Hero's Journey

[sadoeuphemist]

I. Return

1. The Call
You have made your journey, and you've returned empty-handed. You've found nothing out there worth keeping, worth fighting for - or, no fights that you could win, at least. You spent your days away homesick, in thin and distant longing, an unfinished song in the back of your heart. You drift the last few feet, carried by the tides, and your feet touch the shore. You are home. After all these years away, you are home at last. 

2. Refusal
Your hometown is in no mood to welcome you. It is dying, sluggish, rudely indifferent. Your home is all crumbling concrete and stone, slow stagnation, and you were meant to either stay and help revitalize it, or to escape it. You have done neither. All you've given it is a history of debts, a past left unfinished. So many long-forged chains reeling you back in. 

3. Crossing the Threshold
There are no great upheavals to your return. You slot back in easily, as though you'd never left. There are the glances, the snide remarks, the insinuations, the barely buried resentment, but for the most part you have returned to the quiet cozy town of your childhood. Much has changed, but much more is just as how you had left it. You feel as though there should be some mark on you, some irreconcilable alteration to your spirit, that sets you against the home and the family that you left behind. But the lot of you are simply older, and more weary. Nothing more than that. 

4. Supernatural Aid 

You've begun to have the most vivid dreams. Who wouldn't? There's a box that's been cracked open in your subconscious, all the long-buried things come flooding out. If you have not accomplished anything in life, you can at least be anointed by your dreams, made significant by the burden of premonition. You hear the howl of wind in an endless black sky. You see ghosts. You see visions of the future. You see death. You see death. You see death. 

5. Belly of the Whale
The rot has grown, metastasized, but it was there from the beginning, pulsing and fecund even from the carefree days of your childhood. Your home is rotted through: beneath the floorboards, up through the grand stone buildings, in the very air you breathe. It was invisible to you at first, but your time away has made its presence so much more repulsive. It extends past your hometown, to the very corners of the land you traveled. It is bad here, and it is better elsewhere, but there is nowhere that you know of that is safe. 

II. Descent

6. The Road of Trials
Your days are full of simple pleasures and anxieties, people and their problems, those who you once knew and those who are by now unfamiliar. You are not from here, after all, not really, you were not witness to the last several years of their lives, you are not bound up in their internecine disagreements. There is an air of unrealness to you, as if you were not meant to return, as if you will soon once again vanish. People talk to you freely, grudgingly; they are scattered all across the land and social stratum. You are helping them, you think, or they are helping you. Either way, it is a reason for being.

7. Atonement with the Father
Your parents are alive, still there to support you, as they have always been. They are older now, more fragile than you remember. Perhaps one of them has died. Even in this case, they are an ever-present absence, a void that warps the space around it, grounds you in its gravitational pull. You have never built anything of your own, you have not yet cut these ties. They are disappointed, they are supportive, they are struggling, they will keep you afloat amidst everything. They are human now, so much more than you were previously capable of understanding.

8. The Meeting with the Goddess
Of all the people whose lives you intercede in, there is only one who truly matters. She is in the end the reason you returned, the business you had left unfinished. There is still so much you owe her - explanations, apologies, missed opportunities - nothing that can fully be repaid. You are an ancient thing to her, a flickering, long-forgotten hope, someone who abandoned her in her time of need. She welcomes you back regardless, holds you to her heart. There is so little here that she loves. It's unsettling to see how much you still matter. 

9. Temptation
You were cruel to her in your departure. No, cruelty could be renounced, could be forgiven. This was not so much a willful act as it was an utter lack of conviction. You did not fight for her, you did not contact her. She has suffered all these years you were away, watching her world constrict around her, and from you she heard not one word, gained not one ounce of comfort. There was nothing stopping you but your own insecurity and regret, the gnawing sensation that you had discovered nothing to offer her. Even in your tender moments together, you can tally up the records, you can list down your sins and know: you do not deserve her.

10. Apotheosis
You cannot save her. You cannot save anyone.

11. The Ultimate Boon
Your anxieties will coalesce into a monster, someone who has thrived amidst the rot, someone who at times grows impatient and reaches out and suffocates the weak. He is well-heeled and respectable, not powerful as such, but someone beyond your reach. He has killed someone you loved, and he will draw you in, toy with you as prey, and you will charge in heedlessly. He is an individual, or a small group of them, with eyes and arms and hungers. You will see his face. Here is something you can hurt. Here is someone you can kill.

III. Departure

12. Refusal of the Return
You will die here. You will die in the depths of your despair. It is an incontrovertible, mathematical fact. The arc of your life has led to this, its momentum, its trajectory. You have returned to this dark place, again and again and again, like some sick compulsion, a slow spiral around a drain. You have been given your chance at joy, your chance at freedom and escape, and you have wasted every opportunity. You returned to this place voluntarily. You will die here. You deserve no less. 

13. Magic Flight
The path from here is long and stumbling and uneventful, with nothing to bar your way. The monster is dead, diffused, distracted; you are once again beneath its notice. All you must do now is walk, put one foot in front of another, walk through the dark and past these crumbling walls. These halls do not end, they simply widen out into the world, into the open night sky and all the streets and walls of your hometown, where all the evidence of your uselessness surrounds you. All you must do is walk, as far as your legs will carry you. All you must do is walk, as far as you can bear to go. 

14. Rescue from Without
Along the path is everyone you have ever met, everyone you have ever helped, listened to, comforted, manipulated, scorned. All the ties you've formed, everyone who would remember you, miss you, resent you, everyone who would be made lesser by your absence. It is not grace that saves you, for there is no God here to administer it. It is not hope, for there is nothing left to hope for.  The only thing left is another person's presence, that you are here, and they are here, and for now you are all here together, regardless of whatever has come before and whatever will come to pass. 

15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
Your home is dying, rotted through, and the rot has spread far beyond its borders.The rot is vast, and ever-present. You would see the world burn down before it died, you would see deaths in the millions. If there is to be revolution, you will not lead it. The most you could do is be swept up in the flames, live to stumble among the ashes. The rot has infected everyone you know and love; even now it pulses through your veins. You understand this now with an almost fond familiarity. You are home. You are dying, and you are home.

16. Master of Two Worlds
You will have a moment, a week or so, a moment's worth of love, of earnest and wholehearted devotion. You cannot save her, you cannot save anyone, no more than you can stop the course of death and rot, no more than you can change the world. This is the Hero's Journey of our times: you circled back whence you came so that she could know that there was happiness for her still - for a moment, for a week, for a moment that would last you the rest of your lives.

17. Freedom
The world will end, and you will meet it with open eyes.