Fannie from the Underworld

Fannie’s mother died before she was born. Hermes carried her mother’s body to the Underworld not knowing that she was pregnant. After a few years of boredom listening to idle conversations and feeling the steady bounce of her mother’s ceaseless wanderings around the netherworld, Fannie decided to immerge, and see what the world was like.

“Who are you?” her mother asked when she saw the pale, scrawny child appear in the dimness of Hades’ realm.

“I don’t know. I was born just now,” Fannie replied.

“Oh, you’re the reason I’ve been so hungry, and you’re the one who’s been the literal pain in my backside. I shall call you ‘Fannie’ then,” Fannie’s mother declared. And then she turned and walked away without another word, to continue her aimless journey.

Fannie’s mother already didn’t seem like a very caring or nurturing woman, and being dead, it was unlikely that she was going to improve much over time. Of course, Fannie didn’t know her mother was dead. Through all of her so-called life thus far, there was nothing to suggest anything contrary to her mother’s state of being. And her own self-awareness was quite low- she was merely a toddler. Of course, she had learned to speak by over-hearing boring conversations in her mother’s womb. Everything was quite to the point, and there weren’t a lot of flowery adjectives thrown about. In fact, Fannie didn’t even know the difference between good and bad, hot and cold, pretty and ugly, day and night or anything like that. She had never seen any colors- only hues of black and white, but neither of these had names to her knowledge.

Everyone in the Underworld was so blah that they never expressed any emotion. Fannie couldn’t manage to make any friends. Not because they were jealous that she was living and they were not, or even that she was a very pretty girl, and they were decaying corpses- they just didn’t care. None of the dead people had any feelings left but misery, and they grew so accustomed to being miserable all the time that they didn’t even notice misery anymore. Fannie wandered with them. Occasionally she’d bump into a dead person.

“Watch where you’re going,” they’d say, in flat, even tones.

“OK,” Fannie would say back, just as flat. And that would be that. Sometimes Fannie would ask someone for directions to somewhere, but she didn’t know what anything was called, where anything was or what to do when she got there. The vagueness of her inquiries did not lead to any new discoveries for Fannie.

One day or night- who knew for sure?- Fannie decided to learn something. For starters, she wanted to know how big the Underworld was, but for her, the Underworld meant the whole world. She didn’t know the difference between over and under either. Fannie picked a direction, the direction she was already facing, and began to walk. She walked for about two years. She stopped and slept on the cold damp ground whenever she got tired. She picked rotten fruit off the dead trees whenever she got hungry. The traveling had been fairly painless. Fannie had developed tough calluses on her feet already, and the ground was flat and even. She only stopped at all because she encountered a wide, black river flowing across her path. She put one milk white toe into the icy waters, and since she had never felt anything like it before, got scared.

“What is this?” she asked the darkness, but no one was there to answer. But Fannie was determined to continue. She wanted to know the dimensions of this dimension. So, she turned left and followed the river. There were plenty of dead trees with rotting fruit dropping off the limp branches for her to eat. And she discovered that fairly uncomfortable feeling in her mouth, that she would later call thirst, could be somewhat quenched by lapping a handful of water from the river. Under normal conditions, Fannie would have died from cold or thirst or hunger a long time ago. It had taken her a long, long time to even get curious enough to attempt to eat, and still years more to drink, but since she was already in the land of the dead, nothing seemed to affect her.

After seven years of following the river in one direction, Fannie came upon a little wooden dock. It was the first structure she had ever encountered, and she found it fascinating. The dock was simple enough: wooden planks laid horizontally over long round beams that floated in the dark waters of the river in the Underworld, but it fascinated her nonetheless. After gazing at this technological wonder for a week or so, Fannie finally decided to set foot upon the dock. She carefully, as if unsure the thing would stay afloat with the addition of her dainty frame, very carefully placed one unsteady, disbelieving foot on the nearest board of the dock. It bobbed up and down gently with the current, just the same as it had for eons before, but Fannie had only personally observed it for a week. Fannie began to relax and accept the fact that the dock wasn’t going to bite her. She prepared her heart for the excitement of bringing her other foot forward, and actually standing on the dock, instead of just poking it with one foot. She took a deep breath, and slowly, and slowly, and there: she was standing on the dock.

“Get off of my quay!” a dark, cloaked figure shouted at her from a row boat in the river. Fannie jumped back onto land.

“Oh, you frightened me!” she told the figure. It slowly rowed nearer and nearer without speaking again. Then it reached the end of the quay, and the cloaked figure got out of the little boat and moored it to a wooden bollard at the end of the dock. Fannie studied the figure’s every movement. She was awed by it. The discoveries were beginning to pile one on top of the other all the sudden. First a river that one could drink from. Then the dock, which already seemed common to her. And now there was a vessel that could actually move across the water. Its pilot was even wearing a cloak! No one else in the Underworld had any possessions, not even clothes, so this was a real wonder to Fannie. As intriguing as it was, she also felt an uneasy sensation for the first time. More than simple curiosity, Fannie was actually frustrated and rattled by the cloaked figure’s presence. And what was the point of that garment? She found it almost impossible to see what the figure was doing as it moored the rowboat. Finally, she got tired of waiting.

“Hello?” Fannie called.

“What?” the figure called back. It was just finishing up. The cloaked figure made its way up the dock toward her. The darkness of the Underworld and the darkness of the cloak were making it difficult for Fannie to make out any details visually, but she heard a strange tapping as the figure stepped on the wood of the dock. It was not at all like the sound her soft, bare foot had made when she stepped out onto the wood. The figure walked straight up to Fannie. Two white hands of bone slowly reached up to the hood of the cloak and brushed it backward to reveal a skeleton’s hollow face. Crooked white teeth almost smiled at her, and black recesses of eyes seemed to stare at her.

“Well, what have we here?” the skeleton asked, not so much to Fannie as to himself.

“Hello. I’m Fannie. I was just admiring your… What did you call it?”

“It’s a quay. But what I want to know is what are you doing on my quay?” the skeleton asked her.

“I was just admiring it,” she told him.

“How did you get here, though?” the skeleton asked.

“I walked for a long, long time. Then I found the river. I walked for a long time more and found the quay. Then you showed up.”

The skeleton raised a bony hand and raked the finger bones across his skull, scratching his head. “Are you saying that you walked across the mighty River Styx?” the skeleton asked.

“No.”

“But you just said you walked here. And obviously, here you are. We are speaking together and you’re standing in front of me on the dead side of the River Styx. So how did you get over here?” The skeleton made broad swooping motions from behind him and across the river, then pointing firmly in between he and Fannie, indicating here.

“Over here?” Fannie puzzled.

“Good grief! Yes. Over here,” he said again. “I want to know how you crossed the river.”

Fannie’s eyes brightened with juvenile comprehension.

“Oh, I’ve never crossed the river before. I don’t know how.”

“There’s only one way across the River Styx, and it is by that boat, and I’m the Ferryman, Charon!” the skeleton yelled.

“I come from this side of the river. I’ve never known anything else,” Fannie told him.

“But you’re alive,” Charon told her.

“How do you mean?”

“You, dear girl, are not dead. Not decaying or stinking. Not shriveling away, but growing, I dare say into a beautiful young woman.”

A wave of confusion threatened to sweep Fannie away. Alive? Growing? Beautiful? What was this crazy skeleton talking about? She was so lost she didn’t know where to begin. Fannie let the information soak in a little before daring to speak again.

“So, I’m alive and not dead is what you’re telling me?” Fannie asked.

“Yes. It’s my job to bring the dead into the Underworld, but I never brought you here. First of all, I’m immortal, and I’d remember. Second, you’re still living, and bringing the living to the land of the dead is strictly forbidden.”

“Well, I didn’t know there were rules. But it’s not my fault. I was born here. I’ve been all alone, wandering in darkness my whole life.”

Charon pitied the girl. He filled her in on some of the details of life, death, the structure of things. He told her about the gods, the mortals and about the various creatures of the earth. Fannie sat listening in fascination. Charon’s lessons took place over the course of three years, with regular breaks to ferry the dead across the River Styx. At once Fannie felt like she was more learned, but with that knowledge also came awareness of the void of ignorance within her. There was nothing more she could learn in the Underworld.

“Charon,” she called one day, “will you take me across the river? I don’t belong here anyway. You said so yourself.”

Charon paused to contemplate the predicament.

“Well, that’s a toughy. The thing is, you’re not supposed to be here, but you already are. I don’t know if it’s more of a violation for you to be here or for me take you to the other side. And I don’t want to ask Hades about it. He might blame this whole mess on me. I don’t suppose you have any coin for payment to cross to the other side?”

Fannie shook her head.

“I have nothing to give.”

Charon looked at her closely. His teeth began to grind a little. Charon had not seen a living, breathing girl in a few millennia, and Fannie even at the tender age of fifteen, was lovelier than he remembered many other women being. Naturally, she was completely white, having never been exposed to more light than the dim haze of the Underworld. Even her hair was white like a silken veil. There wasn’t a spot of dirt on her skin to mar the beautiful whiteness. Even the dust of the death realm had no effect on Fannie.

“Well, there is one thing you could do for me,” Charon said.

“Oh anything,” Fannie told him, not knowing what foul deed possessed his skeletal mind.

“Well, I’m not sure how this would work, but if you let me make love to you, I’d take you across the River Styx, and you could make your way to the land of the living.”

Fannie consented without much contemplation. She was still young and was almost completely neutral in every way. Nothing about Charon’s request seemed good or bad, since she was barely familiar with either concept.

“OK, but I don’t know what to do,” she told Charon.

“I’m out of practice myself. We’ll figure it out.”

Charon took off his cloak and laid it on the dock in the River Styx, and laid Fannie down on it. Charon’s old bones kneeled down at her feet and spread her legs. Charon stuck two bone fingers inside her, but he could not feel the warm moistness. He wiggled them around slowly, and Fannie squirmed and moaned. Charon brought the bones of his hand up to where his nose once was, but he could not smell the sweetness.

“Oh, to Tartarus with it!” he declared.

Charon laid his bones across Fannie’s body and began to gyrate his ball and socket hips in and out, banging his pelvic bone against her pelvis. His bone fingers clawed at her neck and budding breasts. Charon chomped at the places he scratched and never quit thrusting violently against her. Fannie wasn’t sure exactly what was going on, but she waited patiently, and finally Charon was finished. The skeleton rolled off her to the side and laid down.

“Medusa’s cunt! That was good!” Charon declared.

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” she told him, rubbing the sore spots on her breasts and pelvis. “So now you will take me across the river?”

Charon’s bones rocked back and forth with the current on the wooden dock in the River Styx, but he didn’t answer her right away.

“OK. Tomorrow when I cross the river to usher in the dead of the season, you will hide under my cloak and sneak out when we reach the other side.”

The next day, Charon kept his word.

“Come on, girl. I’m going across to pick up a new batch of recently deceased. Hide under here,” he called from the ferry. Charon lifted up his large black cloak, and Fannie climbed down into the boat and hid beneath the fabric. Charon’s old bones and cloak smelled like dust. Fannie stayed still between Charon’s legs and bobbed up and down with every stroke of the oars until they reached the other side of the great divide.

When the ferry reached the dock on the live side of the river, Charon lifted up his cloak and told Fannie,

“We’re here.”

She crawled out from under the ferryman’s cloak and hopped onto the dock. On the banks of the River Styx stood clusters of dead people insisting they had won the battle, were still in love, had never been loved or just simply didn’t want to be common dead people. A few falsely boasted of their great accomplishments and embraced the looming bleakness of the afterlife with fake optimism. Some just talked about the weather or other meaningless chit-chat. None of them gave Fannie a second glance when she came trotting down the quay and scurried past them. Even after Fannie collapsed to the ground and wailed in agony a few steps onto shore, none of the dead gave her notice.

Years of malnutrition hit Fannie’s body like a hammer. The bitter cold of the dark and gloomy passage to the Underworld stung her flesh. Maroon streams began to seep from the scrapes on her body and the bite marks on her breasts and neck. The dirt and grime of the cavern floor began to stick to her skin. Charon laughed as he stepped down into the ferry with a boatload of groaning dead people.

“You insisted on going to the other side, Fannie!” he shouted. Then the boat rowed away into the darkness.

Now that she was alive, the blackness seemed impenetrable to her ill-adapted eyes. Fannie cried in the dark. After sobbing for some hours, and letting it all out, Fannie finally mustered the strength to pull herself up and start moving.  She stumbled almost blindly through the cave. Then she noticed a white dot in front of her. She reached out to touch the dot, but it disappeared. She lowered her hand again, and the dot reappeared. Fannie finally guessed that the dot was far in front of her. Without knowing what it was, Fannie followed the light at the end of the tunnel. The white dot became a small circle as she walked. Then the circle became a golden arch of white and gold. She kept going, and the air grew warmer and less dank. Eventually, the arch in front of her dimmed and started to change color, from white to yellow, yellow to orange, orange to red, and Fannie emerged from the passage to the land of the dead and into the world of the living.

The light in the sky was the brightest and most beautiful thing Fannie had ever seen. Luckily for her it was dusk, or she may have been blinded. It had taken her a total of fifteen years to escape from the Underworld, but now that she was out of that awful cave, she could already breathe easier. She stared in amazement at the setting sun and rising moon. The grass and trees were green and alive. A warm breeze brushed across her face, and Fannie smiled. The grass tickled her feet. She giggled as she wandered along the beaten path leading out from the cave. Right beside the pathway, a large apple tree grew. Fannie stood beneath its lovely boughs and touched the rough brown bark. An apple dropped from its stem and thudded on the soft ground beside her. The red orb was firm and smooth. She bit into it at once and the juicy flesh of the apple delighted her tongue. After eating nothing but spoiled food for 15 years, wandering in blackness and being fucked by a skeleton, this apple was easily the most pleasant experience of her so-called life. Afterwards, her tiny stomach felt nice and full, so she laid back in the green grass beneath the apple tree and slept soundly till morning.

That morning, just after daybreak, a horse named Artax happened by the place where Fannie slept. Artax had a toothache, so he searched around the base of the tree for soft apples to eat. That’s when he noticed Fannie. She was the loveliest girl he had ever seen. Her hair was as white as his own mane, which flowed down his flank like a curtain of light. Her pale skin was as white as his own coat, but this lass was evidently wounded and dirty from travel. The horse poked his rosy pink muzzle at the areas with dried blood on Fannie’s body. She awoke to the tickling probe of Artax’s nostrils at her neck. Her pale green eyes opened at once but closed again fast. The morning sun beamed off the white horse. Fannie opened her eyes again, slowly, about halfway and tried to discern what huge thing was towering over her, sniffing. It was a colossal white horse, but she had never seen a horse before. Artax saw that Fannie was awake.

“Good morning, young lady,” he said.

“Good morning,” Fannie said back, not knowing whom or what she was addressing, what ‘morning’ meant or that horses did not typically speak.

“My name is Artax,” the white mustang informed her.

“Hello, I’m Fannie. Nice to meet you.”

“Why are you out here in the forest all alone, Fannie?”

“Well, I didn’t know where I would wind up exactly, after coming here from the Underworld,” she told him.

“Underworld? Why would you have been in that horrid place?” the horse asked.

“I was born there, you could say.”

“Well, that’s interesting. I’ve never met a person from the Underworld before,” Artax said.

“And I’ve never met a person like you before you,” said Fannie.

Artax raised up, trotted around in a circle, kicked his hind quarters, and neighed loudly. His solid hooves shook the ground. Fannie sat upright and put her hand up to her mouth, gasping Hah. She didn’t know what to make of his display.

“I’m not a person, like you,” Artax told her as he calmed down from his fit of hilarity. “I’m a horse.”

“Oh,” said Fannie. “I never saw a horse in the Underworld. I thought maybe everyone alive was like you, and then when they died became like me.”

“There are lots of different living things in the world. Not all creatures look the same, so you can still tell humans from horses. People all sort of look like you, but I must say, I’ve never met one so beautiful. But, in all honesty, I am partial to white.”

Fannie touched her hair and looked at the waving mane on Artax. They were the same shade of white. She understood what white was, but she was still unclear about ‘beautiful’.

“Artax, what is beautiful about me?” she asked. Artax thought for a moment.

“The look of your face; the way you smile without realizing it; your perky little tits; your white skin and hair: all of these things make you beautiful in my eyes.”

Fannie nodded, but she still didn’t truly understand the whole concept of physical attraction. There were so many things she didn’t fully understand. Artax wasn’t the best one to explain them either. He was pretty smart for a horse, but he was pretty ignorant in the ways of mortal men. One thing he knew for sure was that the forest was no place for a young maiden to live alone, much less sleep alone out in the open. He attempted to explain this all to her.

“Where do people live, Artax?” she asked.

“Most people live in cities,” he told her, “but there’s not a city within hundreds of miles of here.”

“That’s pretty far, huh?” Artax nodded to her.

“It’s not just the distance that makes the journey difficult,” Artax began.

“No?”

“Not even close,” he kept on. “There are mountains that are tall and steep. There are deserts with no water for days. There are bandits who would kill you for the fun of it. Food can be difficult to come by, and then there’s the weather.”

“Weather?” she inquired.

“Oh yes. Today it is warm and sunny, but in the time it would take you to get to a city, the weather could change. It could rain. It could get cold. It may even get too hot for you.”

Fannie stood up and approached the white horse, whose head towered above hers.

“What am I to do, Artax? Life is hard!”

 Artax took pity on her immediately. He believed that she really was a stranger to this world.

“No human has ever ridden on me, because I am free, but many horses are tame and bear humans on their backs, because traveling great distances is easy for a horse,” he told her.

“Could you carry me to the nearest city, please, Artax?” Fannie’s sweetness, naivety and beauty struck the mustang’s heart among other things.

“Of course, I could, but what will you do for me?”

“I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll die here otherwise, and then I’ll just be right back in the Underworld before I even experience life!” Fannie exclaimed.

As much as it aggrieved him, Artax was a male in need, and he decided to exploit this opportunity. Fannie was too beautiful and desperate to resist.

“Well,” the horse started, “you could just suck my dick, and I’d be happy to take you.”

“What does that mean?” Fannie asked.

Artax had to give her a few pointers, but Fannie figured the rest out on her own. She got underneath the massive stallion and grabbed onto his titanic cock with both hands as it presented itself. It was so big the tip would barely fit in her mouth, but Fannie was determined not to fail to please Artax if for no other reason than she didn’t want him to abandon her in the wilderness alone. She was confident that he could both carry her and protect her. She stroked the horse’s dick and sucked on the tip of it until an explosion of wetness burst into her mouth. She tried to keep going, but Fannie started gagging and coughing up the fluid. Slowly, Artax’s penis withdrew most of the way back into his body. Fannie got out from under him and spit and wiped around the edge of her mouth.

“Did I do something wrong?” she asked.

“No, my dear, you did everything right.” 

Artax took Fannie to a brook where she bathed the Underworld smell, earthly dirt, dried blood, and horse semen from her body, and they drank as much water as they could stand to. Then they set forth to the west, where Artax believed the nearest town was located. As luck would have it, Artax was the fastest horse in the world. They made good time to the nearest city despite the circumstances. Artax didn’t misinform Fannie. What he said about it being dangerous was true, though they didn’t encounter anything too terrible. But still, a naked, naïve fifteen-year-old girl from the Underworld, who was completely unfamiliar with the lay of the land and human behavior would have been at a total loss. He was proud to guide and protect her, and she greatly appreciated it.

They traveled for six months across rocky land where Fannie and Artax remained famished for days, broken up by occasional spots of luscious paradise where food and water were abundant. These areas were so pleasant that Artax seldom wanted to leave. Fannie would have to seduce the horse again and again to motivate him to keep up the journey. Fannie didn’t know that Artax secretly would have traveled to the ends of the earth for her. Artax didn’t know that Fannie secretly loved nothing more than riding her horse in every way interpretable.

The unusual lovers finally came across a small walled village called Taenarum. Fannie and Artax had just crossed a rather large space that was void of the before-mentioned patches of plenty, so they were both looking fairly rough. Fannie was skinny anyway, but she hadn’t eaten in a few days, and was hanging on by a thread.

The town’s gate was wide open and Artax trotted through. People scurried up and down the dirt streets buying food or whatever wares they needed from the markets. A prominent merchant noticed them at once from his balcony overlooking the main thoroughfare.

“Lo,” he yelled to the townspeople below, “a pale horse and she who rides upon it is Death!”

The peasants began to run in fear. Old women were trampled in the streets and mothers abandoned their babies. Men turned their swords on themselves after a quick glace at the apparent ghost-horse and rider that had obviously come to destroy their town. When Artax began to speak in attempts to calm down the screaming masses, more panic ensued.

Thucydides, the king of Taenarum saw Fannie and Artax and recognized at once that she was merely a sickly, naked child, and Artax was a talking white stallion. Stranger things had been known to occur, but nonetheless, Fannie and her horse were causing a riot. Thucydides called his guards to capture the girl and add the horse to his stables. Twelve men with bronze armor and spears blocked the paths of escape. Twelve more men with clubs and nets charged the white stallion with the girl still on his back. The first thing Artax did was back up to a house and let Fannie hop onto the roof out of harm’s way. Then he proceeded to stomp the life out of six men before ultimately being subdued by the clubs and caught up in the nets. It took time, but Fannie had no choice but to surrender to the guards once Artax was taken away. The guards led Fannie to King Thucydideds and were immediately dismissed.

“Of all the nymphs in Lesbos,” the king said when he first saw Fannie. “You’re no ghost at all, are you?” Fannie didn’t look at him. Thucydides strode over to her and grabbed her firmly by the shoulders. “Don’t you realize who I am?”

“I don’t know that it matters, really,” Fannie told him.

“Is that so? You’re obviously not from around here. I would certainly remember a girl of your beauty. Let me just explain a few things to you,” the king told her.

What the king explained to Fannie was that he was pretty much in charge of everything this far south and west, and unless the Spartans came knocking on their walls, things would stay the same for the rest of her life. He explained to her that if she wanted to live in happiness and comfort for the rest of her days that she could stay there with him. And as soon as he could find the means, he would dispose of his current wife and take Fannie to be his bride. Until the day she was queen, she was simply a very privileged guest. She could eat and drink as much as she wanted. She’d be given fine clothes and jewels. Slaves would bathe and groom her and tend to all her errands. She would have liberty over almost everything in Taenarum. Fannie agreed on one condition:

“OK,” she told him. “I’ll stay here and make myself at home, and one day I’ll be your wife, I guess, so long as I may keep Artax as my own and ride upon him whenever I wish.”

“Fine,” said the king.

Fannie smiled.