Chapter Text
Rey was raised on tales of gods and heroes.
What little girl is not? The gods are mercurial, and it is best to placate them as best you can. Only danger can come from catching the eye of a god, and it is a fate better avoided by mere mortals, lest you find yourself destined to become a spider, or a tree, or worse—a mother to a demigod.
Rey always preferred the tales of the heroes to tales of the gods. Hercules and the twelve trials of Hera. Perseus who slew the gorgon and freed his love from a fate worse than death. Jason and the Argonauts who sailed at his side to help him claim golden fleece and golden throne. They were not gods, which made them feel more real, somehow. Listening to tales of their feats, imagining their strength, their cleverness, their heart made Rey’s days pass more quickly as she mended broken plowshares or broken looms.
Rey is a queen of broken things—fitting, for one who as broken as she. She is nobody, left on a hillside to die by parents who did not want her. They will sing no songs of her when she is gone to Hades. No one will remember her. No one has any reason to.
-
Rey builds her first harp out of a broken loom with strings that, when plucked, sing out of tune. She leaves an offering on the altar of the god of music and sunlight and prays that she might one day sing his praise with a voice like a lark’s.
She teaches herself music, as she taught herself all things. She teaches herself because she would sing songs of Hercules and Perseus and Jason, her old favorites, and that, one day, she might sing songs of her own creation.
On quiet, lonely nights she even dared to dream that perhaps someday, someone else would sing her songs too.
If she is to have reason to be remembered, it is through song. So, she begs the light—let her learn.
-
And she does.
“Gifted,” they call her, for when she sings, men stop and listen. Songs of glory and victory that inspire, or lamentations that bring tears to the eyes—Rey sings them all, and she sings them well. The gods grace her tongue with a knack for words, her lips do homage to the gods and legends that gave her hope as a child. She makes them greater, and in so doing, makes herself great.
Word of her gift travels so far as Alderaan, and the queen invites her to play in honor of her son. Rey’s heart is in her throat when she arrives at the palace, is given quarters far more luxurious than those she has ever known, and fed.
That evening, she is brought to the queen’s own quarters, not a banquet hall as she had expected. The queen sits alone in her room, staring out over the darkening groves from her window.
“Sing me a song of the glorious dead,” she whispers, and drinks.
So Rey does, singing high and sweet as she plays her lyre and daylight dies outside. She sings of war and blood, of loves lost, of murder and vengeance, and when she is done, she sits quietly and waits for the queen to speak.
“My son,” she says softly at last, “slew his father.”
Rey’s heart constricts, and her fingers clench around the frame of her lyre. The queen had bade her sing a song for the glorious dead, but in honor of a kinslayer? “There are those who would say such a man is cursed by the gods for all eternity for doing a deed so black,” Rey says as carefully as she can.
“And surely he knows such a curse when he went to Hades.” The queen sounds sad as she takes another sip of her wine, her dark eyes distant.
“How did he die?” Rey asks, not knowing if she means the queen’s husband or her son.
“He gave himself to Hades,” she says at last. “In killing my husband, he slew himself. Not with the same stroke, but it was a deed too black for him.”
The queen does not look at Rey. Her gaze is distant, remembering, perhaps, or simply mourning, simply aching.
“So you have me sing for his memory?” Rey does not understand, but she wishes to. She has never known a mother’s love, but she suspects that is what she sees in the queen’s eyes when she turns to look at Rey—a mother remembering her son as a boy, or perhaps her dead husband as a young man. How lonely she looks. How old and small.
“Sing for the life he should have had, not the one he led—the love he should have known, not the rage and pain in his heart. Sing for the son I should have raised, not the one I did.” The queen drinks, and this time, when Rey’s fingers pluck at the harp strings, she sings a dirge so sweet and sad that the queen’s whole body starts to shake with tears.
She puts all of the queen’s heartbreak into her song, and finds she understands the conflict in her heart. No songs will ever be written in honor of the queen’s son—only tales to revile him and what he has done.
Rey finds that sad.
-
Rey stays in Alderaan. The queen has taken a liking to her, and Rey sings in her palace every day. It is a peaceful place, but not a happy one, and Rey feels the ghosts of the queen’s past in the hallways of her palace. Had her son run through them, laughing, as a boy? Had her husband kissed her here? And now she is alone, with both of them dead and gone.
Rey sings for her, and the queen sits quietly, lost in thought, resting her hand in front of her face.
At first, Rey had thought that the queen was staring at the vineyards and olive groves that stretch out beneath her city. But after several evenings, she realizes that the queen’s eyes are trained on a bend between two mountains in the distance.
“The lord of the underworld is a liar,” the queen says when she catches Rey following her gaze. Her voice is hard, and her gaze is angry. “He stole my son from me.”
“I did not think he was such a god.” The lord of Hades has never seen so keen on stealing away the lives of the living—at least not in all the songs that Rey had heard her whole life.
“Gods are not as they are in songs,” the queen replies. “The sun is older, and death is colder. I named my son for the sun, and yet it was the whisperings of the underworld that won his heart.”
Once she knows that, she finds herself staring too. Not when she is singing for the queen, but rather when she finds herself on her own. It is a place always in shadow, and one morning, when dawn’s rosy fingers trail across the sky, Rey goes off towards it.
The countryside around the palace is beautiful, and Rey is alone save for farmers that she passes. As the day grows more and more bright, the point between the two mountains seems almost to grow darker in the contrast to the brightening sky.
The mountains are farther away than they had looked from the palace, and Rey continues on until the sun is high in the sky. When she reaches the base of the nearer of the two mountains, she begins to climb, the grass fading away to rock and tree, and prickles breaking across her skin as she approaches what she knows to be the place.
She finds a man sitting there beneath a tree, his eyes on a cave that leads down into the ground. There is mist all about them, and Rey pauses, wondering if she is interrupting.
“What’s down there?” she asks the man. He has blue eyes and a greying beard and when he looks at her there is neither surprise nor trust in his face.
“Hades,” he says simply, before turning his gaze back. “That is the path to Hades.”
“You guard it?”
“No,” the man says.
“Then why are you here?”
“Why are you here, singer?” he says. It is not until that moment that Rey realizes that, out of habit, she’d slung her lyre across her back.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Don’t let the dark call to you,” the man says. “There’s no coming back from it.”
She thinks of the dead prince, of his mother’s mourning.
Her mother had never mourned for her like that, and she’d committed no crime as great as murdering a father.
“And what if I go down intent to bring someone back?”
The man gazes at her.
“Who are you?”
“Rey,” she says.
“Where are you from, Rey.”
“Nowhere.”
“No one’s from nowhere.”
“I am,” she replies firmly. “Who are you?”
“I was Luke.” His voice is quiet and doleful and Rey stands straighter.
“The queen’s brother?”
“Once.”
“You guard the gate to Hades because of her son, don’t you?”
Luke gives her a sharp look. “Where did you hear that?”
“I’m a singer. I know how to recognize stories, even when they aren’t being told.”
“Did she send you? My sister?”
Rey pauses. The queen does not know she is here. She does not even know why she is here.
Except that in the curling corner of her mind, the one that is filled with tales of gods and heroes and men, she does. “She longs for her son,” she says simply.
Luke’s eyes are hard. “This isn’t going to go the way you think.”
Rey doesn’t heed him, and plunges into the dark.
-
The road to Hades is dark, and cold, and for all the songs and stories she has ever known, unlike anything she could have imagined.
-
For Cerberus, she plays a lullaby and he sleeps, letting her slip past. For Charon she slips a gold coin under her tongue and he ferries her across Styx without a word.
-
The dead need no light with which to see; they need no air to breathe. But when Rey plucks at the strings of her lyre and one approaches, she knows that they have ears to hear.
“How do I find your king?” she asks when she finishes her tune.
“I can take you to him,” the dead man says. She cannot see him clearly, cannot hear his breath, but his voice is deep, and emotionless.
“Thank you,” she says. He takes hold of her elbow and his fingers are clammy against her skin. His grip is strong. She wonders if this is a mistake, if she will remain forever in the grip of death, or if, like Persephone, she will see spring and sunshine again.
“Why are you here?” he asks as they walk.
“A man gave himself to Hades, and his mother would have him return.”
“If he gave himself to Hades, surely he was ready to die.”
“Then I would hear it of his own lips,” she says. “His mother longs for him.”
“You must be devoted to her if you came so far,” the dead man says.
“She…” Rey pauses, her voice trailing away. How odd, that the underworld seems to muffle her voice. This place is not a place for a singer, “loves her son,” she finishes weakly.
“And you?”
“I did not know him.” The dead man says nothing, and Rey hastens to add, “I did not know my own mother, though. I should have liked for her to bend heaven and earth to have me returned to her.”
“So you do this, the deed of a devoted daughter, or a brave fool—coming to Hades with nothing but a lyre and your own desires.”
“Singers are foolhardy by nature,” she says carefully. “We wish to see the beauty, even where it cannot exist.”
The dead man rounds on her. “And what beauty do you see in me?”
Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness around her now, and she can see him more clearly now than before. He has a long face, and a serious one. There are no laugh lines around his lips, but his forehead is creased from frowning. And his eyes—they are deep, and dark, and dead.
Except no—no they are not.
They are sad.
Sadness, pain, anger all buried so deep that she had very nearly missed them. It changes his face to see him that way. Suddenly, he is not dead at all. He is very much alive. Somehow, inexplicably, alive.
“How can life that grows in darkness and death not be its own form of beauty?” she asks quietly. “You survive, somehow.”
His hand tightens on her arm, and he doesn’t say a word as he continues to lead her on.
There’s something bright in his eyes.
She wonders, briefly, if it is the glint of tears.