InsaneJournal

Melpomene had lost her will, or her ability, to be angry at Urania. She’d lost the ability or the will to do most things. Misery and hopelessness claimed her and she was wasting away, she knew she was. She was dying of her broken heart and it was everything she deserved.

Urania had bound her hands in front of her body, soft fabric around her wrists. Melpomene had barely fought her, and was now curled on her side on the couch, crossed wrists hiding half her face.

Let me die she prayed silently. Let her lose everything she’d built for herself in the mortal world as Romeo, let her reputation as one of the great screenwriters be lost. Let all the power she’d been building with Ares seep out into the earth. Her Tragos was already dead. Her Telos was already gone. Everything had come to ruin. Aphrodite was right; she was just a Muse, how dare she grasp for more.

Let her die. Let herself be reborn somewhere else in the country to start again. She wouldn’t come back here to New York again. She would stay far from LA. She would find somewhere she had never lived before and exile herself, through death and rebirth. She would not fall in love, she would have no more children. She would not let herself want, again. Ever again.

Melpomene curled into a ball on the couch, weeping with such deep pain she writhed with it. The tears on her hands felt as hot as Tragos’ blood. Her hands were soaked in his blood, stained with his blood. She could still smell his death all over her.

Every time she went to the bathroom, there it was, more blood. Apollo had healed her outer wounds, but her body was still grieving the loss of her child from her body. Even as Carl Sagan spoke about the cosmos, her womb cramped, painfully readjusting back to its old size, and the pain infected her with another wave of grief. Her child was lost to her as soon she would be lost to the world. If Ares and Apollo and Hecate failed, she would die. Urania couldn’t keep her bound forever. Or even if she did, Melpomene would fade.

“Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe,” Sagan’s voice was loud in the silence of the apartment. “It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.”

And what about the intricate and subtle ways in which the universe was torn apart? Melpomene had another word for that. Miasma. In the Greek, it spoke of defilement, and when used in the context of the old tragedies, it was even more potent: a contagious power, one that had an independent life of its own, causing a string of events unstoppable.

She knew how this story went. There was no other way out, for any of them.

Until the miasma was purged by the sacrificial death of the wrongdoer, society was doomed be chronically infected by catastrophe.