Looking For Trouble

Chapter 5: Mountains, oceans, and dragons

CHAPTER 5

Arya Crawford

It's a simple story. Potent and eternal.

One that has gained the collective sighs of the masses, soothed the souls of generations.

One that poets have spent their lives invoking. With feverish eyes and trembling lips, reciting prose of pathos, worshiping at the altar of Eros. Their passions forging their fetters. Till their bodies collapse and crumble into dust, their immortal hymns like a call to prayer.

It's a tale as old as time. Larger than life.

Love.

It's something everyone craves. The sweet nothings and the electric touch. The roaring passion and the fierce devotion.

But it's rarely ever as easy as desiring it. There are always mountains to climb, oceans to cross, dragons to slay. And these are the triumphs and defeats that inhabit the lyrics of love songs, that plague the verses of sonnets. It is these trials that set apart the names of lovers we have never heard from the names that have become symbolic of timeless love.

Which is why all good love stories have one thing in common; you have to battle the odds to gain your beloved, and pave your path towards that happily ever after. This makes them memorable. But this is also why the great love stories are more than just lovers climbing mountains, crossing oceans, slaying dragons. They are lovers plummeting to their death, sinking to the depths, burning to ashes. All within an arm's reach of their beloved. Great love stories are tragedies. And this makes them glorious.

When Romeo drank the poison at Juliet's conceived death, and released his soul from his body. When Juliet awoke to find her beloved lifeless at her tomb, and plunged his sword into her breast. The love that drew them together and the violence that pulled them apart becoming one and the same, as the lovers lay forever in each other's arms, finally united in death.

When Sassi ran barefoot through the desert to find the beloved who had been snatched away from her, sands shifting beneath her feet, her lips parched from crying her lover's name. When Sassi prayed for refuge from those chasing her, the earth reached up to swallow her, burying her in the Valley of Mountains. When Punnu escaped from his captors and ran across the desert to find his beloved, he was told of what had occurred, so he lamented the same prayer and the land shook and split, burying Punnu alongside Sassi. The lovers together once again in death.

When Eurydice died on the day of her wedding, and her lover became overcome with grief. When Orpheus journeyed to the Underworld to beg Hades to release his true love, and when treacherous Hades agreed to release Eurydice if Orpheus led his bride back to the land of the living without turning around to ensure she was following him. When Orpheus' control came undone and he turned around at the end to cast a glimpse upon his beloved, only to see her pulled back to the land of the dead once more. This time for eternity.

When Layla was forced to marry a man who was not her beloved, Qays became delirious with grief, thereafter becoming known as Majnun, meaning 'madman'. When Majnun disappeared into the wilderness, composing poetry for his beloved Layla until he collapsed every night. When Layla's unwanted husband died and she was forced once again to stay away from Majnun, confined within the stone walls of her undoing, she gave up on life and died alone, without seeing her lover again. When Majnun wept where she had been buried, consumed by impossible grief, he too surrendered and died at the graveside of his true love, reuniting in dissolution.

When Zhinu's mother, a goddess, learned that Zhinu had descended to earth to marry a mortal instead of weaving colourful clouds, she unleashed her wrath upon the two lovers. When she snatched Zhinu back into the heavens, and Niulang attempted to follow his beloved, the goddess slashed her hairpin across the sky, creating the Heavenly River, also known as the Milky Way. When Zhinu was banished to become the star Vega and Niulang was cast into the stars to become the star Altair, the two were separated by a great divide of cosmos, their tears becoming star dust. When the lovers were only able to catch a glimpse of each other once a year, when the stars aligned. A union forbidden during their lifetime.