The Oracle

Lydia Vardis was the greatest oracle of all time, and I was her assistant.

You've probably never heard of her, but that's okay. Take my word for it, Lydia was a force in her time. She wasn't just an oracle, she was the oracle; the Oracle of Delphi, the most powerful of all the five Greek oracles. Men came from all over the known world to consult her: statesmen from Athens, generals from Sparta, even the ambassadors of the pharaoh from far-flung Egypt. Lydia would admit them all—after they had paid their admittance fee, of course.

Yes, Lydia was a great oracle, but more than that she was an accomplished scholar in her own right. Lydia had, among other things, published a series of books on the gods. They were her lifelong obsession. Unlike her contemporaries, who were content to worship the gods from afar, Lydia longed to meet them, to travel to their realms, to see how they lived and what they were like in person. Her books were great groundbreaking works in their time, but they are now, to the best of my knowledge, all of them lost. Perhaps this is for the best.

I first came into Lydia's service three years ago, a full year before her fall. She hired me for three reasons. One, I was young and eager to help without question. Two, despite my youth and peasant origins, I was literate. I could read and write, and these skills came in handy for the scribing services Lydia was always in need of. And lastly, I was good-looking. Even though the Oracle is supposed to be abstinent, the rules are...well, they are more of what you'd call 'guidelines' rather than actual rules. Lydia often summoned me to her bedchamber in the middle of the night, and there, I would be of service to her in a different way.

There was many a night where we laughed away the day, pleasuring one another through the dense smoke and heady incense, the marble eyes of Apollo our only witness...

And in this manner we might have passed our lives, Lydia giving daily oracular consultations, me being her faithful friend and secret lover, if Lydia did not, one fateful day two years ago, stumble upon a forbidden secret.

The secret of traveling to the realms of the gods.

-

I will never forget the day it happened. It was a lazy morning, or at least it was until Lydia burst into the temple, robes all aflutter, as excited as I have ever seen her. "I've found it!" she cried. "I've found it!"

"Found what, Lydia?" I asked.

Lydia didn't answer me, just grabbed me by the hand and led me straight to her chambers. She left strict orders to the guards that she was not to be disturbed.

Once we were safe from prying eyes, Lydia produced something from the folds of her robes. It was an ordinary earthenware jar, but she cradled it to her chest gently, carefully, like it was a baby or something else equally precious. There was reverence in her voice when she spoke, "I've finally found it, Damon! The key I've been looking for all these years!"

"You can't mean...?"

"Yes!" Lydia said, laughing, and she told me all about it. The jar she so gently cradled contained the drink Kykeon, sacred to the cults who celebrate the famous Eleusinian Mysteries. The drink was so sacred the punishment for drinking it outside the confines of the Mysteries was death.

Then, and only then, did I understand how deep Lydia's obsession with the gods ran.

Lydia gave me a quick but serious briefing. She was going to cast a spell, she said, one that would link her mind with mine. Then we would drink the Kykeon, and I was to stay and watch over her body while she sat in meditation until she reached the land of the gods. She would dictate to me what she saw, and I was to write down everything she said.

"Be sure to leave nothing out!" Lydia said with a shaky smile. She was doing her best to be brave, but I saw through her right away. I saw her nervousness, the reason for my conscientiousness writ large in the twin orbs of her eyes. "Be sure to leave nothing out," those eyes seemed to say, "So that if I were to never return, at least my story will be known to all."

After that, there was nothing more to say. Lydia cast the spell, eyes closed, fingers fluttering, muttering in a tongue that was even older than Greek. After she was done, we drank. My first sip of Kykeon tasted like nothing at all, but the longer I drank, the fresher and sweeter it became. I gulped, and it tasted like wine, like sweet spring water, like rye milk and dead soldier's sweat. I could feel warm tendrils bloom like wildflowers in my chest, comforting and terrifying me in equal measure...then just like that my cup was empty.

I put it aside. "Now what?" I asked Lydia.

"Now we wait," she said with a smile.

-

I realized the Kykeon was working when the world began to bend.

The chamber we were in suddenly seemed...alive. The torchlit braziers around us glowed brighter, and when I took a closer look at them they seemed to dance and wink at me, as if they had a very funny joke to tell. Light and shadow alike were thrown around us in playful disarray. The smell of the smoke, the flickering of the flames, the wavering of the light, all these served to intoxicate me, but I did not feel drunk. On the contrary, I felt sober, more sober and aware than I have ever been in my life.

I turned around to ask Lydia if she was feeling the same. What I saw stopped me dead in my tracks.

Lydia's body was translucent. She was still sitting there, eyes closed, cross-legged on the ground like a gymnosophist. She looked for all intents and purposes asleep, except her skin had obtained a faint blue glow, and more than that I could see through her, to the cold stone wall behind her. The longer I looked, the more see-through she became, and soon she disappeared entirely. I forgot my briefing and became very scared and worried.

"Lydia?" I asked. "Ly-ly-lydia? Are you alright?"

There was a moment of terrible silence where the only answer to my question was the silence of her unheard breathing, but then I heard the faint whispering of one single word, uttered lips unmovingly, in the recesses of my mind.

"Blue," Lydia said. Despite the associated dreariness of the word, I could hear the excitement in her voice, the type of intense excitement one can only feel after seeing one's life's work come true. The spell had worked. "It's blue all over, blue as far as the eye can see, and there are...oh my, there are sharks everywhere, sharks and fish and other scaled and tentacled creatures of the deep. They are far too numerous to count. And in the seaweed forest beneath me, there are...bones. Human bones." At this, Lydia's voice becomes somber, somber and serious and full of hidden dread. "We must be in Poseidon's watery kingdom."

Lydia stayed there for some time, exploring the land beneath the waves. Although she was disappointed she didn't get to meet Poseidon himself, I was secretly glad, because the god of earthquakes and the ocean can be fickle at the best of times, as the drowned sailors in the seaweed forest found out far too late.

"The sky is burning," I heard her gasp when she moved on to the next realm. "Ash is falling everywhere. The ground is barren and red, as if a great battle had been fought here long ago." Lydia wandered around and described to me, in tones of increasing agitation, the ruins she saw around her. "Many castles dot the landscape, but what beauty might have once had is long gone. They are black and charred and very much dead. Their walls are decorated with bloodstains and the carrion crows of combat. This is the work of Ares," Lydia whispered. "The god of war." Before she moved on, I heard Lydia weep at the destruction and senseless slaughter of it all.

"Mist," Lydia said after a short pause. "The land here is shrouded in mist, and oh so gloomy. I can hear the faraway wails of a million bleak souls in resigned suffering. And in ahead of me is a mighty river, bubbling and churning, and as black as the night. This must be the realm of Hades, Lord of the Underworld," Lydia said, and even through our tenuous mind-link I could feel her attempt to suppress a shiver and fail. Lydia didn't stay here for too long. When the boatman of the river came to ask her whether she was living or dead Lydia didn't answer, just slipped quietly to the next.

When she got there Lydia was quiet. I mistook her stillness for sadness and asked her if she was alright, but it turns out Lydia was merely stunned. "Everything here is so beautiful," she said in a tone of genuine awe. "I am standing in the middle of lush rolling hills, with the wind at my back and the spring sun warming my face. The hills stretch on and on, and on them are vineyards, well-planted and heavy with grape. The air is alive with the sweet smell of wine and sex."

Lydia traveled through the realm until from a distance, she heard the sound of music and laughter. She followed the sound to arrive at a clearing. There, there was what could only be described as an orgy of epic proportions.

Limbs, cups, and clothes were strewn carelessly everywhere. There were all sorts of creatures in there: goat-footed satyrs chasing nymphs, centaurs with the bodies of virile horses and the faces of roguish young men, and mortal men and women so beautiful they looked like statues come to life. The nymphs were drunk and laughing, running in their silks, saying no with their lips but please come hither with their eyes, and everywhere Lyda looked there was wine, flowing, flowing, flowing...

All of this was described to me by Lydia in a wry scholarly tone. Then one of the revelers handed Lydia a cup of shimmering red. She hesitated for only a second. Then she raised it to her lips and drank.

When she did she was lost.

The cup slid from her fingers to rest on hollow circles upon the pine forest floor, and her lips opened to let out peals of heedless laughter. Then Lydia leapt into the fray, and there, many hands welcomed her, greeted her, found her clothes and tore them off like they were so many loose leaves in a storm. And as connected to Lydia as I was, I too, was swept up by the passion and mad lust all, and there, alone in Lydia's chambers, I came and I came and I came, lips moaning madly, rolling ceaselessly on waves of Lydia's passion.

-

When it was all over, Lydia was reluctant to leave.

She found the pleasure realm of Dionysus so lovely she wished to stay there forever, drunk and naked and without a care in the world, but in the end, her sense of curiosity defeated her desire for pleasure. When everyone else was sleeping off their drink she sighed and slipped out, moving quietly to the next.

When Lydia arrived I heard her laugh, "Why, I feel like I'm back home already."

Lydia described to me her surroundings, and it did indeed sound like the Temple of Apollo. Everything she described, from the dimly lit marble chambers to the fiery braziers on the wall, reminded me of our home. There were three distinct differences, though.

Firstly, instead of statues of tall bronze Apollo with his lyre and bow, the walls were decorated with images of an unfamiliar goddess. She was all in armor, and her face was impassive and stern. An owl was perched high on her shoulder, and she was holding a spear in her right hand and a shield in her left. The shield was ornately decorated. It was decorated with a snake-haired woman whose mouth was open in a petrified scream. Something about the way Lydia described her filled me with dread.

Secondly, there were books everywhere. There were books strewn on tables, piled up on shelves, and stacked in neat piles on the floor. It looked like how I imagined the great Library of Alexandria must've looked before it was so savagely looted and burned down.

And last but most curiously, there were owls everywhere. They were flying in circles around the room, grooming themselves on bookshelves—there were even some who were perched before open books, rifling through them, turning pages with their talons and beaks. It was a disconcerting sight.

According to Lydia, the owls looked like they were, for all intents and purposes, reading.

This was too much for Lydia. She told me so herself. She had to know. She had to know what exactly it was the owls were reading. So she stretched out her hands to a shelf, reaching out to grab a book at random, and when she did so I felt a terrible sense of fear and foreboding. Acting on impulse, I yelled, "No, Lydia, NO! Don't open the book! Don't open it!"

But Lydia, as she had done so so many times before, ignored me.

It was the last mistake she would ever make.

-

Lydia Vardis did not, as far as I know, make it to another realm.

Throughout her visits to the other realms, Lydia spoke to me constantly. Even when she was frightened half to death in Hades or in the throes of passion in the pleasure land of Dionysus, she made sure to stay in touch with me, to describe to me in clinical terms the wonder and terror of it all.

After she opened the book, Lydia became quieter. Much quieter. I would call out frantically to her, begging for a response, but she would only answer occasionally, and even then only in half-formed thoughts and whispers.

"This cannot be..."

"By the gods! No one will ever believe this..."

"I must read on. I must learn more..."

"I see the world as it is now, not what it is pretending to be. An illusion, unstripped of pretense at last..."

-

It has been two years since Lydia first ventured into the realm of the gods. She has long since disappeared, and is presumed by all to be dead—but I know better.

I know better because Lydia has never stopped whispering to me. Her thoughts are no longer decipherable in any known language. The last time she said anything coherent to me was four months ago.

Nowadays, she does not even whisper.

She only hoots.

I can hear her now, hoot, hoot, hooting. She sounds scared, and lonely, and finally and utterly mad. And curious. She still sounds, after all this time, oh so very curious.

I often think of Lydia. Not of her as the thing she is now, but of the energetic girl she had once been. I often think back to that fateful day when she burst into the temple, her robes aflutter and her eyes full of life, cradling that jar of Kykeon.

I would stop her from drinking from that jar if I could.

I would silence her hoots if I could.