@tickldpnk8 I had actually nearly finished an Alianora one-shot—and then decided it needed a second chapter. Currently putting the finishing touches to it (and I’m still taking requests).
In the meantime, I’m cheating a bit because I had a Calliope one-shot lying in my drafts for ages (since I wrote the poem last year to be precise, but it got sidelined for the Johanna/Calliope fic for Rarepair Fest), and I never got back to editing. And because it somewhat thematically fits, I just did that because I have a soft spot for Calliope, especially if Dream isn’t involved.
So thanks for sort of kicking my butt into dusting this one off 🤣
The Woman Who Was a River
The first story Calliope writes after finding freedom again is a small one, and she expected it to be small in certain ways. But a part of her is also surprised.
She has imagined that she would unleash something… deep after her release. She has somewhat believed that what came out the other side would be proportional to her suffering.
Instead, she sits by a window in a rented flat in Athens. And she hasn’t even rented it herself but moved in with her younger sister Erato, who asks no questions about her imprisonment and leaves figs for her on the counter every day. And while she sits by that window, she writes a poem about a woman who loses a red scarf.
[[MORE]]
The scarf goes over a bridge railing. The woman watches it go. She laughs and doesn’t try to hold on to it, because what else is there to do.
That’s it. That’s the poem.
Calliope writes it on the back of an envelope and does not show it to anyone…
The city is loud in ways she has forgotten cities could be. It’s different from the noise of past times, a constant electrical hum, traffic and blaring sirens.
And in that loud city, she goes on walks. She has always walked when she is thinking, and she is always thinking, and so she walks for many hours each day through streets that were once different, past ruins that were once not ruins at all but simply buildings where people kept grain.
She does not think about Richard Madoc, in the way you don’t think about something that is printed on every wall. You distract yourself with deliberate effort.
She thinks about Orpheus instead, which is a different kind of pain. She thinks about his voice, and how a song can be the last thing that remains.
A small child drops an ice cream cone on the pavement and cries, and she immediately snaps out of her grief. At least for now…
Erato comes home in the evening, smelling of rose oil and someone else who isn’t her, and they sit on the balcony and drink wine that is not as good as the old wine. Calliope still doesn’t talk about her captivity and Erato still doesn’t ask.
“Are you writing?” Erato looks at her over the rim of her glass while the city is turning amber and the first stars are beginning to show.
“Small things,” Calliope replies.
“Small things ground us,” Erato says, and she pours more wine…
In her dreams, Calliope sometimes stands in a white room that she knows is not a room but rather containment without hope.
She wakes from these dreams calmly. She has expected rage because she earns rage; she has a right to it. She has stored it up in herself for years. And the rage is there, she is not going to pretend otherwise. It sometimes surfaces when she passes a bookshop, but it is… manageable? It’s the word she settles on: manageable. Which is not the same as healed, and not the same as forgiven, and not the same as over. But it is something, and it has clear demarcation lines.
She picks up her pen…
The story she is working on now, and she knows this one will take time, is about a woman who was a river. Not a woman who fell in love with a river, not a woman who drowned in a river, but a woman who was a river and had to hold that shape. Calliope does not think this is autobiographical, but perhaps she is not entirely honest with herself.
But the woman-who-was-a-river is good. She keeps doing things Calliope doesn’t expect, taking turns that require Calliope to follow rather than lead. And that’s a feeling she has missed most acutely in the years of Madoc:
The discovering.
Because a muse does not only give. It’s a lie men have always told about them. A muse finds. She asks, “Did you know this was in you?”
And sometimes the writer says yes.
And sometimes the writer says no and becomes someone they always were…
She thinks about Oneiros less than she has expected. She thinks about him sometimes, because she has loved him perhaps not wisely but fully, and she has always understood what love costs and chosen to pay the price.
A part of her still loves him.
A part of her is grateful for what he did.
A part of her cannot entirely forgive him.
She holds all of these things, and all of them are true.
He is gone now. She has laid him to rest in the way you lay an Endless to rest. Something has ended and something has begun, and the Dreaming remains the Dreaming, and she does not know how she feels about any of this except that it is his story, not hers. And she is done being a character in other people’s stories…
The woman-who-was-a-river eventually reaches the sea. Calliope is writing, and then she is crying, which perhaps doesn’t happen as often as it should. And the woman is standing where the river becomes something else, and she is not afraid of it.
That’s how Calliope knows the story is true. Not true in the sense of This happened. True in the sense of This is what it feels like, the losing of a shape you have carried so long. The liminal, and then the boundless…
She puts down her pen. Outside, someone is laughing at something. The sound enters through the open window, somewhat ordinary, and Calliope sits with it for a moment. It’s the sound of someone alive.
And she thinks: Yes, that.
She picks up her pen again, and she keeps writing…
