Charon

It was his mother speaking. He heard her voice in his ear like cold, prickling wind.

"And at the last, can you not show yourself?" he asked.

She seemed brutally aware of Charon's hate for her and twisted desire, which she believed had been bred into him from her union with her brother. Although he was surrounded by night, it would always remain impenetrable.

"What freedom is this? I am exiled to the plane of the dead. The cycle is reduced to a point and that point is the boundary of me. I am shackled inside of it. I exist now for no purpose, and sail my ship on an ocean that cries for my being."

"Is there to be no rest for the ferryman? No place of peace?"

The cycle had been merciless in its endless repetition. The circle that could not be broken now was. He was doomed to remain with Acheron, either on it or a part of it.

The ship of the dead, bearing its rotting passengers, crewless, towards no goal. It seemed that all of its existence was meaningless. But these were the souls of the dead that were lost. If they could be called souls at all. The ship was wide, too wide, it seemed, to share the ocean with anything else. The majesty of its dessication made it so. It mattered so little, because on this plane, there was only this ocean and only the dead.

The ship passed on the gray ocean waters, called Acheron, the sounds of wood straining against collapse, and waves branding the hull with their mighty slap. Only this ship would ever pass through this ocean, and this ocean had the might to make that ship pay for cutting through its restless violence of motion.

This endless, endless drift of loss in an insurmountable ocean that resented, so bitterly, being sliced open forever by the body of the ship and the passengers it bore.

Only Charon, at the helm, was ever able to rise above the demands of the ocean to sink into grief. It called to all of the dead on the ship to sink, that the ocean might overcome them. Charon moved his mouth in an uneconomical way. His bottom lip, so gently tattered and dry moved to parry the ocean's taunt with a taunt of his own. Although they all knew the ocean was calling for them, only Charon understood its precise call, and only Charon could refuse it. The others, the lesser, lost dead, would eventually fall to it, would become part of the ocean, would join the gestalt of hate that formed against Charon for bringing them there, and the passengers he carried.

Charon's taut, cracked skin, exposing every sinew and decayed, beaten muscle, glowed iridescently, displaying all hues of an impossible rainbow in this night of gray fog.

There were no women this voyage. This displeased Charon.

There wouldn't be women for a long time. There was war now. That meant the lost took shape in the battlefields, calling to their brothers, still living and fighting. Fighting along side them against the dead of their enemies. When the sun began to set, Charon would come, and delight, watching the ruined, ravaged faces of the dead who had not known they were so.