i have a small story about helnik. walk with me. so me and my ghosty @polycrowtruther were talking about soulmates/twin souls/twin flames, all that stuff, and because i apparently have a medical condition that forces me to connect everything back to helnik, i sat down and started searching where these ideas came from and what the differences were.
eventually i ended up reading aristophanes’s speech in plato’s symposium. according to aristophanes, humans didn’t always look the way they do now. originally, they were spherical beings. they had four arms, four legs, two faces looking in opposite directions, and because they effectively had the strength of two people, they were incredibly powerful. they were also incredibly arrogant.
aristophanes says there were three original kinds of humans: all male, descended from the sun; all female, descended from the earth; and half male/half female, descended from the moon. and because these little idiots were so strong and so convinced of their own greatness, they decided they could challenge the gods themselves and marched on olympus.
this went about as well as you would expect. the gods wanted to punish humanity, but they didn’t want to wipe them out completely. humans were useful and entertaining. so zeus came up with a different solution. he split them in half. even apollo stitched the wounds afterward, pulled the skin together, and left the belly button as a reminder of what had been lost.
and from that point on, humanity wandered the earth searching for the half they had once belonged to, searching for the person who made them feel whole before they were divided.
after reading all of this, i sat down and searched through the grishaverse books because i wanted to see if anyone besides helnik got the soulmate motif (and i consulted the human version of the grishaverse wiki @butterflypython as well)
to be clear, i searched for the actual words: soulmate/twin soul/twin flame
i found none. the only pair that gets that is helnik,
“They were twin souls, soldiers destined to fight for different sides, to find each other and lose each other too quickly.”
and the more i think about that line, the more it reminds me of aristophanes’s story. they were supposed to remain apart. they were supposed to hate each other. every part of the world they were born into told them to stay on opposite sides. instead they found each other anyway. and together they became more than they had been alone. nina survives parem with him. matthias turns his back on brum, on fjerda, on the life he thought he wanted because of her. together they start imagining something bigger than survival, war and hatred. they genuinely believe they can build a different future. they become hopeful enough to think they can change the world.
ck, ch15: “Then we’ll find a way to change their minds. All of them.”
ck, ch19: “He would locate Nina. They would survive this night. They would free themselves of this damp, misbegotten city, and then… Well, then they’d change the world.”
ck, ch38: “We’ll find a way to change their minds.”
and in the end, they were punished for it. which is also strange, because if you look at it through the lens of fate, destiny, or whatever higher power you want to call it, they were separated once in elling. they fought their way back to each other anyway, enough to find each other again and all they got for it was another goodbye. now, i don’t think leigh was consciously rewriting aristophanes when she wrote that line. but every time i read it, i end up thinking about two people who found each other against impossible odds, became stronger together than they had ever been apart, and were separated long before they were ready. which is a terrible thing to do to me personally.
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