Christopher Golden - Tears of the Furies

Ocean-blue cloak fluttering in the wind, Ceridwen extended her arm, fingers splayed, feeling the emanations from the great stone projection. "So much more than that," she said in a voice tinged with foreboding. "So much more than is obvious."

Eve made clicking noises with her mouth as she placed her hands on her slender hips. "Isn’t that always the way," she said, giving Conan Doyle a quick look from the corner of her eye.

The high rocky formation loomed above them, and Conan Doyle moved to the front of the boat for a better view, searching for the area that was rumored to be an entrance to the Underworld. The Ayil Asomati caves were the most famous of Hades’ ventilation shafts, favored by mortals on quests.

Captain Lycaon joined him. "I’ll get you as close as I can," he said, eyeing the towering rock formation as he suckled the end of his pipe. "But you’ll need a raft, if you’re planning on climbing to the caves."

"Bring us as far as you dare, Captain," Conan Doyle ordered. "We’ll make do from there."

The sound began as a distant warble, and Conan Doyle at first mistook it as the cry of some lonely night bird. It was a song, perhaps one of the most beautiful he had ever heard, and it was coming from somewhere on the cliffs of the promontory.

"Look!" Eve called, distracting him from the unearthly tune.

Conan Doyle followed her gaze, again enveloped in the overpowering beauty of the song, and saw three figures standing on one of the small ledges jutting out from the promontory. It was Gull and his people, and the deformed sorcerer was using his damnable gift to sing in the voice of Orpheus.

They were closer now, and Conan Doyle could make out the words of the song in the language of time long past. Plaintively it asked for the entrance to the Underworld to be revealed.

"It’s beautiful," Captain Lycaon whispered, and Conan Doyle saw that the old seaman was crying.

As he looked back toward the promontory, he realized that it was not only they who had been affected by the song of Orpheus. Conan Doyle watched transfixed as two towering gates of solid rock parted in the face of the mountainous cliff.

The Underworld.

Clay is falling.

Deeper and deeper he plummets into the darkness within himself, the oblivion into which he has been cast by the gaze of Medusa. After a while, he finds himself comforted by the darkness surrounding him, the desire to escape slowly draining from him.

He wonders if this was how Medusa’s other victims had felt? Suddenly trapped within themselves, gradually losing the will to be anything but stone.

For a brief moment he again struggles against the sucking pull of the abyss, but to little avail. He is drowning in shadow, the ebony pitch attempting to work its way into his mouth and nose. It wants to be inside him — to consume him. It wants him to forget that he ever existed.

And it almost succeeds, but then he hears Eve’s voice, as he had that day they lunched on Newbury Street. "Do you remember?" she had asked, a longing in her voice that made his heart break.

And he does. He remembered then — and he remembers now, and his unremitting fall into oblivion is slowed by the recollection. Memories flash before him, curtains of darkness are savagely torn aside. Clay recalls a murk deeper and darker than the one that now envelops him, but it lasts for only a brief instant, before it is banished by the brightest flashes — the light of creation. And the inky black is replaced by entire constellations.

Creation. It is his first conscious memory.

The memories give him buoyancy, and he begins to ascend.

Clay remembers the hands of the Creator, molding and shaping him — preparing him to take on the forms of the wondrous life that would inhabit these new worlds. He is the imagination of God made malleable flesh.

He is the Clay of life, and God was his sculptor.

Oh, the creatures he had become. Clay remembers each and every one as he climbs up from the darkness, suddenly able to resist the pull of the depths. He tries to alter his form, there in the dark, to become something more acclimated to swimming in the sea of black, but realizes that he has no shape here, that he is nothing more than conscious thought.

To be only one thing, unable to change… the idea fills him with a powerful fear, and Clay remembers another time when he felt this afraid.

The Creator had been finished with him. Every form of life that was, and would ever be, had been molded from his being. God’s masterpiece of creation was complete. And he was cast aside, left to wander the new and glorious world that he had helped to define, forgotten and alone.

Alone.

But he survived. He thrived and became a part of the world, found a purpose for himself. Clay feels the darkness take hold again, its pull given strength by his despair, and he fights against it, finding strength in the knowledge that he found his own way in the world. A life shaped not by the Creator’s hands, but by his own intent.

The shadow’s hold upon him slips away, and he surges upward. He is not merely refuse left over from the Supreme Being’s master plan, he is needed. Clay will not squander the potential of the life he had made.

He is not cold, lifeless stone.

He is the substance of creation.

He is Clay.

His eyes were first to change.

In one instant he was blind to the world around him, and the next his vision was restored, the stone crust over his eyes flaking away. Clay gazed around the Kerameikos Cemetery, not sure how long he had spent in his petrified state. The confrontation was still going on.

Squire darted in and out of the shadows, keeping Medusa off guard, as Graves hovered above the scene, fashioning a net from the ectoplasm that made up his body. Interesting, Clay thought, but he wasn’t convinced their plan would succeed. They needed his help.

The eyes were but the first step. Clay exerted his will over his body, forcing away the shell of rock that now enveloped his form. The enchantment of Medusa’s accursed gaze fought against him, not wanting to relinquish its hold, but he was so much more than mere flesh and blood, and its grip on him shattered. His flesh had fought the curse from the moment he had begun to succumb to it, and now he forced every atom of his form to return to life from stone death, leaving only a sheath of rock around him. That sheath popped and snapped like melting ice on a frozen lake during the first days of spring, and it fell away from his body in large chunks to litter the ground.

"Heads up, honey!" Clay heard Squire cry out.

He turned just in time to see the hobgoblin emerge from a patch of shadow cast by a section of ancient stone wall. Squire threw himself at Medusa’s legs and, as she fell forward, Graves silently swooped down, dropping the shimmering net of ghostly material over her.

Clay willed himself to move, ignoring the stiffness in his joints and the burning aches in his muscles as he ran across the burial ground to join his comrades.

"Nice to see you up and around," Squire said, moving out of his path.

Clay dropped to his knees, throwing the weight of his body on top of the Gorgon, who thrashed beneath the ectoplasmic net. "Give me a hand here," he called to the goblin. Medusa was strong, incredibly so, and was trying to maneuver her body to again affect him with her petrifying gaze.

Sorry, not this time.

He instinctively shifted the configuration of his face, his eyes receding into the flesh to be replaced with highly sensitive sensory stalks that picked up on vibration and the shifting of air currents no matter how minute.

"Holy shit, I think I dated your sister back in ‘75," Squire sniggered, even as he attempted to hold down Medusa’s thrashing legs.

"Maybe you should hold off on the commentary and sedate the Gorgon. Just a suggestion," Clay said, even as he struggled to keep Medusa down.