Categories > Cartoons > Class of the Titans > The Cold Side of Heart
Author’s Note: 2 months!?!?!?! Not a long note, just another apology. And an ironic and fitting opening to my life recently. Also, a thank you for patience. Things happen, you have to suck it up, without letting yourself go numb… Wow, that was angst…. Hmm… CAKE! All better now J. This will be sure to answer a few questions, if you remember any. Be sure to note in chapter eight, that only Persephone knew the true cause of the war of legends. Thank you so much! –Nuuoa Eclaire
Disclaimer: I do not own Class of the Titans, but I own all my own writings, story, Aredith and the modified legend of Thisbe.
Pairings: Thisbe/Jyros, Hera/Jyros (purely mother-son)
Warnings: No actual Class of the Titans characters, besides mention of the gods, this happened in the times of ancient Greece, after Jason and some other main heroes. Character death.
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The Cold Side of Heart
Chapter 11: Love of the Cursed, Part Three: Of Death
Chapters 9-11: Love of the Cursed: The Cursed Kiss of Death
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Death is a plague, claiming not only lives, but affecting the entire landscape where that poor soul fell, but then again… No one can describe death until they feel it, and because of this, no one really knows what it’s like. Is it quick at sharp? A loss of breath? A stabbing pain that draws out slowly from your heart? A trickle of energy from your fingertips? Anyone to have ever felt death has died; thus making it impossible to write about. That’s the logical reasoning, right? But what some people fail to understand is that death comes in many forms. Sadness turns to despair, and before long despair is numb acceptance. When you taste the richness in life, and are then forced to taste the dust on the road, that can be a fate worse than death.
Because in death you are asleep. And in pain you are vividly, vividly awake.
‘The sickle of death took one, but the aftershock killed far worse. Thousands of innocent souls, and one heart.’ – The Legend of Thisbe and Jyros, The Lost Works
For Thisbe, death took the form of a broken smile.
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“I wish to marry the mortal.”
The words left Jyros’ bleeding lips before Hera even began to smile a greeting,” How are you my son? Why are you beaten? Was there a battle this late at night?” This instantly began to dissolve bitterly in her mouth.
“What?” The goddess of all gods rose from her high golden chair, and thunder boomed in her steps, then stopped to erupt in forced laughter. Jyros brought his dark brows together to study his adoptive mother. Her long silver hair flew around her as she laughed, and her sharp, hawk-like features were basked in the blinding glow of her throne in sunlight.
“My son! Surely your farce has brought me laughter, but how can you joke of this?” The rare glitter in the queen’s cold blue eye vanished as she turned to face him. Hera was blessed or doomed to never die, and in all her years she had never seen the sight of passion burning fiercer. And for the first time Hera lost her breath.
When Jyros was born, his widowed mother had died in childbirth and he had been left next to the corpse by the side of an old abandoned farm of Terabetta. The newborn boy wailed into the cold night of the north and awoke an older traveler. His heart immediately felt for the boy, but this man was very old, and knew he could not care for the bundle.
Feeling pity and compassion he decided to find a home for the child, and so the baby was brought to the heavens. On this clear diamond night, Hera, the queen of the gods, was waiting for her husband outside the gates, which was very lucky. Clothed in tattered rags, the senior came forward in awe and worship. Hera was irritated and quickly dismissed him as peasant trash.
By a thunderous eclipse she asked him to leave, but the old man humbly smiled and told the deity that he was old and only had one more wish left in him before he went to be judged. Hera was planning on making his judgment day sooner when a single laugh escaped from the pack the man held. Reaching forward, Hera peered into the wide-eyed sparkling eyes of a newborn babe.
In the vastness of thousands of mortal lifetimes it is rare to hear of a first feeling, yet here stood Hera, the goddess made of ice, loving a mortal peasant child. Taking the baby from the smiling wrinkled fellow, she fit him in the palm of her bony hand and rose back upwards to her full one-hundred-foot height. The child giggled in delight.
The man told Hera the child was a direct descendent of Jason himself. As the man left Hera planned on tossing the child over the edge of Mount Olympus.
She never had the heart.
“Jyros, boy, listen to yourself!” Hera was growing in size, her silken robes trailing behind her as she passed over the clouds under their feet with growing fury.
“I am, Hera!” Jyros tightened his able hands together in emphasis. He limped around the mythical chamber of jewels and cloud. The hard goddess ignored the hurt at the lack of: mother.
“Can’t you see my love for her!”
“The cursed girl!” Hera spat acid to the fluffy floor; she grew higher into the expanding blue above.
”You know the tale, Jyros! You will surely die for marrying that wench.”
“You cursed her family years ago! You can fix it!” Jyros brought his injured leg forward and rose to stare at his mother’s twisting face.
”NOOO!” The cries carried like a ruptured explosion over Greece, and screams of terror rose from towns huddled around the sacred mountain. Jyros feel to his knees in a spasm of pain, clutching his ears shut.
“I can’t let Thisbe win…” Hera collapsed onto her trembling throne in a whisper, “We had a plan… You were to marry a goddess! Aphrodite perhaps? And you were to become a god! And stay with me… forever…” Hera brought her moist eyes to search his chiseled face.
“Eternity means nothing without her.” Jyros couldn’t bear to see the effects of his words.
“Am I not enough?” Hera bit back her tears with such force that her voice trembled.
Jyros said nothing.
“The woman you… She draws her clairvoyant power from her heart? Did you know that? With your love she could over-power even I? For she speaks the tongue spell words that even the realms of celestial beings cannot learn to use. Aellaqui Stuna Leima. Did you not know that… my son?” Jyros remained on the bruised knees, avoiding the gaze of the terrifying being that had been his mother. She had been a fool.
A deathly silence swam the air as Hera hid tears. For absolute power, some sacrifice must be made. Hera knew the logical thing that must be done in this moment. She had no hesitation before, and she could not now. Her heart sank to the floor, and she tore it from her soul.
“How did you injure yourself?” The foster mother’s tone was devoiced of feeling. She kept her silt eyes to the ground at she shrunk back to normal size. Jyros raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow in confusion at her serenity.
“The was a late night out-break at camp recently, I barely escaped to seek your blessing. I have yet to give Thisbe news.”
“Hmm.” Hera drew closer.
“Let me see.” And with the skill of a hunter, she turned the welcoming hand into a clasp. Jyros’ handsome face turned pale in pain. Hera continued to choke him.
“I’m sorry, my son, this was not how it was supposed to end.” Hera’s ghost white hands shook as she clasped harder onto his strong olive neck. Her nails drew blood.
“I will not let you win, Thisbe! You will not have him! You will not be powered to over-throw me with his love! The curse will not be broken!”
“M-mother…” Jyros was chocking desperately at the air and trying at a futile attempt to pull Hera’s grip from his throat. Words left his as he searched her cold aged face in a child-like desperation. His feet flayed uselessly beneath him as she brought him up in the air like she once had when he was small.
Hera clenched against the feeling of his strained lifeline pulling closer to fate’s scissors with every final breath. Jyros lost strength in his last moments, becoming a helpless doll in her arms. In the snap of thread dark brown eyes met melting ice, the same that had first thawed snow twenty years past. Her baby smiled.
And then Jyros’ limp body fell from the heavens; the only thing hitting ground first was a single crystal tear.
“Hera!?” Persephone’s aghast voice brought her back to reality.
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“NOOO!”
Thisbe awoke in a fresh coat of sweat, bringing her hands to her ears at the cry from the heavens. With her darkened hair damp against her head, she rose with wobbling steps towards her window.
“Oh, Gods. What was that?” She stared lithely at the strong wall before, watching at the single crack penetrating its side danced in the shadows of the approaching dawn.
The birds weren’t singing this morning.
It was ominous, and blood streaked sunlight was trapped, withering behind the cloak of the acrid haze that filled the skies. Shivering, her heart slowed down in fear. Thisbe touched her trembling lips in reassurance; sure of those past hours she had spent in the embrace of her forlorn lover, and of his heated kisses trailing up her neck to her mouth. She smiled as she entered the state of bliss.
“It wasn’t a dream.” She threw one last look at the grimacing clouds and grabbed the transparent arms of her Jyros… Her Jyros, and imagined him swaying with her against the prediction of the sunrise.
Humming, Thisbe picked up the damp folds of cream cloth around her legs and danced about the room that had been her cage for what she felt was eternity.
“I wonder what uncle will think?” Lilacs wafted the air as she glided along the marble,” When I tell him that Greek’s greatest hero loves me?” Thisbe chortled in disbelief at her uncle’s pudgy face gawking at her fortune.
‘That’s right uncle,’ with hope she thought as she smirked at the death spilled vastness over looking the dry wall, ‘ he loves me, and mysteries and freedom will soon again be mine, and I will share them with another. You can no longer scare me with your prophecies of doom, or your whispers of hate. For I am not a monster, or cursed. I am loved.’
Scremas broke beneath her.
In alarm Thisbe curved around to the locked doorway, where she was traumatized to see an anorexic form watching her hungrily. The maiden’s, though she could hardly be called that, face was hollow and stark, as pale as her own, but far more yellow, and had the grossest brown eyes she had ever seen, caved into her scrawny head.
Thisbe remained calm; she was obviously some hater come to mock the demon in her private chamber… And yet… A queasy feeling was slowly building in the pit of Thisbe’s stomach, it lurched and churned.
The woman’s swam in her dirtied rags as she limped towards Thisbe hungrily; almost close enough to smell the stench from her pointy slimy teeth and-
“Aellaqui Stuna Leima.” In a burst of blue and green the intruder was thrown helplessly across the room, and whacked into the sidewall.
Thisbe’s nostrils’ flared in anger as the sickly person rose in awe.
“What do you want?” Thisbe snarled as the toothy grin spread in fear.
“I mean you no real harm, I’m simply a clairvoyant that gave you a favor in return for what you did for me.” The word ‘favor’ sounded dangerously sweet.
“What do you mean, favor?” ‘I do not trust her,’ Thisbe bit her soft bottom lip out of bad habit.
“I killed your family,” Thisbe bit so hard she drew an ooze of sticky blood, “Because you killed Jyros.”
Thisbe’s heart lurched like it did the moment she had awoken because of the cry from the heavens. She knew. It was the cry of Hera, his mother, because her boy had died.
The puzzle she finally completed was torn a part.
“No… NO! They- He can’t be dead! I don’t believe you!” Thisbe couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t believe it! It made no sense that he’d died… After winning so many battles, just to run out into a minor camp violence and… Thisbe shivered despite herself. The Covra in front of watched bemused. An artic sting burst from Thisbe’s lungs and she gasped desperate for warmth.
“Why do you deny this, Thisbe,” The word oozed from Era’s long mouth like it was coated in dirt, “You should know… I killed your family, but you gave me a break and killed Jyros yourself.”
Her world all of a sudden became a tornado, an endless cyclone of despair burst around her, and a rush of artic water it filled every corner of her skin and numbed her of thoughts. Thisbe lay collapsed on the floor of her bedroom gasping with a fogged breath.
“No.” She hyperventilated against the blizzard ragging inside her. Era sent images of Jyros hurtling at her.
“Jyros raced blindly into the battle outside his camp, briefly smiling as he touched his wet lips…
”Run, Thisbe!” Jyros commanded at her slowly fading body racing away. He barely noticed the burly man grinning wildly right behind him…”
“It’s not real!” Thisbe’s greenish eyes rolled to the back of her head.
”Come back from reality! The curse has been fulfilled, and he loved you and died!” Era’s platinum hair flew around her pointed nose.
“Not real!” Thisbe pounded her fists against the tiles and felt little pain as her hands bleed and her bones broke like ceramic. The cold was worse now, confining her until she broke free and yelled in all her might. But the lone passerby didn’t care enough to help her as he gazed over the wall; it was only the ravings of a cursed witch.
“Jyros gurgled blood as a thick bloodied sword parted his neck in half. His breath came rasped and jagged as he clung to the soil of the earth with desperation, as if he was trying not to leave his body.
“Thisbe…” His angel lips parted in sorrow, “Why didn’t you save me? Why did you just run as I tried to fight… after our… kiss…”
And in the deepest corners of her heart, Thisbe knew that it was true. So she wept.
“What- what ARE you!” Thisbe crawled across the floor and rose using a reserve of her strength, grasping at her heart trying to get it to beat properly. She was sweating profusely despite her temperature.
“I told you,” the smile was like a snake slithering, “I am Era, a clairvoyant… but I am also a Covra. I use the pathetic weaknesses of magic-holders power sources to stop them from being able to use their power, and then slowly they turn to a solid block of ice, and they die, leaving me all of their magical abilities.” Era laughed maniacally into the silence.
“With Jyros and your family dead, you can never use the ultimate power-words again! Your heart is dead!”
“You can take away my love,” Thisbe rose slowly to Era’s bewildering terror, “You can take away all I hold dear, but you will not take my life!”
“You’d live in a world without him?”
“He’d want me too.” The tears of pain and sorrow burned with a passion behind Thisbe’s eye lids.
“And you could live with your self not doing the one thing to save him?”
The tears all dropped.
“What?” Thisbe shook with suspicion, cold, and longing for one face.
“Yes,” Era hissed again, “If you let go of your heart, then you will be freed of the confines now on your power source, and be able to draw from you soul, and then bring your lover back…”
And in that moment the lonely beautiful girl didn’t even had to think. She had read of this in her solitary days, and knew what he must do. She grimaced at Era’s ugly face and used the last of her magic to tear away her heart’s magic…
It was cold, after all.
As Thisbe felt her heart leave her body she turned sadly towards the growing sunlight beyond her window, and she saw a slowly falling body tumbling gracefully from the sky. Rage bit her in the final remains of her heart being sucked from her body.
“JYROS!!!”
The scream shook both earth and heavens, and with it Era’s sticky grasp was pulled away from the vast violet aqua glow of Thisbe’s heart, and it rose to dance silently with the lone dot against the sun before it hit the ground, kissing the cold lips in a fragment of an instant.
“What is-“ Era’s eyes grew wide in terror, and Thisbe… no… This new woman pulled her to her feet.
There was pain, freezing cold, and then death.
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The town of Terabetta was small to be sure, and had nothing to distinguish it from any other Greek farming town. Terabetta stood stout, but proud, on the green hills rolling down to the crystalline waters of their river. They didn’t have the Mediterranean, they lived far north.
The houses that descended were dry cracked, and molded in white creams to repel the sunlight. Merchants yelled at the passing wives, chanting tall tales about their goods and service; while the men worked long hours of the fields and in the streets. Older children learned of great deities in the skies, and watched in boredom from their windows at the smaller tumbling in the meadows with their cattle.
The winds of time blow over earth, and sometimes they tend to sweep away things that are precious and beautiful in the process.
The past is set in stone and tomorrow will never come. But this was today, which was a gift, called the present.
This felt like more of the gift of socks at Christmas time.
Invisible footsteps struck the worn cobble stone.
“Disgusting,” The harsh feminine voice echoed in the chamber of silence at the dwindling stench of blood and gore; still putrid after seven years. Whispers of children’s laughed was a shadow in her transparent mind.
A twig snapped under the unknown intruder’s weight, warning the dead inhabitants of the sodden town of her arrival. But they did not attack; dust beckoned her closer and closer to the cave at the far end of the grass-covered pathway.
“Soon,” The voice carried ominously over the wasteland. Then she was there, at the mouth of the cave, open in a wide grin.
“Hera.” The chill in the wind was summer compared to the metal chime of the voice. The shadowed form of Terabetta, the Covra, regarded the invisible with amused distain. The ghost, revealed to be Hera, let her spell vanish and stood tall at the entrance of the simple cave, watching as the angelic woman before her fiddled with a golden chain around her neck, lavished in the finest jewels of each city that she had crumbled. The haunting moon’s light shone through the cave enough to refract the tiniest shimmer from Terabetta’s mahogany hair.
“Thisbe.”
The chain snapped.
“What did you call me?” The queen of the gods had earned the witches attention, Terabetta’s emotionless blue-green eyes wide in shock.
“Congratulations, you broke your curse… I must admit you’ve been a hard one to track.” Hera’s syllables brought her closer, “But you leave a bloody trail… And yet…” Hera’s blue eyes sparkled devilishly, “I should’ve known you’d come to his home.”
“I am not Thisbe, this place has no meaning to me.” Terabetta rasped. Hera let her maroon hood fall back.
“You cannot fool the gods!” Entertained, Hera came closer and closer, “To think you even took the name of his most cherished sanctuary and made it your own? You cannot let go of the past, not even with a new name.”
Sparks of sea green aqua spread like wildfire from Terabetta’s eyes to her hands in turmoil.
”Fultera Ramas!” The power words of Terabetta’s beaten soul flew from her mouth in the form of a snake, it’s large silted eyes growing larger as it flew across the slim space between the two power-hungry immortals.
And with a single motion of Hera’s bony hand the snake dissolved into dirt, and did Terabetta finally fall to her knees. Hera had summoned a person.
“Jyros!!” Terabetta, Thisbe, wailed into the cold frosted night, wailing with the thousand cries of the ghosts that still lingered in the twilight. She flung herself over his cold, perfectly preserved body, and trailed her numb pale hands from the bruise of his neck to his swollen lips. Terabetta tenderly brought her quivering full-lips to his mouth and rose in a fit of invisible tears, shaking in agony. Her own lips were colder than his.
He was exactly as she had forgotten, strong, handsome, serious, dark….
And smiling.
“What’s wrong?” Hera spat at the woman she despised, “Forgotten how to cry? Can you not feel the tenderness of his lips? Can you not love him?” Hera laughed at her opponent on the floor. Terabetta pounded the rough slate floor beneath, harder and harder until her marble skin opened into numerous wounds.
“You can’t use the ultimate power-words anymore can you?” Terabetta was wide-eyed as Hera tormented her further.
“Aellaqui Stuna Leima… It’s because you are a monster. What would my boy think of you now?” The gentle caress of Hera’s breath struck her across the visage.
“He was never yours!” Hera showed no sign of her flinching.
Terabetta whacked the floor harder and harder, but she could not bleed.
Turquoise eyes stared in agony over the tendrils of fallen red hair around Terabetta’s oval face.
“Can’t you see that you can never truly be rid of your pain? Even without a heart you’re still the unwanted bitch of cursed parents. A monster.” Hera moved effortlessly across the floor to where Terabetta had again fallen in a heap of dark silk.
“I feel no pain.” Terabetta glided her un-bleeding hand to Hera’s feline face.
“And yet…” One stray lock of snowy hair brushed Terabetta’s cheek as she grabbed the out-stretched arm. Hera’s grasp instantly froze.
“You do,” Hera whispered.
The snake reappeared as soon as it had left, its long coiling body curling around Terabetta’s collapsed frame. Hera knew that Terabetta could’ve easily fought back, but she refused to. The heartless terror that had ravaged the heart of Greece for seven years simply let the snake mesh her closer to the dead body of Jyros.
“I killed everyone I ever loved… Myself, Acacia… Jyros… I deserve to die.” Terabetta’s vision wasn’t going blurred, and her blood wasn’t pounding in her ears. That was for mortals. The snake brought long pointed ivory fangs closer to her neck. When he struck there was little pain, for nothing compares to the loss of love. Hera just chuckled.
“After all these years you still never figured it out.”
“What?” Terabetta stared up in a loss of strength.
“I killed him.”
“Wh-what?” All her pain, suffering, loss of life, loss of him, loss of…. Her heart….
“I killed him.”
“No.”
“Yes. And he let me… He wanted to marry you, you know? Oh, you would’ve been so happy. But it was not to be. I choked him, and he died.”
The tension in the air over-threw the silence.
“I’ll kill you!” Terabetta yelled! The venom was filling her limp body at an alarming rate as Terabetta gasped at the life dripping from her body.
“I expected more of a reaction? You can’t kill an immortal!” Hera laughed as her victim’s porcelain complexion became whiter than death.
“And yet now you kill me with an immortal weapon!”
“Immortals can only died at the hands of another, and only using an immortal made power, but they cannot truly die. After thousands of years they return. So how do you expect to kill me?” Hera laughed at her enemy’s pain. ‘I’ve won Jyros… I have won…’ Hera’s thoughts drifted sadly to the stone body of her lost son.
“I too am now immortal.” Hera shot her head back to Thisbe’s distorted face, still so unearthly of feeling besides loathing.
“It’s sad, Terabetta, that you would give yourself up if guilt over something you didn’t do. You’re gullible, and you will not come back.”
Terabetta’s lucid eyes reflected, to Hera’s horror one last part of Thisbe, hidden and half-mad.
“I will come back, and kill you…” And then the war of legends was over. And as Hera leaned over in spite of herself, she saw the flash of anger forever embedded on Terabetta—Thisbe’s face. The bright moon filtering through the dust-speckled air around them and drew lazy patterns over Thisbe’s glazed eyes.
Hera had a feeling that she was far, far from dead.
“She had named herself Terabetta, and had feasted on the hearts and souls of clairvoyants to increase in her own power. Terabetta had been caught and killed after seven years of internal ravaging, and erased from memory. But she was immortal, and could only be killed for so long; until the day she was reborn once again. The same face and power… But a new goal. To kill Hera; for a reason that no one knew of besides Persephone and Hera, herself….
Hera had killed her heart. Jyros.”
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Author’s Note: Wow. So there you have it. Hera killed Jyros so that Thisbe could not have him, and with his love, over-power the great goddess, and then convinced Thisbe that she killed him herself! Then that annoying power-stealer came along and took Thisbe’s heart because she was too wrought with grief to stop her! Thus Terabetta, the name of Jyros’ hometown, was born! Thisbe then killed the Covra, Era, and Thisbe’s soul, and no heart, then stole the power of other clairvoyants and grew in strength! But she could not be stronger than Thisbe’s heart, and therefore could not beat Hera when she came. Now Terabetta will come back to life with one goal, to kill an immortal. Whoa, big explanation. So what do you think? Do you think that Theresa’s heart has been damaged on purpose to have her powers taken by the rebirth of Terabetta? Or do you think she IS Terabetta, or Thisbe. Guess you’ll have to find out.
I’m starting a musical theater program that should last about eight hours a day on the seventh, it’s three weeks. But I’ll try to update on the days that I have off! I won’t keep letting you down! See you next time! –Nuuoa Eclaire
Disclaimer: I do not own Class of the Titans, but I own all my own writings, story, Aredith and the modified legend of Thisbe.
Pairings: Thisbe/Jyros, Hera/Jyros (purely mother-son)
Warnings: No actual Class of the Titans characters, besides mention of the gods, this happened in the times of ancient Greece, after Jason and some other main heroes. Character death.
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The Cold Side of Heart
Chapter 11: Love of the Cursed, Part Three: Of Death
Chapters 9-11: Love of the Cursed: The Cursed Kiss of Death
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Death is a plague, claiming not only lives, but affecting the entire landscape where that poor soul fell, but then again… No one can describe death until they feel it, and because of this, no one really knows what it’s like. Is it quick at sharp? A loss of breath? A stabbing pain that draws out slowly from your heart? A trickle of energy from your fingertips? Anyone to have ever felt death has died; thus making it impossible to write about. That’s the logical reasoning, right? But what some people fail to understand is that death comes in many forms. Sadness turns to despair, and before long despair is numb acceptance. When you taste the richness in life, and are then forced to taste the dust on the road, that can be a fate worse than death.
Because in death you are asleep. And in pain you are vividly, vividly awake.
‘The sickle of death took one, but the aftershock killed far worse. Thousands of innocent souls, and one heart.’ – The Legend of Thisbe and Jyros, The Lost Works
For Thisbe, death took the form of a broken smile.
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“I wish to marry the mortal.”
The words left Jyros’ bleeding lips before Hera even began to smile a greeting,” How are you my son? Why are you beaten? Was there a battle this late at night?” This instantly began to dissolve bitterly in her mouth.
“What?” The goddess of all gods rose from her high golden chair, and thunder boomed in her steps, then stopped to erupt in forced laughter. Jyros brought his dark brows together to study his adoptive mother. Her long silver hair flew around her as she laughed, and her sharp, hawk-like features were basked in the blinding glow of her throne in sunlight.
“My son! Surely your farce has brought me laughter, but how can you joke of this?” The rare glitter in the queen’s cold blue eye vanished as she turned to face him. Hera was blessed or doomed to never die, and in all her years she had never seen the sight of passion burning fiercer. And for the first time Hera lost her breath.
When Jyros was born, his widowed mother had died in childbirth and he had been left next to the corpse by the side of an old abandoned farm of Terabetta. The newborn boy wailed into the cold night of the north and awoke an older traveler. His heart immediately felt for the boy, but this man was very old, and knew he could not care for the bundle.
Feeling pity and compassion he decided to find a home for the child, and so the baby was brought to the heavens. On this clear diamond night, Hera, the queen of the gods, was waiting for her husband outside the gates, which was very lucky. Clothed in tattered rags, the senior came forward in awe and worship. Hera was irritated and quickly dismissed him as peasant trash.
By a thunderous eclipse she asked him to leave, but the old man humbly smiled and told the deity that he was old and only had one more wish left in him before he went to be judged. Hera was planning on making his judgment day sooner when a single laugh escaped from the pack the man held. Reaching forward, Hera peered into the wide-eyed sparkling eyes of a newborn babe.
In the vastness of thousands of mortal lifetimes it is rare to hear of a first feeling, yet here stood Hera, the goddess made of ice, loving a mortal peasant child. Taking the baby from the smiling wrinkled fellow, she fit him in the palm of her bony hand and rose back upwards to her full one-hundred-foot height. The child giggled in delight.
The man told Hera the child was a direct descendent of Jason himself. As the man left Hera planned on tossing the child over the edge of Mount Olympus.
She never had the heart.
“Jyros, boy, listen to yourself!” Hera was growing in size, her silken robes trailing behind her as she passed over the clouds under their feet with growing fury.
“I am, Hera!” Jyros tightened his able hands together in emphasis. He limped around the mythical chamber of jewels and cloud. The hard goddess ignored the hurt at the lack of: mother.
“Can’t you see my love for her!”
“The cursed girl!” Hera spat acid to the fluffy floor; she grew higher into the expanding blue above.
”You know the tale, Jyros! You will surely die for marrying that wench.”
“You cursed her family years ago! You can fix it!” Jyros brought his injured leg forward and rose to stare at his mother’s twisting face.
”NOOO!” The cries carried like a ruptured explosion over Greece, and screams of terror rose from towns huddled around the sacred mountain. Jyros feel to his knees in a spasm of pain, clutching his ears shut.
“I can’t let Thisbe win…” Hera collapsed onto her trembling throne in a whisper, “We had a plan… You were to marry a goddess! Aphrodite perhaps? And you were to become a god! And stay with me… forever…” Hera brought her moist eyes to search his chiseled face.
“Eternity means nothing without her.” Jyros couldn’t bear to see the effects of his words.
“Am I not enough?” Hera bit back her tears with such force that her voice trembled.
Jyros said nothing.
“The woman you… She draws her clairvoyant power from her heart? Did you know that? With your love she could over-power even I? For she speaks the tongue spell words that even the realms of celestial beings cannot learn to use. Aellaqui Stuna Leima. Did you not know that… my son?” Jyros remained on the bruised knees, avoiding the gaze of the terrifying being that had been his mother. She had been a fool.
A deathly silence swam the air as Hera hid tears. For absolute power, some sacrifice must be made. Hera knew the logical thing that must be done in this moment. She had no hesitation before, and she could not now. Her heart sank to the floor, and she tore it from her soul.
“How did you injure yourself?” The foster mother’s tone was devoiced of feeling. She kept her silt eyes to the ground at she shrunk back to normal size. Jyros raised a perfectly sculpted eyebrow in confusion at her serenity.
“The was a late night out-break at camp recently, I barely escaped to seek your blessing. I have yet to give Thisbe news.”
“Hmm.” Hera drew closer.
“Let me see.” And with the skill of a hunter, she turned the welcoming hand into a clasp. Jyros’ handsome face turned pale in pain. Hera continued to choke him.
“I’m sorry, my son, this was not how it was supposed to end.” Hera’s ghost white hands shook as she clasped harder onto his strong olive neck. Her nails drew blood.
“I will not let you win, Thisbe! You will not have him! You will not be powered to over-throw me with his love! The curse will not be broken!”
“M-mother…” Jyros was chocking desperately at the air and trying at a futile attempt to pull Hera’s grip from his throat. Words left his as he searched her cold aged face in a child-like desperation. His feet flayed uselessly beneath him as she brought him up in the air like she once had when he was small.
Hera clenched against the feeling of his strained lifeline pulling closer to fate’s scissors with every final breath. Jyros lost strength in his last moments, becoming a helpless doll in her arms. In the snap of thread dark brown eyes met melting ice, the same that had first thawed snow twenty years past. Her baby smiled.
And then Jyros’ limp body fell from the heavens; the only thing hitting ground first was a single crystal tear.
“Hera!?” Persephone’s aghast voice brought her back to reality.
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“NOOO!”
Thisbe awoke in a fresh coat of sweat, bringing her hands to her ears at the cry from the heavens. With her darkened hair damp against her head, she rose with wobbling steps towards her window.
“Oh, Gods. What was that?” She stared lithely at the strong wall before, watching at the single crack penetrating its side danced in the shadows of the approaching dawn.
The birds weren’t singing this morning.
It was ominous, and blood streaked sunlight was trapped, withering behind the cloak of the acrid haze that filled the skies. Shivering, her heart slowed down in fear. Thisbe touched her trembling lips in reassurance; sure of those past hours she had spent in the embrace of her forlorn lover, and of his heated kisses trailing up her neck to her mouth. She smiled as she entered the state of bliss.
“It wasn’t a dream.” She threw one last look at the grimacing clouds and grabbed the transparent arms of her Jyros… Her Jyros, and imagined him swaying with her against the prediction of the sunrise.
Humming, Thisbe picked up the damp folds of cream cloth around her legs and danced about the room that had been her cage for what she felt was eternity.
“I wonder what uncle will think?” Lilacs wafted the air as she glided along the marble,” When I tell him that Greek’s greatest hero loves me?” Thisbe chortled in disbelief at her uncle’s pudgy face gawking at her fortune.
‘That’s right uncle,’ with hope she thought as she smirked at the death spilled vastness over looking the dry wall, ‘ he loves me, and mysteries and freedom will soon again be mine, and I will share them with another. You can no longer scare me with your prophecies of doom, or your whispers of hate. For I am not a monster, or cursed. I am loved.’
Scremas broke beneath her.
In alarm Thisbe curved around to the locked doorway, where she was traumatized to see an anorexic form watching her hungrily. The maiden’s, though she could hardly be called that, face was hollow and stark, as pale as her own, but far more yellow, and had the grossest brown eyes she had ever seen, caved into her scrawny head.
Thisbe remained calm; she was obviously some hater come to mock the demon in her private chamber… And yet… A queasy feeling was slowly building in the pit of Thisbe’s stomach, it lurched and churned.
The woman’s swam in her dirtied rags as she limped towards Thisbe hungrily; almost close enough to smell the stench from her pointy slimy teeth and-
“Aellaqui Stuna Leima.” In a burst of blue and green the intruder was thrown helplessly across the room, and whacked into the sidewall.
Thisbe’s nostrils’ flared in anger as the sickly person rose in awe.
“What do you want?” Thisbe snarled as the toothy grin spread in fear.
“I mean you no real harm, I’m simply a clairvoyant that gave you a favor in return for what you did for me.” The word ‘favor’ sounded dangerously sweet.
“What do you mean, favor?” ‘I do not trust her,’ Thisbe bit her soft bottom lip out of bad habit.
“I killed your family,” Thisbe bit so hard she drew an ooze of sticky blood, “Because you killed Jyros.”
Thisbe’s heart lurched like it did the moment she had awoken because of the cry from the heavens. She knew. It was the cry of Hera, his mother, because her boy had died.
The puzzle she finally completed was torn a part.
“No… NO! They- He can’t be dead! I don’t believe you!” Thisbe couldn’t believe it, she wouldn’t believe it! It made no sense that he’d died… After winning so many battles, just to run out into a minor camp violence and… Thisbe shivered despite herself. The Covra in front of watched bemused. An artic sting burst from Thisbe’s lungs and she gasped desperate for warmth.
“Why do you deny this, Thisbe,” The word oozed from Era’s long mouth like it was coated in dirt, “You should know… I killed your family, but you gave me a break and killed Jyros yourself.”
Her world all of a sudden became a tornado, an endless cyclone of despair burst around her, and a rush of artic water it filled every corner of her skin and numbed her of thoughts. Thisbe lay collapsed on the floor of her bedroom gasping with a fogged breath.
“No.” She hyperventilated against the blizzard ragging inside her. Era sent images of Jyros hurtling at her.
“Jyros raced blindly into the battle outside his camp, briefly smiling as he touched his wet lips…
”Run, Thisbe!” Jyros commanded at her slowly fading body racing away. He barely noticed the burly man grinning wildly right behind him…”
“It’s not real!” Thisbe’s greenish eyes rolled to the back of her head.
”Come back from reality! The curse has been fulfilled, and he loved you and died!” Era’s platinum hair flew around her pointed nose.
“Not real!” Thisbe pounded her fists against the tiles and felt little pain as her hands bleed and her bones broke like ceramic. The cold was worse now, confining her until she broke free and yelled in all her might. But the lone passerby didn’t care enough to help her as he gazed over the wall; it was only the ravings of a cursed witch.
“Jyros gurgled blood as a thick bloodied sword parted his neck in half. His breath came rasped and jagged as he clung to the soil of the earth with desperation, as if he was trying not to leave his body.
“Thisbe…” His angel lips parted in sorrow, “Why didn’t you save me? Why did you just run as I tried to fight… after our… kiss…”
And in the deepest corners of her heart, Thisbe knew that it was true. So she wept.
“What- what ARE you!” Thisbe crawled across the floor and rose using a reserve of her strength, grasping at her heart trying to get it to beat properly. She was sweating profusely despite her temperature.
“I told you,” the smile was like a snake slithering, “I am Era, a clairvoyant… but I am also a Covra. I use the pathetic weaknesses of magic-holders power sources to stop them from being able to use their power, and then slowly they turn to a solid block of ice, and they die, leaving me all of their magical abilities.” Era laughed maniacally into the silence.
“With Jyros and your family dead, you can never use the ultimate power-words again! Your heart is dead!”
“You can take away my love,” Thisbe rose slowly to Era’s bewildering terror, “You can take away all I hold dear, but you will not take my life!”
“You’d live in a world without him?”
“He’d want me too.” The tears of pain and sorrow burned with a passion behind Thisbe’s eye lids.
“And you could live with your self not doing the one thing to save him?”
The tears all dropped.
“What?” Thisbe shook with suspicion, cold, and longing for one face.
“Yes,” Era hissed again, “If you let go of your heart, then you will be freed of the confines now on your power source, and be able to draw from you soul, and then bring your lover back…”
And in that moment the lonely beautiful girl didn’t even had to think. She had read of this in her solitary days, and knew what he must do. She grimaced at Era’s ugly face and used the last of her magic to tear away her heart’s magic…
It was cold, after all.
As Thisbe felt her heart leave her body she turned sadly towards the growing sunlight beyond her window, and she saw a slowly falling body tumbling gracefully from the sky. Rage bit her in the final remains of her heart being sucked from her body.
“JYROS!!!”
The scream shook both earth and heavens, and with it Era’s sticky grasp was pulled away from the vast violet aqua glow of Thisbe’s heart, and it rose to dance silently with the lone dot against the sun before it hit the ground, kissing the cold lips in a fragment of an instant.
“What is-“ Era’s eyes grew wide in terror, and Thisbe… no… This new woman pulled her to her feet.
There was pain, freezing cold, and then death.
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The town of Terabetta was small to be sure, and had nothing to distinguish it from any other Greek farming town. Terabetta stood stout, but proud, on the green hills rolling down to the crystalline waters of their river. They didn’t have the Mediterranean, they lived far north.
The houses that descended were dry cracked, and molded in white creams to repel the sunlight. Merchants yelled at the passing wives, chanting tall tales about their goods and service; while the men worked long hours of the fields and in the streets. Older children learned of great deities in the skies, and watched in boredom from their windows at the smaller tumbling in the meadows with their cattle.
The winds of time blow over earth, and sometimes they tend to sweep away things that are precious and beautiful in the process.
The past is set in stone and tomorrow will never come. But this was today, which was a gift, called the present.
This felt like more of the gift of socks at Christmas time.
Invisible footsteps struck the worn cobble stone.
“Disgusting,” The harsh feminine voice echoed in the chamber of silence at the dwindling stench of blood and gore; still putrid after seven years. Whispers of children’s laughed was a shadow in her transparent mind.
A twig snapped under the unknown intruder’s weight, warning the dead inhabitants of the sodden town of her arrival. But they did not attack; dust beckoned her closer and closer to the cave at the far end of the grass-covered pathway.
“Soon,” The voice carried ominously over the wasteland. Then she was there, at the mouth of the cave, open in a wide grin.
“Hera.” The chill in the wind was summer compared to the metal chime of the voice. The shadowed form of Terabetta, the Covra, regarded the invisible with amused distain. The ghost, revealed to be Hera, let her spell vanish and stood tall at the entrance of the simple cave, watching as the angelic woman before her fiddled with a golden chain around her neck, lavished in the finest jewels of each city that she had crumbled. The haunting moon’s light shone through the cave enough to refract the tiniest shimmer from Terabetta’s mahogany hair.
“Thisbe.”
The chain snapped.
“What did you call me?” The queen of the gods had earned the witches attention, Terabetta’s emotionless blue-green eyes wide in shock.
“Congratulations, you broke your curse… I must admit you’ve been a hard one to track.” Hera’s syllables brought her closer, “But you leave a bloody trail… And yet…” Hera’s blue eyes sparkled devilishly, “I should’ve known you’d come to his home.”
“I am not Thisbe, this place has no meaning to me.” Terabetta rasped. Hera let her maroon hood fall back.
“You cannot fool the gods!” Entertained, Hera came closer and closer, “To think you even took the name of his most cherished sanctuary and made it your own? You cannot let go of the past, not even with a new name.”
Sparks of sea green aqua spread like wildfire from Terabetta’s eyes to her hands in turmoil.
”Fultera Ramas!” The power words of Terabetta’s beaten soul flew from her mouth in the form of a snake, it’s large silted eyes growing larger as it flew across the slim space between the two power-hungry immortals.
And with a single motion of Hera’s bony hand the snake dissolved into dirt, and did Terabetta finally fall to her knees. Hera had summoned a person.
“Jyros!!” Terabetta, Thisbe, wailed into the cold frosted night, wailing with the thousand cries of the ghosts that still lingered in the twilight. She flung herself over his cold, perfectly preserved body, and trailed her numb pale hands from the bruise of his neck to his swollen lips. Terabetta tenderly brought her quivering full-lips to his mouth and rose in a fit of invisible tears, shaking in agony. Her own lips were colder than his.
He was exactly as she had forgotten, strong, handsome, serious, dark….
And smiling.
“What’s wrong?” Hera spat at the woman she despised, “Forgotten how to cry? Can you not feel the tenderness of his lips? Can you not love him?” Hera laughed at her opponent on the floor. Terabetta pounded the rough slate floor beneath, harder and harder until her marble skin opened into numerous wounds.
“You can’t use the ultimate power-words anymore can you?” Terabetta was wide-eyed as Hera tormented her further.
“Aellaqui Stuna Leima… It’s because you are a monster. What would my boy think of you now?” The gentle caress of Hera’s breath struck her across the visage.
“He was never yours!” Hera showed no sign of her flinching.
Terabetta whacked the floor harder and harder, but she could not bleed.
Turquoise eyes stared in agony over the tendrils of fallen red hair around Terabetta’s oval face.
“Can’t you see that you can never truly be rid of your pain? Even without a heart you’re still the unwanted bitch of cursed parents. A monster.” Hera moved effortlessly across the floor to where Terabetta had again fallen in a heap of dark silk.
“I feel no pain.” Terabetta glided her un-bleeding hand to Hera’s feline face.
“And yet…” One stray lock of snowy hair brushed Terabetta’s cheek as she grabbed the out-stretched arm. Hera’s grasp instantly froze.
“You do,” Hera whispered.
The snake reappeared as soon as it had left, its long coiling body curling around Terabetta’s collapsed frame. Hera knew that Terabetta could’ve easily fought back, but she refused to. The heartless terror that had ravaged the heart of Greece for seven years simply let the snake mesh her closer to the dead body of Jyros.
“I killed everyone I ever loved… Myself, Acacia… Jyros… I deserve to die.” Terabetta’s vision wasn’t going blurred, and her blood wasn’t pounding in her ears. That was for mortals. The snake brought long pointed ivory fangs closer to her neck. When he struck there was little pain, for nothing compares to the loss of love. Hera just chuckled.
“After all these years you still never figured it out.”
“What?” Terabetta stared up in a loss of strength.
“I killed him.”
“Wh-what?” All her pain, suffering, loss of life, loss of him, loss of…. Her heart….
“I killed him.”
“No.”
“Yes. And he let me… He wanted to marry you, you know? Oh, you would’ve been so happy. But it was not to be. I choked him, and he died.”
The tension in the air over-threw the silence.
“I’ll kill you!” Terabetta yelled! The venom was filling her limp body at an alarming rate as Terabetta gasped at the life dripping from her body.
“I expected more of a reaction? You can’t kill an immortal!” Hera laughed as her victim’s porcelain complexion became whiter than death.
“And yet now you kill me with an immortal weapon!”
“Immortals can only died at the hands of another, and only using an immortal made power, but they cannot truly die. After thousands of years they return. So how do you expect to kill me?” Hera laughed at her enemy’s pain. ‘I’ve won Jyros… I have won…’ Hera’s thoughts drifted sadly to the stone body of her lost son.
“I too am now immortal.” Hera shot her head back to Thisbe’s distorted face, still so unearthly of feeling besides loathing.
“It’s sad, Terabetta, that you would give yourself up if guilt over something you didn’t do. You’re gullible, and you will not come back.”
Terabetta’s lucid eyes reflected, to Hera’s horror one last part of Thisbe, hidden and half-mad.
“I will come back, and kill you…” And then the war of legends was over. And as Hera leaned over in spite of herself, she saw the flash of anger forever embedded on Terabetta—Thisbe’s face. The bright moon filtering through the dust-speckled air around them and drew lazy patterns over Thisbe’s glazed eyes.
Hera had a feeling that she was far, far from dead.
“She had named herself Terabetta, and had feasted on the hearts and souls of clairvoyants to increase in her own power. Terabetta had been caught and killed after seven years of internal ravaging, and erased from memory. But she was immortal, and could only be killed for so long; until the day she was reborn once again. The same face and power… But a new goal. To kill Hera; for a reason that no one knew of besides Persephone and Hera, herself….
Hera had killed her heart. Jyros.”
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Author’s Note: Wow. So there you have it. Hera killed Jyros so that Thisbe could not have him, and with his love, over-power the great goddess, and then convinced Thisbe that she killed him herself! Then that annoying power-stealer came along and took Thisbe’s heart because she was too wrought with grief to stop her! Thus Terabetta, the name of Jyros’ hometown, was born! Thisbe then killed the Covra, Era, and Thisbe’s soul, and no heart, then stole the power of other clairvoyants and grew in strength! But she could not be stronger than Thisbe’s heart, and therefore could not beat Hera when she came. Now Terabetta will come back to life with one goal, to kill an immortal. Whoa, big explanation. So what do you think? Do you think that Theresa’s heart has been damaged on purpose to have her powers taken by the rebirth of Terabetta? Or do you think she IS Terabetta, or Thisbe. Guess you’ll have to find out.
I’m starting a musical theater program that should last about eight hours a day on the seventh, it’s three weeks. But I’ll try to update on the days that I have off! I won’t keep letting you down! See you next time! –Nuuoa Eclaire
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