Styx started as a prompt.
Well, a series of them.
“How do you kill a god?”
and
“I was a king!” He bellowed, spitting at the girl’s feet. She smiled at him, her eyes sad and yet full of mischief.
“And I was a god.”
and
“Believe the lie.”
All of them manifested into an idea.
What if the villain of the narrative wasn’t the villain at all? What if the real evil was just a guy with a superiority complex?
I had just finished Wonderworld, and I had learned something from that book. Sometimes you don’t expect the villain to be who it becomes.
I was moving when I wrote Styx. Across country from the second time, back to my home state. Back to warmth. Away from the loneliness that sank into my bones while I was away.
I had a travel job, and going home on weekends was unbearable. My roommate traveled too, often times we traveled opposite each other. The few times we were together we were exhausted. Our social calendar centered around dinners and farmers markets.
But then the winter hit. I’m Floridian, we don’t have winter. We have summer and fall. And fall is two weeks in February.
I hated winter. Everything made me feel alone.
So, I was moving “home”. To the city I spent the majority of my adult life. Back to the friendships I have built out of sweat and tears and pixie dust.
And what Styx was going through resonated with that. No matter how she hunted them, Lethe was still her sister. They were bonded together over centuries, lapping through the stone of the Underworld.
Just because she had been torturing her for thousands of years, it didn’t mean she didn’t miss her sister.
And so, Styx was born. The story of how someone who wasn’t inherently evil was cast as the villain in someone else’s narrative.
Looking back, I identify with Styx more than I do Lethe.
Styx knew what she wanted from the start. But she had to follow the rules. She had to do someone else’s bidding. She had to fall in line.
But just long enough to get to where she needed to go. Then, she neatly stepped out of her marching orders, straightened her designer cashmere top, and held her head high.
And once she did, nothing could stop her.
I envy her, but I think we all envy our characters a little. They get neat, tied up bows on all their endings. We don’t.
At least not usually.
I like to think that Styx’s ending and where I was when I finished the novella weren’t far off.
We both got to what we wanted, eventually.