Who: Lyssa [Narrative] When: Sunday morning, sunrise, days after this. Where: The living room/kitchen in the house Erebos and Aether share. Warnings: The price one pays for bringing Rage into the house.
She was sitting on the rug in the living room, staring at the television screen as it droned the weather report for the day. Her wounds had been cleansed by Aether and tended to by Erebos, but her arms still felt awkward in their sockets, she could still feel displaced ribs within the cage of bone beneath her flesh. Had she been able to feel pain through the plight of blind insanity she was, she would note even walking was a stress on this body, this container of skin and bone. Her eyes, which had a color that was almost-brown and almost-red, were focused on the television screen, the moving pictures. Through the delirium in her own mind, she could recall when she and Mania first found televisions, and Mania's insistence on liberating the moving pictures from their little boxes.
They had tried very hard. But the moving pictures were trapped. They were not as lucky as Mania or Lyssa, who had dragged themselves with sharp claws and broken minds from the pages of tragedy to unleash their furies on the world, so long as that world could still believe in madness, in all the elements of the broken psyche that the Maniae were.
Slivers of morning sunlight filtered in through the drawn curtains. Lyssa inched herself to the couch, where she pulled her self up to her knees and stood, her face set in a grimace. She glanced around. The house was quiet. Whether her father-figure was home or not was unclear; she could not feel him, nor could she feel the blinding light of Aether. Aether, who had brought her in. What a fool, what a fool.
An uproar was being had about the shining boy of the big mountain attacking Lyssa. It was delightful. Their rage sustained her. Their concerns only maddened the fury in her mind more. Muses and their lovely emotions were easily toyed with, easier than one would have thought, so precious, so divine. And Apollo's fury! Each moment he drove her face into the side of that park bench, each kick into her ribs, each toss of her body around as if she were one of his playthings gone wrong, it fed her, it sustained her, it made her feel alive. Picking a fight with frenzy was hopeless, for there was no hope in Lyssa. There was only madness. And the desire to spread it however possible.
Lyssa turned on her heel, moved behind the couch. It was not entirely surprising that Darkness had a metal baseball bat leaned against a bookshelf. She bent, her movements strange and jerking considering the damage done by Apollo days before. She was a goddess, a spirit, but she was an old one, and healing quickly was not something she or any should expect when they were of dusty pages from antiquated books. Long fingers curled around the cold handle. She pressed her lips together, straightened, the bat hanging in her hand as she walked back around the couch.
The man trapped inside the television was talking about a warm front. Lyssa swayed to the left, to the right, tilted her head, lifted the bat as if she were at the plate, and swung violently at the television.
The man trapped inside the television was no more. Glass sprayed and scattered, and with each strike her smile grew wildly. Whirling on her feet, she swung the bat at a glass ornament displayed near to the television, chucked the bat out of her hand, let it fly up. As the chandelier above rained fragmented glass onto Lyssa's head and as the glass crunched beneath her bare feet, Lyssa flung herself at the book shelves, tearing them from their homes, throwing them across the room with violent shrieks. She hopped up onto an end-table, knocked the bookshelf to the floor, leaped over the couch (in such a way that tipped it over), to the kitchen, seizing the baseball bat along the way.
Cupboards were flung open, mugs slammed to the ground, wine glasses, crystal glasses, the kitchen table legs ripped from the table top, wall paper clawed and stripped at. Bloody footprints where Lyssa had walked over glass mingled with dirt, as she found the houseplants, and liberated them from their pots.
After an hour into sunrise, the living room and kitchen were completely ripped asunder. The front door and the door of Aether's bedroom were both ripped off hinges. hinges. Erebos's studio was the only part of the house untouched by Frenzy. There was only one of the flowers from a potted plant, ripped apart and scattered along Erebos's drawing table.
On one of the walls of the studio, however, was a painted scrawl of ancient Greek, the paintbrush itself stabbed brutally into the material of the wall afterward.
The old seer sings to the chorus, "Suddenly the earth yawned and opened wide with a gulf immeasurable. Myself, I saw the numb pools amidst the shadows; myself, the wan gods and night in very truth. My frozen blood stood still and clogged my veins." And we leap. And the brood, the brood leaps.
Lyssa, along with the metal baseball bat, was nowhere to be found.