Welcome to Gaia! ::

It might've been a dream, but lately she found it hard to tell whether she was sleeping or awake. She had stared at the walls of her cellar so hard that they blurred and seemed to fall away, and she had long since lost sensation in her limbs. It was not that "anywhere was better than here", it was that she had nothing else to do. So she walked.

Occasionally she seemed to meet other figures in similar plights, with blurry outlines and barely visible faces, but she had no desire to stop and talk to them. She was on a spiraling road that extended as far as she could conceive, through dreams about sheep, about being pursued by invisible forces, about going out pantsless in public. None of these things interested her.

There was a dream about being locked away in a white and sterile place, with people that wanted to know and threatened to kill, but it was a noisy and confusing ordeal, and listlessly she drifted away from the plight of the dreaming person.

Distantly, someone was remembering what it was like to be home. She walked into a familiar landscape, of white marble temples and clouds in the skies, and came to a stop in front of a statue.

A spark of something familiar warmed her body uneasily, and her fingers twitched, reminding her that she did still indeed have hands. Lethe stood politely in front of the statue in the garden of someone else's dream in her best dress with her hands clasped behind her back, scrutinizing the facial features of the goddess depicted before her.

It's wrong, she thought. "It's wrong," she said out loud, and jumped at the sound of her own voice. Even as her hands came up around her own throat in wonder at the rumbles of vocal cords that had long since ceased to function properly, the words came spilling off her tongue excitedly like a torrent unleashed. "No. No, that's not what she looked like. I know what it is. Let me fix... I will fix it. Here, this is right."

With the absence of her ribbons came the freedom of her arms to function independently of each other. Lethe climbed laboriously up the statue, gripping its cool marble sides without a care for its feelings, until she at last managed to slide herself into a seated position upon the woman's shoulders. The statue's head was turned to one side, facing Lethe, staring beyond her with a solemn, detached unanimity. "I can fix this," she said again, taking the statue's face into her hands and pressing her thumbs into its eye sockets.

Lethe did not expect the other one's grab to work. It had been a long time since she was solid. But this was a dream -- and in dream logic -- she could be grabbed. She ignored the outburst of the other, the lesser, and hoped that in a moment she would turn to smoke and be swept away with the other dream figments.

She didn't, and the statue Lethe was perched on turned to face her with obvious disapproval.

Lethe almost seemed to wilt at the undeniable fact that she was not the Superior Being, not in a place such as this. Zaoll's fingers sank an inch or two into her wrist as Lethe squirmed for balance on the statue's shoulder and finally came down, half-liquid, to the ground. The marble stained dark in a small perimeter around her, as if touched by something very very damp.

Wordlessly, Lethe took Zaoll's other wrist in her own cold, clammy hand. There. Now they were even, and no one would be able to say who was the captor and who was the captured -- except she was hard to hold onto, there was something about the nature of her skin and the brightness of her being that made it hard to look at her, much less touch her. Lethe persevered, tightening her grip. "Who are you?" She demanded in a distant voice, "Who are... you to tell me that... How would you know?"

Floating, she was still an inch shorter than Zaoll, with large eyes set into a pale, gaunt face that seemed more skeleton than skin. The only color to her was the bright, forget-me-not blue of her dress, and her dark hair, wet curls that dripped water on the temple floor and faded at the ends like smoke. There was nothing in her eyes, they were clear and empty and the empty white seen in them might as well have been the back of her skull. This girl was like Lethe, but also -- not like --

It was in the pinching of her fingers into Zaoll's warm skin, and in the way the water from her hair spilled over her dress and left stained trails of white in their wake as they dripped down and stole the blue color from the fabric. Her lips were slightly parted, not showing the usual visible line of teeth but just an abstract darkness.

"Give me yours," was the decision from the hungry ghost. "Your face. You're the one who doesn't belong."

"You cannot own what you did not create," said Lethe fiercely, squirming in futility in her grasp. "These places -- these names that you stole, you can't claim to own. They were mine first. They are mine, because I knew of them first."

...But even as she said that, she did not know whether she really wanted to have this place. There was no denying the familiarity of it, the pillars, the white marble, it was a place that felt like it should be home. But the name of it was too harsh on the other girl's tongue, and the statue -- the statue's face was too broad, and Aphrodite never wore her hair completely up. And there were too many flowers and plants for a goddess more associated with the ocean than the earth, the goddess of love and beauty would have never consented to appear in such a form beneath the hands of a sculptor... The columns. The columns were wrong. The details sculpted into the entablature were too angular, and the capitals were entirely the wrong shapes.

Stricken, she returned her gaze to Zaoll, her thick, wavy hair, her pale complexion, the way her skin reflected the blue of Lethe's slowly stained-monochrome dress. There was a ripple underneath the hungry ghost's skin, and though her own figure remained soft and blurry, like water, Lethe's facial features became slightly sharper, grayer. The ends of her hair turned white and relaxed into gentle waves rather than tight curls.

"You're not right. You never existed here, looking as you do now. You are defiling the memory of my Pantheon with your mistakes." Lethe grabbed onto a column as they passed it, with Zaoll pulling her along, in an attempt to wrestle free; she failed but her fingers had left deep grooves in the marble where she had completely smoothed it down and stolen away the carefully sculpted details in the building. In the wake of her failed attempt to escape, she lunged forward instead, the fingers all crooked in her free hand as she reached out for Zaoll's face to -- smooth it over, or steal it, or whatever she wanted to do as the other Fa'e's features slowly bloomed across her own face. "State your business," was the warbly echo, "Or leave."

"No," was the anguished reply, followed by seemingly repetitions of the monosyllabic word, each more piercing than the last. With Zaoll's reflexes too slow for her hungry grasp, she managed to splay her fingers squarely over the other girl's cheek -- but though it seemed she wanted to, and though one could see the little tendons in her half-visible hand flex, her fingers never curled, her nails never hooked into Zaoll's skin.

In fact, she recoiled as if burnt. "You took them," she sobbed, jerking out of Zaoll's grip at last and clutching her seemingly injured hand to her chest. "You took my father, you took my people, and you took me and wouldn't even give me a different name -- and they don't come to me anymore -- they don't know me anymore! S-so where am I supposed to go? W-what am I supposed to be? Rome still stands -- but I... I am not a river or a Fa'e..."

The River of Oblivion suddenly straightened mid-sob, standing in sharp angles in front of Rome with tears still streaking down her cheeks. "I want to go home," she said, voice quivering. "I want to go home. If you are Rome, and this is your temple..." She seemed to have calmed for now, but her moods were wild and unpredictable as water, and it did not help that her hair was still slowly relaxing, up to her roots, and slowly bleaching itself white.

For a moment she said nothing, and it seemed she might burst into tears again. "Civilized," she echoed hollowly, "Better." She said nothing again as Zaoll made her symbol, the one Lethe knew would now not even allow her to even approach the other Fa'e, and asked her a question that clearly indicated the other girl did not recognize her.

Even Rome. Even Rome, a heathen Goddess from Lethe's time, no longer knew her.

"Are you... Are you even listening to me?!" The only indication that this was the wrong thing to say was her vague, indistinct facial features twisting into a combination of rage and pain alike as she whirled on her heel to face the opposite direction, fingers curling into sharp fists.

"Maybe you don't understand, because Rome still stands -- but do you think, for a moment, anyone would look at you and see you for who you were?! Do you think they would continue to acknowledge and respect you the way I know they once did, with their feasts, their sacrifices, their statues --"

Her movements were jerky and erratic, and there was something odd about the looseness of her limbs, the same oddness that coordinated with the reason Zaoll's hands had sunk into her wrist earlier -- Lethe moved as if she were boneless, and her arms bent at odd angles as she approached the statue of Venus and took its face into her hands, smearing her palms over its blank, accusing eyes and leaving nothing behind but smooth, uncarved marble.

"They wouldn't! You know why? BECAUSE THEY'RE CIVILIZED AND BETTER NOW."

Her voice had reached a threshold of both high pitch and volume that their mutual surroundings seemed to shake with the force of it as she continued to desecrate the statue with her greedy hands. "And if they do, I'll make sure they forget, I'll make sure the entire world forgets filthy, thieving, blinded Rome ever was alive!"

The other one's calm words did nothing to quell the contemptuous rage that so stirred Lethe, and she did not notice the remains of her leaking body freezing until it was too late. The frost hit the undersides of her feet, but with little sensation left in her body she only recognized that she was soon rendered unable to move, her legs stiff and slick beneath the knees, and her back to the Roman goddess. That the water she so liberally smeared over the statue also froze and corroded it even further, leaving ugly jagged edges where there was once beauty, comforted her only a little bit.

She was not too far gone to see the sharp contrast between the two girls, even if there was no power left in her to realize that the other was Fa'e. Here, Zaoll spoke in detached, even, logical tones -- and even now the force of her contempt burned holes in Lethe's back. Meanwhile, Lethe herself (who recognized that she once did not spill so much water everywhere as she did now, and could detect the hoarse edge to her voice) postured as if she were.. almost human. Beneath divinity. Nine days and nine nights ' worth of distance between her and the other girl.

"My people are now yours," Lethe said with numbed lips, and cursed the other in Greek. "...And you are in no position to underestimate me. Just as I was once the River Lethe, so I can make you forget you were ever Rome. And then what will become of your child?"

"No," Lethe said, but there was no denying the decreasing visibility of her figure and the sudden feebleness to her voice. "You can't. W-why would you..."

There was an uncomfortable silence, filled only by the sound of her struggling to move within her frozen shell, resulting in noises that sounded eerily like cracking bones.

"Why won't you," she finally amended in a small voice, but she either no longer had the will to finish the thought or had forgotten what she was going to say.

Finally she sunk, defeated, falling from her ice statue pose to a crumpled form barely more visible than a lumpy puddle on the marble ground. "I-I don't want to go back right now. I won't bother you anymore. Leave me alone and I'll go away in a while, I promise." She did not say she was sorry. The story of Sire and Callix still burned strongly in her mind, the story of how one life was traded for another -- how one Fa'e was able to come into being from the ashes of another's death. She owed nothing to this girl who probably only benefited from her death (wallowing in her puddle-like form, she felt distantly she was allowed such melodramatic thoughts. If she was to die, she wanted a poetic death too. And though this girl was no where near as cool as she was, at least she was... powerful. Resolute. Yes, she thought bitterly, she supposed the goddess of Rome deserved to live more than she did.)