is uhm, Lady Taylor! Our newest goddess!"
Achilles bowed his head in greeting towards her, his smile never flickering. "It's a pleasure to meet you, Lady Taylor. I am Achilles, I was hired for the purpose of training young Zagreus in the art of warfare."
"Was the Trojan War real?" She couldn't help the words, they slipped out before she could properly bite back on them. "The—the mortals, they have a story called the Iliad, which depicts it," she hastened to clarify, cursing her own sudden problems with impulsive questions. "I'm just, it's taking a while to accept that this is all real."
Of all the things Achilles did, he just smiled. A smile filled with empathy and shared experiences, one drawn tight across his face like a bowstring, like it could slip down into a miserable frown at any notice. "As much as I would prefer it not to be, the tragedy of the Trojan War is quite real. Perhaps a touch different than what I remember, but then us mortals tend to let stories... drift, with time."
"Uhm!" Dusa blurted, voice still squeaky and nervous. She'd have to work on that, hopefully make Dusa not see her as a threat, considering she was going to have to interact with her for the foreseeable future. "Sorry, but uh, we
really have to get you to your room! Hades does not like it if we dawdle."
Achilles acquiesced with a bow of his head. "Until next time, Miss Taylor."
"You as well, Achilles." The words felt odd on her tongue, utterly foreign. She felt like she was LARPing or something similar, role-playing along to half-remembered fragmentary mythos of a culture she had no real interest in engaging with. There'd been too many other problems to give Zeus' fetishistic plights the time of the day, back then.
Glancing away, Taylor finally let herself take stock of the hallway proper. At one end was a series of pedestals holding up a mix of ornamental objects with a large set of doors behind them, inscribed with details Taylor couldn't make out at the distance she was at. At the other, the hallway ended in a balcony, with a railing that overlooked the red rivers that coursed through the area. Nestled into the stone wall not too far from said balcony was a door, with a stone mural - with accompanying skull - framed above it.
Dusa picked up the pace again, floating away, with Taylor following sedately behind her. In places, presumably to hide the stony, cave-like walls that encircled the area, someone had hung huge draperies, gray in colour, with tassels shaped like what one might think of when the word 'bone' was uttered in their presence. It looked as absurd as the rest of the decor, but then by that very fact it made it almost seem normal.
They arrived at the door within a few seconds, Dusa swinging down to tuck one snake around the knob and tug the thing open after a few aborted attempts. She glanced back towards Taylor, smiling nervously at her, before pressing her face against the door and easing it open, the entire thing giving a low, miserable
creak as it did.
Her first glimpse into the Administrative Chamber painted a stark picture. Mountainous piles of scrolls, some tucked away in shelves, others seemingly just stacked on top of each other, framed the majority of the square room. Interspersed throughout were desks, tucked behind which were shades who didn't even pause to glance up at them. There were a pair of almost comically modern filing cabinets off to one side, with what looked to be a genuine
water fountain, fitted with the red water and everything, shoved off into the corner between the wall and the cabinet. At the far back of the room was a raised platform, no taller than a single step, with a circular portion in the center and a variety of candles strewn almost haphazardly around it.
Passing in through the threshold after Dusa shot her another look, Taylor gently eased the door shut behind her, listening for it clicking back into place. The dull murmur of the chambers outside faded in an instant, replaced instead by a distant sound of scribbling quills and quiet humming. Dusa went on ahead, floating towards the candle-strewn platform, and Taylor found herself following with nothing else to do, peeking at the various papers strewn over the rows upon rows of desks. Most of them seemed to be similar 'death reports' to the one they had on her, though all of these were filled in much more thoroughly, and without any redacted parts.
Turning her head away, Taylor eased herself up the step and onto the raised platform, approaching the circular portion wordlessly.
"So, uhm," Dusa began, twitching. "For those of us who can't phase, like, well, Lady Nyx and Lord Thanatos, we have to use Eldest Sigils to get around to different parts of the Underworld! To use it, you just have to stand on it and sort of... really think very hard about where you want to go? Like, think 'I want to go to my room'! Okay?"
Dusa's full attention turned onto her. Big, doe-eyed, and utterly polite.
"Yeah," Taylor managed to get out, fumbling with the word. She stared warily at the circle before easing one foot onto it, then the other. Dusa stared at her, full of apprehension, and Taylor ran the words she said back over in her head. She shut her eyes, and tried
very hard to think about wanting to be in her room, despite not knowing what it looked like nor particularly actually wanting to go there. She wasn't exactly sure where she
did want to go, but at this point it was 'anywhere but here'.
When she opened her eyes, the Administrative Chamber was gone, and in its place what looked like a storage room. The room was oddly curved, shaped like half of a larger loop, with black stone walls and floors. Most of its size came from its length, easily as long as the hallway between the red pool and Hades' desk, and it had already been somewhat outfitted. There were a few shelves, four or five cubbies tall, a rickety-looking wooden chair with a throw pillow for a seat, a bed tucked away at the far end, and a rug that had clearly been haphazardly strewn out across the floor, bunched up on one side due to it not quite fitting. Some of the shelves had things in them, a half-dozen errant books and baubles, and there were a conspicuous amount of pots cluttered next to them. The area was mostly lit by orange-burning candles, which had been more or less placed
where-ever, and showed no sign of actually melting.
A closer glance revealed more as well. Next to her bed was a cauldron of some kind, swirling with an indistinct purple liquid, and there was a sole window, so caked with dust she nearly hadn't noticed it, directly above the headboard of her bed. Her bed itself wasn't as large as Zagreus', but was certainly larger than a single, looking over-stuffed with the small hill of comforters and pillows that had been left on it. The light from the window was a sickly green, but it barely penetrated the layer of dust.
Easing herself forward - and glancing back just in time to see a similar sort of raised, circular platform that had been on top of the platform in the Administrative Chamber flicker and dull, reddish energy sluggishly bleeding out of it - Taylor squished up against one wall to avoid the four shelves right next to the entrance to her room, passed over the wrinkly, out-of-place wine-red rug and chair combo, and came to a stop next to her bed. There was another door that she hadn't been able to see from the entrance to her room, tucked into a corner, and when she wandered over to open it, it led rather directly into a small, box-shaped room with a hole in the middle, half-filled with water, a gaudy bronze faucet - skull-shaped, of course - right above it. There was also a toilet off to the side, which raised several questions about her digestional tract that she wasn't very interested in answering as of this current time.
She shut the door to the bathroom with little fanfare.
Pacing over to the bed, she leaned up, pried her fingers beneath the lip of the window, and managed to find the latch. Pushing it aside, the hinges on the window screamed miserably as she shoved it open, managing to haul herself up by using the bed as a sort of stepping stool.
Tartarus laid sprawled out far, far beneath her. The window looked out of the side of a vast tower, so high the mess of temples and buildings below looked distant and utterly tiny. Green motes of light flickered up from below, and she let her eyes drift up, towards the rocky roof of Tartarus not ten or so feet away from her current position.
Oh.
Now she understood why he wanted her to go to her room.
He was making a point. She blinked, glanced down one last time before pushing away from the sill, collapsing bodily onto her bed, which squeaked from the impact, sending a small plume of dust out from beneath the mattress and onto the floor.
She stared up at the ceiling for a moment, mind blank.
What was she even going to do?
Again, as though summoned by the mere thought, there was a low, shuddering rattle of bones. Twisting around to look in the direction of the sound, Taylor watched a skeletal hand emerge from the cauldron next to the foot of her bed, a piece of paper clutched between its index finger and thumb.
What.
It took another few seconds for the sight to properly process, but when it did she buried the sense of absurdity beneath pragmatism and shuffled forward, across the slightly dusty confines of her bedspread, and reached out to take it. The skeleton let go of the note willingly, dropping back down into the purple fluid below in an instant, leaving barely a ripple.
Dear Taylor,
I know you still struggle with adapting to your environment, so I went ahead and asked my child, Charon, to get you a welcome gift. The Well of Charon that you received this letter through is merely the first part of this gift, but the second part will require some money. You will find a small bag of coins on one of the shelves, and you will simply need to drop one of them into the well, at which point the gift I asked of him to acquire for you will be given.
Sincerest regards,
Nyx.
...Okay. She could do that. Shuffling off of the bed, she glanced towards the shelves, wandering over. There were a few bags, though all she had to do was pat them down to check what was inside. One felt like it had round, soft orbs in it, another felt full of sand, but the third ended up being the bag of coins, clinking merrily as she lifted it from its place. Brushing the dust from the russet cloth, she loosened the loop of golden cord and opened the top, revealing several dozen golden coins within, inscribed neatly with Hades' symbol. She fished one out, fastened the top, and placed the bag back down where she'd found it.
Wandering over to the cauldron, Taylor stared down at it. The purple fluid inside seemed mostly content to swirl ominously around in circles, not strong enough to be particularly blatant, but enough that it felt vaguely
alive and unsettling. Wordlessly, she flipped her hand around and dropped the coin into it, a ripple of liquid passing over the surface as it fell into its depths.
A short moment later, the skeletal hand emerged, with a glass bottle grasped firmly in its fist, another note folded and tied to its stem. Her reflection stared back at her from it, slightly distorted by the sunny, orange fluid within, but that—it couldn't be her reflection. Surely not.
She didn't remember having purple eyes.
It took a lot not to flinch away from it, to banish the unsettled feeling gathering in her stomach and just swipe the bottle haphazardly from the outstretched skeletal hand, which obligingly vanished back into the fluid. It could've been a trick of the light, but each time she caught herself looking at her reflection, the purple eyes remained, however distorted her features became in the glossy surface of the bottle.
Carefully untying the small length of thread from the paper note, Taylor unfolded it.
Taylor,
This is nectar, the food of the gods. It is rather popular among the Underworld, a delicacy, especially when things such as ambrosia are nearly impossible to find. I personally do not have much of a taste for it, though I believe my children don't share my opinion on the matter.
I know you avoid our food and our drink, and I do not begrudge you necessarily. But I do hope you enjoy this vintage, if nothing else.
Nyx.
She reread the letter a few more times, not finding the answers to her questions in it, but still feeling oddly... happy, about receiving it. Her attention kept slipping, though, kept being dragged back to the bottle, to her reflection, to the purple eyes that stared back at her.
She dropped the nectar and letter on the bed and turned towards the bathroom. She hadn't seen a mirror in there, but then she hadn't really checked much beyond what she could see through the door. It wouldn't be outlandish to keep one in there, and regardless of how spotty candlelight could be, it at least wouldn't be orange-tinged.
Striding over to the door, she pulled it open and stepped through, turning around the corner and, lo and behold, finding a mirror. It was one of those old-time silver mirrors, mounted on the wall with big, fat iron screws set into stone. The reflection looked much clearer than it had in the bottle.
Then, so did the purple eyes, too. Her eyes were
purple, an identical purple to the motes of darkness she'd seen Zagreus picking up, a sort of dark-ish amethyst. She crept closer, one hand reaching out to touch gently against the silvery surface while the other reached up to pull at her lower lid, revealing the red of her socket.
She blinked a few times.
The purple eyes remained.
What the fuck.
edit: or is perhaps Melpomene more appropriate?
