Achilles, Best of the Greeks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
refusetofight) wrote2024-03-26 07:42 pm
refusetofight) wrote2024-03-26 07:42 pm
For @messageforyou
Achilles may have many, frustrating flaws, but he always keeps his promises. Patroclus had arranged for the two of them to take another journey into the ancient depths of Elysium where the shades lived and died in a time before Athens, when borders and languages and even the gods were much different. Both of them enjoyed the adventure of it, like stepping back in history.
As much as Patroclus hates to admit it, Hermes was right; Elysium has more to offer beyond their insufferable heroic contemporaries, their feasting and fighting.
Pat waits for one hour, two, anxiously petting Méli and muttering excuses into her soft ears. He’s dealing with some difficult young shades. Theseus has trapped him in conversation. The House of Hades has called on his services. He’s tending to Lyra …
But Achilles never appears. Neither Pat nor Méli can stand to sit still any longer, so they begin to search.
Optimistically, Pat enlists Méli as a scent hound, but she’s easily distracted from the task (if she even understood it to begin with). She meanders aimlessly through glades, tail wagging in contrast to her master’s palpable anxiety. Whatever this game is, she’s enjoying it.
They wander for another hour until a rustle in the bushes perks her ears and in a flurry of motion, she bolts off, barking eagerly and chasing something unseen. Patroclus sighs and does his best to follow her crashing, splashing progress through a stretch of marsh. “Méli! Méli!”
The chase is punctuated by the sudden, shrill squeak of a dying rodent. Pat doubles his pace and pushes forward into a clearing. In the middle, Méli proudly holds a monstrous rat in her jaws. All around her, the mossy earth is churned and bristling with arms and armor. There was a structure here, too. He spies beams and freshly-toppled columns, more grotesque rats scuttling in amongst them …
… and a hearth he’d know anywhere—a hearth by which he’d once warmed his hands and listened to Peleus’ tales of the Argonauts. This was the glade made to look like Phthia.
As much as Patroclus hates to admit it, Hermes was right; Elysium has more to offer beyond their insufferable heroic contemporaries, their feasting and fighting.
Pat waits for one hour, two, anxiously petting Méli and muttering excuses into her soft ears. He’s dealing with some difficult young shades. Theseus has trapped him in conversation. The House of Hades has called on his services. He’s tending to Lyra …
But Achilles never appears. Neither Pat nor Méli can stand to sit still any longer, so they begin to search.
Optimistically, Pat enlists Méli as a scent hound, but she’s easily distracted from the task (if she even understood it to begin with). She meanders aimlessly through glades, tail wagging in contrast to her master’s palpable anxiety. Whatever this game is, she’s enjoying it.
They wander for another hour until a rustle in the bushes perks her ears and in a flurry of motion, she bolts off, barking eagerly and chasing something unseen. Patroclus sighs and does his best to follow her crashing, splashing progress through a stretch of marsh. “Méli! Méli!”
The chase is punctuated by the sudden, shrill squeak of a dying rodent. Pat doubles his pace and pushes forward into a clearing. In the middle, Méli proudly holds a monstrous rat in her jaws. All around her, the mossy earth is churned and bristling with arms and armor. There was a structure here, too. He spies beams and freshly-toppled columns, more grotesque rats scuttling in amongst them …
… and a hearth he’d know anywhere—a hearth by which he’d once warmed his hands and listened to Peleus’ tales of the Argonauts. This was the glade made to look like Phthia.