Katabasis

by R.F. Kuang

Funny how when something enormous was at stake you refused to believe the evidence of your own eyes.

For Plato, the First Court punished those possessed of a timocratic soul—the soul who purported to love justice and honor and beauty, but who cared more about preserving the appearance of such things rather than making the sacrifices necessary to fulfill those things themselves.

Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas, Lucian, Seneca, Saint Brendan—their accounts were doom and gloom, no doubt, but the dangers they described were divine and

Those guilty of lust had made reason slave to appetite.

For this reason, many Tartarologists argued that the punishment of Desire, which by most accounts encompassed both lust and gluttony, was the source of addiction itself—both motivation of appetite and cause of harm. It trapped you with enticements; it made you the cause of your own suffering.

The Christian explorer John Bancroft described Desire as a false imitation of paradise wherein punishment lay in temptation. You succumbed, you indulged, and you were never able to leave.

He simply did not notice the consequences of his actions. None of them were worth his attention, and this fact stung more than anything else.

But Alice had never wanted money, she had wanted the truth.

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect.