Live, Love, and Hate – by Orpheus

 

Week 47 take 2 – VItalis

 

The school yard was empty, and not that different in the Shadowlands. The trees were more gnarled and withered, and the grass was all dead. The newly renovated class rooms didn’t look like anyone had touched them in thirty years or so, and the majority of the classrooms, the ones that hadn’t been renovated, looked as though they’d been burned from the inside out.

 

Honestly, Orpheus had expected more people to be here. He’d expected more wraiths to be trying to find solace in whatever parts of their lives hadn’t crumbled to time or moved on and forgotten them. Of course, he’d always expected there to be more people like him, so what made this time any different?  

 

Orpheus sighed as he sat down on a familiar, small brick wall. He wished that his problems had stayed as simple as they had been. Every Wraith dealt with their Shadow, every Wraith heard the inner siren song of Oblivion. Not even the harshest of Harrowings, however, could sever a Passion and a Fetter at the same time. During his time in the Skinlands, Orpheus had always believed that the best way to get to like a soda was by drinking it after it had gone flat, thus adjusting yourself to the taste without the bite of carbonation; he silently noted to himself that the way that the Restless fed off of emotions did not work the same way.

 

To tell the truth, he’d been hoping that the soda vending machines in the Skinlands would reflect as Pathos machines here in the land of the dead. He’d never seen a Pathos vending machine, mind you, nor had he ever even heard rumor of one, but he’d always hoped. Back when he had left the Folly, love was the only emotion that was left, and what little of that he had left was very watered down to the point where some swallows tasted absolutely nothing like the drink, almost as though it had been diluted by some strange emotion that had absolutely no taste, nor any charge. “I can’t forget why you were mine…” he whispered to the no one who was around.

 

(an explanation for the take 2 thing is in order, I believe. I originally wrote a menagerie for Week 47, but then I decided it didn’t really fit anymore, but I will most likely scavenge it for later usage)