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disneyimaginings · 6 years

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Won’t You Be My Salvation?

Request by Anonmyous for a Persephone/Hades themed piece with Ivar the Boneless

Hope you enjoy 🌸

On his first trip to England with his father Ragnar, Ivar had been kept captive. He played games with the prince, but he spent most of his days alone, trying not to let the guards think he was anything but a mere cripple while he waited to see what fate had in store. It was difficult being away from everything he knew, from people who spoke his language, even the foods he was used to. But isolation had become a familiar feeling now, and he had become dull to its ache years ago. He had never been able to join in the games with the other children, to go fighting with his men, or compete in the wedding races with his brothers. So he had learned to amuse himself with his thoughts.

However, things changed the day he saw her. He was leaning against a barred window frame and he saw a girl, with hair, not like the spun gold blonde of his people, but red as fire, crossing the market far below. She had woven flowers through a circle plait in her hair, and carried a basket as she walked through the village. In Kattegat the women only wore flower crowns on their wedding day, but here with blossoms woven through her hair came the girl, heaving vegetables and herbs with her. He hated being different from the people around him but she didn’t seem to care. The people around her showed no sign of this being unusual so he realised she must go to such efforts with the wildflowers regularly. She must have a gentle touch. His interest growing, Ivar shuffled with a grunt at the effort to move with her, to watch her walk through, like the colours of spring through the muddy square. Then she was gone too quickly.

It became a daily ritual now, to look out for the girl. He heard her often before he saw her for she loved to laugh. He wondered how she got her work done as she made time to she speak kindly to almost everyone who passed her. She seemed to be just a humble girl but the whole town was taken with her as if she were a princess. Their faces softened when she spoke to them, their tears dried, their hearts strengthened. He didn’t know what she was saying but he could guess. He had never seen anyone like this before. She walked without fear of attack – bringing no blade nor shield with her like the women of Kattegat. She treated each animal like a friend whether she sprinkled crumbs of bread for the birds that now followed her on her journeys or petted the wolf hounds that guarded the gates. She was not of his world. She seemed like something pure; and though he knew her days must not be without their troubles, she acted as if she were free.

He had time to wonder what it would be like to be a part of her world. But he realised too quickly, that he would never fit. He was broken, bloodthirsty, ever seeing the schemes in men’s hearts before he tore them out. He was ruined already. But perhaps he could drag her into his world. When he left England he could take her into his boat and she could then bring him that light he had so long been craving, though he never realised it until now.

Shortly after, he pieced together that she was bound to a place called York. Moving with her family to a richer province, away from this place, sensing that if Ragnar Lothbrook had arrived, trouble would soon follow one way or another. He felt so angry that she would be gone from his sight, but he made a silent vow to himself that he would come back to England, with a great army, and he would find cause to go to York… and then he would take her.

Time passed and York had fallen. A priest had been drowned with the molten metal of his cross. The houses were looted for their goods, the men had been overcome so easily on this, a day of drunkenness and prayer for the weak English. Ivar now searched high and low for the girl with red hair, the girl who looked like Spring.

It took a long time for him to find her, but his men had discovered and kept her locked into her home on his orders. His heart beating in his chest he burst through the door on his crutches, looking at the upturned table, the broken vase smashed on the floor, but seeing no girl. He heaved his body through a back door to a small enclosed plot of garden, rich in vegetables, flowers trailing up the stone walls, and one girl with hair of flame sat on the grass her skirts around her, her face white with fear. She must have felt safer out here than she had in the raided house.

“What is your name?” He asked, cautious to pronounce the foreign words as best he could. Her eyes widened at the sound, and trembling she said, “Persephone.” She began then to ramble, to talk too quickly and he could not follow so let out a roar of frustration and she silenced herself. He felt a stab in his heart that he had frightened her.

He towered above her in his crutches so with some labour, cast them aside and thudded onto the grass beside her so they could be of similar height.

“I am Ivar,” he said, hesitating at following on with the rest of his normal title.

He showed her his empty hands to show that he held no weapon and meant her no harm, and though she shuffled on the grass he knew she understood. He smiled. She was much more beautiful than he remembered. Her skin shone, her hair still littered with flower heads as he remembered though some of them were now crushed probably in an earlier struggle. He opened his mouth, shut it again, then spoke in a calm voice, a mixture of pleading and commanding, “This world doesn’t need you. I need you. All of you. I need you to be mine.”

Persephone clutched onto the grass beneath her digging her fingers into it to hold her in place in her panic. She answered but slower this time, and he loved the sound of her sweet voice though he recoiled at her words. “Your world is all death and violence. I would die! How could I flourish in a world of decay and blood?”

Ivar crawled along the ground beside her and though she shirked back he reached for her anyway, his fingers not touching, but tracing the outline of her face. “You would not die for I would not let you. I am Ivar the Boneless, loved by the gods, so I get decree over who dies or not on my land. Even you at your worst would bring more to life and promise to Kattegat than I have seen in all my years.”

The screams of York sounded far behind them as he spoke, the last stragglers being dealt with. The wind rippled through his hair dishevelling it and for just a moment she felt a longing to belong… to someone, to somewhere, now that her home was surely gone. He had blood smattering his face and yet… there was something in his ice blue eyes that compelled her. She could see that he was in love with her; but how she had no idea as he was a stranger to her. So she remained silent.

At long last he broke the silence.

“You are Christian yes?”

Persephone nodded the flower crown around her forehead slipping slightly.

“Christians believe in salvation.” Ivar’s blue eyes cut right through her and stopped her heart beating as he spoke quietly,. “Won’t you be mine?”

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turnloosethelibrary · 6 years

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Balance

By Cee

It had started with the ascension of the Princess Lelimori. It always does, in the end. Someone who grasps power they were told they deserved will either use it stupidly or ruthlessly. At first, it seemed the raven haired girl - that’s all she was really, a girl, the elders had reasoned - would be the former. Her soft face and long lashes and quiet manner and great love of tea parties didn’t seem to amount to any other result. The castle guards who saw her grow thought her happy. They missed her scowls, her dark nights in the castle’s laboratory, her tinkering, her preoccupation with things with more than four legs and anger flashes.

That was how she lowered their defenses. Frivolities and deadly innocence.

At first, her proclamations had been almost nonsensical ideas that were easy enough to follow. They didn’t seem to serve any true purpose. House hounds couldn’t be let out past noon. Honey and candle wax were to be left out on the windowsills at night. Black ants were to be left alive. Red ants? Drowned with milk.

Then she issued the color decrees. Certain colors could only be worn by nobility, then by no one at all. Purple was the first color to be scrapped. They escalated, including the most common dyes. The Princess sent out her construct to ensure these were enforced. The unlucky few who were first visited by the Paintist had their clothes burned. Those who were able to catch the word of these events started keeping tubs of ink and oil to dye their clothes in. There wasn’t major protestation. It was odd, not belligerent, they said even as their neighbors were stripped naked for a single thread of green, even as they looked to the ground and mumbled apologies and had their shirts ripped off.

The village of Demokyos was of particular interest to The Princess. She visited it multiple times when she first ascended, when the world thought her only happy. The village of Demokyos had two things to its name - its proximity to the River then, of memories and their mayor. Angeline - for their mayor was named after those helpers of the gods themselves - wore the rainbow cloaked around her shoulders. She was colorful, both physically and spiritually. Never was there a frown in her village, for she bent herself over backwards to make each villagers life a joyous adventure. On the last night before their lives changed, the Princess had visited it for the last time. She got in an argument with the mayor. No one knew what it was over, but they did know a few facts.

The mayor steadfast, wanting to protect her village. The Princess was just as stubborn. The mayor laughed at The Princess. She went missing the next day, while She left the village to get ready for the Remembrance Day.

Hers was the first memory stone that was crushed. The river hadn’t had time to claim it, wrap its muddy arms around it, and it was as bright and colorful as she had been, still fresh with her blood that had been a few days stale when Demokyos realized who hung from the willow tree. The Princess took a metal device of warm silver on that Remembrance Day and grabbed the stone with metal fingers.

“Now,” The Princess spoke, smiled giddily, “Now, I shall free all of you. We will all be balanced.”

She closed the tongs, tighter and tighter and slowly, slowly, cracks formed making bloated veins of rock. They echoed with a volume that should not have been possible for a stone so small. The initial ripple of fear quieted as hush descended upon the crowd as they realized what their Princess was doing. Never again would they be able to commune with their deceased mayor. Rebirth was impossible without her stone. Whispered recollections of favored events would be gone to the void. There would be no more celebration and wonder around each new birth, wondering who had returned beyond to them. The few colors that were present - it was a red day - seemed too bright for the event, too much like the blood that had taken their friends, families.

That was the moment the elders realized what they had lost. That was the moment the Princess felt true power. That was the moment the Princess became the Queen. She did the same to five other rock in the river. A deep red one that once belonged to a great hunter, a purple one that had belonged to her Holy mother. A dark blue speckled one that had been a knight, the light orange one of a poet, the green of a child departed too soon. She took them at random but each stone brought out carried a cry of grief from a mother, a partner, a grandchild, a shade from their past life. The few who dared speak up against their Princess were seized by something from the shadows. There were no trumpets bellowing the way home that first night, and past then, they didn’t even bother to bring out the instruments of brass. There was no cause.

She sent her troops out after that first night, certain in her power than she had ever been before. On every street corner and alleyway stood those dark insectoid soldiers.They feasted on what was left in windowsills. When people started to slip poison in the honey, the ones who couldn't clear the corpse out fast enough went missing along with their household. It was a coincidence that the new soldiers sent out after were in the same number of those who had disappeared. A total coincidence. Color hurt them. All color was outlawed. The Color Decrees were used as a base. People started either lightening their skin with flour and paper pulp or darkened it with charr and resin. Those who couldn't manage it were sent out of the cities in long chain lines, headed by the biggest ants. None returned. Some went blind trying to dull the color in their eyes but when faced with the fact that a blind populous was unable to flourish in the environment she had created, The Princess relented. Blues and Greens and Browns remained safe, only in the eyes of her subjects. There was some hope there, if the windows to the soul could fall under tyranny, then truly, anything could, if they couldn’t, then anything could stand against tyranny.

The walk to the River of the Dead (it had a new purpose now, it got a new name, it was slowing, never as fast as it had once been, it was turning dark as sand) was no longer jubilant. Where once there were colorful parades with trumpets celebrating the memory of the dearly departed, now the town walked in a line, paired up. Completely silent.

The people bowed, they had nothing else to do. Rebellion was quelled, in the public eye at least. Children rebelled - though they knew not how - by taking rocks from the river, hiding them in their pockets and in lockets of dull silver. This didn’t accomplish anything other than keeping the spirits in the stone alive, but when their parents discovered the stolen river seeds, they cried tears of joy.

They finally saw her as their Queen, they said in public, and that was all she ever wanted. The title of The Princess kept her young, made her immortal. She still had her tea parties, only her peasants ate only scraps of stale bread and rainwater. She was as quiet as ever. No one told her she was happy anymore. Her experiments were done in plain daylight but still, no one saw.

Her rule was of balance between darkness and light. Perfect, cruel, balance. Balance was happiness and compromise, wasn’t it? That’s how cities topple and how her reign was ever ingrained - the promise of happiness, the lie of balance, complacency and the slow boiling of the water.

Still, no plan was perfect and never was there ever a tyrant who didn’t meet his end by his own sword. There were five stones left when it happened, when the now quiet murmur of the river grew to a deafening roar of a mob. Some said it was lead by a trusted servant, some a lover, some a good friend, some a total stranger and that she simply hadn’t expected resistance. There were only so many explanations why she hesitated one, two seconds before calling her army. Those two seconds were near enough for Her to be overcome in her own throne room. She was hung in a willow tree, kicking all the way, asking “How Could You Do This To Me, I Am Your Queen.” Neither mercy nor forgiveness were thoughts in her mind. Perhaps if they were, there would’ve been a wet eye in the land of willow trees. She was hung as dawn broke, sky turning the same color of the blood they took from Her. They made Her a memory stone. All their rulers got one. The era of breaking tradition was (almost) over. Those brave rebels, not quite children, not quite adults, Her peers in age only, marched the stone to the River. It had to be there it all finished.

Only five stones remained in that River of the Dead, the rest either stolen or crushed. Two for the light, two for the dark and just one, to tip the balance forever, a gray stone belonging to both and to neither. Just one would’ve balanced it perfectly.

The people of Demokyos made Her stone the last of the metal arm’s casualties.

#short fiction #turn loose the library #TLTL stories #short story #fantasy #Cee #dystopic fantasy is a good term yes yes

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