Pitched Countless Souls into Hades Dark
And left their bodies to rot -- Iliad (modified)
I have a series I’m writing that takes place in Renaissance Florence as they’re confronted with the reality of Hades, the Greek vision of the underworld. One early passage from the discarded early attempts proved itself the most meaningful to me. It no longer exists within a story that’s transformed beyond anything that could sustain its details, but I’d like to share the scene with you, if I may. At the time the book was called:
Hades Dark
Life is short, and death is long. You think you believe me, but you don’t, not really, not the way you should. I’ll tell you what I know of life and death, which is more than most. I was already over eighteen hundred years old when I met the poet Virgil. I promised him a few prophecies and the story of his people, if only he would carry me into the underworld and leave me there, allowing me some pretense of death, but, even in Hades, I’ve lingered.
Some have seen in my writings a foretelling of their Christ, and, even now, Michelangelo is including me in his painting upon the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, alongside the prophets of the Old Testament. It is a proper farewell. After more than three millennia, I have achieved my chief desire. Soon I will not only die, I will cease to exist.
#
When I was a young woman, Apollo offered me anything I wanted in exchange for my virginity. I asked for life, not that I might live forever but that the prospect of death would not sour every joy. May the latter end of a long life be mine, I thought. What a fool.
I pointed to a pile of sand and asked for as many years as there were grains. Apollo gave me my wish--a thousand years for each of the thousand grains--and promised me lasting youth as well, but I could not surrender myself to him. When he came for me, I rejected his advances. In his anger, he allowed me the life he had promised (and more besides) but took my lasting youth.
I continued to serve as Apollo’s sibyl and, at the age of seven hundred, led Aeneas into the underworld. Three hundred years later, I was counting the days to a welcome death, but death did not come.
I was once tall and beautiful, but with age I grew hunched and small. Across the years, I continued to shrivel until my acolytes carried me in a jar. Within that jar I melted away, becoming nothing but a liquid, and still I lived.
Now, as I wait for my long-anticipated end, time feels insufficient, but I will tell you what I can.
#
As an undying sibyl in the underworld, I could--like the dead who pass through the veil--absorb the energy of the living, but (being alive) I could do something more. I could store that energy for the dead to feed upon at their leisure. Out of the battles raged over my power, the cubi emerged victorious, but they soon learned I did not intend to serve them but to lead. I became their mother, and they, the children who sucked at my teat.
Now, their focus and obedience faltered, my girls.
I was absorbing Bertoldo’s emotional energy when the debate stopped. Heads turned. A few human voices cried out; most went silent in open-mouthed disbelief. My girls turned, and several scurried into the garden.
Beside the fountain stood a naked woman. This, my vision had not foreseen.
Savonarola, reared back, his eyes averted. “Demon temptress!”
Young Michelangelo edged around the others for a better view, but Bertoldo pushed him back with a sweep of his hand, his own brown robes, thick against the chill of the winter air, shielding Michelangelo’s eyes.
Ficino took off his own cloak to place upon her shoulders. He was nearly sixty and his face radiated kindness and warmth, although some of that warmth might have come from that red cloak. “My child come inside.” he said. “You’ll die in this cold.”
Before Ficino could reach her--and before I thought to order otherwise--my girls swarmed over the woman’s naked flesh. Most had already transformed themselves into males, small as babies, fast as falcons. They felt the emptiness of the woman’s heart, emitting nothing but the slightest hint of human emotion, but no niggling matter such as this would deter them.
In an instant, her naked form undid the training of centuries.
They sank their fangs into her flesh. Their venom pumped into her veins and fed her heart, filling it with passion, and they directed that passion at the hottest emotion in sight, Bertoldo’s.
The woman breathed as if for the first time, her blue-tinged flesh turned pink. Ficino wrapped her in his cloak, held her, and walked her through the open door, but, as they went, her face turned to watch Bertoldo.
The crowd grumbled. “Disgraceful,” said one. “And so close to Twelfth Night,” said another. “An ill omen,” said a third.
To that, they all agreed.
The cubi and I followed the others indoors, where candles lit complexly painted walls. I felt the warmth of Bertoldo’s glow and drew it in, the way a vortex draws in water. His emotions overwhelmed me, and then a jolt struck like lightning within his storm. I opened my eyes and saw the woman staring at me, her lips pulled back in a snarl. She jerked away from Ficino’s grasp and hurled herself upon me.
I tumbled through the air, fell free of my jar, splashed against a chair, and dripped to the floor. A man’s foot landed on me without a sound like the sucking of deep mud, but he moved on without noticing. The crowd spilled over one another moving away from or toward the woman in Ficino’s red cloak.
Bertoldo sat where he had fallen to the floor, his hands about his head. The woman circled him, her back to him.
“Strike her down,” Savonarola said, his face long, lean, and severe, like the specter of death beneath the black hood of his friar’s cloak.
“Please,” Ficino said, “we mean you no harm.”
The cubi circled the room, and the woman hissed at them. I called them to me. Her eyes followed their movement, but she would not leave Bertoldo.
“Are you hurt?” Ficino asked.
“She didn’t strike me,” Bertoldo said. “She startled me, and I fell. I don’t believe I’m injured.”
“I see no evidence she wants to hurt you,” Ficino said.
“Everyone stay back.”
The family murmured in confusion but did as they were told.
“No evidence?” Savonarola asked. “Look around you. What do you think she’s doing?”
“Protecting him,” Ficino said.
A door crashed open behind us, and Michelangelo burst into the room. He held his master’s hook gun, complete with matchlock and trigger. The woman in Ficino’s red cloak glared at him, not understanding the danger she faced.
Ficino cried out, his hands splayed, but it was too late.
Later, Michelangelo would say he only meant to scare her, that the weapon had fired on its own. However it happened, the explosion echoed off the walls and rang in their ears, and the metal ball pierced the woman’s shoulder.
She stumbled, shrieking, bleeding. She bolted out the door and fled across the garden. Those who could gather their wits chased after her. My cubi scooped me into my jar, and we followed after them. We overtook the crowd and closed in upon the woman. She sprinted toward the view of the valley, which opened atop a great, stone wall and a long, steep drop to the wooded hillside below.
Ficino’s red cloak fluttered behind her and fell to a rest on the stone path. She fled to the wall’s edge and threw herself over.
Her feet twisted into talons and her shoulder blades spread forth in terrible, feathered wings.
From the edge of the garden, through the eyes of my cubi, I watched her disappear into the wild wood.
The humans reached the garden wall and looked to find a body that was not there. Bertoldo arrived last of all. My girls carried me to him and bathed me in his warmth. They chirped to one another like insects, and we fed.
—End Snippet—
What’s Changed
The Sibyl, liquefied and in her jar, will be an important character, but she’s no longer the viewpoint character, no longer a current resident of Hades, commands no horde of cubi, and after a prominent roll in book one, is largely missing from the books that so-far follow.
As evidenced from this passage, I was attempting to begin at a moment when the greatest names of the Renaissance in Florence lived—and it was too much. There are so many historical figures to play with, it becomes like a child, smashing together his action figures.
I pulled back to begin the series in 1439, with Plethon and the Ecumenical Council that has now reached Florence in its ongoing efforts to mend the breach between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church while simultaneously outpacing the plague. In the scene above, Ficino is nearly sixty, and now he is a child of six.
As I say in my current introduction:
Plethon came to Florence as part of the ecumenical council attempting to unite Rome with the Roman Empire (the Latin church with the Greek) prior to the fall of Constantinople. Plethon, whose birth name was Georgios Gemistos, was at least seventy-nine, and he had come at the request of the emperor to be his advisor. He was a respected philosopher, but after his death, writings were discovered that were interpreted as a rejection of Christianity and an embrace of a pagan spirituality inspired by classical Greek mythology. It seems accurate to say his writing interpreted the facets of the Divine and categorized those facets using the names of the classical Hellenistic gods. The truth is elusive, though, as the bulk of that writing was deemed heretical and destroyed.
The Latin church of the time was very much beholden to Aristotle, but Plethon helped re-introduce the west to Plato (after whom he’d styled his own name). It is said that his profound effect upon Cosimo de’ Medici inspired the creation of the Platonic Academy which Marsilio Ficino led, but that is history, which isn’t the same as saying it’s true. Plethon’s influence on Medici has been questioned as has the role and nature of the Platonic Academy.
We too easily think ourselves above believing in mythology, which we pretend is limited to pagan gods and magical creatures, but modern mythology is a re-imagined past told to hide unpleasant truths. We create mythologies about our nations, our institutions, and our past, like children who tell themselves bedtime stories so they can sleep at night.
--Thaddeus Thomas
And now…
Discover classical-era, mythological, epic fantasy in a historical-fantasy, Renaissance wrapper!
The Sibyliad, Book One: The Hell Jar
The Sibyliad is an epic series of novellas, beginning with The Hell Jar, which you can pick up at no cost. The Greek underworld comes to Renaissance Italy!
Plethon:
My dear Daphnis, you think yourself ready to die. Most do, secure in the one belief that’s meant to ease their passage from this world to the next. I could teach them all to fear, if they were ready for anything but comfort and grace.
Stand in the grass outside the Basilica of the Holy Cross or idle curiously along the road; hear me teach; see the thinkers of Florence discover greater illumination outside the church than in. Too bold a claim? Before today, you’d have thought that idea a grave danger, but now, we present Florence the skeletons of freshly dead monks, stripped of skin and muscle, immaculate in their bloodless display.
My words are not the threat.
Become a patron of the literary arts; “achingly human fantasy” awaits you.
Get free and discounted books!
Subscribe to the Sibyliad fantasy series!
an epic fantasy of myth and history, told in a series of 100-page novellas
the first books is free
Or get EVERYTHING with the Super-Fan Subscription
Download anything and everything in the bookstore
Get early access to the dog-in-space novella, Warp & Woof. It releases to Super Fans a full week before anyone else can get it!
Can’t wait to finish Kraken in a Coffee Cup? The entire book will be released for Super Fans before the next installment hits the newsletter! Everyone else will have to wait until the serialization is complete.
Exclusive access to a book so racy, I thought I’d hide it away forever—my adults-only horror novel: Ritual and Racita.
Exclusive access to my works-in-progress: The House of Haunted Women and Heartfelt Among the Flying Islands.
There’s no feeling in the world like a bookstore—and when it’s a single-author bookstore where you’re buying directly from the writer, that’s a magic all its own.
Steampunk Cleopatra: From the title I was expecting swashbuckling adventures against a vaguely Egyptian backdrop, but instead I found a finely crafted and exhaustively researched work of historical fiction, full of mesmerizing detail. The book is studded with details that make the world seem richer and slightly more unfamiliar than you'd expect. These are embedded in a story of palace intrigue, scholarly curiosity and - most importantly - several very different kinds of love.