3. In the Shadows of Hades
His mind turned blank once
more, as barren and cold as the heart of winter in the inhospitable lands of
the North. The fleeting moment in Atlantis had vanished, and that livid,
sinister hand had dragged him into the deepest reaches of the Earth, to the eternal
prison of silence and solitude: dark Hades.
'The boat advanced inexorably over the waters of the Styx, solitary, towards the darkness, in the silence of the eternal night, broken only by the tolling of his lyre, which made the branches of the trees draw back, and the vermin hide in silence behind the thickets. The nine golden strings trembled at the caress of his hands, and their ripples became entangled in the veils of silence, weaving crystalline nets in the air and casting flashes of light that tore through the fabric of the darkness. Orpheus fought his way through the dark mists, in search of his beloved…
‘"Oh, Gods! I seek her whom ye took too soon. The strength of my love shall break beyond thy distant walls,” Orpheus warned with an altered voice, his gaze directed towards the dark sky.‘To the darkness of the firmament, suddenly, was joined a painful silence which, nevertheless, echoed in his ears, mixed with the sound of the strings, resonating in the distance as if veiled voices from a world beyond were answering him. His fingers slid harmoniously between the strings and his gaze now remained fixed upon the almost inert surface of the river.
‘"Sweet Styx, beloved current, at once sinister and celestial, sentinel of the Shadows,” his voice, now steady, became a languid melody, a whisper that the sombre waters welcomed into their eternal silence, “light my path and allow me to reach her, and I shall surrender my soul and my body, my entire life, in the Realm of Deep Silence."’
‘… He fought his way through the dark mists, in search of his beloved…’ To Eirik, the last echoes of his dream were still resonating in his head when he finally returned to the world of consciousness.
Before him, in the distance, lay nothing but a vast, opaque
mass of whitish vapour, impenetrable to the sight, concealing whatever lurked
behind its veil. Seated upon one of the banks of the frigid current, beside his
boat grounded in the mud, he had already extracted and buried the second of the
pentacle seeds. A tiny stalk was blackening rapidly in its first sprout upon
that damp, cold earth. As he stirred the mire to cover the seed, a strange
effluvium was released: a herbaceous and wild fragrance that did not belong to
the heaths of Skellig. It was the scent of lavender—an aroma of legends and
lands of eternal sun that seemed to confirm how far he was from his own world;
but the fragrance, unable to endure in that tomb-like air, withered as quickly
as it had risen, leaving upon his fingers only the fleeting echo of a distant
purity. Its brittle stem traced the silhouette of a dull, feigned smile,
perhaps a reflection of his own sorrow. There remained only to resume his march
towards the interior of the cave he could discern ahead, once the white mist
had dissipated to reveal the only passable path in all that landscape.
I observed that the river’s current became slow, heavy, and
indecisive, yet it followed its own uninterrupted course. I rescued my vessel
from amongst the reeds and continued my journey along the narrow stream. The
interior of that immense cavern I perceived as an unsettlingly sombre sinkhole,
though it allowed one to guess where the walls stood at the sides and the
irregular height of the ceiling. Its path was sinuous, exhausting, and in my
head dark omens began to swirl that those waters would lead me nowhere.
Soon there appeared a rift in the middle of nowhere, barely
illuminated at its centre by a weak light coming from its silver compass; a
cavity even darker than the night itself, narrow and inaccessible. Suddenly, I
heard a roar amongst the rocks, like a mournful lament seeking a desperate
answer.
Eirik pushed the boat towards the tunnel where the river
sank into the very bowels of the rock. The cavern walls closed in around him,
dripping with black water that rang with metallic echoes. The confined,
oppressive atmosphere brought to mind the ancient songs of the skalds
concerning Beowulf. He imagined the Geatish hero descending into the underwater
cave, that sanctuary of horrors where Grendel’s mother lay in wait within the
liquid darkness. That cave, too, had reeked of ancient death and forgotten
stone.
He thought also of the fearsome Caorthannach, the mother of
demons, the ogress whom Hel had succeeded in banishing from the cliffs of
Skellig into the eternal abyss. If they had been overcome by strength of will,
he could not allow fear to anchor him to the shore.
A triple-throated growl, as deep as an earthquake, made the
stalactites vibrate above his head. A few yards away, perched upon a rocky
ledge that forced the river to narrow, loomed Cerberus. The guardian of Hades
was a mass of taut muscle and bristling fur, exhaling a foetid steam. His six
yellow eyes searched the blackness, hunting for any trace of warmth or life.
Eirik felt his heart hammering against his ribs. To row
with force would be futile; the beast would spring before he could take two
strokes. He laid down the oar with extreme care and reached for the mark on his
cheek, where the Sowil rune seemed to pulse, before touching the timber of his
boat to invoke the essence of Hagalaz.
'Hagalaz... Sowil...' he
whispered in a barely audible galdr, a rhythmic chant seeking to entwine the
order of the sun with the chaos of the hail.
In that instant, reality appeared to warp. The sun-rune did
not emit a blinding glare; instead, Eirik channelled it to refract what little
light remained, whilst Hagalaz condensed the cavern’s moisture around him. Bit
by bit, a white, dense mist, as glacial as the heart of an iceberg, began to
sprout from the sides of the boat. From the wood itself and the biting air
arose a strange effluvium—a zesty fragrance and the ancient cedarwood that
clashed against the beast’s stench of sulphur. It was a noble, dry scent,
seemingly creating a bubble of purity around the vessel.
Cerberus lowered his three heads, sniffing violently. The
central head passed mere inches from where Eirik held his breath, yet the
guardian perceived only the inert chill of a passing cloud and the scent of a
frozen forest released by the magic. The beast, bewildered by the sudden shift
in temperature and the loss of the trail, let out a frustrated bark that shook
the very walls, yet he remained upon his rock, watching a current that now
appeared empty.
The boat, swathed in its cocoon of runic mist, glided in
absolute silence beneath the ledge, leaving the monster behind as it drifted
deeper into the darkness of Hades.
The roar of the water grew until it became a dull scream
when the rift, until then barely visible, tore open before him. The river,
released from its prison, engulfed the boat with implacable fury and dragged it
into the jaws of darkness. Behind him, the portal sealed with a thunderous
crash, leaving behind a silence so profound that it seemed to have erased his
very existence.
Inside the cave, an echo of laments coiled around Eirik’s
mind: moans and whispers of pain that weighed upon him like a mantle of sadness
and exhaustion. The boat, now a spectre upon invisible waters, struck against
the endless walls of the cavern until, suddenly, it ran aground.
Eirik’s eyes opened anew, disoriented, to find himself in a
place that defied all comprehension. The clamour had gradually subsided until
only a distant whistle remained, constant and weakened, like an out-of-tune
lyre string that ceases to vibrate, leaving only the weakened throes of its
lost echo behind the cracks in the walls.
At the back of the chamber, an immense figure, carved in
marble, emerged from the shadows. Its face, a mirror of the horror of the
underworld, concentrated all its fury in stony yet burning pupils that
scrutinised him. The being demanded, without words, an explanation for his
audacity, for his intrusion into the most secluded heart of Tartarus.
'A scion of Cronus’s lineage never permitteth a
human intrusion into our sacred sanctuary beyond the time needed for one of
Cerberus’s maws to devour a mortal, ' the voice of Hades suddenly
resonated with rawness and cruelty. It burst forth without warning, as if the
columns themselves had found their own throat to release a primal shriek,
extracted from a creature locked away and forgotten in time.
'Who art thou?' Eirik asked, visibly bewildered.
But immediately, to Eirik's astonishment, the answer
reached him in a completely transformed tone:
'Has someone left aught for me?' Eirik asked, his understanding clouded. The walls shuddered of a sudden. In the distance, a potent and blinding shaft of light pierced through a vast fissure that carved its way with boldness amidst the shadows of the abyss.
‘That which was once the
golden lyre of Orpheus,’
he continued, immutable and unheeding, ‘shall attend thee from this
day until thy journey’s end. Strike its strings ever with measure and wisdom,
and thou mayest go forward upon thy winding path. Flee! And for thine own sake,
look thou not behind thee!’
In that instant, that divinity, shrouded in a luminous
halo, held out an instrument that time seemed to have transformed: a harp of
dark wood, dusty and mouldy, which, nevertheless, seemed to me to shimmer as if
it had been burnished with pitch.
The silhouette of Hagalaz, my eternal companion, chiselled
with precision on one of the sides of the unusual instrument, began to glow
with an intensity that left me blind for a moment. As I took it, I felt the
weight of centuries sink into my arms.
Without being aware of it, the brush of my hand against the
strings awakened a murmur that was not born of the air, but of the wood itself.
That vibration, deep as ice cracking, ran through my fingers until it anchored
in my chest beside the triquetra, which beat with impatience. In that instant,
the harp ceased to be a dead weight in my arms to become a part of my own
breath.
Upon regaining his vision, clouded yet by that flash and
the echo of that invisible note, Eirik found the immense figure of the god had
vanished. As the deity’s silhouette dissolved into nothingness, a fold of
shadow fell briefly over the left side of his visage, concealing the socket and
masking half his countenance in a fleeting veil of darkness—a shadow that sank
into the void just before disappearing, unnoticed by the mortal.
In its place, the landscape returned to a dense gloom,
broken only by a ray of light, now subsided, which allowed the restless course
of the Styx to be discerned as it lost itself amongst mists and darkness. The
beats of his compass, constant and rhythmic, impelled him to move forward
towards that place...
- I. OVERTURE: My Name is Eirik
- II. EXORDIUM: "MYTHOS", Symphony of a Wandering Soul
- III. RESONANCE: My Story and the Secret of the Shadows
- IV. PRELUDE: Eirik's Dirth
- CHAPTER 1: Eirik and the Secret of Avalon
- CHAPTER 2: Discovery in Atlantis
- CHAPTER 3: In the Shadows of Hades
- CHAPTER 4: The Pull of Niflheim
- CHAPTER 5: The Icy Breath of Yule
- CHAPTER 6: Return to Mabon
- CHAPTER 7: Eirik and the Mystery of the Sirens
- CHAPTER 8: The Mirror of the Lake of Shadows
- CHAPTER 9: Finale
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