Untethered in the Afterlife

Recap: Epiphany, the betrothed of Icarus, stands condemned in the court of the gods. This is the tale of how she got there, which started with Icarus’s death at sea. She ran away from serving in the house of her master Celeas, a nobleman of Athens. With the ambition to bring Icarus out of the Underworld, she commissioned a fisherman named Sulaiman to help her sail to the end of the Earth. After searching hopelessly in the Underworld in the midst of danger and warnings from the gods, she has just been reunited with Icarus in the depths of Tartarus… but now she needs to find a way to get him out. Click here to read this story from the beginning.

I left you.

I try to understand the words that Icarus has just said to me, but I can’t.

“What?” I ask, knowing I must have heard him incorrectly.

“I can’t be with you,” he says in a soft voice. “It’s over, Epiphany. We have lost. Death has had its say. There is no more life for you and me.”

“That’s not… you know that’s not true,” I stammer, my mouth going dry, my heart starting to race. “That’s why I’m here. We still have a chance. I came all this way for you.”

“I know what you did,” he says, grief in his expression. “It was amazing. I didn’t say that I don’t love you. I just said that our life is over. I have to leave you, or else you will simply die down here; I want you to live.”

“But I can’t live without you,” I say, tears coming now. “Don’t you understand that yet? I was ready to face all the danger of this world to revive you —”

“But you can’t revive me,” he says. “I understand, like I’ve never understood before, how precious life really is. You can’t waste your life on my behalf. I won’t let you. And it tears me apart to be alongside you, hoping in vain, while we are hunted by monsters and inviting the wrath of the gods. I cannot do it.”

“But if Bacchus answers…”

“Bacchus has already answered, Epiphany,” says Icarus, his voice rising for the first time. “Don’t you see? His answer is no.”

I am reeling; my mind is on fire. I can’t feel my hands.

This is impossible.

In all my imagination about what I might encounter on this journey, it never crossed my mind that Icarus would break off our relationship, that he would stand in front of me like this and turn me away. My Icarus. The only person who has ever really loved me.

He says he still loves me, but I can’t believe it. He is leaving me alone. He won’t be with me.

He won’t be with me.

That idea falls like an iron weight on my consciousness, breaking every thought in my mind, crushing my sense of clarity. My tongue is like a swath of cotton, muffling every syllable that I try to put together.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. His once-vibrant blue eyes are muted, and his form just a vapor, static from the moment of his death. He is a broken spirit.

My whole body is burning, and I still can’t speak as he turns away from me and wanders off into the gloom.

It didn’t just happen. It couldn’t have. I look around as other ghosts pass by. The ceiling of this tunnel looms over me like it is falling in. I stumble like a drunkard, the walls coming at me, the darkness getting darker.

Then a great cry tears from my lungs and I fall to my knees.

No one comes to me. Not Icarus. Not Orpheus. Not Odysseus. The gods pay no attention. The King and Queen of the Dead go about their business.

I am utterly, completely alone.

I collapse on my face and lie as though dead (am I not dead?) with no care for time. Perhaps a lifetime has gone by. What difference does it make? My eyes blister with tears. Every ounce of energy and hope has been drained from me.

The thunder of Sisyphus occasionally reaches my ears in a pounding cycle.

My soul-sucking grief ebbs away as a spark of anger alights within my heart. My mind awakens with thoughts of what should have been different, of all the evils that were done to me, of how poorly I have been treated. Suddenly the little flame becomes a roaring fire when I think of Bacchus. I rage at him.

If you had been here, Icarus would be alive. I would not be crushed by grief. I would not be here alone. You are the god of life! You should have come!

I think of Aphrodite, who strung me along, and Poseidon, who enabled my journey. I asked them for pity; is this what I get? If they knew it would end like this, why didn’t they refuse me? Why didn’t they force me to turn back?

I think about how Hermes told me that the gods wanted to give me mercy. An enormous lie!

“Is this what you wanted?” I scream at all of them in the depths of the Underworld. “You call this mercy?”

And then I fall to weeping again. I babble at the gods like a punished child. “You took everything from me. You took my love from me. All I ever wanted. All I ever wanted.”

Then I hear a voice nearby. “Excuse me.”

I look up and see an older man, a wraith holding a hammer and chisel. He sits down next to me.

I stare at him skeptically. “What? Who are you?”

“You said your love was taken from you?” he says. “Would you like me to make you a new one?”

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