Hypatia of Earth
a short story
Hypatia of Earth
By Ophelia Everfall
Content Warning - Leave nothing unexpected.
They’d thought her dead. She crawled to bleed here alone. The sight of what would be lost by her life consumed her most in the hour to come. She’d been the future and known it. She thought her people worthy—better than this—those of such potential seen everywhere.
Hypatia loved everyone. She hated the structures of religion and ignorant male philosophy. She hated men who stood for it, but she’d care for their hearts within no matter. She fought for all.
Her parts were left on the outside. She’d been murdered on the inside. She would end the body for what they’d done. That was her plan.
Court abandoned her—names unworthy of history failing to stand beside—Christianity’s legion came to steal her heart—they’d burnt her hopes and all she’d wish to one day learn. Knowledge had been destroyed over again. Her lost life would be the worst of all—she’d carried most of that wisdom thrown to fires in the library.
This place was split, fractioned—factions within factions—brutally repugnant fiefdoms and hovels of refuge beside towering castles of fortress. Moats with soldiers were a constant of Hypatia’s sumptuous era spent learning and speaking, hoping to teach and join with the chamber of men who’d council to govern.
She’d crawled to her feet and knew the plan’s purpose—her secluded chamber a graciously open aired oritorium courtyard left undamaged and depopulated by the rioting. Her stumbling by collapsing feats of leap from ground to foot and back were shown of faith when seeing it empty.
Hypatia was dishonored at last the worst only before. She’d long forgone this fate along with the privileged. It hadn’t been until the very end—with peers of refuge taking her sails—breaking inside all of her homes to burn everything—when what she’d seek to do had been foretold in heart—that someone stole it all.
Something spoke of need to end herself for honor, and what might come to pass in the foreground of her walking.
Channeled wisdoms were the way her sisters from the coven told of her intelligence. Witchcraft was the accusal from those male colleagues she’d never achieve a true place beside. Wisdom was what she called it.
Hypatia knew when she knew and wouldn’t feel the need to waste time proving it out for anyone because that was a bore. Those things she understood would be the foundation expected for others to set forth with her into exploration. She’d cajole and insult and plant seeds for them to discover themself and wait for choices of will to bring people back with answers. No one returned.
Why wait? Why double back? Why did people doubt what they knew was a right? Why didn’t they accept it—adding their own voice of truth onto that base to work from? Seeking real answers crafted through the rigorous applications of duality was necessity. Nothing could be known but everything should be sought, proofs were shown true within the container of life, outside remained a mystery which proved it all fallible. Hearts and minds would need some balance, community speaking together, everyone’s rightness accounted for—balanced—found places beside those who fit and pointed towards their known fate of purpose upheld by pride.
Trust in people was something she had even while being raped.
She found nothing more unpleasant, nothing could be. Honor was her life. Her place to seek had gifted protection but that was never forsaken through lack of gratitude in things she had. Hypatia would be accused of just that—ungratefulness—for seeking to fill her cup and protect her life while pouring the most in secret where others would puff their chest.
Many women found themself with influence on the court. They’d sweep to claim in games with their men moved like chess pieces. These powerful women alone—who’d abuse their place and exploit all advantages—they seemed the worst of all to Hypatia. The men they steered were simple creatures being manipulated—horror wrought from actions of their worst was injustice personified a thousandfold—perpetrations against self and earth, mother and sister, brother and father, human to human—carried some weight of ego on the back of men who thought themself in control while being told what to do. These powerful women were beasts of insecurity, protectors of their place in comfort alone, and blatant of self-denial.
Forgoing all decency when operating with women of the many classes below them would prove the calculation of unrighteousness which Hypatia knew unforgivable. To wield privilege and play a victim—to have it all but see it not and enjoy it none—to cast your sisters down by judgement of projection, unwilling to understand yourself—it was disgusting like nothing else in a world so plainly steered towards the subjugation of women.
Even now, understanding what it was like to be taken against her will by the worst in most undignifying circumstances. She saw the man a victim too, and it was that ideology which would kill her inside.
He was a victim—everyone was. Even those women on high who would make her break the most for how they held sway over the city of Alexandria and by extension Rome, with so much she’d plead for to spare, wielding it poorly while Hypatia would hold but a single channel of long silenced resentment into the court’s confines.
Her truth felt needed. Hypatia wanted nothing more despite her broken demeanor than to find a way into acceptability and being understood by others—to find a home with someone pure of heart like herself that could hold her tightly.
She’d met a man once; a boy, and she’d been a friend. They let her in to their home for a time. There was a way they saw to use what she knew, and believed others would see the same as them at first—she was special despite her differences. She was a woman who spoke like a man of the council.
Hypatia was an unrepented plagiarist of her heart’s raw knowledge and a misunderstood prophet of mind’s insight. She’d consume and rebuild it in flow with command of her artful prose and viscousness of communication in those spaces she’d feel safe.
Less now—as she’d found the spot she’d tie the rope—did Hypatia believe in her own ability to follow through with the plan.
Honor was broken in everything that happened. One terrible happening after next had befallen this world around Hypatia. Nothing would scar her more than the ashes—scrolls unread to be forgotten—the fallen library in which she’d found her home and place to exist as a scholar. Hypatia intended to live inside and be seen forth into the world by that forsaken place until her dying day.
She’d seen its depths. How much it would prove to offer in the times of future, where she might slow down and pour over those wisdoms taught by others. The towering shelves—stacks on stacks of scrolls—leatherbound volumes and tomes—stone tablets painstakingly collected and restored—everything was nothing when it burnt in all for ignorance and fear.
People were afraid to learn how they were wrong. Christians felt that way the most in Alexandria, and they’d chosen to destroy the greatest repository of knowledge which would ever exist on Earth—setting humanity back towards directions unknowable in eras or eons to come.
Hypatia knew this loss as much as any for it was her whole heart which burned in the hatred of blindness. Collections and debated conclusions—forays into myth of legend around the globe—written histories of biography from explorers lost—reflections from history’s great figures—her own works—all singular, gone, forever for nothing.
To be taken in the fallout, while seeking to find some means to live by which her honor might survive without the hope she’d long pinned it to—Hypatia only choosing to help people, and mostly Christians—proved inequal to her honor and of an unacceptable degree to her spirit of consciousness. It broke her towards intentions of chosen death.
Her feelings had been muted by the destruction of her library—the murder of Alexandria’s beating heart—a darkest stamp on the soul of humanity which would echo forward for eras without being learned from in the slightest.
Everyone was worth salvation, though it hadn’t been for this understanding in which Hypatia chose to live. It was for the fact she’d not been dishonored truly by herself once throughout the process of seeking to partake in this city and her unmaking now followed. Everyone saw her dishonorable from the start—something misunderstood most by herself from her youngest years—she’d carried it into reputation of politics in Alexandria—even her closest confidants at the library, her family, all witnessed Hypatia wrong in some fashion.
One had given her hope but lost her faith and scurried from the city to leave her for dead—a fool to fate unearning of place in history—some man without the courage to act. His feelings would not matter, for the action completed in his disregard of the woman he’d been meant to trust and let in for the whole of Alexandria had ultimately been discarded by his own rueful decision.
It was simply too hard for him. She’d not fit with what people expected. Hypatia would not be his wife and steer from the shadows. She’d offered only to be his friend and ally and nemesis and lover or sister. She wished to speak her own in court and never let go that dream. It made him despise her to see how much she saw him a part of the corruption—he’d hated her so much that he’d become it through response, or simply revealed some truth of who he was to begin with.
Honor would be stronger to live—she’d decided. To stand tall. To fight.
Hypatia was a woman—she was a warrior—she was a lover—she was a wisdom keeper—she was a healer and a sister—and she’d seek to change this place again. She would let these people know the truth. It was only themselves who’d been dishonored for what happened to her heart.
They would all get chances to prove themselves worthy of redemption until and beyond her bitter end.
Sand and stars. Earth and Water. All were here in Alexandria at night. Her keep would be made from private and continuously trespassed property near the library.
While Hypatia would stay there most nights, reading into the early hours and making lists of what tomorrow’s studies and plans to write might bring—etching hopes of how she’d better sway policy in governance while finding fury for its ignorance—she’d come here for need. The cosmos was everything.
Each night would teach her again who she was by its gleam. The desert air and ocean’s wind would meet for a peaceful equilibrium only matched by lightness in that dark of the sky itself.
It was the chance to hold a glimpse of its sprawl above and stars beyond by clearest sight—in balance with the moon and ocean—horizons of dune foretelling travels of exploration’s return with knowledge found—that would urge her towards insights of breakthrough.
She was always looking for solutions.
This one taught of heart. She’d go it alone. The time to seek for that council would be lost. Hypatia would leave her seeds to be found in The Great Library of Alexandria—that would be her gift to the world. All of her heart would be placed into its retainment of knowledge and counter-balanced opinion. She would love nothing more than to encourage another towards doing the same themself.
Hypatia knew every voice mattered. She’d changed the library in and of herself. She taught the teachers how to teach. She showed the seers how to see. She learned from any who’d take her hand and tell it true of heart. There’d be no greater gift than friendship with the woman to any who would find themselves able to withstand fruitful splendors of her retained immensity of spirit.
Something about her was different than others. Her life was traumatic and bore holding into her body and mind. She felt earnestly of discouraged conditioning that saw her not to seek in ways that scarred her most—largest of all was that way she’d once been eager to share with people. Still, Hypatia knew it her gift and would fail to relent all the same. She’d fight through it. She would show people what it meant to struggle for healing and honor of self and others the more.
Hypatia wouldn’t let it go. She was shaking inside, and it shook her body sometimes. Shudders took her when facing issues of violence and carnality. Distortions of lie would make her boil and churn to bring rupturing emotional hurt forth. Her eyes could not help but speak. When stress became her the entirety of her body would scream with empathetic pain from her projected psyche.
She needed to be held but gave up long ago in looking to find an equal that might do it for extended periods. Each grasp she’d make with her peers of colleague, and acquaintance or friendship would be appreciated. Yet it was the bigger kind she’d need the most and never seek for, fear of repetitions in being slaughtered by men and women alike, their attempts to seek comfort in arms overnight—some safest human place to weep.
The woman was a loving fool and a kindest mind but a foolish spirit. Her wit was epic and brash and holy. Her flow in dance was reborn while free from societal weight—she’d prove some fairy. She always needed a home to bow her head.
Community with others would be a rarest moment amongst separated few who would find themself unjudging and hopeful to share of earnest spirit with Hypatia. Plague hadn’t served Alexandria well. It separated people into fragments of segregated and urgently separatist hierarchies. She’d be seen the least appealing for choice somehow.
None would be free from burden and Hypatia found herself zeroed out. She didn’t fit anywhere. Even amongst her home—the tomes. Her colleagues judged her for the ways she moved. They saw her unlearned and of distrusted intuition—projections of their manhood’s folly—to condemn the things she wrote as far less true than they were, with their own regurgitative assertions being believed far more important than they ever should have been.
Friends would be her haven. Touch would be her heaven. To be held apart from them her burden of karma too far beyond that earned in life.
Hypatia was a beacon of unwitnessed truth and lie in divine distillation of belief. Matches would only be seen and not found. Broken would be those mechanisms of social integration entirely. She needed people but couldn’t try to search for how it would beat her down again without fail.
Finally done fighting upstream—Hypatia looked to the sea and found again her home in the stars.
Honor was relocated, discovered in the way it took her towards the center of Alexandria—where mobs had come to own the square. She’d held her head despite the broken body which sported it most highly.
The choice to live on and not succumb to darkness of defeated surrender, to live another step after next and seek the hardest to heal through the horror which was clearly before her now—Hypatia had gone into hell itself.
She’d been taken by the hair and dragged. She was shown bare and beheaded. The people cheered when it happened. Everyone clamored for more. Christians throughout Alexandria—even many who were seen as far less than zealots had celebrated—most failed to care at all for they’d not known of that woman they only saw once as a bare-chested whore of Roman unvirtuousness being brought to justice.
Her body would be disposed with the rest. Some great lie of farce to her need for people beside through life.
Those of court would live in hiding through this massacre and politic to keep some place alive through exile or surrender. One would seem to think of the woman he’d left behind most. That unnamable beast of a coward who’d let her down and steered the entirety of her heart’s hope off course. It was his place to stand for her as she would for all and he failed. It would have allowed her to earn her some place of connection with others, leaving her to find a way into the council no matter how her challenging of his ways made him feel.
Hypatia would have saved the city.
He was hurt and petty and confused of the why. He’d discarded Hypatia, thoughts then stolen in taking her works to share with the council his own.
That boy had bought his way to honor she would seek to demoralize outright by her seeing of it falsely bestowing privilege on those undeserving. Nothing was ever personal with her when it came to art and politics, apart from those things of herself she’d share. Her tearing voice of fury which bought her discharge from his grace was the strongest thing a woman could have in any time throughout the history of their planet; a force of ruthless fierceness and compassionate truths.
She’d been even too loud for that boy she loved. It had him turn all of her makings away eventually. Legions of those who might see her as something special would instead know to feel her wrong for how this trauma of being alone would graft viciousness into her language of movement and delving, horrendously delivered speeches.
The future was failed on that man’s choice to let Hypatia go.
Everything broke in his persisted reluctance to save Alexandria by simplest actions that challenged his ego while resonating in the heart. Fate allowed him to escape and live to grow old in travel. He’d see her everywhere. He wouldn’t be able to forget. The honor he’d carry would be stolen from those final notes she’d left him, and that very last which he’d finally read with an open heart.
Hypatia promised to love him still on the other side—where she would be waiting.
