linos

The brilliance of the goddess Selene flickered wildly for a moment as she stood over the restless form that slumbered on its own padded dais. “Endymion,” she whispered caressingly. ‘Endymion, you shall never grow old.” One perfect hand stroked the young man’s pale hair; her perfect lips touched his forehead. “My Linos.”
He stirred and frowned, hands twitching, and the goddess smiled at him tenderly. “You will never change, my love. No more a mortal…” A cold hand came to rest on the moon-goddess’ shoulder, and she looked up into Artemis’ fierce eyes.
“Are you ready?” queried the Lady of the Wild Things, her hair twining in tendrils of shadow-color around her hawkish face. Reins trailed from her forearm and hooked over her thumb, four pairs of braided leather line. The nebulous horses snorted and tossed their velvet-black heads. “It is time that Nyx was summoned.”
Selene gave her acquiescence gracefully, bowing her hooded head. “I come, Artemis.” As they walked toward the edge of Olympus, the mortal that was not mortal flinched once more, and his fingers curled down into weak fists.

The soul of the man Selene had called Endymion pressed its cold hands to its eyes, standing next to his immortal, ever-sleeping body. The consciousness, the thinking essence considering himself to be Linos, that went with the soul was troubled. Selene made a game of it, calling him Endymion because, after all, he was the sleeping prince-godling now, and no shepherd’s son named for his pale hair.
Linos gave up and opened his eyes, flinching as he looked right through his hand.
A rainbow arched slowly from the peak of Olympus, slanting downward without a curve in its misty length. He took a breath in shock, and reached out with one hand, helplessly, calling “Iris!”
Colors scintillated across the rainbow’s breadth, like a face turning under a veil. Purple and indigo skipped off humps of cloud until the luminescent figure was close enough to touch. A woman’s face shimmered amidst the veils upon veils of a thousand hues, warmer than Artemis’, stronger than Selene’s, more forgiving than Athena’s. Her lips moved, making ripples of blue and lavender across her garments. “Linos,” she greeted, and kissed him sister-like on the cheek. “You still fight your bondage.”
His smile was heavy on his face, but he kept it there. “Iris,” he told her gravely, “you still delight in yours.”
“And why not, Linos son of Marcus? My duties are mostly pleasant, and there is little else for me to do. To me, it is no slavery, but my life’s purpose; however, I am not bound to sleep without waking by the wishes of a goddess. Perhaps if I were in such a position, I would fight as hard as the beloved of Selene.” She cocked her head, and again he smiled at her. “Ailinon, Linos, I must leave you now. I am on an errand.”
“An errand?” he asked, tilting back his head to look at the iridescence of her eyes. There was an unhappiness now to the messenger, a bleakness, and even the angry and bitter godling Endymion could not bear to see peaceful Iris upset. “Can you not put it off for a while, Iris? The night is not yet old, you are distraught, and I am a listening ear.”
Iris shook her head with agitation, her mellow voice climbing slowly higher as the rise and fall of her words took her on. “Put it off? Juno has sent me to Somnus to ask if he will tell the mortal woman Alcyone that her husband is dead. She has prayed without ceasing for his safety, and my lady Juno has taken pity on her. I must see the God of Sleep this very day. There is no time to linger and talk to you, Linos.” Hues kaleidoscoped across her raiment, echoing her distress.
He rocked back on transparent heels, and looked to the sky, dizzied. “I’m sorry, Iris. Perhaps I am growing selfish in my immortality. Forgive me.” He bowed his head for the woman, briefly, his spectral hair falling down over his face. Then Linos slowly looked up, as if he’d seen the Elysian Fields. Dark blue eyes shone like stars in his head. “Somnus?” he asked, hope wild on his face. “The God of Sleep? Iris, Iris, could you take me with you?”
She faltered, gazing at this new, gorgeous vision of the immortal Endymion—No, her mind whispered, this is truly Linos—and inclined her head. “I could,” Iris confirmed warily. “Why?”
“Somnus,” extolled Linos, half-shaking now, “Somnus governs sleep. If I can talk to him, he might be able to set me free…” Shadows flickered across his face, and made quarter-moons beneath his eyes. He watched her melt.
He tangled his vaguely material self in the trailing glory of her veils, and she drew him along like a child on a blanket. There were only foggy glimpses of the River Lethe and quiet, pristine meadows between facefuls of rainbow before Iris touched down in the deathly-silent caverns that housed the god.
The messenger was pale and uncomfortable in the solid, sleepy, heavy-scented surroundings that Somnus had spread about his home. A somnolence dragged on her bright and beautiful countenance that skipped over Linos entirely. Fearfully, she stepped up to the slumbering god and touched his shoulder with one veil-trailing hand.
“Somnus,” she called in a magnificent voice, “Somnus, Juno asks for your aid.”
The god’s lean and age-seamed face came alive at once. Unblinking grey-green eyes pulsed a smoke-seared blue before they fixed on Iris’ face, snapping into focus. His iron-grey hair swung around his face in a tangled crown of laurels as he rose. “I have dreamt of this,” the god rumbled without pause. “I hear the Good Lady’s command.” Long fingers clapped into his palms as he stretched out his hands. “Morpheus!”
Somnus’ voice was strong and wild, but the drowsiness of the place pushed on Linos unmercifully as he listened to the rise and fall of the flattish tenor. Poor Iris swayed like a lily in the wind, a spun-glass prism dangling from a weak thread. But when the being that the God of Sleep had called flung itself into the room, the heaviness left his eyes.
Morpheus was a shadow of pale yellow, exactly the weak and melancholy hue of the sunlight that draws daydreams. His eyes were spangled cosmos in a face that rippled and shimmered like a torch’s reflection in water, and the long and wild mane of hair that grew down his back was as flowing as fire. A very faint glimmer that stretched up from his shoulderblades might have had the suggestion of wings. When he spoke, it was in liquid and colorless gabble that made no sense to Linos. The God of Sleep seemed to understand it perfectly, and spoke back to him in his cracked-bell tenor, giving instructions and directions.
The bizarre creation flitted off — through the doorway, Linos noticed, and not merely diving through the walls — and they were once again alone with the slumberous god. “Yes,” the god murmured softly, turning toward Linos, “I have dreamt of this.” He caught at the hem of Iris’ gown as she began to stride away. “Will you not stay?”
She shook her head, setting spectrums to spattering the walls. “I dare not. This man,” the goddess inclined her head toward him, “wishes to speak to you. Have your son return him to his body if this is the way his path goes. He can do this, can he not?”
Somnus smiled wistfully. “Oh, he can, lady Iris. My Morpheus has little he cannot do.” His hand closed fast around Linos’ arm — this did not seem unusual to Linos until he thought about it — and the god led him gently to a seat.
“Sit,” spoke the old god, and Linos numbly bent his insubstantial knees, flexed his phantasmal hands, and sat. The chair was unexpectedly solid, and made for Somnus’ taller frame, so that his legs dangled and the sharper angle of the seat-cushion’s edge jammed into his calves.
Somnus examined him for a moment, his sharp face creasing beyond age’s crevices and canyons, and there was a wall building behind his oddly alert eyes. Linos had the disconcerting feeling that the God of Sleep was not looking at him nor through him, instead, the gimlet gaze searched him from the inside out.
At last, the soft tenor asserted, “You are the sleeper, Linos Marcus’-son. You do not dream.” After this curious statement, his face hardened, and every line and wrinkle was etched in knife-point on his olive skin. “Is Selene asking more favors of me? I will give her nothing more, if that is why you have come.”
The Greek boy’s eyes flashed. “I do none of Selene’s work,” he gritted. “I plead on my own behalf, and nothing that I ask for would please her.”
Somnus presented a singular expression of skepticism and impatience with one winged brow cocked halfway to his hairline. “Ask.”
Linos leaned forward earnestly, finding the floor with his toes and balancing on the balls of his feet. “I wish to wake as Linos Son-of-Marcus again,” he besought strongly, fists clenched at his side. “I wish to be free of my immortality. And I wish to…go home.” More softly, he murmured, “Selene never asked if I wanted to be a god.”
The god gave him an odd look. “You wish,” he said slowly, disbelievingly, “to be free of your immortality?”
The boy-man laughed harshly. “There is not a moment of my time here that I do not wish to know that my life is both meaningful and finite, that there is some chance that I will not wake up and wonder tomorrow. Mortals are creatures of fortune, and when you have no task, no purpose, no hope of finding a task or purpose another day, it is not comfortable or right. Here I am merely what Selene weeps over.” Linos paused, and then smiled again unwillingly. “I do not speak as most mortals might, I suppose.”
“Mortals are usually looking for a way to make their lives longer,” agreed Somnus. “They dream of death, and to them, it is the enemy. And you, Linos Marcus’ son, you are seeking to go back to the very uncertainty they despise. Very well,” he broke the discussion abruptly, “you will have a chance to go back into mortal chaos, if you so will. But the road will be long and hard, beloved of Selene. Long and hard and cold, Linos, and with that look to you, it will not matter. Still, you may have to…sacrifice a little. Abandon what you hold dear. Do you understand this?”
Linos nodded sharply. “I understand. What must I do?”
A smile created more pleasant lines on Somnus’ creased face, and he shook his head. “I cannot see your task clearly. The thought is too abstract, the details too complex. The moment before sleeping and waking robs even my dreams of their clarity. For clarity, you must ask the first wife of Zeus. Mnemosyne, who sees and cannot forget. Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, patron of memory.”
The live-soul-walking that was Linos bowed his head. “As you say, Lord of Sleep. How shall I get there?”
Somnus smiled again, his smoky eyes half-closed. “You’ll ride Pegasus, of course. Mnemosyne is still trapped in Zeus’ head, and lives only in his dreams. Who but Pegasus and Morpheus could ever reach her? Morpheus will be along to assist you…” The god’s head jerked as he pulled himself awake. “I must go back to dreaming now, Linos, son of Marcus. Touch my hand as I fall asleep, and Morpheus will find you.”
The heavy incense weighed on Linos’s consciousness, and his incorporeal hand’s touch on the God of Sleep’s skin sucked him down into a new slumber. The faint outline of the moon-goddess’s beloved shifted restlessly before he disappeared.

The world was solid again, and Linos breathed and bled. Almost before he could take stock of himself, the cosmos of Morpheus’s eyes stared back at him. Curtly, Somnus’s child gave him a nod, and beckoned him on with one gleaming hand. Morpheus, he noticed, was also much more solid here, his wings shifting and rippling behind his golden shoulders.
The son of Somnus saw his look, curled his lip, and closed his eyes for a moment while his features ran like hot wax. A moment later, the dark face of Marcus stared back at him, with only the hint of starry depths to his pupils to differentiate him from the father Linos remembered.
Morpheus smiled coldly, pursed his lips and whistled. Like a falling star, an ice-white horse with wings as gray as twilight swooped down to land in front of them, his dark eyes wild. “Ride, not-mortal,” he said harshly, one hand on Pegasus’s muzzle. “Ride, as so many have ridden, the child of Medusa and Poseidon.”
Shaken, Linos mounted the white horse, fitting his legs awkwardly in front of Pegasus’s great wings. “My thanks,” he started, face turned toward Morpheus, but Somnus’s son was already shifted back into the light-and-darkness impossibility of his natural form, one golden hand raised. The star-strewn eyes flickered as Morpheus winked at him before his golden skin struck Pegasus’s white hindquarters.
The white stallion shrilled his anger as he vaulted into the sky, wings beating, teeth bared. Linos clung to the seafoam-fine mane, in awe at the sheer power that whipped the air beneath his thighs. The world tumbled away as the mist-gray wings flayed the fragile reality of the dream.
Neck arched, Pegasus thundered in to a landing, his hooves only touching ground for a moment before he was skimming away over land, leaping up the sheer peak that arched up before him like a mountain goat. Linos dared not look back, or at the rocky steeps that clashed against the winged horse’s hooves. He would have hidden his face in the silken depths of his mount’s mane, but Pegasus snapped his head back for balance, and Linos thought better of it. Mountain-peaks rose and fell beneath the sleek hide of Pegasus’ shoulders, muscles bunching and shifting with a sharp, living power that drove the white horse up the impossible heights of the dream-Olympus.
With a final, bone-rattling leap, Pegasus surmounted a wide ledge, snorting and dancing, shoulder damp with sweat. Hastily, Linos slid off the winged horse, stumbling as his feet hit the rough ground. His legs ached, and his neck and back were sore from the constant tension of hanging on. Biting his lip—it was more strenuous being ‘alive’ again than he had remembered—Linos stroked Pegasus’s neck, murmuring his thanks.
Thankfully, the white horse bowed his head, ears pricked alertly, and thrust his muzzle close to Linos’s face. His sweet, wild breath filled the man’s lungs, and Linos stiffened, that he might not fall over from the dizzy, heady beauty of that scent. At once, the winged horse was away, a pale streak climbing toward the invisible summit of Olympus.
A tall, pale woman, too slender by far for her rangy build, stood in the rough arch of the cave entrance, her ice-green eyes studying him as if she intended to memorize every detail. Her long, lank hair was dead white, and her skin also, as if all the color but those cool eyes had been washed from her. Her garments may have once been fine, a deep, expensive cochineal on fine fabric, but her skirt swung in tatters ‘round her legs, and her blouse was worn thinner than vellum.
“Mnemosyne?” he asked softly, and the woman jerked a little, as if speech were foreign to her.
The empty eyes closed, her handsome head bowing. “My name.”
Shivering, Linos made a sweeping obeisance. “I am Linos, sometimes called Endymion. Somnus sent me.”
“Somnus?” Mnemosyne inquired eagerly, a faint smile on her lips. “For Somnus, I will come to your aid, mortal-not-mortal.” Wild-green eyes, as opaque as marbles, bored into him.
“I will not tell you the way,” she said at last, abruptly. “But I will bring it about as well as I am able.” Mnemosyne ducked her white head, breathing deeply, and then caught her breath, sharply, and raised her head and her hand. Three drops of blood were beading across the shallow slash on her palm, and a single tear glittered on her cheek.
“Blood of green,” she whispered, straightening, staring at the malachite-dark drops. Fiercely, she intoned:
“Blood of green will bind your fate,
Tears shall make you whole.
Time shall be your haunting-grounds,
Eyes will steal your soul.
Life and love will battle
O’er your heart and mind.
Only a place without a world
Will give you loyalty blind.
Shadows will you haunt until
You value air in taking.
Nighttime is a bane to you,
Sleep without waking.
The moon will chase you through the day.
And haunt you to the bone.
Ware the dark, ward the sun,
While you are yet alone.
Waves will welcome waifs and haunts
When they the shadow keep.
Water, soul, will soothe your wants,
Will fill your restless sleep.
Water, soul, will bring you life,
As surely as I weep.”
Mnemosyne touched Linos’s cheek with her blood and tears, eyes glazed, and cried out a harsh, sibilant word that darkened the pale glow from Helios’s stables, sweeping Linos into icy blackness.

He was insubstantial again, barely visible, and movement was an effort. The world around him was just as vague, faint shadows and twilight. A flash of color caught his eye, and Linos stared.
A tall, glorious woman, to Linos’s eyes, dark-skinned and elegant, dressed in purple and white. A single streak of white lanced through the woman’s black waves. She was in living color, sharp and clear, and an aura of brilliance surrounded her, as if this hazy not-place were centered on her.
Linos flickered toward her, and as he did, he grew better-defined, the light-on-light of lines visible on his misty hands. “My lady,” he said, and knelt. His words were sucked up by the fog of his surroundings, made to hiss and echo. “I beg your aid.”
She frowned, her sharp features forbidding. “I’ve had enough of ghosts. Go away.”
He shook his head, wishing that he breathed, so that he might hold his breath, or saw with his eyes, that he might close them. “I’m no ghost, my lady. My body lives. I walk to free it. Help me!” The blood and tears of Mnemosyne were beginning to burn on his cheeks, to pulse with the beating of his heart, and they made Linos frantic.
“I—“ the lady began, but her outline fuzzed as a loud, indistinct voice called, “Baeris!”
She was leaving, turning, walking away. He could not stay here, alone!
As she faded into obscurity, Linos reached out for her. His fingers passed through the fringe of her long, dark hair, but found strands to grasp…
The pure white strands of ghost-touched hair anchored Linos as Baeris Kshau left her dream behind her.

<<How dare you touch my rider! Get off!>> An angry female voice invaded Linos’s befuddled mind as he tried vainly to pull himself together. The transition from dream to reality had left him limp and exhausted, though thicker. He was now clearly visible, though colorless and intangible. The green-amber voice nearly knocked him flat again.
“Sorry,” he said humbly, his words once again echoing as if he were in a cave.
<<You keep your ephemeral hands off Baeris,>> the voice said again, but less sharply. From the corner, a pair of glowing eyes watched him. <<You are another flaming candidate, aren’t you? Why must you hang around my rider? I’m certain that there are other people you could haunt.>>
The dark woman stirred, half-opened her eyes. Linos shook his head, angrily. “I am not a ghost. My body lives. I am not haunting anyone.”
Sleepily, Baeris looked back at him. “What is your aim, then?” she asked huskily. “Pseudo-immortality, living outside your body?”
Linos bristled with rage. “I have immortality. I want mortality. What does she mean, candidate?”
The glowing eyes drew closer, and the bright sunshine that spilled into the room lit up their owner. A green-gold creature, as smooth and polished as any Hesperides apple, surveyed him coolly, her gorgeous wings half-spread, and a look of deep suspicion on her alien face. <<A candidate. Someone who will Stand and bond to offspring of other creatures such as I.>>
“Oh,” Linos said helplessly, not sure at all.
Baeris sighed. “I’ll explain it to him, Dulath. And he’ll tell me just where he came from, and what he’s doing invading my dreams.”
Apprehensively, Linos followed the woman out, shivering through the shadows behind her.