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Published:
2025-01-29
Completed:
2025-01-29
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1,213
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2/2
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Tesserae

Anonymous

Summary:

A mosaic's image cannot be seen from one tile alone.

Chapter 1

Summary:

Five beings that watched Moros begin courting Odysseus and saw nothing wrong, and one that couldn't watch at all.

Chapter Text

[Melinoë]

“I'm attempting to contain my enthusiasm for the venerable hero of mortalkind over there, Princess,” Lord Moros says, and Melinoë has to hide her smile at how eager he sounds. To her, Odysseus is just Od, cheerful and irreverent, clever but so playful it is difficult to remember just how much so.

Odysseus, sacker of cities, did not carry the young Princess of the Underworld upon his shoulders, nor listen patiently to a child reciting magic lessons he did not care for simply to lend his ear. Od did.

She does not think Moros will be disappointed to meet him.

*

[Dora]

Horns is all right. Bit stiff. Funny, though, when he tries. Sometimes when he doesn’t – he practically trips over himself trying to make a good impression on Hecate’s pet thinking Shade – the one who looks almost alive even though he’s far from new.

Unlucky, that the guy can’t shift to anything more fearsome, that all he’s got to strike out with is a dagger, like some mortal. Imagine being so old and still bound to looking practically human. Someone somewhere hated whoever that guy used to be, obviously.

Moros doesn’t though. Moros likes him. Maybe that balances it all out.

*

[Hecate]

Doom is one whose presence both gods and Titans meet with unease. If she had cared to think upon him, Hecate would not have imagined the stiff unbending shape ever in the shadow of the prophecies of his sisters, but it is fitting indeed.

She would not have imagined either that his eyes would stray to and linger so often upon her Tactician, though that, too, is perhaps fitting, a lingering echo of Odysseus’ life, just as the Shade himself is.

Better by far that Moros continue to haunt one he has already condemned than bring such Doom to Melinoë.

*

[Aphrodite]

The Crossroads is layered in such bothersome protections even the gods of Olympus may not enter without Hecate’s permission, and she does not grant it. Veiled like a bride before the groom can see what he’s paid for, some might say, if they were the ugly unsentimental sort.

Still, shapes can be made out even through the heaviest of mantles, and Aphrodite can sense the whisper of her domain, which stretches from shore to shore, from the peak of Olympus to the depths of Tartarus. Even in the Crossroads there is lust and love and want.

It shines, even shadowed.

*

[The Shades]

The Tactician asks: where have you been?

The Tactician asks: what did you see?

The Tactician listens. The Tactician translates.

Gods do not hear Shades. They are all heat and ichor and cannot understand shadows and dust.

The Tactician is ill-served by his existence – even when he is no longer looked upon he remains the Tactician, and even without sacrifice he remembers his name and home and other such trivial mortal things. It is a cursed existence, to be dead and still care. To still be of use to gods.

They would pity him, if they could only remember why.

***

[Schelemeus]

The training grounds are his place. If they happen to be away from the bustle of the Crossroads proper, and all those gods coming and going and lingering, well, that’s a coincidence.

It’s not that he’s scared or anything. Just common sense not to mess with gods – not like godlings, sheltered young things, so gullible, nowhere near as quick to smite.

It's just – it makes him feel a little sick, even without a stomach, watching Doom press his suit – courting a Shade like he could say anything but ‘whatever you want, milord’.

He likes the poor guy. He can’t watch.

Chapter 2

Summary:

Five times someone had an idea that something was Not Okay, and one person that actually said something.

Chapter Text

[Eris]

It’s a gift, knowing exactly where and when and how to nudge one little thing to set a boulder rolling downhill, crushing all in its path. A word here, an apple there, the tiniest spark is all it takes to set someone’s brain alight – this is mine, I’ll fight to have it. I’ll fight to keep it. I’ll fight.

Moros used to be okay, until the Fates told him not to talk to her any more, and like a good boy he did as told.

He’s an idiot to think his ‘love’ is anything but a match in her pocket.

*

[Selene]

Selene has seen Odysseus with lovers before. Sometimes her gaze would fall upon Circe’s bedchamber and within she would find Odysseus still awake at the window while her niece slumbered in the bed behind him. Sometimes he would leave Calypso’s cave, the marks of love still upon him, and wander adrift until the chill night air drove him back.

The wanderer Odysseus does not care to be tied for long. It is no surprise a god should find delight even in his Shade, but it surprises her he allows himself to be kept. His eyes do not seek the horizon.

*

[Icarus]

Odysseus is once more upon the shore, watching the ghostly ships head ceaselessly for Olympus. Icarus wonders what he is seeing, if he imagines how things will go – this way if Meli does one thing, that way if she does another, choices unfolding endlessly – just as Icarus tries to anticipate the potential effects of his Hammers.

The Tactician is often here, there, and everywhere, corralling spirits, seizing information, obsessively seeking knowledge in the same way Icarus tests for flaws in his own work.

He is rarely so still. It makes Icarus twitch, like a memory of wax upon his back.

*

[Nemesis]

Sometimes, when Melinoë has brushed against some arbitrary line Odysseus alone knows, his voice slips into the tone he used to address Calypso, the word Goddess taking on such syrupy flattery it makes the skin crawl. It doesn’t suit him, however much he uses it. Nemesis prefers his arrogance, his false tongue a sharpened blade instead, calling her to test him without regret.

In life, when he flattered, when he bowed, when he scraped, it was only ever in hope of eventual fleeing.

His charm of her brother serves a different purpose but that is what she is reminded of.

*

[Hecuba]

The Shade is a servant of her Mistress so though she imagines her teeth clacking in his ephemeral throat often, never does her lip lift to show ivory fangs.

He cannot touch her (he can no longer harm what is hers). She is alive, beating heart and barking breath, and he is dead, his body long discarded, buried, and hopefully pissed upon. He is nothing, a voice, a sigh, a mere scentless image. She fears him not. She hates him not.

But to see him become a bitch taken more than she has ever been – her mouth can still smile.

***

[Prometheus]

“I fashioned men from clay, and mixed it not with water but tears – after all, I knew what you gods would do to them.”

“Spare me,” the girl says, cold and contemptuous, truly the image of her grim workmanlike father, no care in his heart but for duty that could hardly give true succour to the spirits of mortals forced to dwell in his house.

“You disregard them so easily. Even those supposedly close to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is no man or god who embraces his Doom with anything but despair,” Prometheus says softly. “Think upon it.”