EURYDICE: She died on her wedding day (The Olympus Cycle) by IOAKIM IOAKIM

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice has always been told from his side. This is her side. She died on her wedding day — twenty-three years old, the snake in the grass at the edge of the celebration, the music of Orpheus still playing when the dying happened. She arrived in the underworld without preparation and without a coin and the ferryman took her across anyway. She learned what the underworld actually was, which was quieter and more habitable and more interesting than the living world's stories had suggested. She found her people among the dead. She learned a different relationship with time. She made something of where she was. Then the music arrived. EURYDICE: THE LOOKING BACK is the literary account of the story that has always been told about someone else — the woman who was the object of the most famous rescue in Greek mythology, told from inside her own experience of it. The underworld she came to know. The Persephone who received her and saw her as a full person. The life she built that the rescue interrupted. The ascent behind Orpheus toward the light she was not certain she wanted. The moment he turned — what was in his face, what she understood about why the turning was inevitable, what she felt that was not what the stories assume she felt. We wrote Orpheus. Now Eurydice speaks. She is still in the underworld. He came eventually. He plays. She listens. She is showing him the place she learned before he arrived. The music is learning what the underworld knows. They are here. Read more