“Do you always remain by her?” Isme managed to ask. The numbness in her limbs did not extend to her tongue, not fully, but she felt swollen and wet all over.
“I do,” said the snake. “I followed her down here, not just for my broken back, but for the song—when she lay dying, Orpheus broke out in a wail of sorrow, and many of his guests were killed for sheer despair. I myself writhed in the dust and my heart splintered, to know what I had done in a moment of anger. And so down I went.”
“That is a sad thing,” Isme said. The snake turned its attention to her more fully.
“All things are sad, in their own way,” it said. Tilting its head to the side, it said, “What is this question that you have been asking without any satisfying answers?”
“Blood guilt,” Isme said, and realized that before her was one much like herself: something who, unknowing, had struck out in a moment of passion and disliked the results. Perhaps it truly would understand. “I have killed, and like you, I regret. Is there any way to obtain absolution of blood guilt, forgiveness for wrongs?”
“Those are two different things,” said the serpent. “Absolution is payment. Forgiveness is that wrongness will not be held against you. But neither are possible, in the living world or the next.”
Isme frowned. “I don’t understand.”
And the snake coiled in on itself, a remarkable movement that suggested it was thinking, composing its next words. It must have taken more of Isme’s blood than she had thought, because it did not seem ready to fade back to an unknowing shade, scales rippling with vibrant colors, radiant, brightly marking: here is poison.
Once compiled in on itself, the serpent said: “When someone commits a wrong, the stain is on him always. Even should he be caught and punished, even should the victim offer forgiveness, and should restoration ten, twenty, a hundred times over be paid, the wrong itself does not disappear. The wrong and the price is forever.”
“I still don’t understand,” Isme said. She felt pins prickling all over her arm, especially her ankle and wrist.
The serpent said, “When you killed that person, where did his soul end up?”
“Here,” said Isme, “Among the dead.”
“Now imagine you came upon him,” said the snake. “Imagine he threw his arms around you, said that he understood what happened, and he forgives you. Is everything restored to the way it was?”
“The relationship was,” Isme said, imagining Lycander smiling at her.
“But does he come to life again?” said the serpent. “Does he continue on, restored? All the things he was going to do now available to him? No, that does not happen. He remains dead. Because forgiveness is just an idea.
“For every deed there is a price to be paid—and he is paying it, for you forced it on him. The price for him is this: he is dead and will remain dead. And the price for you is this: you have killed and there will never again come a time when you did not kill.
“You are, now and forevermore, the sort of person who kills, no matter how sorry you are. Consequences. The price remains. And so you and he continue paying them, forever.”
“I—” Isme stopped. What the snake was saying made sense—but the terrible implications of this lesson was too much to bear. She thought: I cannot go on like this—always a murderer, in my heart, for all time and all worlds—there must be a way— “But,” she added, “What if he could be restored? Come back to his body?”
“The price remains,” said the snake. “Even if you were to restore him, there will never be a time when he was not once murdered and dead. He will bear the memories and marks upon him for all time; and so will you. The event is not erased. Even if he forgets, the worlds do not forget, the gods do not forget, and so the event remains.”
“But if it could—” Isme whispered, “Oh, if only it could—”
“There is a price for wrongdoing, every wrongdoing, no matter how small,” said the snake. “And that price is everything. Because the wrongdoing has been done—and so it remains committed, forever and for all time, and thus each guilt remains forever.”
“Impossible,” gasped Isme, and she jerked what of her body she could, limbs tightening. “How can anyone escape? Even a single wrong is an endless weight around us to bear down to the grave and beyond—how can we then endure?”
“There is no way I know of,” said the serpent, eyes lowered. “But they say that the world will end soon—and perhaps that will be the end of everything. The last price can be paid and then there will be no more wrongdoing upon the earth. Thus the sorrows of now will not be strengthened further by the sorrows of tomorrow.”
“You’re talking about an end of all,” Isme said, slowly. “An end of everything—a world dying, and nothing following it.” And the serpent nodded, slowly. Isme closed her eyes. At length she said, “Even knowing what I know, I cannot want that to happen.”
“I do not understand you men,” said the serpent, at last. Isme opened her eyes. It continued, “Somehow you always hope for something better, although yesterday was the same as today, and will be tomorrow. It is like there is something in you that is missing, longing for more, always striving upward even in death.”
“I do not understand it myself,” said Isme, quietly, and before she could say anything more, the serpent turned and slithered away—but she saw that its scales had gone ashen again, surmising that what life it had bitten from her was gone. She watched the tail flick as it moved through the asphodel, trailing after the feet of Eurydice.
You do follow her, don’t you? Isme thought. Even unknowing, without any life or memories left, something in you still regrets and seeks a kind
