Details About Tartarus And Kore
One moment, the gray, desert-like environment was empty, void of any other living being or even any defined structure. It was all-but a void, an expanse of dull-colored dust expanding in every direction. Any color, any defined shape, anything that had ever stood out had long-since been lost. There was nothing of any apparent import in this place. No plants, no animals, no structures at all. It was as though every hint of life had been literally leached out of the landscape and used to fuel… something that was now gone. Or perhaps, something that simply couldn’t be seen with the naked eye.
It was into that dark, gray expanse that a dark-skinned, white-haired figure appeared without warning. Her body simply manifested right there in the dust. The second it did, the woman was already flipping up out of the dirt and spinning around in midair, hand snapping up and out to hurl a throwing knife at… nothing. The blade flew out through the air before coming down awkwardly into the dirt, bouncing end over end with an unsettling series of thunking sounds, which seemed to echo through the surrounding environment in an unnatural way.
Charmeine, already having flipped herself from a sprawled heap to a crouching position before the knife had even finished its arc through the air, snapped her gaze around. Her teeth were bared, a growl escaping her as she searched for her enemies. That Chambers girl, the Columbus boy, their friends, they were all… she had been falling through the air and… and something had… what had happened? Where was she? What the void had those idiot children done to her? How did she end up here?
Wait, here. She knew this place. She had been here once, a long time ago. As she slowly rose to a standing position and summoned her knife back with a sharp word, Charmeine continued to look around. Her rage from having been in the midst of battle had begun to give way to unease. Something was very wrong here. She shouldn’t be in this place. Her visit last time, the visit that had gifted her with her Olympian abilities, had been under very controlled circumstances. She was put in this place to absorb some of its energy and then pulled out again. But this? This wasn’t controlled. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She had been on Earth, and nothing those children had should have been capable of sending her back to this hell. How was this even slightly possible? It was a trick, an illusion, something one of them had done to manifest her fears or something. That was the only possible explanation for any of this. She simply had to focus and push through this illusion. The children might have been capable of creating the false vision somehow, but there wasn’t even the slightest chance they could keep it going now that she knew what was happening and was actively fighting it.
With her knife held tightly in one hand and the other raised defensively, Charmeine began turning in a circle while focusing very intently on seeing through this illusion. The second it fell, she wanted to be ready to put this blade through the skull of whoever was nearest. These humans, any who survived, would learn their places.
Strangely, the void images around her didn’t vanish, no matter how much she focused on seeing through them. That was impossible. She was a Seosten, an Olympian Seosten. The human children, no matter how unexpectedly clever they might’ve been (how did the Chambers brat manage to escape her prison and show up at the hotel?), couldn’t hope to create an illusion strong enough to trap her for this long. They must have had help, it was the only explanation both for Chambers’ escape and this entire situation. But who? Who could possibly have managed to pull this off? And why? Was this that headmistress, Arthur’s sister? It did seem like her level of trickery, and she had the power for it. But something… no, this was something else. But what? What was the purpose of this, why was she being held in this illusion, and why couldn’t she escape from it? What was she missing? There had to be something obvious, some trick to break this spell and show the human children just how bad of a mistake they--
“You’re dead.” Those simple words came from behind Charmeine, who spun that way and went to throw her knife. But she stopped short, staring at the source of them. That wasn’t one of the human children, or any of their allies. It wasn’t anyone she could possibly have expected to see no matter how much time and effort she might’ve put into thinking about who could possibly have been helping the Chambers brat.
“Persephone?” Even as that name escaped her incredulously, Charmeine somehow knew it was wrong. The way the woman in front of her stood, the expression on her face, the very aura she gave off, none of that matched what Charmeine had come to expect to see from the Revenant-woman. No, this definitely wasn’t her, it had to be--
“Kore,” came the flat correction, even as the woman in question lifted her chin slightly. A very subtle smile played at her face, though it was subdued. Her eyes seemed to stare with remarkable intensity. “But you figured that out already, didn’t you?”
“Kore,” Charmeine echoed softly, letting out a breath before crossing the distance between them. “You’re the one--you…” She paused, then gave an almost violent shake of her head, grip tightening on her knife as she spat, “I don’t understand.”
The other woman, the dead woman, offered her a knowing look, a look that said Charmeine couldn’t lie to her. Especially not about this. “Yes, you do. You understand what this is. You just don’t want to. But then, you always were one of the most stubborn out of all of us. And, given our species and our ship, that’s saying quite a lot.”
Part of Charmeine wanted to lash out. There was a voice screaming in the back of her mind that this was another part of the illusion, that the figure in front of her wasn’t really there any more than the rest of her surroundings were. But she didn’t want to listen to that voice, because if this was real, if this figure was really there, then… then Kore was here. How long had she wished she could have another chance to talk to the real Kore. Not Persephone, not the Revenant puppeting her form, but Kore herself.
But if this was real, if she was really talking to Kore, that had to mean that the environment around her was real, it wasn’t an illusion. But… but… which did she want more? Did she want this to be fake, a trick, or did she want to talk to the real Kore?
For once in her life, Charmeine had to admit she didn’t know the answer to that. She didn’t know what she wanted. What she did know was that the first words the woman in front of her had spoken, the ones that drew her attention, had finally penetrated her consciousness, through the surprise and confusion of the newcomer’s identity. “Dead,” she found herself murmuring in a dull voice. “You think I’m dead.”
A faint, yet visible wince crossed the other woman’s face, her forehead wrinkling. “Oh Charmeine, I don’t think that. I know it. I’m sorry. I wish there was a better way to ease you into that, but there isn’t. Especially not in this place. You know where we are.”
“Tartarus,” Charmeine agreed, face twisting. “I can’t be dead. I was fighting children. Human children. They--wait--what?” Her eyes closed and a shudder ran through her as she felt her stomach twist with confusion. “The children, they--they had power, they were from Crossroads, of course they could have--they were dangerous, I couldn’t underestimate them. But I did. I didn’t see them as a threat. I dismissed them. I just--why? What-- I wasn’t careful. I know better than that. I--why--what was…” The knife fell from her hand to bounce in the dust once more, as she brought her fingers to her forehead. “What did I do? I don’t understand.” That time, she really didn’t.
Taking another step to her, Kore put her own hands against Charmeine’s shoulders. “That’s Tartarus, its influence. It wanted you to die. It wanted to bring you here, so it made you more and more reckless. It made you more arrogant, pushing you to keep acting more dangerously until… until it got what it wanted.”
“Kore, what are you talking about?” Charmeine found herself demanding. She looked up, staring intently at the other woman as a rush of conflicting, confusing feelings ran through her. “Tartarus--how could it want anything? It’s a place, a location, it’s--it’s not alive, it can’t think or feel.”
For a moment, Kore didn’t react. She simply stood there, eye to eye with the other Seosten. Then, she leaned in, gently touching her lips to Charmeine’s. The two kissed like that, and for those seconds, Charmeine forgot her confusion and anger. Though they had never been an official couple, not in that way. They had-- as the humans would say--’hooked up’ before. They had some fun together. And it was possible that more could have come from that, given time. It was part of the reason she had been so gutted by Kore’s death, and so bothered by Persephone’s existence. For these past couple thousand years, she had been tormented, in some back corner of her mind that she refused to openly acknowledge, by what-ifs. And so, in that moment, when Kore gently kissed her, Charmeine allowed all the rage to fall away for what felt like the first time in millennia. It was like shackles falling away, leaving her weightless after spending all those years dragging heavy iron bars everywhere she went.
Then it was over, and Kore took a step back while her hand stayed on the other woman’s shoulder. Abruptly, Charmeine felt a slight pain, realizing Kore had scratched her elbow. “Ow, what--”
“Come, I’ll explain.” Turning on her heel with that proclamation, the other Seosten began walking across that empty, seemingly endless expanse. “We shouldn’t stay in one place for too long, the others could find us.”
“Other who?” Charmeine demanded, yet she immediately started following the other woman without a second’s hesitation. Even if she had scratched her.
There was a brief pause before Kore answered in a voice tinged with regret. “The other Olympians, the ones I couldn’t get to in time.”
Well that was… confusing. But Charmeine didn’t have to ask for clarification, as Kore continued almost immediately. “You do remember what my power is, right?”
“How could I forget?” Charmeine retorted. “You reset your body to any physical condition it’s ever been in, or reset any other person to any physical state you created in them. Stab someone in the arm and then at any time you see them in the future you can give them that stab wound again. Heal someone and if they get injured later, you can reset them to a healed state.” After reciting all that in a tone that made it clear she was practically reading from the woman’s ship personnel file, she paused, a grimace finding its way to her face. “I mean… you could do that, before the… infection. Before you died and she took over your body.”
“I died,” Kore agreed, her voice gentle while continuing to walk at a brisk pace. “But I didn’t stop being able to do that. I can still reset myself, and others. At least if I get to them soon enough. That’s why I’m such a threat to Tartarus.”
“A threat to Tart--there it is again,” Charmeine put in sharply. “You’re talking about this place like it’s alive, like it can want things.”
Giving a heavy sigh that seemed to come from deep in her soul, Kore muttered, “It is. Tartarus is--it’s better if I show you. Let’s get a little further and I’ll share the memory with you.”
Charmeine had--well, honestly no idea what that was supposed to mean, or what the woman wanted to show her. But then, everything about this situation almost seemed like a dream. She still hadn’t processed what was happening, where she was, or… or why. One moment she had been putting those children where they--she had been fighting children… fighting… children, punishing children, acting… acting like--she had been lost in that, and now she was here, in this place with Kore, a woman who had been dead for millenia.
She… she was dead. It had really happened. It was true. Somehow, those children had killed her, and… and…
Oh.
Her pace stumbled, as she almost collapsed. But Kore’s hand was there, catching her arm to help her keep going. “It just hit you, didn’t it? Sometimes it takes longer to get that far. You were fairly quick, all things considered.”
They continued walking, traveling across that empty expanse for what felt like hours. There was nothing to see, no change of scenery. They might as well have been walking in place. Charmeine certainly couldn’t tell how her companion had any idea where they were going, or how far they had traveled. They simply kept putting one foot in front of the other.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Finally, Kore turned to her. It was still confusing, seeing her like this. She didn’t look like a ghost. She looked completely solid and real, just like Charmeine herself. Maybe that was why the idea of being ‘dead’ hadn’t really sunk in. They couldn’t be dead, they weren’t ghosts. They were right here, able to touch each other.
As though understanding what she was thinking, Kore murmured, “When we’re here, in this place, we appear to be solid. It has something to do with the Tartarus energy inside us.” She let that hang for a moment before adding, “When I died, I ended up here, in this universe. I tried for a long time to find a way out, a way back. I could feel the… energy trying to corrupt me, trying to control me. But I kept using my power to reset myself. Tartarus infects people. The longer they stay here, the more control it has over them. Every time I reset myself, I go back to how I was when I first got here. It stops Tartarus from controlling me. And if I can get to people, our people, soon enough, I can use it on them too. I can reset them.”
“That’s why you scratched me,” Charmeine realized. “So you can set me back to that… that physical state, before I get any more Tartarus influence.” She said that last word with a tone of mixed disgust and disbelief, still uncertain of how she felt about all that. But Kore wouldn’t lie. Not about something like this. Whatever was going on, she believed what she was saying. With that understanding, Charmeine’s throat was dry. “You said something about sharing a memory.”
Giving a soft sigh, Kore looked around briefly, as though making sure they were far enough away from where they’d started. Though how she could tell, Charmeine had no idea. This spot looked completely identical to the one they had walked away from. But apparently it was enough for the other woman, because she extended a hand with a quiet, “Hold still.”
For most people, Charmeine wouldn’t even have considered doing that without question. For Kore, especially now, after all this time, she obediently kept herself motionless. The woman’s fingers touched her forehead, then gently pushed inside. It didn’t hurt. There was more of a tingling sensation, before she felt a sort of connection between them. More than the literal one from having Kore’s fingers inside her brain.
Then her vision of the other Seosten, and the gray landscape, went away. Instead, Charmeine saw a beautiful field of light purple grass, dotted with flowers of various colors. Atop a low hill there was a glass wall-like structure, three meters wide, ten meters tall, and long enough to stretch out of sight in either direction. Every hundred yards or so, a set of steps, also apparently made of glass, rose from this side of the wall to the top. The steps themselves were about twice the size of Seosten (or human) stairs. Probably meant for the four-legged creatures she could see several of standing on top of that wall.
Their main bodies looked like that of a moose from Earth, though with very white fur. Near the center of their front torsos, a pair of Seosten-like arms extended, complete with hands that had seven clearly quite dexterous fingers. Those arms were quite thin and certainly not much good in a fight. They looked incredibly fragile. But a much larger pair of arms were attached near their hindquarters. These arms were quite muscular, with hands that appeared to be capable of crushing skulls rather easily. They were long enough to reach all the way forward, nearly as far as the smaller, front-facing arms could, and had full range of motion to reach back behind the being as well.
Yes, their torso was that of an Earth moose with four arms, one pair smaller and clearly meant for dexterous work, the other pair much larger and meant for heavy lifting and combat. But in the spot where a moose’s head would be, these creatures had a very long, fur-covered neck. More like that of an Earth giraffe than a moose, in that case. Given the way one of the creatures was standing with that neck fully extended upward (the neck itself was four feet long), while another was all the way down near its body, and a third had stretched backwards to inspect something in its fur near its hindquarters, they appeared to have full range of motion of their necks and could retract or extend them quite a bit. The heads attached to those necks appeared fairly Seosten-like, with long white hair, a rather large, bulbous nose, and a wide mouth. Their ears were long and floppy, like that human cartoon character Lucifer had sent her so many pictures of in the years since his banishment. Goofy, that was it.
Charmeine found herself stuck watching this scene, as one of those creatures spoke up. He clearly wasn’t speaking any language she should have understood, yet somehow she did. “If this works, our world will never be the same. Our people will never be alone.”
Another of the creatures extended his long neck to put himself face to face with the first, while moving one of those large rear arms to squeeze that one’s torso. “Whatever happens, we shall always be Kutaya. Nothing will change that. This experiment, when it works, will only make us more than we were. We will have the companions we have sought for so long.”
What followed was a series of very technical-sounding instructions, as these Kutaya used their smaller, dexterous hands on holographic controls that appeared in midair and seemed to follow them around as they paced back and forth. After a moment, Charmeine realized the holograms were being projected by the wall-structure itself.
“You didn’t just happen to appear within walking distance of the right place,” Kore’s voice informed her, coming from seemingly every direction. “The structure encircled the entire planet, along the equator. There’s a second one along the meridian line.”
“Why do they need two walls around the entire planet?” Charmeine demanded.
There was a soft chuckle. “These are about as far from walls as it’s possible to get. Walls are meant to keep something out. What you see before you is meant to pull something in.”
Charmeine wanted to ask what that was supposed to mean, but before she could, a strong humming sound filled the air. It came from the glass structure, even as a series of bright, neon-colored lights began to flash past, traveling through the ‘wall.’ The lights would appear off in the distance, approach the spot nearest Charmeine’s view, then pass by and keep going until they were out of sight. Then a different colored light would appear, and so on, until the first color returned. That happened faster and faster with each passing second, until the structure was full of a steady stream of different colors, all layered on top of one another.
“Kore,” she murmured while staring in awe. The energy coming off that structure was unbelievable. “What were they trying to pull through? And from where?”
“They don’t know,” came the answer. “They’re trying to open a gateway to another universe, a gate leading back to this universe, this world. They’re trying to create a portal to another place, along with an invitation. ‘We’re here. We want to talk. We want to meet you. Let’s be friends.’ This structure isn’t a wall. It isn’t a weapon. It’s a door, with a welcome sign. The Kutaya were trying to reach out to anyone who would come through the door and be their friends. They had so much trust that they were opening the door to their world, and asking people to come inside.”
Staring intently at the colors flashing through the glass structure, Charmeine spoke in a tight voice. “Who came through? Who attacked them?”
There was sadness in Kore’s voice. “Oh…. if only it was that simple. No one came through. They reached out to another universe, but… the universe they reached was in the midst of being born. Think of the odds of that. Of the uncountable possible universes these people could have connected to, they happened to do so with one at the very moment of its birth. Our people call it the Warmth.”
“Humans call it the Big Bang,” Charmeine muttered.
“Bang is a good word,” Kore agreed. “It’s very fast. After that first spark, a universe is born and expands into its space with indescribable speed. It happens so quickly that if you measured the amount of time it takes, you could fit more of those measurements into a single second than there have been actual seconds in our universe from its beginning to our present day. And these Kutaya opened their gate to that other universe at that precise moment.”
And then it happened. The connection was made. Charmeine knew it had, because everything ended. There was no warning, no countdown, no sudden fear. One second the structure was humming with power, those lights flashing by, and the next… the structure was gone. The grass and flowers were gone. The landscape was gray and featureless, and there was no sign of the Kutaya. They had opened their gate to that other universe at the moment of its birth, and the energy that would have gone into creating that universe had instead been sucked through the gate and… was exploded even the right word? It had erupted into this one.
“Thus,” Kore’s voice informed her, “the heart of Tartarus was born. This world, the Kutaya home, became its center. Every living thing on the planet was annihilated in that moment. And somehow, the energy itself became… sapient, able to think and feel. And what it felt was anger. It had been taken from the place of its birth, pulled away and transformed. It wasn’t what it was supposed to be. It should have been its own universe with its own stars and planets. Instead, it was here, in this universe, because these people had opened the gate to it. Maybe it was the magic of the gate itself that gave that energy its own sapience. Either way, it despised them for changing it, for trapping it. And so, it grew to despise all living beings. It began to stretch across this universe, gifting power to those other species who came into contact with it. But its power came with a price. Those who stayed too long within its influence would be mutated, transformed into its children. It was torn away from its own chance to create life, so it took the life that already existed and twisted it. And then it pitted those mutated creatures against one another. Every time one of them killed, they would gain strength from the dead thing.
“And so it continued, on and on and on. The living beings in this universe became stronger with every one of their fellows they killed. Stronger and more mutated. They grew larger, more deadly, more… monstrous. Billions upon billions of lives in the universe were reduced to a bare handful. A handful who could not kill one another, though they tried. For millions of years those few remaining beings, gifted with so much power, fought one another from one end of this universe to another. Until, through some accident, they found their way into our universe millions of years ago. Their stay there did not last, but it did give their creator, the being we call Tartarus, a glimpse of places it had not corrupted. It allowed Tartarus to see that there were other places, other universes with living beings. And it has worked ever since to find ways into those other universes, to destroy them as thoroughly as it has this one.”
“Like that hole we found and poked at to get our powers,” Charmeine muttered. “Is that why we’re both here now?”
The other woman nodded once, face twisting a bit. “Everyone who is infected by its energy pays a cost. The powers themselves are fueled by the energy of an entire universe, and even if it’s not enough to twist your body into its monstrosities, it infects your… ghost. That gets pulled back here, to this universe. And once you’re trapped here, it twists you to serve its ends.”
“Unless you’re you,” Charmeine noted in a flat grunt.
Kore visibly exhaled. “Unless you have my power, or I get to you in time, yes.” After a moment, she shook that off. “But I did make it to you. Which means you’re still yourself, and we can use that to warn--wait.”
“What’s wrong?” Charmeine immediately demanded.
Grimacing, Kore explained, “There’s… something, someone pulling at your ghost, trying to pull you back through, can’t you feel it?”
“Now that you mention it… but that’s good, it’s probably Manakel,” Charmeine reminded her. “He’ll pull my ghost out, I’ll…. well I was going to say I’d swing by and kill those human children for killing me, but I don’t… feel that angry about it. Why--you.”
“Yes, my influence is keeping you calm,” Kore confirmed. “Something to do with how I use my power here. But you’re wrong, it’s not Manakel. It’s something else, something worse. I can keep you here. Every time they try to grab you, I just reset you and make their grip slip off. But as long as I keep you here--”
“I can’t warn the others--the rest of our people about what’s going on here, so they won’t be working on a solution,” Charmeine finished for her. “So either we stay here forever and wait for more and more of our people to show up… or you release me and I take my chances with whatever’s trying to pull me out. I think you know my answer to that.”
Kore’s head shook. “You don’t understand. This thing, whatever it is, it’s stronger than you think. I’ve seen them before, here and there, they’re… they’re like us, they have possession powers. But they can possess ghosts. If I let go of you and you get pulled out there, they’ll possess you. They will enslave you.”
Charmeine reached out, grabbing the woman by the arm. “And if you don’t let me go, nothing will change. We’ll be safe in here, but our people, our crewmates, our friends, they… they’ll just keep being drawn in here. And you won’t be able to get to all of them. Yes, maybe this thing will possess me. But you and I both know our people don’t go down that easily. If I’m out there, I’ll find a way to break that control. I’ll warn the others. I’ll tell them to start finding a way to fix that problem so we can get you and everyone else out of here. But you have to trust me. You have to let me go.”
She paused briefly, then added, “I’m going to be angry again when I’m out there, right?”
Kore nodded. “You will be. I won’t be dampening your anger anymore.”
With a shrug, Charmeine replied, “Then let me just…” She leaned in and gently kissed the other woman, before rocking back on her heels. “Okay, let go. I’ll find a way to escape and warn our people, I promise.”
“I can do one thing for you,” Kore announced, even as Charmeine felt the faint grip on her ghostly form start to grow stronger. “If this thing does possess you, it won’t be able to read any of your memories about what happened here in Tartarus. It won’t know about me, or about your plan to escape, as long as you don’t tell it yourself. But Charmeine, you’re going to be angry again, you have to control it! You might have to work with those humans to stop all this.”
A dismissive snort escaped the woman in question. “Me, work with humans? Not a chance in--”
Then she was… in her quarters, back on the Olympus. Tartarus was gone. She had been pulled back here, by… by a presence. Something surrounding her. Something that wanted to take her.
And Kore had been right about one thing, Charmeine’s anger was definitely back. With a snarl, she spun, eyes searching for the invisible presence. “You listen to me, whatever you are. I have things to do. If you think you can stand in my way for long, you don’t--”
“--even know what you’re fighting against,” her voice finished. But she wasn’t the one saying it. She had been taken, that easily, that quickly. Charmeine was no longer Charmeine.
And those humans she was so angry with? Well, the thing that had taken her over happened to know that at least some of them were right here on this ship right now.
It was time to go say hello.