Tchesmu

...or "the Hound": the great sight-hunting dog of ancient Egypt -- see the note here -- and the source of the preferred on-case pseudonym (when in Egypt) of Till We Have Cases's Consulting God. (Art by Jonathan Wesslund on Instagram as part of Doggust 2023: reblogged by @thecollectibles on Tumblr)

Art for AxeMeAboutAxinomancy’s slightly unhinged but genuinely delightful Lions series: “Wild Kingdom”, “Mating Snarl” and “It’s Good To Be The King”.

Thank you, AxeMe!

Now up on AO3, Chapter 36 of TILL WE HAVE CASES: “Of the Darkness before Dawn and What Befell Within It”

The latest (22.5K word) chapter of Till We Have Cases is now up at AO3.

Please note: the last update of TWHC was on May 14, 2016. It’s good to be back! For those interested, some very apologetic notes on the Not-So-Great Hiatus are here.

In Chapter 36: In the lavish Egyptian home of the two demigods who are prime suspects in the ancient world's most notorious serial murders, the Consulting God and Prince Iaon have staked their lives on an undercover operation to bring the murderers’ centuries-long killing spree to an end. Hidden somewhere in the House of the Lilies is crucial evidence that will bring the criminals to justice and release the souls of forty-nine unjustly condemned Danaïds from Hell.

But though the God’s deductions have led him to the evidence he and Iaon seek, bad luck has betrayed the Consulting God into their suspects’ hands. Now the suspects—the fiftieth Danaïd, Hypermnestra, and her husband Lynceus—have used their favorite murder weapon, a drug out of ancient myth, to render the God helpless and obedient to their will. He’s now the bait in a trap meant to lure Iaon to the same fate they’ve planned for the God: a one-way trip to the Houses of Hades...

Warnings for mind control of captured deities, canon-typical violence, journeys through liminal states, seriously angry BAMF princes, spilled ichor, and subterfuge.

Till We Have Cases is a BBC!Sherlock AU fic set in the post-Trojan War Bronze Age of ancient Greek myth. In this fusion with the classic love story of Eros and Psyche, a dangerous young god with a gift for deduction is sent to put a stop to the lifesaving ways of a warrior-prince with healing hands. But all of a sudden Prince Iaon has moved into the Consulting God’s flat on Mount Olympus and they’ve started solving crimes together. And what follows after that is, well, somewhat unexpected.

Warning! Till We Have Cases contains: Greek wines, mythology running amok, embedded casefic, industrial-strength smut (from around chapter 19 on), the birth of firearms discipline and other freeform but entirely justified anachronism, body parts (some still splendidly, if not magnificently, in use), and True Love tested to destruction... and final triumph.

Notifications about updates, as well as maps, notes, and other reference material can be found at The Lotus Room.

Notes on Chapter 36 of “Till We Have Cases”

First of all: It’s been four years since this fic updated.

That was...really NOT how things were supposed to go. And I’m so sorry to have kept everybody waiting so long.

The combination of circumstances that led to this very UN-Great Hiatus would, at the end of the day, just wind up sounding like a litany of Inexplicable Weird Shit: life stuff, family stuff, Real World stuff, all conspiring to keep me away. But at last everything quieted down enough for me to start getting back to grips with this work. (And to overcome the awful guilt for it having taken so long.)

Lest anyone wonder if the coronavirus situation contributed to this improvement in local circumstances, in terms of making more time for writing: I only wish. Paradoxically, real-life stuff surrounding the ‘Rona has conspired to make life more busy for me, not less. Yet here we are, and here is chapter 36 for you: 22.5K words, the WP program says.

(Please also note that there’s been a slight change in chapter numbers and numberings. There will now be 49 chapters and an afterword.)

And what comes next?

Well, first of all, I have no idea when the next update will occur except “soon” -- later in July 2020, I hope. What I most need people to know at the moment is that (a) I have no intention of abandoning this fic -- I have approximately another 80K of it complete already, from ch. 37 through to the end -- and (b) that I’ll do my best to be more frequent about updates, a LOT more frequent in view of recent history, despite the depredations of the coronavirus and everything else that’s been going on nationally and internationally. This piece of work is very dear to me, and I’m as eager to see the ins and outs of how it all comes out as I assume a lot of its other readers are.

My endless gratitude goes out to those who have read it and kept reading it -- what there was of it -- despite its being a WIP and despite it having languished so long with no sign of continued activity. I treasure your fidelity; you are my fixed points (as the man says) in a changing world. Thanks again, so much, for sparing this tale your time. I hope so much you enjoy what’s to come.

And now back to it.

...Finally, a note imported from the chapter 35 notes, for convenience’s sake:

Nepenthe: …Nothing whatsoever to do with Edgar Allen Poe (the major reference left to the word in English). νηπενθές is a compound word: νη / ne, “not”, and πενθές deriving from πένθος, penthos, “grief, sorrow, or mourning”. It is the world’s first substance specifically described as an antidepressant…but powerful well beyond anything known today.

The drug is first mentioned in Odyssey book 4 lines 220ff, when Helen puts it in the wine for herself, her husband and their visitors (Odysseus’s son Prince Telemachos and his friendly escort and fellow-prince, King Nestor’s son Peisistratos Nestoridês) after the conversation turns rather sad. The passage says:

There has, as one might expect, been endless conjecture over what nepenthe actually was. Various writers and analysts have tried to identify it with hashish, opium, henbane, and even coffee, but no one has any realistic idea of what Homer was thinking about. The temptation to label it “100% plot device” is strong, but it doesn’t particularly drive the plot, so that doesn’t work either.

Hypermnestra’s mention of the plant eaten by the lotophagoi, the Lotus Eaters of the Odyssey, is interesting in that many mythology-oriented botanists and historians have spent a good while attempting to identify just what plant was growing on their island. (At least one source claims that the word lotos can be translated as “clover” and suggests that the lotophagoi were early vegetarians.)

At any rate, the description in the Odyssey makes it plain that the Lotus Eaters’ plant was at the very least immediately psychoactive and intensely addictive. It has occasionally been associated with the eastern “blue” lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, as well as the Egyptian blue water lily, Nymphaea caerulea. While both have mystical associations, neither seems to be pharmacologically active, though some sources claim N. caerulea was used in Egypt for shamanistic inductions.

Cupid and Psyche, John Roddham Spencer Stanhope (1880)

Famous Wine Regions of Ancient Greece via @DigitalMapsAW on Twitter