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When Eurydice slipped back to the underworld, Orpheus cries fading away from her ears, she promises him that in some way, she’d remember him. Maybe just in the field of flowers he’d planted for her in his songs, maybe just in the primal feeling of sun on skin, maybe in the knowledge that no night could ever be darker or colder than this one. There would always be an undercurrent devoted to him. She’d expected the emotionless, cool wind of the underground when she resurfaced, but there was none. There was only the sun.
Her first thought was that she was waking up from a dream. But what a vivid dream that would have been and arising into a field of flowers feels much too strange to be the end of a dream, too much like the beginning of one. Her second thought was that she’d fallen asleep on the train the first time going to Hadestown, imagined all that Hadestown was and this was her arriving in Hadestown for the actual first time. But Hadestown was hell, was it not, and unless some sort of nightmarish creature was going to come out of the woods and hunt her for all eternity, this landscape seemed heavenly. It was an exact copy of the field that she and Orpheus had escaped to after his shift, celebrating summer’s return, where she had confessed her love, her fear and he had returned the feelings and reassured. Then they had laid down together, the world echoing their love tenfold, and slipped into a blissful, fulfilled sleep under the dying sun. It had seemed like paradise then, as it did now, and Eurydice could find little to be afraid of beside the perfectness of it all. So, she stepped from the border of the forest into the clearing, stepping out of the shade she had once thought of as safety, into the sun.
“You’re not far off the truth, darling,” a familiar voice manifested out of the dusky cool of the forest, Hermes.
“If you’re here, does that mean that this is just one stop on my way to my afterlife or have I arrived?”
“It’s up to you.”
Eurydice laughed, half annoyed, half reassured by Hermes’ usual half-answers and waited a beat to see if Hermes would continue unprompted. He did not. “An elaboration would be appreciated.”
Hermes smiled, “The gods noticed you and Orpheus, how heroic his actions were despite their failure, how even now in his dreams he still goes back for you over and over, as if magically the situation might change just once.”
“Oh, gods.”
“They took pity on yous, let you at least have a life, an eternal one if you wish, together in the afterlife.”
Eurydice sighed, taking in the air properly for the first time, the aroma of the flowers, how it mixed with the earthly, woody smell of the damp woods, how unbelievably them it was. “So this is ours?”
“Yes.”
“What about Orpheus?”
“See that’s the only issue,” Hermes sighed, sitting on a tree stump summoned out of nothingness, “You’ll have to wait until he dies for you two to be reunited. You can watch him up above, though I doubt you’ll want to. You can have anything you want here through a simple request, everything except him.”
What was another wait, maybe sixty, seventy years, on a lifetime of joy again? “I can wait.”
“I know, just wanted to make sure you knew, you heard from someone you know.”
“Thank you, Hermes.”
Hermes smiled and turned to go, vanishing back into the forest shade. Eurydice turned back to the field, noticing how a new flower bloomed every now and again, and set her mind to discovering all parts of this world so that she could give Orpheus a proper greeting upon his return.
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For Orpheus, his nights were filled with emptiness, a sense of hope stolen night after night, wholehearted, then addictive, then bleak, like everything else. His days were spent wandering the earth, always singing about her, her face, her voice, how her body felt under younger, naiver fingers. Songs, poems, were the only way he knew how to preserve someone who had been dead for a day, a week, a month, six, a year, two. There were women, no more than there were before her, but they transformed from sorrowful, to passionate, to impatient, to enraged, their words transitioning from kind condolences to screamed threats. One day it became too much, as it would with anyone, and Orpheus, somewhere in there, was a little impressed that they’d been able to hold out that long. When they tore him apart, he was nothing like when he’d first lost her. His hair had grown out a bit, a bit of stubble, it had been a bit since Hermes had come to visit. His fingers were calloused, engraved by the lyre, his voice had turned from angelic, to raw, to gravelly. He did not cry or scream as they took him, knelt him in the cleft between the misty forest and the raging river and gave him once last to take them as his lover. When he shook his head and turned his eyes towards the ground, forever to his wife, they tore him limb from limb, his lyre from his back, then his arms, then his legs. They took what they’d always wanted from him before they fully killed him, but by that point the loss of blood already had him seeing the girl sat at the table asking for a match again, the wind taking him away as they moaned, danced with what waste his body had become. His mind floated away much like his head did once they tossed it to the tide.
When Orpheus descended to the underworld, he too expected the cold. He hadn’t expected warmth, something he had not been able to feel without Eurydice. As colour returned, the grass a glorious emerald, the sun golden over everything, he could only think of one reason why:
“Eurydice?”
The cry seemed to vibrate through everything, the grass leaned into the name, the flowers favouring it over the sun. Then it echoed back:
“Orpheus.”
The same sweet voice, what was Orpheus to do but run. What was he to think about, that it was a trap, that he had been tricked, when faced with a reunion with the love of his life. The echoes guided him to a house, the door open, and in the door a woman. A goddess. Eurydice.
“It’s you.”
“It’s me.”
“Eurydice.” He raised his hands to wipe away the tears and saw the reminders of what he had done without her, how deeply he had failed her, and shame overcame him.
“Orpheus,” she stepped forward, arms outstretched to her world.
“I am not the man you fell in love with. I have tortured myself over my failure of you, my dearest Eurydice, my voice and my fingers have been turned raw too many times that their healing has changed me. I do not play songs of spring, of joy or love, only of loss, the winter and its bitter cold. It’s best, perhaps, we start again.”
“Come home with me.”
“Eurydice…”
“You see those flowers, do you not?” She points to the field overflowing with flowers, all blood-red, stunning against the blue sky.
“Yes.”
“Destroy them all, crush them in your roughened first and burn them deep in the woods.”
Orpheus was wordless, thoughts and emotions clearly running amok in his head until clarity clicked into place in the form of anger
“Each of these flowers is a symbol of my love for you, to destroy them would be like destroying the song of our love. How could you ask this of me?”
“Because only my husband knows what depth these flowers hold. Only my husband would understand that flowers that bloom blood-red in loss, regret and sadness are still notes in our love’s symphony, not a disease that kills it off.”
A tear rolls down Orpheus’ cheek and Eurydice swears to herself that it would be the last that Orpheus produced in pain and suffering.
“My husband, I do not care that your hands are rough, your voice deeper and laboured. I care not about what my husband looks like, you could be a worm for all I care, but what my husband thinks and feels, how he forms words into the most beautiful images possible. I only want that mind, that soul, to return home with me, lie down on our wedding bed and live in eternal happiness together with me.”
And with that Orpheus fell to his knees in front of his wife, utterly overwhelmed by the return of his world to his arms as he wrapped his upper body around her waist and felt her hands, warmer than the sun’s gaze, soothe the tense muscle of his back and nestle into his hair. She too fell to her knees, allowing his arms to hold her once again to his chest, baring her weight on him again like a comfortable, long-lost blanket. The tears that poured from his eyes then were not sad, painful or anguished, but grateful and loving, and she kissed away every one of them.
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The gods watched their reunion with popcorn and wine, even their eyes watering a little, though none would admit it. Though all could agree that with Orpheus, the legendary poet, and Eurydice, the legendary muse, hand in hand once more, there was a sense of rightness restored to the world.