PHILOXENIA ➸ Percy Jackson¹

έντεκα

ELEVEN—What Matters Most

─── ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽☼☾.* :☆ﾟ｡ ───

Standing in the Fields of Asphodel, Ciaran now understood Grover's Kansas cornfield metaphor.

But at least in Kansas, you would be able to watch the sky change color and saturate the golden heads of corn with soft hues, hear the song of the wind, and catch the silhouette of nymphs as they raced through the fields, their delicate laughter weaving through the leaves.

There were no such liberties here. 

It was all an endless sea of black. The stretching expanse of black grass that has been trodden on for centuries by dead feet, the tiny blades never able to raise their heads far from the ground. Black poplar trees dotted the dreary place, their shape twisted and gnarled. The black cavern ceiling that loomed over them, accentuated with glowing gray stalactites with their tips carved down to become razor-sharp. The gray robes of the dead that were suffused with black shadows.

In a crowd of millions, it was difficult to not make eye contact with a spirit. As their face shimmered, Ciaran could barely make out any of their defining features, as if over time everything about them had melted away, even their own memories of what they looked like. Some of them tried talking to him, but the sounds that left their pallid mouths were a cross between the fast buzzing of a hummingbird's wings and the faint, almost nonexistent flap of a butterfly.

They would then frown and turn away once they realized he couldn't understand what they were saying, blending back into the darkness to be forgotten forever.

As a matter of fact, all of them have frowns on their faces. It was as though they finally came to the realization that the easy death they envisioned was nothing like reality. But maybe a part of them already knew this. The words "easy" and "death" seldom go hand in hand together.

They knew it and chose it anyway, for they were used to choosing the easy path, the obvious path. The path that would give them the least amount of risk, even if it meant foregoing a better eternity that they could reach. Because having the details of their insignificant lives laid out before them and the possibility of being judged that they indeed did not deserve any better was much scarier than feigning ignorance and sticking to the status quo.

After all, death remains the greatest unknown.

Ciaran understood why some of them made this choice, but when it inevitably became his time to choose, he would rather take his chances before the court.

They crept along, following the line of new arrivals from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:

JUDGMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION

Welcome, Newly Deceased!

Out the back of the tent came two much smaller lines. On the left, the spirits were flanked by the ghouls as they were marched down a rocky path toward the Fields of Punishment. It was glowing crimson like embers, with smoke curling from the bubbling rivers of lava that ran through its cracked landscape, where mines littered the debris-ridden ground and miles of barbed wires separated the different torture areas.

From a quick glance, Ciaran could see people being chased by hellhounds, burned at the stake, encased within ice, and submerged in the lava. From the far distance, he could make out the slopes of a hill, where the ant-size figure of Sisyphus was struggling to move his boulder up. Not far from that was a lake, where Tantalus stood waist-deep as he desperately reached for the fruit hanging on a branch just within sight of him.