more three sentence!
I tried to cut this to make it less space-consuming on an flist, but the cut-tool was not cooperating, sorry everyone!
[Beowulf, Freawaru, the spear snickers / the wicked arrow / narrowly flickers / and nicks the marrow]
They named her peace-weaver, and so she is. She sits in the hall and helps allot gold and brews mead and at night tells her husband with her body how much she desires him, and for him to keep the alliance. But sometimes, she takes his spear from the wall and tests the strength of her arm, and thinks what else she could have been.
[Beowulf, the wailing woman, heroes have the whole earth as their tomb.]
The voice is hers, but the grief she lends it to is of the entire earth. The sea he swam, the rocks he climbed, the lowliest grasses he ran across - all these and more mourn the passing of a hero. There is a comfort in this universal sharing, even as her own insignificant heart breaks over and over again.
[Game of Thrones, Sansa/Jaime, with the perfect armor/with the perfect dream]
They bring him before the court stripped of his golden armor - the gold cloak is long gone, and the ghost of his hand twitches - and weaponless, but unbound, unsure if he is an enemy of war or a guest. He can't help looking around for weak points, escape routes, but then he looks up and remembers why he is here.
The Queen in the North smiles at him, and stretches out her hand.
[Greek Mythology, Apollo/Hyakinthos, I think I made you up inside my head (Sylvia Plath).]
The West Wind blows cold, sending clouds across Apollo's vision, and by the time the sun god drives through them, the last purple flowers have been torn from their stem and swept away. He warms the earth desperately, tugging at whatever seedlings may be there, grasping the memory of laughter, strong muscle and gentle hands, but none reply. The memories fade a little more - pitiless laughter wafts by on the breeze.
[Greek Mythology/Roman mythology, any god/any Roman version of that god, the ultimate vanity]
"Σ'αγαπώ" Narcissus murmured dreamily, reaching out to touch his reflection.
"Ave," came a voice from the water. "Faciem tuam est divinam."
[Greek Mythology, Aethra + Helen, I wake every morning and pray that I could hate you]
This city is nothing, for all the horse-lords love it so, and she is nothing in it, not quite a slave, not quite a royal prisoner, not quite a maid, nothing like a friend. She helps the littler princesses with their sewing and watches Astyanax sometimes, and avoids Helen. She wouldn't be able to stand facing the woman who tried to do something to break free of this whole cycle.
[Greek Mythology, Hector/Andromache, even Hector Tamer of Horses can make a joke once in a while, you know]
It's early in their marriage, and the city is yet foreign to her, her shining husband barely coalescing from tales of fame to something real. He enters their room to find her buried under the driving gear she was trying to clean for him, in tears of frustration and no small amount of fear, and lifts the heavy leather mess off Andromache with one hand, offering the other to help her up.
"The horses don't much care what it looks like, anyway," he says, and smiles.
[Greek Mythology, Hermione & Andromache, "Tell me about my mother, please."]
Neoptolemus expects them to clash and clearly revels in the keeping of two such noble women, their reputations made intriguing by the war rather than ruined. Hermione plays along well enough, acknowledging Andromache but frostily before the court, making a fuss of begging her husband to send the foreign bitch away. But later, in the women's quarters, unveiled and raw, she falls to her knees before the other woman and asks, "Did you know my mother in Troy?"
[Greek Mythology, Alcestis & Eurydice, the nature of true love]
"It was a choice," Alcestis says, leaning comfortably against the cold rock.
"A snake, for me," Eurydice replies, looking back at the boat which brought her in, head cocked as if to pick up some faint strain. "But," she continues, shaking her head and turning to examine the Underworld, "I could grow to choose it."
[and a second fill bc I can't make up my headcanon]
When they call up shades, men always want to ask them about love.
"I loved my husband so much that I died in his place, to please the gods," Alcestis tells them demurely.
"My husband loved me so much he walked into Hades to seek me out," Eurydice shares, confidentially, a hand on the arm, implying that it's alright if they can't all do the same, if everyone doesn't have that kind of love in them.
By themselves, though, they drink up all the wine spilled in the calling, and share different stories, and ignore their now equally dead husbands, who were weak, who were greedy, who didn't have that kind of love in themselves either, only obsession.
[Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, my bones are shifting in my skin/and you, my love, are gone]
Spring comes, and takes the Queen back home to her mother like an errant child. The shades yawn, and pull in on themselves, and wait for her to return, tiptoeing around a silent and melancholy Hades. And the god of death watches new roots break down through the earth and reaches up to hold his wife's tendrilled fingers.
[Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, all I can dream about/is how to make you smile]
They say that the god of death sleeps when his wife is gone, that autumn and the turning of the leaves is not just Demeter's grief but his wakening joy. They say he takes the form of a bear, and hibernates, and when Persephone returns there is a new cub for her to mother, a new life down in the shadows of Dis. They say he dreams, through two whole seasons, of her smile when she took the pomegranate seeds from his hand.
[Greek Mythology, Oenone/Paris, "oh will we pass the test/or just as one loves more and more/will one love less and less"]
She watches him in water and wine, and watches the new wife, too, to see what made him forget her -- it's not difficult; the new wife is, in the way of women, most beautiful, and the way she twines around Alexander suggest an easy intimacy Oenone hadn't shared with him since the birth of their child. Their child - she looks up to where the toddler plays with her sisters and the shepherds, and this is a little grace at least, that Corythus and herself are not in that doomed city.
She watches, and the ships she sent guides for draw closer, and she loves her shepherd more and more.
[greek mythology, ariadne & medea & circe (going with the version of the myths in which Ariadne and medea are both granddaughters of helios, and therefore circe's nieces), stitch and--]There is a world in which no men come to them asking for salvation, nor offering it, no lonely islands or gods or strings or fleece or children.
They come of age in hard, blood-soaked lands which have eaten adventurers and inventors and their own mad kings.
There is a world where they arrive, blinking in the dazzling sun and sand, upon the island of their aunt, and they keep a house with her, and learn her magic, and they keep in what they will and, like the islands of their birth, eat whatever comes to them that they will not have.
[Canaanite religion, Asherah/Yahweh, breaking up is hard to do.]
El is consummate power, yes, and she took him in the oldest of days as a suitable father for her children, and the coupling has turned out well enough. These days, though, he has begun again one of those power-mad games in which he forsakes most of their creation and her role in it to choose and test a certain people - this happens periodically, but now he seeks to eliminate all other powers. Her name has been wiped from lips and books, and if he comes crawling back again, he'll see that this time it is impossible to forgive.
[Greek/Roman religion; Mithras, Christianity; Mithras is not jealous]
He has been known by many names over the volcano years, the flood years. Aspects of him have been El, YHWH, Zeus, and he has floated in the waters of himself, lowed in the pastures of himself, judged himself and found himself innumerable and all-truthful. These Romans no longer know which parts of the divine they want, nor how they want each part to act, but Mithra is mutable, and knows how to give way gracefully, like the sun from morning to noon to night.[Beauty and the Beast, Belle/Beast, Greek mythology]
She sees from the first that this castle is a labyrinth, that the Beast at its heart is a Minotaur, born of greed and a curse, trapped away for his own safety and that of others. When he doesn't show any real inclination to eat her, she reassesses the story she knows. Then, she finds a thread she can follow and sets out to free him.
[Beauty and the Beast, Belle/Beast, languages]
Her French is immaculate, high or low, her Latin quite passable, and she can even carry a conversation in English, thanks to her multitude of books. He speaks a guttural sort of re-learned aristocratic French, yes, but it is forced out of a voicebox not made for human sounds, and she works hard to hide how difficult he can be to understand.
Sometimes she hears him speaking in an altogether wilder and more lovely language, to himself or to the servants, and she wishes she could make those sounds.
[Arthurian Myth, Guinevere, "Diplomacy, in my own name."]
From the convent she dispatches piles of letters, advice to Orkney, to Avalon, to all corners of Albion. She calls on old favors, promises prayers, deploys every secret and shame and pride she has gathered through the years, for she will not let her own failures and those of others continue their rampage. She signs them, simply, "Guinevere."
[The Mummy series, Evie/Rick, "No harm ever came from--" "No. Just no."]"But it's a book, Evie, look, I thought you love books!"
She wavers, then, because it is a book, a very nicely old-looking one, with a deliciously old and difficult form of hieryglyphs on the cover that might take her weeks to translate....but it's also a book from a tomb, and she has learned her lesson there, she knows the power both good and harmful in "just peeking" at books.
"I'm the librarian, and I say no, Rick."
[The Mummy/Narnia, Digory and Polly meet up with Rick and Evie on a dig. Hijinks ensue]
"But, Polly, the inscription says it's merely ceremonial," Evie protests as Polly and Digory pull her away from a familiar pedestal bell-and-gong set up, "and Rick and I have been looking for this for months, it's probably the only undamaged one left..."
"Hey, Evie, I found it," Rick yelled, followed by a dusty but surprisingly clear ringing. Digory groaned and Polly clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and from deeper in the cavern a strange thumping began to sound.
[Sistine Chapel ceiling, Libyan Sybil/Prophet Jonah, gaze back at me]
She can feel him, watching her from above - or is it beside? Her sense of space has been off ever since that painter and his assistants dashed her up here; she can feel the curvature where walls meet ceiling, can feel the foundations of the building itself; sometimes she thinks she can feel everything except her own hermited passions. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the plaster and dust of centuries, and looks up.
[Twelfth Night/The Tempest, Viola and Miranda, shipwreck]
Father told her to wait, hidden, and so Miranda does, even if it's up on the bluff and not in their cave. So she sees the pieces of ship wash up, and she sees the various older men set out in groups across the island. But she also sees the young woman, just her age, who takes stock of her surroundings and her loneliness, who rips up an undershirt to bind her breasts, who cuts her hair jagged and short; Miranda watches the young man squint into the salt-sprayed sun and begin to hike into the hills, and she moves to follow.
[Narnia, Susan, social construction of reality]She asks the priest: what is real? and he hands her a wooden crucifix and says - sacrifice, passion, original sin washed away by divine and human blood - and she grips the tiny cross so hard it splinters into her palm, but what she feels is stone.
She asks the nurse: what is real? and she says - the train's brake failed, it went around the corner much too fast and flew off the rails, and they all died on impact, probably without pain - and she identifies bodies and arranges funerals, but she dreams she is always running, further up and further in, but she is never fast enough.
She asks the trees: what is real? and they say - shhhhhhhh, we are being played upon by the wind, we are drinking sunshine, shhhhhhhh, you are alone and uprooted, shhhhhhh - and she walks away and asks no more.
[Narnia, Pevensies, temporal detente/where clocks are barely breathing/yet no one cares to notice]
There is a moment - no more, no less, and for each of them a different length - where one can feel oneself between worlds. Branches to coats, field to trainstation, the edge of the world to the smallest bedroom - there is a roughness to it, a hook, they say to each other, a catch, something slipping past. As if Narnia doesn't want to let them go, either.
[Beowulf, Freawaru, the spear snickers / the wicked arrow / narrowly flickers / and nicks the marrow]
They named her peace-weaver, and so she is. She sits in the hall and helps allot gold and brews mead and at night tells her husband with her body how much she desires him, and for him to keep the alliance. But sometimes, she takes his spear from the wall and tests the strength of her arm, and thinks what else she could have been.
[Beowulf, the wailing woman, heroes have the whole earth as their tomb.]
The voice is hers, but the grief she lends it to is of the entire earth. The sea he swam, the rocks he climbed, the lowliest grasses he ran across - all these and more mourn the passing of a hero. There is a comfort in this universal sharing, even as her own insignificant heart breaks over and over again.
[Game of Thrones, Sansa/Jaime, with the perfect armor/with the perfect dream]
They bring him before the court stripped of his golden armor - the gold cloak is long gone, and the ghost of his hand twitches - and weaponless, but unbound, unsure if he is an enemy of war or a guest. He can't help looking around for weak points, escape routes, but then he looks up and remembers why he is here.
The Queen in the North smiles at him, and stretches out her hand.
[Greek Mythology, Apollo/Hyakinthos, I think I made you up inside my head (Sylvia Plath).]
The West Wind blows cold, sending clouds across Apollo's vision, and by the time the sun god drives through them, the last purple flowers have been torn from their stem and swept away. He warms the earth desperately, tugging at whatever seedlings may be there, grasping the memory of laughter, strong muscle and gentle hands, but none reply. The memories fade a little more - pitiless laughter wafts by on the breeze.
[Greek Mythology/Roman mythology, any god/any Roman version of that god, the ultimate vanity]
"Σ'αγαπώ" Narcissus murmured dreamily, reaching out to touch his reflection.
"Ave," came a voice from the water. "Faciem tuam est divinam."
[Greek Mythology, Aethra + Helen, I wake every morning and pray that I could hate you]
This city is nothing, for all the horse-lords love it so, and she is nothing in it, not quite a slave, not quite a royal prisoner, not quite a maid, nothing like a friend. She helps the littler princesses with their sewing and watches Astyanax sometimes, and avoids Helen. She wouldn't be able to stand facing the woman who tried to do something to break free of this whole cycle.
[Greek Mythology, Hector/Andromache, even Hector Tamer of Horses can make a joke once in a while, you know]
It's early in their marriage, and the city is yet foreign to her, her shining husband barely coalescing from tales of fame to something real. He enters their room to find her buried under the driving gear she was trying to clean for him, in tears of frustration and no small amount of fear, and lifts the heavy leather mess off Andromache with one hand, offering the other to help her up.
"The horses don't much care what it looks like, anyway," he says, and smiles.
[Greek Mythology, Hermione & Andromache, "Tell me about my mother, please."]
Neoptolemus expects them to clash and clearly revels in the keeping of two such noble women, their reputations made intriguing by the war rather than ruined. Hermione plays along well enough, acknowledging Andromache but frostily before the court, making a fuss of begging her husband to send the foreign bitch away. But later, in the women's quarters, unveiled and raw, she falls to her knees before the other woman and asks, "Did you know my mother in Troy?"
[Greek Mythology, Alcestis & Eurydice, the nature of true love]
"It was a choice," Alcestis says, leaning comfortably against the cold rock.
"A snake, for me," Eurydice replies, looking back at the boat which brought her in, head cocked as if to pick up some faint strain. "But," she continues, shaking her head and turning to examine the Underworld, "I could grow to choose it."
[and a second fill bc I can't make up my headcanon]
When they call up shades, men always want to ask them about love.
"I loved my husband so much that I died in his place, to please the gods," Alcestis tells them demurely.
"My husband loved me so much he walked into Hades to seek me out," Eurydice shares, confidentially, a hand on the arm, implying that it's alright if they can't all do the same, if everyone doesn't have that kind of love in them.
By themselves, though, they drink up all the wine spilled in the calling, and share different stories, and ignore their now equally dead husbands, who were weak, who were greedy, who didn't have that kind of love in themselves either, only obsession.
[Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, my bones are shifting in my skin/and you, my love, are gone]
Spring comes, and takes the Queen back home to her mother like an errant child. The shades yawn, and pull in on themselves, and wait for her to return, tiptoeing around a silent and melancholy Hades. And the god of death watches new roots break down through the earth and reaches up to hold his wife's tendrilled fingers.
[Greek mythology, Hades/Persephone, all I can dream about/is how to make you smile]
They say that the god of death sleeps when his wife is gone, that autumn and the turning of the leaves is not just Demeter's grief but his wakening joy. They say he takes the form of a bear, and hibernates, and when Persephone returns there is a new cub for her to mother, a new life down in the shadows of Dis. They say he dreams, through two whole seasons, of her smile when she took the pomegranate seeds from his hand.
[Greek Mythology, Oenone/Paris, "oh will we pass the test/or just as one loves more and more/will one love less and less"]
She watches him in water and wine, and watches the new wife, too, to see what made him forget her -- it's not difficult; the new wife is, in the way of women, most beautiful, and the way she twines around Alexander suggest an easy intimacy Oenone hadn't shared with him since the birth of their child. Their child - she looks up to where the toddler plays with her sisters and the shepherds, and this is a little grace at least, that Corythus and herself are not in that doomed city.
She watches, and the ships she sent guides for draw closer, and she loves her shepherd more and more.
[greek mythology, ariadne & medea & circe (going with the version of the myths in which Ariadne and medea are both granddaughters of helios, and therefore circe's nieces), stitch and--]There is a world in which no men come to them asking for salvation, nor offering it, no lonely islands or gods or strings or fleece or children.
They come of age in hard, blood-soaked lands which have eaten adventurers and inventors and their own mad kings.
There is a world where they arrive, blinking in the dazzling sun and sand, upon the island of their aunt, and they keep a house with her, and learn her magic, and they keep in what they will and, like the islands of their birth, eat whatever comes to them that they will not have.
[Canaanite religion, Asherah/Yahweh, breaking up is hard to do.]
El is consummate power, yes, and she took him in the oldest of days as a suitable father for her children, and the coupling has turned out well enough. These days, though, he has begun again one of those power-mad games in which he forsakes most of their creation and her role in it to choose and test a certain people - this happens periodically, but now he seeks to eliminate all other powers. Her name has been wiped from lips and books, and if he comes crawling back again, he'll see that this time it is impossible to forgive.
[Greek/Roman religion; Mithras, Christianity; Mithras is not jealous]
He has been known by many names over the volcano years, the flood years. Aspects of him have been El, YHWH, Zeus, and he has floated in the waters of himself, lowed in the pastures of himself, judged himself and found himself innumerable and all-truthful. These Romans no longer know which parts of the divine they want, nor how they want each part to act, but Mithra is mutable, and knows how to give way gracefully, like the sun from morning to noon to night.[Beauty and the Beast, Belle/Beast, Greek mythology]
She sees from the first that this castle is a labyrinth, that the Beast at its heart is a Minotaur, born of greed and a curse, trapped away for his own safety and that of others. When he doesn't show any real inclination to eat her, she reassesses the story she knows. Then, she finds a thread she can follow and sets out to free him.
[Beauty and the Beast, Belle/Beast, languages]
Her French is immaculate, high or low, her Latin quite passable, and she can even carry a conversation in English, thanks to her multitude of books. He speaks a guttural sort of re-learned aristocratic French, yes, but it is forced out of a voicebox not made for human sounds, and she works hard to hide how difficult he can be to understand.
Sometimes she hears him speaking in an altogether wilder and more lovely language, to himself or to the servants, and she wishes she could make those sounds.
[Arthurian Myth, Guinevere, "Diplomacy, in my own name."]
From the convent she dispatches piles of letters, advice to Orkney, to Avalon, to all corners of Albion. She calls on old favors, promises prayers, deploys every secret and shame and pride she has gathered through the years, for she will not let her own failures and those of others continue their rampage. She signs them, simply, "Guinevere."
[The Mummy series, Evie/Rick, "No harm ever came from--" "No. Just no."]"But it's a book, Evie, look, I thought you love books!"
She wavers, then, because it is a book, a very nicely old-looking one, with a deliciously old and difficult form of hieryglyphs on the cover that might take her weeks to translate....but it's also a book from a tomb, and she has learned her lesson there, she knows the power both good and harmful in "just peeking" at books.
"I'm the librarian, and I say no, Rick."
[The Mummy/Narnia, Digory and Polly meet up with Rick and Evie on a dig. Hijinks ensue]
"But, Polly, the inscription says it's merely ceremonial," Evie protests as Polly and Digory pull her away from a familiar pedestal bell-and-gong set up, "and Rick and I have been looking for this for months, it's probably the only undamaged one left..."
"Hey, Evie, I found it," Rick yelled, followed by a dusty but surprisingly clear ringing. Digory groaned and Polly clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and from deeper in the cavern a strange thumping began to sound.
[Sistine Chapel ceiling, Libyan Sybil/Prophet Jonah, gaze back at me]
She can feel him, watching her from above - or is it beside? Her sense of space has been off ever since that painter and his assistants dashed her up here; she can feel the curvature where walls meet ceiling, can feel the foundations of the building itself; sometimes she thinks she can feel everything except her own hermited passions. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the plaster and dust of centuries, and looks up.
[Twelfth Night/The Tempest, Viola and Miranda, shipwreck]
Father told her to wait, hidden, and so Miranda does, even if it's up on the bluff and not in their cave. So she sees the pieces of ship wash up, and she sees the various older men set out in groups across the island. But she also sees the young woman, just her age, who takes stock of her surroundings and her loneliness, who rips up an undershirt to bind her breasts, who cuts her hair jagged and short; Miranda watches the young man squint into the salt-sprayed sun and begin to hike into the hills, and she moves to follow.
[Narnia, Susan, social construction of reality]She asks the priest: what is real? and he hands her a wooden crucifix and says - sacrifice, passion, original sin washed away by divine and human blood - and she grips the tiny cross so hard it splinters into her palm, but what she feels is stone.
She asks the nurse: what is real? and she says - the train's brake failed, it went around the corner much too fast and flew off the rails, and they all died on impact, probably without pain - and she identifies bodies and arranges funerals, but she dreams she is always running, further up and further in, but she is never fast enough.
She asks the trees: what is real? and they say - shhhhhhhh, we are being played upon by the wind, we are drinking sunshine, shhhhhhhh, you are alone and uprooted, shhhhhhh - and she walks away and asks no more.
[Narnia, Pevensies, temporal detente/where clocks are barely breathing/yet no one cares to notice]
There is a moment - no more, no less, and for each of them a different length - where one can feel oneself between worlds. Branches to coats, field to trainstation, the edge of the world to the smallest bedroom - there is a roughness to it, a hook, they say to each other, a catch, something slipping past. As if Narnia doesn't want to let them go, either.