Epilogue: Elysium

"Look, you don't understand," Lois Lane said. "I'm Episcopalian."

The woman the reporter was talking to smiled warmly. She was taller than Lois, a veritable giant at ten or twelve feet, but built on a more heroic scale than any basketball player. Her round hips and huge breasts were wrapped in a kind of sheet, trimmed in purple. Flowers were woven in her hair, and she had a kind of stately poise that Lois associated with very saintly schoolteachers. Her skin was a faded tan, as though she had been used to being outside, but for some time had been stuck indoors, and the reporter found it impossible to judge the tall woman's age...sometimes she seemed younger than loss, and other times...when Lois glimpsed her out of the corner of her eye...she seemed as ancient as an oak tree, the faded tan as rough as bark and criss-crossed with wrinkles, the pale flowers in her hair wild with thorns.

"Walk with me, Lois of the Lane," she said.

Or at least, that's what Lois thought she said. Whatever language the tall woman spoke, it wasn't English, but the reporter found she could understand it.

When Lois had been twelve, her father had taken her and her sister Lucy to Iowa. The farmland seemed to go on forever, just an endless plain of standing wheat, interrupted now and then by a house, a silo, a lone tree...and that's what this place reminded her of.

After she had died...and Lois could remember that clearly...she had woken up in the middle of a field that seemed wider than the Great Plains. A spring sun hung overhead, warm but not stultifying. The grass was tall as her hips, soft and green. The reporter had found herself wearing a kind of white tunic, and sandals on her feet...and she was not alone. Moving among all the tall grass were people, in twos and threes. Talking, laughing, dancing, playing games...and quite a few were having sex.

Like, lots of sex. Lois had blushed to see some of them go at it. The first time she had simply stumbled across a woman who was deftly attempting to take two cocks into her mouth at once, while another woman licked her ass. They smiled when they saw her, and spoke to her, in that same strange language that Lois weirdly understood, and invited her to join in...but she had declined, and asked questions.

Which led her, after many more encounters with casual sex among the ancient dead, to Persephone.

The woman walked with a long stride, that Lois was hard-pressed to keep up with...although she found that she didn't tire, in Elysium. Didn't grow hungry or thirsty. Needed no sleep, or to defecate. In her search for a way out of here, Lois had seen men cum and cum, absolutely endlessly, with no need to pause and regain their strength. The only limit was their libido, and their own interests. She had seen men simply sit on their heels and masturbate, endlessly, eyes closed as they whispered the names of loved ones who had not made it to Elysium, the rich earth around them a viscous mud of dirt and cum.

Persephone wore no sandals, her feet stained with dirt that seemed utterly at place there, as though it would look wrong if her gigantic feet were clean. She was tall enough to stand out on the endless plain.

"No pregnancies, no disease, no growing old," the giant said. "For those who wish it, the love and peace of this place is endless. You were drawn here, Lois, though others claimed your soul, because of your marriage..."

The reporter was jogging to keep up. "I mean, we were never legally married."

That smile turned on her like the sun. "There are marriages of flesh and spirit, which bind two souls much more securely than any words or piece of paper. A marriage of hearts that find each other...that suffer for each other...that is why, I think, you aren't happy here."

Lois swallowed. It wasn't as if she hadn't been tempted. Many of the women were beautiful, they had invited her, some lewdly with obscene gestures and parting their legs and labia to bare their dripping sex, some with flashing eyes and soft smiles. Eager to serve her, service her, or to draw her into their arms for warm kisses and embraces.

None of them were Diana.

"My husband," Persephone said. "He knows your wife of old. She is his niece...and soon, she will come for you. He is fond of her, though she knows it not, and has arranged for your release...but it shall be a trial for you both. You recall the story of Orpheus?"

"Yes," Lois said, desperately scrabbling in her mind for ancient myths and legends...and what Diana had told him. "Wait, wasn't Hades...dead?"

Persephone laughed. It was like the whisper of the breeze through a summer forest.

"Gods do not die as men die; thrones are overthrown and set right again. Let us say, for the sake of your story, this is the underworld, and Hades has dominion."

"Okay. Right. Ancient Greek underworld. I'm here for Diana. And she's going to get me out."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"She will try," Persephone said with a sigh. "But much depends on you. Are you sure you wish to leave? There are many here that would love you, until you are reunited with her again in the fullness of time..."

"If I wanted to drown in strange pussy, I could have done that on Earth," Lois said.

"Very well," Persephone said...and Lois heard her unshod foot hit on stone. The reporter blinked, and realized they stood at the mouth to a vast cave, though she had not seen it until that very moment. "Though I warn you, Lois of the Lane; no mortal writer ever wrote of the trials that Eurydice suffered in her ascent...and there are sacrifices you must make, if you wish to dwell on Earth with your love once again."

Without hesitation, Lois Lane took the first step from Elysium...and toward something greater.