Work Text:
Medusa was tending to her garden.
Most wouldn’t call it a garden —more a desolate valley void of mankind— but that’s just because they didn’t know where to look. There was plenty to take in and enjoy.
The sunset sky,
the crisp wind,
the tickling grass,
and the perfectly preserved statues.
Medusa sauntered up to one of them. A satyr, with a slightly unnerved expression. And that expression was now preserved forever, thanks to her.
In fact, Medusa was surrounded by different expressions, which could be observed for as long as she wished: shocked expressions, horrified expressions, confused expressions…
It was art, wasn’t it?
Is not making something last forever a wonderful form of love?
“Hissssss…”
Medusa used to curse her situation, but she had learned the joys of curses.
She placed two fingers on the petrified satyr’s forehead.
Perhaps this was the lesson the gods had taught her.
He had quite an unbalanced posture. Well, it wasn’t like he knew.
The ability to keep a moment forever,
She pushed the satyr quite easily.
and destroy it whenever she wanted.
Its upper body shattered on impact with the valley ground.
Medusa smiled as the snakes on her head hissed with jubilation. One might call her tendencies for destruction hypocritical. But it wasn’t.
For one, relinquishing freedom to Medusa meant it was only natural she could do whatever she wanted to the bodies that were hers.
And two,
“Sssssss…!”
“Hahaha…”
Bitterness was also a gift the gods had given her.
Medusa didn’t need peace. She had her art, and she would grant it to every unsuspecting wanderer and glory-hungry hero that crossed her path.
“Marvelous, isn’t it?” Medusa asked to another petrified satyr, gesturing to the shattered stone remains. Maybe they know each other. Wait. Knew each other. They’re her art now.
And they always will be.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA—!”
But then a woman fell from the sky.
SPLAT
She immediately died, her corpse spattering pinkish blood on her statues. Confusing.
Then her statues started sizzling and melting from the blood that was apparently acid, and Medusa became annoyed.
“Tch…”
Clicking her tongue, Medusa stomped over to kick this corpse that some bird of prey definitely dropped out of her garden.
“—?”
And then the corpse stood up. Medusa stopped.
The headless body, facing away from her, started regenerating a skull from nothingness. Then muscle tissue, then skin, then a bob of blonde hair.
The newly alive short woman yawned, stretching her arms in an imperious boredom. “Where am I? The Gospel really works in mysterious ways… eugh.” The stranger caught sight of the field of statues surrounding her. “And there’s a bunch of ugly sculptures everywhere, too.”
“Are you lost?” Medusa finally asked. This creature was a disruption for every second it existed in her garden.
“Haah?” The creature turned around, fully revealing her raunchy appearance. She was dressed like a prostitute, and her toxic-pink eyes were filled with a natural disdain.
And then those eyes went gray as she turned to stone.
“Hm. Well, I suppose I’ll never know,” Medusa shrugged, turning away. That stranger’s disdainful expression would be perfectly preserved, all thanks to her.
“Hisssss…”
“Yes, yes.” It was kind of confusing. Most who set her eyes on her were shocked or confused, but that woman had remained conceited until the very end.
“Oh well,” Medusa sighed. If she didn’t like it, she could just break the statue later.
“You’re an interesting meatbag.”
“What—!?” Medusa whirled around, seeing the stranger returned to flesh and smirking.
She turned to stone again upon Medusa’s gaze, of course.
She waited, and only when the statue didn’t move did she release a breath she didn’t know she was holding.
But it hitched again when the stone started cracking, and a smile broke out. “So, I become a sculpture when I look at you, is that it?”
As if breaking out of an eggshell, the blonde stranger shook the stone off her left arm and covered her eyes. “Is it because you’re so ugly? It has to be. The state of the meatbags surrounding me agrees with that sentiment. Riiiight?” She gestured all around her as she figured what the field of statues meant.
“H-how did you do that?” Medusa yelled, the stranger’s insults the least of her worries right now. The snakes on her head started hissing defensively. “What are you?”
“Kahaha…” The stranger bowed in introduction. “Sin Archbishop of the Witch’s Cult, representing lust.”
Medusa scowled as the woman removed her hand, revealing her pink-eyed, sharp-toothed smile in full.
“Capella Emerada Lugunica!”
She kept not being petrified.
“Aww, come on, ugly! I just wanna see if you can get even uglier!”
“Hrrgh!”
Medusa had never heard of this “Capella” before, but she had power to support her arrogance.
A large serpent shot out of Capella’s arm, gaping maw ready to devour, and Medusa petrified it with a single glance before shattering it with her sturdy gorgon claws. Capella simply laughed before cutting off her serpent arm, immediately regenerating from the stump.
She could shift her body into whatever she liked. How infuriating.
“Now then—” Capella sneered, turned to stone, and broke into flesh again. It was taking less than a second now. “—why won’t you just accept my blood, meatbag? It has to be better than the boring, pathetic life you’re living right now.”
She scratched her palm with a knifelike nail, and then put forth her arm as if offering a handshake. The pink blood in her hand bubbled and hissed like the snakes on Medusa’s head.
What was this thing talking about? Was she offering to melt her face off?
Stupid. “You know nothing about me,” Medusa spat. “I’d rather die.”
“And why would I kill you?” Capella shot back, incredulous. “You can’t love me if you’re dead.”
“…What?” Medusa’s clawed stance faltered a little.
Capella responded by theatrically hugging herself as she shouted, “I want everyone, everywhere, as much as possible, for as long as possible, to love me!”
Her voice was filled with an excited jubilation.
“Even if they’re ugly, even if they’re disgusting and stupid, so what? Everyone’s inferior compared to me. That’s why I bless them! If love is the goal of all things, then I deserve to have it all!”
With a manic sneer, a serpent body with a lion’s head shot out of Capella’s navel. “So come on then!” Medusa petrified and shattered it before it could bite. “Give in already~. I’m sure you’ll love submitting, just like all the rest!”
Medusa glared, and Capella began blinking into and shattering out of stone.
“I’m not sure what you’re getting at, but it’s clear that you live in your own world. I don’t need anything from you.”
Everything she wanted, she could preserve with a single look. Except this woman. So she was basically trash.
“All I need is my art,” Medusa declared. “So you can just perish.”
“Ka– ha– ha– ha– ha–a!” Capella stutter-laughed stonily, before putting a hand over her eyes to speak again. “You call this art? It’s as ugly as you are!”
Capella grabbed at one of the statues by the head. “Stone is boring. I can improve this shitty ‘art’ of yours easily.”
“Wait…” Medusa unconsciously reached out a hand.
She could shift other people’s flesh? Not just her own?
But the people she petrified have been stone for years now. She couldn’t—
—but then the gray skin of the frozen satyr started cracking, and a screaming abomination of lumpy, bleeding flesh burst forth.
“Stop ruining my art!”
“Improving it, you mean?!”
Capella kept turning her statues into shambling masses of flesh that lashed out at everything in sight, and Medusa petrified as many as she could, back to the stone she preferred them as.
They were uglier now, but as long as they were stone, it would be fine. Stone is unchanging, and the unchanged is beautiful.
“Eeeeeehahahahahaha!”
That’s why this woman was disgusting.
Medusa dodged out of the way of a rolling mass of screaming muscle tissue and petrified a horned abomination that leapt at her. It’s a good thing that most of the statues Capella turned still had eyes. It must be difficult to not include them. Some of them didn’t have eyes, though, and as such Medusa left them to bleed out after clawing them once.
“Hrrrgghhh…”
“HISSSSSSS…”
“Uhuh, yeah, both your voices are uuuuugly~,” Capella giggled, bouncing around as she touched more statues, birthring more monsters. Even when she got petrified, she broke out of it too quickly to properly claw. “Hm hm hm~ —ooh! I think I have it now.”
“Have what?” Medusa hissed as she gored an eyeless amalgam.
“You must be so belligerent because my appearance isn’t to your taste, right?” Capella goaded as her hair color began to shift. “Well, let me change to something you like, then.”
Medusa petrified the final two screaming flesh-lumps with a sneer, and the valley went blissfully silent with statues and corpses, save for Capella. “The only thing I ‘like’ is the silence of stone.”
“No you don’t. I’ll prove it.” And then Capella began to shift in full.
A beard burst forth on her face, and her hair became long like dark, flowing water.
And Medusa went stock-still.
Capella continued, becoming taller as her womanly body turned to masculine muscle. Even her clothes shifted into the form she remembered.
It was when she manically grinned with sea-green eyes that Medusa could truly confirm.
“This is what you like, right?!” Capella declared, arms outstretched. Even her voice became deep like his.
She had taken the form of Poseidon.
Medusa had a realization.
She knew who this woman was now.
The evil.
The ability to shift the forms of others and herself.
That arrogance.
“Soooooo~?” Capella sang. “You have to admit my beauty now, right?”
“I know what you are.”
“Huuuh?”
It was characteristic of a goddess.
“You can’t play dumb now, Athena!”
A scoff. “Do you have scales for ears, slither-brain? I told you what my name i—”
“Don’t play dumb!” Medusa roared, baring her fangs as the snakes on her head did the same. “You did this to me! And now you’re here to gloat, aren’t you?”
Capella raised an eyebrow. “Uh.”
“He violated me,” Medusa spat, pointing at the form Capella had taken. At that, she had actually gone silent. “Poseidon lured me into your temple, and I couldn’t resist, and you blamed me for it.”
Medusa nearly clawed at her own face. “You made me this way, and you call me ugly?” She scoffed before declaring,
“Your soul is more rotten than my appearance could ever be!”
And Capella became petrified once again, in Poseidon’s form. When she shed that stone, she was looking down with a blank expression. Silence reigned for a few seconds.
And then—
“Maybe you deserved it,” she muttered.
“What?” Medusa grit through her fanged teeth.
“You probably deserved it…!” Capella spat back. The color of her hair started shifting again.
The rest of her body, too. Shifting in color, texture, and size like a hazy mirage made flesh.
“‘Soul?’ Heart? Personality?”
“They’re all just fake, flowery words to justify yourself.”
“I mean, what were you wearing?”
“You were probably asking for it.”
She wasn’t looking at Medusa anymore.
“Take responsibility, you dumb bitch.”
“Of course it was violating. Of course it was rotten.”
“Don’t you know that all men are like that?”
“That’s what love is, dumbass.”
“Caring only about the meat on our bones is the truth of what love is.”
“If you hate it so much,”
“JUST GIVE IT TO ME!”
Medusa was being lambasted by a myriad of voices like different flavors of acid, because the flesh of the creature’s throat was shifting as well.
Capella started pulling at her own hair, which kept shortening and lengthening. “I’ve always known what everyone wanted, deep down.”
“Love is skin and meat and blood.”
“That’s exactly why I deserve it all.”
“So what? So what? So what?”
“That’s why they made you ugly,”
“So ugly that you turn people to stone,”
“You ugly, ugly, ugly bitch!”
“IT’S ALWAYS BEEN YOUR FAULT, YOU DUMBASS MEATBAG!”
With that, Capella ripped her own body in half. From inside, her original form burst forth.
Medusa readied her claws.
But then she noticed.
This “original form”, with it’s small body and blonde hair,
lacked eyes.
“Die.”
And Medusa was beheaded.
“What a monumental waste of time,” Capella grumbled, shifting her eyes back into existence and flicking her whip-like, bladed tail.
Walking over to the corpse, she silently cursed. Capella meant to shift that snake-bitch into a new form, but she got too excited and killed her.
Well. Not like it was her fault. Slither-brain was the one being all complain-y and annoying. And annoying. Don’t forget: annoying.
“Look what you made me do,” Capella sneered as she picked up her head by the snakes.
Then she turned to stone.
“—Gah!” Capella cried as she un-petrified, before throwing the head to the wayside. “You can petrify people even when you’re dead? Ugh.” Clicking her tongue, she shook her hand free of the filthy feeling of touching that scaly hair.
“Your ugliness truly is eternal,” Capella remarked, before walking away.
She said it to Medusa, even though she was dead.
No one else.
No one else was there.