#nightshadeis

a continuation of 1 2 3 4

Zagreus hoards the darkness.

It's a waste to spend it on the mirror when he can twist it into something different, something better and more useful.

Wielding chaos doesn't come to him easily, but that just means it's like everything else in his life. He uses it to hide things from his father and to change things without his notice.

This domain belonged to Chaos first, after all. They can see everything that he's doing, but they;re intrigued and amused and even offer boons and advice to help him. Zagreus is grateful for it, even though it's always a double edges sword.

He wouldn't have been able to do so much so quickly without it.

Replicating Chaos's portals is tedious and pulls the blood from his veins, but less and less as time goes on. And as his priestess spreads his names and his blessings across the mortal earth, he has more blood to give.

Zagreus bleeds, and bleeds, using the power of his blood melded with chaos to twist the underworld into a different shape, and yet his body never runs dry. These days he only dies when he chooses to.

He shifts among the levels of the underworld, bypassing all the irritating challenges and using the time everyone thinks he's using to fight his way to the surface on more substantial pursuits.

Creating a path from Tartarus to Asphodel to Elysium without getting caught by Charon does drain him to exhaustion a few times, but it's worth it.

"Oh, you've been up to something interesting, haven't you Prince Z?" Sisyphus asks in delight when Zagreus shows him the entrance.

"We could use some help with the next harvest," he says, grinning. "If you're up to keeping a secret."

It's a huge swath of the underworld that he's edged his way into, formed by chaos and blood and that can’t be touched by anyone without his express invitation.

“This isn’t a path,” Patroclus scoffs when Zagreus shows him. “This is – it’s nearly the size of Elysium! You could fit a whole kingdom in here!”

That’s an exaggeration. It’s much smaller than Elysium.

“Or a princedom,” Eurydice adds thoughtfully. “The clearing has been getting a little crowded. I don’t suppose anyone knows how to build a castle?”

“I designed a few in my time,” Sisyphus says, rubbing his hands together.

Zagreus frowns. “I don’t – it’s just supposed to make things easier for us, and to give us more room to grow things.”

“We’ll do that too,” Patroclus says, surveying the land with a contemplative air that makes Zagreus nervous. “But every god needs his domain.”

“This is my father’s domain,” he points out. “My domain lives in my followers’ veins and perhaps in the temples they’ve started constructing.”

“Where is your father’s power here?” Patroclus asks. “All I feel is yours.”

Well – well. Hm.

“There are a few more nymphs I trust that could help,” Eurydice says, “if you don’t mind, Prince.”

He gives up. “If you trust them, I trust them. Just don’t go overboard.”

Three of his very good friends are smiling at him and nodding and Zagreus tells himself the unease he feels is paranoia.

~

Meg hears rumors but doesn’t understand them and dismisses them. The dead are all a bunch of gossips and nothing they say can be trusted.

Except she vanquishes another disobedient soul and as it vanishes it hisses, “Horrible harpy! You deserve to be part of the Prince’s Court!”

What an odd way to phrase that, she thinks. She and Zagreus are just sleeping together, whenever she’s free and she can stop him for long enough to roll him into bed.

It’s almost laughable – the idea that Zagreus would have any court of his own, that there’s any power that could be clawed out of Hades’s grip.

It’s impossible.

You've changed what labels you use and feel comfortable with so many times, and I for one am super pleased on your behalf. Finding the right words is hard sometimes, and while I personally feel confident in my identity as I label it now, it's always good to see that it's 1000% okay to change it if we need to.

I know I'm kind of rambly right now but I'm pretty sure I got my point across and that's what matters. Happy for you!!

Thank you. :)

I feel like, for me personally, it’s important to talk about these things in a public fashion. I know a lot of younger queer or LGBTQIA+ folx are reading what I have to say, and it’s important to me that I affirm the idea that queer is an okay thing to be, that you will change or grow throughout your life, and that’s okay! It’s okay to not stick with the same definition of yourself that you had when you were 12, 15, 25, etc. There may be some parts of you that never change, and that’s good! You have a core self, and that’s great!

But some things about you can change. Maybe it’s because you grew and changed, and maybe it’s because you came to understand yourself better. Maybe you unpacked a lot of other people’s expectations for you and suddenly remembered that night when you were laying in bed at like, 12, whispering ‘I’m a lesbian’ to yourself and you look back to that 12-year-old you and say, “Actually, you know, you’re right. Thanks for telling us.” 

Just for random example. 

But like, I think we’ve done ourselves a disservice as a community because we were trying to guard against things like conversion therapy. The ‘born this way’ narrative makes sense as a defensive maneuver, because allocishet people as a group can be really harmful shitheads to us, and for some people, that narrative is exactly correct! But it’s also true that for some people, that’s not correct, they grew and changed and understood themselves better. 

It’s important that we acknowledge within our community that that’s okay, and that doesn’t make their identities less legitimate or conversion therapy less wrong! You can change and grow during your lifetime, learn about yourself and shape yourself, and maybe that means you’ll find yourself saying ‘wow, I’m not actually a binary trans woman, I’m non-binary! I have learned and reassessed my needs and now I know!’ or maybe you’ll be saying, ‘hunh, I guess pansexual is a better label for me these days’ or ‘my means of interacting with my sexuality has changed, and I think demisexual is a better fit for me now,’ or even ‘I’m going to invent a gender for myself because all of the extant gender terms no longer serve me.’ 

For me, I think it’s a little of column A and a little of column B. I’ve always liked girls better, and in HS started acting out real hard to cover that up, because I lived in a rural area, and if I was a slut, at least I wasn’t queer, and could survive until graduation. I genuinely loved a couple of guys, which has nothing to do with my actual desire and attraction mechanism, I just ... loved them because they were good people. (Sexuality and gender and love and sexual desire can be very complex and confusing and it doesn’t serve us to pretend they’re not.) But I’ll tell you what, realizing that every AMAB I’ve been attracted to since I broke up with Cat’s dad was an egg, and they invariably came out after I started crushin’ on em? Kinda blew the top of my head off, and I had to sit down and think really hard about what that meant for me as a person. 

Hahaha, thank YOU for not just unfollowing outright! :P I'm glad you've been enjoying the unending stream of anime criminals.

It's not unreasonable to add abortion as an option to that post, because it was NOT directed at people being pressured into one.