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Across Mount Helicon, the call comes again, again, rebounding through fissures in the ground, hot springs burst to lakes, and cairns left by meandering mortal, “Sister, muse— soror, musa— αδελφή, μούσα.”
With every call, there came eight responses. It was an echo that always met its mate, a poem that was repeated and refined, a whole that was a circle bending in on itself until the end was no different from the beginning. Seeded with memory as much as power (for they were their mother’s children as much as they were their father’s), the Muses were a part of time itself. They were artifacts of imagination, externalizations of creation, and these roles seated them on this mountain just at the edge of mortal lives.
The comforting call that rolled across the mount was an affirmation of their divinity. It acknowledged all the pieces of what they were and helped to sew their fates together. It was a perfect chorus, one that made Terpsichore dance, Melpomene perform, Thalia laugh, Euterpe sing, Polyhymnia compose, Urania gaze at the stars, Clio pluck her lyre’s strings, and Erato stretch languidly. It even caused the head of them all, Calliope, to close her eyes and let warm, familial comfort wash over her. Here, in this repetition that was embedded in their ichor, that was the undercurrent of their purpose, Calliope could set aside her heartbreak over her son’s loss and husband’s leaving. She could lean on her sisters and hear them grieve with her. Their shared, shored pain became beautiful inspiration that trickled down through Helicon’s groundwater to humans who wanted to be so grand.
They did not understand how thirsty those humans were. What they were willing to do to become greater was deeper, crueler, and more yoked to ancient, crude law than any of the Muses could ever have imagined. Inspiration, these mortals said, ought not be given out by piecemeal. It should be taken whenever the mood strikes. How else do you become the best? How else do you rise above Homer, the blind poet, or Orpheus, the unearthly musician? The answer is simple: do not wait for the call of the Muses to distill down to you. Seize the day. Capture it. Hone that muse. Bend her to your use. At least, that’s what Erasmus Fry thought when he took a decrepit scroll out and declared to the mountain, “Calliope, you may call me master.”
And then, she was gone. And then, the call changed, now with the tenor of a scream, “Sister, where are you— soror, ubi es— αδελφή, που είσαι—”
....
Fry never understood what she was and now, neither does Richard Madoc. Their eyes don’t let enough light in; their ears don’t detect the full range of sound. They cannot feel the truth of her words when she remarks, “I choose with whom I share my gifts.”
They think that, simply because epic writers pleaded for her and she came, they can cut out the middleman of prayer to make genius arrive. It was never so simple, nor will it be. There has to be something there, she could tell these men. I have to see the glimmer of creativity, of spark, alive inside of someone before I can bestow a blessing, she could explain. But she is stubborn (as her once-lover found out), and obstinate (truly her father’s daughter) and perhaps too used to being at the head of her nine-pronged court, so she says nothing. She may have already forgiven these men, these masters, for what they have done, for how they cannot help themselves, but that does not mean that she is obligated to tell them why their words inevitably fade, why their books and ideas from her have the scent of strange upon them. Knowledge is a gift; the Muses know this best.
Euterpe knew it even better than Calliope. It was what drove her to always be traveling.
“So much to see, so much to do, so much to hear,” she would claim, shaking her midnight dark, curly hair. “How could I stay here where I can only touch so much? I want to be out there.”
So Euterpe walked, sailed, flew, and climbed across the world, much past Helicon and Parnassus, lingering every once in a while. Calliope remembers not long ago —or was it a millennium or more; it’s so hard to tell— finding Euterpe laying in a garden underneath a lotus tree, not more than ten feet from where a youthful woman garbed in a dark red and silver beizi in the style of the Song sat on a bench, carefully writing on parchment with brush pen. As Calliope approached, the woman suddenly paused her writing with an irritated tsk. She reached up to tap her fingers against her straight collar and cast her eyes out at the pond before them that was coated in twirling lotus flowers.
Euterpe had been humming a tune. The wind carried it softly from where the muse laid to the ear of the writer, more a hint of melody than the gift of it. As the notes came through, the woman, electrified by poetic insight, returned to her work. Euterpe leaned back on her elbow, a pleased smirk the perfect match for the mirth in her eyes. With that look, and with the way she stretched out, hip pressed to the earth and head perched in her hands, Euterpe could almost be her immediate twin, Erato. At the sight of Calliope, she rolled onto her back and wiggled her fingers.
“Sister,” she had called with delight. “What brings you here?”
Calliope chuckled incredulously, “To see you, of course.”
Euterpe returned the laugh but then quickly hauled herself up from the ground. She leaned in to conspiratorially whisper, “You could be here to see her, you know.”
She cocked her head toward the bench where the woman works away. Calliope raised her eyebrows, “Oh?”
“Yes,” Euterpe nodded sagely, the playful mocking gone from her voice. “She’s one of the best.”
Calliope felt the urge to gasp; Euterpe, for all that she loved to imbue mortals with her hymnal gifts, did not often play favorites. She liked to say that poets visited her, but she never invited them to stay (sitting now on the ground with a box of chocolates on the bed and a lock on the door, Calliope could cry at the irony). For her to levy this such praise on this writer was something to note. Almost unconsciously, Calliope looked back at the woman on the bench, taking in her long ochre hair gathered in an aristocratic bun, her lithe hands alighting across the page, and the pure magnetism of her piercing, monolid eyes. Beneath her brush pen, the calligraphy was rushed but artful, a ci rising from the weeds of pure idea like a song peeking through the lotus petals spinning in the pond.
“See?” Euterpe muttered into her ear as Calliope turned completely to face the mortal. “I told you so.”
Calliope had asked, also hushed, “What’s her name?”
Euterpe pushed the lower half of her face into Calliope’s back, eyes glimmering out from beside her neck, lips pressed to her shoulder blade, “Li Qingzhao.”
In the late afternoon blush, the woman seated on the bench turned to them with an almost preternatural sense. Her brow furrowed as her intelligent eyes looked over them, but their linen Greek peplos had already become matching beizi with green floral patterns and their features were now delicate mirrors of passers-by in the park. Confusion was thus replaced quickly with recognition as Qingzhao took in the (apparently familiar) guise of Euterpe. She beckoned them forward, and Euterpe waved back before taking Calliope’s hand.
Euterpe nodded her head toward the woman on the bench once again, her now honorable Confucian hair pinned back from her face. With a teasing smile, she tugged Calliope forward, “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
There was no introduction to Fry; there was simply mine and stay and quiet and give, but there was also a promise, “When I die, you’ll be free.”
She believed him, not because she was naive, but because there was no alternative and the marrow of her very bones ached from familial separation. The part of her that had to keep going needed hope to sustain itself, so she caved. She thought, he will be done and I will go home and that will be the end. But there is no end and no beginning, as she well knows.
There’s even less of an introduction to Madoc when he appears to whisk her away into the night as Fry waxes and wanes poetic; the young writer’s eyes dance around like he is a startled deer as she is handed off like chattel, not goddess. Whatever of her pride remained from decades spent in a basement bares its teeth at the ignominy.
At first, she thought that he might see how forcing her will do nothing but bring candles that melt down, away, but he does not see. Instead, he takes the lessons that Fry taught him and reaches into her, uninvited, fracturing her from the inside out.
So, the imprisonment continues on, time stretching across her like a suffocating film. At least here, there is a window.
....
In the rebounding absence brought on by ancient laws that did not care about them, Euterpe can no longer muster the strength to stay sane let alone travel. Calliope was the cardinal direction, the compass arrow that guided the sisters, the north star that offered sounding point for their song. In her absence, everything is off.
Melpomene, mother of Sirens, imbuer of tragedy, the one among them most used to such desolation as this, becomes their new anchor point. It is not her lot, so the horror that grips their song easily becomes lopsided, overwhelming, self-repeating.
There is no reprieve in sight, and none of them can survive this weight the way Melpomene can, her storm-dark eyes severe and hair tightly worked into cornrows. On the other hand, her twin in domain, Thalia, muse of comedy, starts to pale. Her normally flush, olive skin wilts like the yellowing ivy crown on her head, and her words wilt too. Her poems turn to gallows humor, inward and cutting, that starts to scare them all before long. Without their sister, the ribalds have no timber and are just bitter. They are grating on the tongue, like their comedy has the taste of depression, not joy. Decades or days after Calliope was taken, Melpomene moves to mollify Thalia by embracing her, but the comedian casts off her trumpet and reaches for her sister’s knife, the sigil of her tragic domain. Melpomene lurches away, her eyes wide. Thalia falls to her knees, sobbing before she starts to laugh hysterically. It fills the air brutally, broken only by the sound of the muse pulling savagely at her hair. Her sisters rush to brush their hands down her back and through her locks, but their comfort is not a solution.
Though it is perhaps unfair to her, Melpomene remains the only rock that splits the tide of madness calling to them all. She continues to bear Thalia’s burdens as if they were her own, and then moves on to cradle Clio’s hands when she wears them raw writing every detail of everyday that Calliope stays gone, and always remembers to encourage the little songs that Euterpe manages to summon when Melpomene helps her bathe and braids her hair.
Even Polyhymnia, the most serious and sober among them, who is always cloaked and veiled, cannot keep a level head. Her poetry takes on the tenor of revelation like she is Apollo’s Pythia at Delphi reincarnated, a mere priestess hunting for oracular deliverance in the water from the Helicon spring sacred to them. Polyhymnia, the new oracle, needs Melpomene to rouse her from her meditations, to interrupt her sacred mutterings. She cannot align herself to the present without the harmony brought by Calliope’s voice.
They never learned how to be on their own; they weren’t from the moment they were born and shouldn’t have been until the universe itself ended. It is not right. Euterpe cannot tolerate it, so how could Polyhymnia, Thalia, Clio, Terpsichore, Erato, Urania, or even stoic Melpomene?
It is a sickness that cannot heal. It is a choice that none of them made but are forced to bear. It is not what Calliope deserves, and the call tying them together cannot abide that, so it ruins them.
....
In the attic, Calliope muses to herself for hours on end since she has nothing else to do while waiting for Madoc to return to ply her.
These days, she thinks often of Erato’s darling, the poetess who her sister connived with Aphrodite and Desire to inspire: Sappho. They call her their tenth, a muse herself, now. Or perhaps they once did; Plato said it, or it was Socrates, or maybe it was Madoc when he came last, a bouquet of hyacinths and roses in hand. Yes, he did say, didn’t he? He left a book here, one with purple flowers on the cover, and said (commanded in that way where he pleads, like he doesn’t want this but can’t make himself stop and somehow it still —always— is her fault), “Make me write like this.”
Like this, like what? She picks up the book and ah— yes, this is why she thinks of Sappho often. Centuries ago, Erato would steal home to the mountain with poetry from Lesbos stowed in her Parian-white bosom; she would spill it out for her sisters to see and share in. They examined the meter by the light of the moon, in the ghost-light of the constellations placed by their father. They cleansed the wanting words in the hot springs. They recited the best phrases into the very earth, stitching a new stanza to their ever-constant call. Calliope was there when these words were written.
She remembers pride, love, and fondness piercing through her grieving haze as she took in the lines. Now, she looks down at the book. Here, she cannot sanctify the words as she and her sisters once did for all their favorites; she’s not even sure if she would want to, given that it’s all fragments now.
There’s an ode to them, the Muses, asking after their beautiful hair (Calliope’s never dirties while she’s here but it does wilt; she reports this to a poetess’ shade), but that’s all that remains. There are expressions of desire, craving; they are impressions, really, the fading trace of a poetic mouth pressing a kiss to the page. The book on the bedspread is a repository of memories, not-quite-poetry.
“Write like this,” he had adjured. Calliope scoffs. She cannot give him the erosion that whittled these fragments down to a fine point anymore than she can turn back the clock to pull the poetry’s full form from Helicon’s seams.
The Muses are of time and of power, but Calliope is just a fragment. She is not a whole but a one. To give Fry what he wanted, to give Madoc what he wants, she has to be wrung out, squeezed. It is torture, trying to create an entire call by herself when there used to be eight others, when there should be eight, when she can sometimes feel them shrieking into the dark for her.
She lights a candle and tries to respond; she reaches out for her mother, for fate, but there is no response nor aid. It is her alone here, in this room, with her master.
The longer she stays here, the farther her thoughts stray from each other and the more her divinity darkens. It’s hard not to feel fragmentary, to feel as if her heart is being torn right through her skin, slowly exploding into pieces.
....
On the mountain, away, Erato slides down her knees onto jagged rocks until her heart is kin with the earth, until her ichor lips can part lava flows. Her domain is one of pain— of loving, needing, choosing, worshipping, and sometimes leaving, but she never had a part of herself leave before.
Desire of the Endless with their scintillating tongue comes to collect her before too long. They step into the fissure, pull at her now ashen shoulders with warm fingers, “Come now, Erato, this does not become you.”
If she lifted her eyes, she would meet golden jewels affixed in face, and they would pour the promise of something more into her, attempting to stitch her familial wound. She keeps her gaze down. They suck their teeth irritatedly, “We have so much to do.”
Erato shakes her head, presses her heart further into the ground, and listens to the keening roar of her sisters as they try to wrest Calliope back, as they plead, as the Fates look on, as their father (as always) ignores, as even missives to Dream are met with only silence.
Desire is anticipation alone, same as the Muses are. They can only promise. Erato cannot bear that anymore, even though it has always been her trade. This isn’t foreplay or a game; this is her sister.
“No,” she tells the Endless, her shining skin continuing to grey. “No, there is nothing to do except to get Calliope back. We need her.”
Desire huffs disbelievingly. They do not understand; their siblings and them are bound by the wholeness of their impact on mortals, by how they command aspects of their lives. They do not sing together, they are not a whole, they do not breathe in tandem with one another as the Muses do. The link between the sisters is beyond them.
Somewhere past this ridge, Erato can hear Thalia babbling to herself as she dances with the hysteria of a bacchante or the freedom of her only sons, the armored-dancer Korybantes. Terpsichore has obviously joined their sister because Erato can hear the tell-tale sign of her artful feet beating the ground and offering some sense to Thalia’s melody. What isn’t normal though is how Terpsichore's usually self-assured, strong voice is now high and thin as she hangs cruel laughter in the air. Her domain, like all of theirs, has been spoiled. At the sound of distant cackling, the Endless seems to shiver; Helicon is not the welcoming wellspring it used to be.
Desire slinks away into the cotton of gleaming clouds above. Down here, Erato sinks her fingers further into the earth, chokes on invented volcanic smoke, and waits for her sister. Surely that man will wither and die soon; she has beguiled too many poems about a beloved’s mortality not to know this in her soul. Further, Melpomene assures them it will end; there will be apotheosis, climax, as it has been in every story ever written, from Gilgamesh to gospel, so they merely have to hold on.
Eventually, the muse of tragedy comes to console her as Desire did. Melpomene soothes, succor dripping from her words in a way that is horribly akin to her daughters, the Sirens, “Just a little longer, my dear, and it will be over. This too shall pass, you will see.”
Ah, in her words is Rumi, another one that they had visited. Visited, but never come to stay, as Euterpe always says. Staying is the thing of madness for them unless it is with their sisters. Even Erato, who champions the touch of others, always knows that none of it —not their children, nor their spouses, nor their inspired mortals— can stay. Only them, but not even that anymore. They are missing a piece. Euterpe cannot help but hope it won’t stay gone long. Surely, they will come together again. Surely, surely, she isn’t participating in the dramatic irony she seeded into a hundred thousand poems; surely not.
Long after Melpomene has left her to go quiet Thalia and Terpsichore, Erato lifts her head from the dust to see that, not far from her, Urania clutches her plaything stars in hand and stares up at the heavens, unseeing. It is an alien look on her because Urania always sees the sky; they used to joke that she was the first of them to find her domain since she was born with her eyes looking up in wonder. But now, for the first time, she does not. Instead, tear tracks run deep across her face like she is Niobe turned to watered stone in her grief. It’s wrong.
Erato fights the urge to walk over and slap her sister before screaming at her that Calliope’s not dead, we would know if she was, stop looking like she is already, stop it, stop it. But just as her hands begin to curl into fists, Erato realizes that she too is acting like their sister’s already gone. Urania can’t help it; none of them can.
How do you be, when the sense of direction that you always had, your youngest sibling, the best of all of you, is scattered far, far away from you? Like Urania, Erato tilts her head back to take in the sky and asks that question. From father, from mother, from Endless, from all other forms of divine, there is no answer, only again, again, the tide pulling at them all, “Sister, come back— soror, redi— αδελφή, ελα πισω—”
....
Madoc gets sloppy.
He’s a success, happy and sated. He leaves the door cracked. Like the nymph some versions of the Muses’ myth portend her to be, Calliope slips through the gap, light as a feather and nimble as a raindrop on rock. She steals down the stairwell to the desk, writes the name she once cursed, prays to her husband, and, for a bare moment, believes. But then it ends. Sloppy but not stupid, Madoc snatches her best chance and tears it apart, burns it away.
“You’re mine,” he proclaims, and she has to fight a shiver. It was almost; she was so close that she could taste her once-lover’s skin, the texture of his own beliefs in her head.
Once upon a time, she had struggled with that idea of setting someone loose inside her mind, in the tender parts of herself where she could be wounded, because Calliope did not always know how to believe in things. The only one who ever taught her how is her favorite sister, Clio (but shush, don’t tell the others, they are parts of a whole and therefore equal, after all). That evening, at twilight, Calliope rubs her fingers together, remembering the feeling of paper before fire and a storied name on her lips. That desperate plea, sucked straight from her marrow, causes Calliope to recall the first time Clio truly showed her how much conviction could be worth.
Clio had pressed her fingertips, skin dark as ink, to the bronzed, wrinkled temple of Herodotus, a Halicarnassian with a talent for listening. Calliope had asked, reproach in the twist of her lips that was birthed by the elastic hurt of her fresh losses, what it was worth. What use would there be in simply writing the world as it was without epic transformation?
Clio had laughed, her coiled, shining hair brushing against the writer’s shoulder as he worked, the silk of her golden peplos brushing against his arm as she perched on his desk, curling her umber fingers in the candle fire. She had leaned back, head tilted to the ceiling, anticipation in her wide grin, declaring, “You will see, sister. Truth is the greatest —no, the strangest— story. He will sing, and it will capture the world too.”
When Clio brought her gaze back from the shadows on the terracotta ceiling to stare at Calliope, she quirked her eyebrow, her mouth tilting downwards in a challenge. Do you dispute my own divinity, the look asked. Even Calliope, swept up as she can be in the grandness of her domain’s narrative and rhythm, can admit that she does not, that she would not. She accedes with a deferential nod, and they both turn their gazes to the aging man scribbling away.
Her sister had been wrong, in a way; they called Herodotus the father of lies. But she was right, deeper than that, more importantly than that, because he was known too as the father of history; his Histories, his inquiries, his listening were the scaffold that held up millennia-long written memory. It was the scaffold that ensured that Calliope’s own toil, her blessed epics, would survive.
Thus, it was Clio who had taught her that even they Muses are subject to time’s passing. They are not its masters but its voice. They put age into words. They help to create the poetry, the history, the wisdom that become fragments. These remnants are not objective; they are hauntingly, beautifully, wonderfully marred by the hands that made them. A human heart is at the center of every story ever written, of every one they patroned. That heart cannot truly lie, cannot reinvent like it’s shedding useless skin. Instead, its transformation is hard, borne out through epochs and sleepless nights spent staring at a blank paper, but Madoc and Fry wanted it now . To be great here, and now, and where they can be lauded. Clio, bearer of hindsight, would have spit at them. Calliope, gentler because of the empathy embedded in her poetic medium, just ruminates on how she cannot hear their hearts at all.
Here in this attic, she is sequestered from time. The only signs are what she can see from her window and in her captors’ encroaching faces. Here, Clio cannot remind her how all things become, and love, and die. She can only dream, but that itself is painful, ringing with the impression of a lover she had once utterly adored.
When she lost her child, it had been Clio then, too, who had shown Calliope all the records she had made of their lives: the way she had sketched the faces of her sisters’ children and noted their first steps, last laughs, and greatest achievements. Clio had pressed a bruising kiss to Calliope’s forehead, suddenly the protective older sister that she rarely got to be when Calliope burned so bright on her own. She placed those carefully annotated memories about Orpheus into her sister’s hands. As she parsed through her son’s life with shaking fingers, Calliope finally began to accept his death.
Would Madoc be able to accept such an ending? She remembers how he wanted it, his novel, to have something happy at the end. She doesn’t know how to do that; that wasn’t what she gave Achilles, or Odysseus, or Aeneas. That wasn’t what was given to her son, or her, or her husband. But Madoc asks, he presses in, he pulls at her skin, and she reaches out for Clio’s hand, but in their long-dormant bond there is only a wail into a cavernous emptiness.
Madoc does not understand heroes (he does not understand his own flaws, either, or how he changes every time he takes; his features sharpen and his character bites, but he cannot see the fall surely coming, the one not even she could have written so well), so she gave him his happy ending. He smiled, offered his version of thanks, and slithered away. The memory is acid in her head, one of many that sticks its claws in.
Night falls. Loneliness lengthens. She lays on the bed. Her eyes slip shut or stay open; sometimes, it’s hard to tell. In this space at the edge of twilight, dreams, or prophecies, or visions, come.
This one stands above the rest: in candlelight, the muse of history is both Epimetheus and Prometheus, gazing at Calliope from the foot of her bed, listening to their past and their future. In this dream, her peplos is dripping blood red, and from her calloused hands spills a record of the destruction wrought upon their song.
But when Calliope shocks awake, her hand already reaching forward to complete the circuit between them, Clio’s weeping face is gone.
Right. Dreams are only absence. There is just now, now, until Madoc comes again to ask her to spin happy lies. She moves to stand at the window so she can press her ear to the curtain and hear, ever so faintly in the dearth of sound, that forever call from her sisters who reach and reach for her. The pain in their voices hooks into her lungs, burning much worse than a ripped page in a fireplace.
She misses the truth. In the back of her mouth, she tastes ash, and loss, and sickness.
Then suddenly, her glass-bound reverie is broken by a whoosh with an eldritch twang, and the scent of him, musky like a pillow worn from sleep and blistering like the hydrogen stars in Urania’s hands.
She smothers a grin, and fills whatever she can touch in the sisterly bond with trepidatious hope. Still, she keeps her gaze away, eyes stuck to the windowpane as she says, “You came.”
Then she turns to him, brought back to life by his face, his comfort in the darkness. His voice, the same one that sang lullabies to their child and mumbled sweet things in her ear, responds, “You called.”
....
“Yes, vero, ναι,” the Muses far away cry. “Yes, we called and you heard us.”
The pure relief when Calliope emerges onto city street just a few days after Morpheus returned her entreaty is indescribable. Aglow in the moonlight and adorned in her mystic vestments once more, Calliope reaches out a hand, watches Helicon rise in her eye, and hears the call of her sisters once more righted. They, the givers of inspiration, are reunited.
The stories this moment will birth will be ones of healing, and forgiveness, and love. It will be peace nestled in the bosom of truth. And best of all (maybe one day worst of all, if they cannot rewrite the laws and keep themselves together and heal their wounds), these stories will not be the end, same as they were not the beginning. They are born of a circle with nine separate fragments, each one with dreams and love and hate and desertion all their own, but still wholly connected.
These women divine are the children of fate, the memory-wracked mother, maiden, crone; they are the children of omnipotens, of all-power. They are the Muses, and their sister has returned home.
As Calliope is secreted back into familial embrace, blissful harmony surging from her hands, all that remains for the call to sow into mountain-ground is, “Hail— ave— χαίρε.”