Dirge - Beth Byrne

Your shoe scrapes the moss from the stone. What remains resembles a curved spine, faintly glowing on the rock.
 
What use does moss have for a spine...? Hypothesis: simple mammalian organism. Unknown and unexpected: should not further engage.


She looks at it curiously for a moment longer, then continues down the path.


She feels remarkably calm about the whole "performing an arcane ritual and then being swallowed by the ground" thing, which says a lot because she's pretty sure it defied physics. Maybe it's just a delayed reaction.
 
The caves twist and wind and sometimes branch off, but it seems prudent to maintain your course.


This attitude is rewarded when you step onto... sand? It feels like sand, underfoot. Soft and gray.


Ashes.


The walls fall away - you've exited the tunnels and now stand outside. No, not outside. What you think, at first, are stars in the night sky appear to be luminous mushrooms and moss on a distant cavern ceiling, describing spirals and constellations of morbid aspect. You're on a beach. You can hear the wind and the waves, see the dark water lapping at the shore a few meters away. A lantern burns brightly, approaching on the waves.


It does, eventually, dawn on you that this cavern is impossibly vast, but that same scope is so abstract it's hard to relate it to anything. 
 
...How?


She can't even run through her usual designations.


She steps forward and peers curiously into the water, then up at the approaching light. Boat?


She's not sure it's a good thing that it seems to be coming her way with purpose, but she waits for it nonetheless. She can't exactly decide on a course of action until she has more information to go off of.
 
It's a broad beach. As you descend towards the water, you notice shapes on the sand. 


Hunched figures. Humanoid. Gray. Curled as if prostrate to something. Like they're praying in the direction of the water, these naked shades with foreheads pressed to the ground and barely anything to distinguish them.


A boat indeed approaches, half-revealed by its lantern hanging from the prow, burning with a greenish flame.


In the distance, you see something. A city. Rising spires and clocktowers on some distant island.


No... something else. Something beyond that.


A tower. An impossibly tall tower capped by a vast coin of lead, engraved with a skull. You can see it clearly, for a moment, as if you're standing in the air mere feet away. You can see it clearly, for a moment, the ominous ascent of that dark iron before you.


But it passes. The boat has crunched onto the shore and a shadowy, robed figure stands on the deck of the narrow gondola. 
 
It's not quite what she imagined, but a well-read girl like her can place these images.


She stares at the hooded figure for a moment, then walks to it. After a moment of thought, examining it closer, she says, "I'd like to board."
 
The hooded figure speaks with a dozen whispering voices in unison.


"There is a toll."
 
It makes her shudder. Rather all at once, with no great provocation except the final straw, she lets go of the idea that all things can be explained. It leaves a hollow place in her, somewhere left of center.


No matter. Most things, at least, can still be explained.


She pats her pockets, searching for a coin.
 
You find no coins. 


The ferryman stands patiently, watching.


"What is a coin?" It whispers.
 
Beth blinks slowly and frowns, looking around the cavern. Ash underfoot, bodies supine by the water, bones under moss, bones on the monolith. A helping of questionable but strong intuition. It clicks.


"A coin is matter..." she says, stooping and scooping a handful of wet ash into her palm. Packing the ash together into a vague coin shape, she continues, "and body is matter. And..."


She holds the makeshift coin out. "...matter is matter."
 
"Matter is matter," the ferryman replies. "The Law is the Law."


It points at the clump in your hand.


"This is not yet a coin."


It occurs to you that really, what a thing is physically comes from the configuration of the atoms that comprise it, the heat and pressure of its formation.  We are all stardust, so they say. 


If you were to just squeeze and focus...
 
She closes her eyes and places one hand on the other, covering the clump of ash. She focuses on the grainy feel of it and, with a twitch in her fingers, makes all the little movements she can't physically feel stop. They hang in metaphysical stasis for a tense moment, and then suddenly are sent explosively awry like an angry swarm, components rearranging themselves blazingly quickly. She almost loses concentration as it heats against her skin, but she holds still and after what probably only amounts to a second or two, something cold and hard sits in her palm.


She opens her eyes.


She opens her hands.
 
A bronze coin, perfectly formed, with a faint skull embossed on the face.


The ferryman speaks; "And now you know half the truth."


A bony hand extends to accept the toll. 
 
Beth places her first creation in the skeletal palm a little reluctantly. She feels intensely aware of everything around her, from the air brushing her skin to the traces of water interspersed between the flecks of ash underfoot. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say she feels aware of their compositions, of their essences. Matter is matter. It all rings with a kind of clarity, like her temporary lapse in hope had been the pause the ash had undergone before the flurry transformed it into gleaming coin.


"What is the other half of the truth?" she asks.
 
The ferryman merely gestures for you to board, taking hold of their oar.


"That is not mine to know, Necromancer."


The boat is strange to the touch, smooth and slightly flexible, a sickly yellow-white in the lantern's glow.


Nails. Nails from finger or tow, you realize, fused together like grotesque scales yellowed by smoke and age. 
 
Even with all the surreal goings on - rituals, bone ash beaches, caverns, possibly-vaguely-Greco-Roman-ferryman-figures, and so on - she still is able to wrinkle her nose and occupy her thoughts with something as mundane as how unsanitary this must be. Gingerly, she sits.


She accepts the title of Necromancer without comment. On the one hand, some part of her senses that if she just reached for that and then tugged this... But on the other hand, she doesn't understand how what she did with the coin really translates.


"Where does this ferry go?"
 
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The Ferryman looks to the horizon, such as it is.  Pushes off the shore and begins drawing the oar.  The water is as still as a salt lake, black and lifeless.


"Stygia, seat of the Pale Horseman," the Ferryman whispers, "and more distant shores besides, which is where you must go."


The false-stars above glimmer faintly in ominous constellations and the dry wind carries no scent, only the sound of distant voices raised in pain and fear.  All is shades of black, but you can make out somewhere... no directions, here.  Are you going south or north or west?  In any event, far on your right something akin to stormclouds seem to be gathered and roiling.


The Ferryman's motions are slow and deliberate, and you don't feel like you're traveling fast, yet the distant spires grow rapidly nearer and you can now make out other islands. 
 
Her mind stirs on that point; she's heard something somewhere about this pale horseman, read something somewhere about Stygia, but.... nothing's coming.


Context makes an educated guess easy, though. She takes news of Hades' existence with remarkable ease.


"What will I do once there?" she asks, gaze dancing around the nearby islands and weather, looking for the source of those faint cries of suffering, before settling on the ever more looming tower surmounted by a heavy lead coin.


There are dozens of other questions she wants to ask - is the nearby storm a danger? why does the ferry move so quickly? is this where souls await their fates? - but they will wait, for now.
 
"It is not the city to which you go," is the whispered reply, "and your deeds are not for me to know."


The ship fetches up against a shore of compressed bone, the tower looming in the distance.  More shades in supplication litter the island, like Pompeian dead. 
 
She rolls her eyes at the cryptic message even as her mind picks it apart.


After Beth disembarks, she stands on the shore and stares for a moment. First at the Ferryman, then at her surroundings. Her eyes are drawn to the supine forms on the ground, grey and almost stony.

"Who are you bowing to?" she wonders aloud, looking at the nearest one. Her thoughts pace forward.


She needs an objective, here, and she supposes the broadest one would be to understand what is happening. She's making progress there, in any case. Firstly, this is a world for the dead. She thinks. Probably. It's definitely called Stygia. Secondly, she has... awakened, she supposes, to some greater intuition of the world. Matter is matter. She is rather eager to do more with this, now that she thinks about it; in fact, she has rarely felt so excited.


But she also wants to understand it.


Come on, Beth. Identify a primary short term goal.


Items to learn: how ability to exert will on world functions - parameters, conditional influences?  What function does this place serve?


...Could I find people I know, here?


Right. Places to learn all that. Ferryman. Communicative but cryptic. Prone forms? Silent and motionless; unsure if animate or dead. Experimentation. Never ineffective, but time-consuming. Travel and observation. Like experimentation, effective but lengthy.


Primary short-term goal: Interrogate Ferryman (Charon?) re: items until all avenues of discussion are exhausted or withdrawn.


"Wait," she says to the Ferryman. "What is Stygia? Is this where the dead rest?"
 
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The Ferryman stares out across the dark waters.


"There is no rest, in this place"  they say, and there's some hint of emotion in the voice this time. "Disembark, Necromancer; I may not tarry here long."
 
Well, that was quick. And not very informative.


She gets herself away the boat and chews it over in her head. The prone forms don't seem to be responsive, so after glancing around, she walks without particularly knowing where. The tower draws her like a fly to a corpse.
 
With every step, you feel a weight on your shoulders.  Your footprints in the ashen ground grow deeper, your bones feel like lead.  The tower looms inevitable.


There is nothing atop that spire.  There is nothing under your feet.  You are falling into darkness and buried by miseries.  The ash is under your feet and it will fall away and all this will be dust in the void.  There is nothing within you.  There is an empty space atop the tower.  Here is where all roads converge to end.


You had a name.  The leaden coin in your hand is blank and weighty.  The restless dead rise from supplication to their knees and they beg with arms open.  Matter is matter, they whisper, and what is a soul?  The coin is blank.  You know what must be inscribed upon it.  You know where the name belongs.
 
She cups her hands around the coin for a moment, then splays her fingers wide as she tosses the lead up, pulling her palms apart as the coin abruptly suspends itself, quivering, in the air. It's as if a string was speared through it and connected the centers of her palms. As she stares intently, small pieces of lead flake away from the surface and crumble into the ambiguous air as dust, stray atoms nudged to follow their patterns just a little faster, further. Her name is etching itself upon the coin. It looks mundane, this way; shouldn't she have some fantastical, historic designation? No: Beth Byrne, in ornate lettering, will have to do.


Even though instinct has taken her, she feels lost, dejected. There is so much weight. There is so little substance. Everything is grains floating through the not. Would it not be better to lie down, to relegate herself to the slow and gentle disintegration like the praying forms which now implore her?


 As her hands clench around the coin once more, the grooves of her letters hot on her skin, she shakes her head.


Beth Byrne will fill the empty spaces.


She just, er... needs to figure out how, first. Her thoughts are addled by the stealing gloom, but she does her best to take stock of the situation, staring up at the pinnacle and wondering how to reach the empty space she knows is there. Is there a door? Are there stairs?
 
The name is carved upon the coin.


The coin is upon the tower, by act of raw will.


The name is carved upon the base of the Watchtower.


Beth Byrne is Awakened.  The weight is lifted.  Death without dying; mortality and fear replaced with power.


The Abyss between this place and the fallen world you know is clear to you now, a terrible and conscious un-being.  Equally clear the fabric of lost souls and every atom in a grain of sand. Matter is matter and some things are not. 


The Underworld convulses.  Your vision blurs, fades.


Once more you stand before that worn and pitted grave, surrounded once more by light and life and warmth.  Seconds have passed, here. 
 
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