Arke
Daughter of Thaumas and Elektra, princess of Thaumantia, and twin to Iris. Possessed of the same skill, grace and beauty attributed to sister, she was also a winged messenger goddess, though where her sister was beloved easily by all who met her, Arke was more subdued in temperament, and remained forever in her sister’s shadow. Despite it, she loved Iris fiercely, and recounts her childhood a happy one. But the idyll did not last.
While the last vestiges of golden era peace reigned in the 5th Age, she was known to be studious, sensible, and was a natural mediator and record keeper. Knowledge delighted her, and she had a renowned capacity for memory, whether faces or facts. Though it made her a skilled and valued diplomat, Arke was a keen archivist in her own right, preserving and sharing the riches of the world’s libraries and museums and engaging with its thinkers and academics more than she engaged with society’s politics. She kept diaries and books of her own, though all of it was lost in the wars that later claimed the end of the Age.
For the lure of its mystery and peace, she spent much time in the world of dreams, numbering among its natural denizens. She was never a notable power there, choosing instead to respect those who laid greater claim and never reaching for any potential inside herself. But it was always a place of great sanctuary. In particular she was enamoured of Morpheus and his work, for the way he brought order to the chaos of an ever changing world. However her admiration always remained from a distance.
Arke’s tale is ultimately a tragic one, her memory besmirched by her loyalties and choices. If she is remembered at all, it is as the faded rainbow goddess, betrayer of the Olympian gods, and messenger of the Titans.
Titanomachy
Born into a new generation of channelers, Arke was nonetheless content with the old ways. The Olympians stood for progress, and though they won many to their cause, the more she heard the more she feared what it would bring. For the first time in her life, she was disturbed from the safety of her bookish sphere, and turned to heed other sorts of news along her networks. She soon came to fear what destruction would be ushered in with the chaos of change; feared the loss of their world and legacy. She feared Zeus. But more than the sum of her fears, what she valued was peace.
When civil war erupted she chose to support the Titans, offering her aid as war messenger despite Iris’s allegiance to Zeus. Many were surprised by the boldness of her choice, and considered it a deep betrayal.
She primarily served the titan Pallas, and her swift dispatches along the front lines were an integral component of his many successes against the three Brothers during their initial rebellion. For a time she hoped it would be resolved quickly, but it was not to be. Arke was remade, turning her sharp mind from scholarly pursuits to that of warfare. She was often the voice of reason, counselling temperance and mercy — advice Pallas once heeded well, but over the years he began to change. With each betrayal around him, his paranoia only deepened.
Her work as emissary undoubtedly brought her into frequent contact with Iris, who continued to serve the Olympians. How the siblings dealt with the conflict between them is unclear. But Arke was never to return to her sister’s side.
Upon Pallas’s death by the hands of his own family, Arke was left without a protector. The defeat and fall of the ruling channelers soon and inevitably followed. If Arke ever sought clemency through her sister, it was never recorded, and when the Olympians finally won their rebellion, Zeus chose to make an example of Arke on the battlefield. For her unthinkable defection and the betrayal of her own people, her wings were torn brutally from her back, severing her from the source.
After, she was consigned to the pits of Tartaros. Iris was simply told she was dead.
Tartaros
Alongside the vanquished Titans, Arke suffered many long years in the underground soul-cells of Tartaros. Each one was designed to be a personal hell, connected to the one it contained and guarded by it’s own hundred-hand mutation. She was not permitted the mercy of death. But it was her banishment from the dreamworld which wounded her most, for it was there her consciousness constantly tried to flee in solace for all that she had lost.
During her incarceration she was experimented on frequently by the dread matriarch Nyx, who used her to explore the secrets of severance. When Nyx eventually declared a desire to test reinstating what was taken, none were willing to cross Zeus’s wrath, not least because he had been the arbiter of her fate himself. Though of course Nyx was not suggesting emancipation of a prisoner, but satisfaction of an academic theory. She alone did not fear Zeus, saw no reason to inform him, and would not let it lie. The negotiations were complex, and she leaned upon her illustrious family ties within the underworld to see it done, calling favours in particular from her son Thanatos, the minister of Hades’ court. Eventually, an agreement was made.
Arke’s memories were first purged upon the Chair of Forgetfulness, punishment itself for one who prided her own sharp mind: the only thing that had been left to her. But Lethe delved too deeply; from kindness or curiosity, it can never be sure. The cleanse washed to her very soul. Arke was left a shell, even her beloved dreaming ability burned from her, for she no longer remembered her own capacity for the gift.
The Lady of Hate
After so long imprisoned, her body was much changed from her life before, and she was vastly unrecognisable even to those who’d known her best. From pity or sport, it was Hermes who engineered the final ingredients which would end up obscuring the truth from his own father, and indeed the world, when he came to gawp at Nyx’s latest experimental dalliance (how he heard these things was anyone’s guess). In amused ridicule, he told the vacant Arke that she was a Titan who had betrayed her own people, the very first to kiss Zeus’s feet in desperate supplication. That she had taken Pallas’s beloved children away from him, bringing them with her when she had cruelly betrayed him too.
Thus did it come to be remembered in myth.
She was given the title of Styx, and she was chained to a new duty as the underworld’s dread oath keeper. A great reward, she was told as they bound her to her river. Of course it should be considered an honour to hold the gods to their word, for she had never broken her own. Arke was never the same, and in the conflict left to war in the empty vessel of her heart, ripe with the lies she had been told and believed, she grew corrosive and bitter. At Hermes behest, it was Iris, of course, who was bid to come and fetch the water for her chalice: the only one allowed.
Neither sister ever knew.
.
Other Turns of the Wheel
1st Age: Lore Dearborn
3rd Age: Calathea Mavronéri
0 Comments