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Inferno, Canto I
All Aoife wants is to go home. Not, to her mind, an unreasonable request given that the prior few … months, perhaps – she’s not been privy to linear time much as of late – have consisted of: nearly being murdered by the goddess Anat for uncovering her betrayal of Marrowmont; Aoife’s wandering spirit then trapped in Tír na nÓg by yet another goddess, fair Flidais; before being set free by a third in the form of An Morrígan, who shoved her into a fen that acted as a gateway between realities. Only instead of the latter’s promised transit home sending her back to Marrowmont, Aoife found herself … wherever the fuck this is.
The world around her gleaming gold so bright it burns her eyes to behold. Clockworks colliding and meshing in teeth and gear and slipping into and out of each other in ways that defy even the semblance of logic to which Aoife desperately clings. Her flesh feeling as if it wants to eat itself, her muscles gnawing at the inside of her skin like hungry teeth, if she wanders too far from her only companion.
He, too, glowing golden in the light of all these cogs, this magnificent machinery stretching past sight and still deeper off into the bare hint of horizon in shape and color it beggars Aoife’s remaining mental faculties to even attempt to consider. Wheels within wheels moving between patterns alternately astrolabes and orreries as they drift through esoteric configurations until they become their own celestial bodies: multi-partite suns on cosmic scale off-gassing light and heat, their orbits set and metals spun by unseen hand.
Against all that chaos it’s comforting to be here with her own personal Virgil – by his own admission so named, and claiming his role as her guide home when he found her; her own and very welcome psychopomp – on this most unwelcome journey through the afterlife, or underworld, or spirit realm. Or just somewhere in between everything else. She’s not really sure. Aoife’s spent most of her life being fairly grounded – immune to magic in her own world. And able to keep a measure of distance from the magic and chaos around her since she’s been flung out of it. Sometimes. Not that it’s helped much as of late.
But her companion… Her companion moves through the world rather differently than she. Unaffected by the ordered chaos around them. Aoife’d thought him part of this place, made of the same metals as the world in which they now exist, when she first encountered him. Until shadow and occlusion transiting across Virgil while he wanders, looking for something, let his more naturally bronze hue and tone show through. Her guide roaming quickly enough, up and over hills of grinding, metal teeth and too-smooth discs, that Aoife has to hurry to keep up.
