Belne's Love

An alternate universe story with the characters of Belne's Love in the French Revolution. Belne is the Angel of Death, Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just. St. Just was Robespierre's, here played by Gardie, right-hand man in inciting and carrying out the Reign of Terror. Aldow, the painter, appears also as an artist who works in the atelier of the famous Revolutionary painter David. Aldow sees a beautiful boy standing in the crowd by the guillotine and draws him as Hyakinthos, the lover of the god Apollo who was accidentally slain by him and whose blood became the hyacinth flower. Aldow's dilemma is to find a model for the god, and he does: Saint-Just. But this is a different Apollo: not the god of light and literature but the other, older aspect of Apollo, the one who shoots arrows of pestilence and ruin in order to cleanse what is corrupt and filthy.

Another alternate universe story with the main characters of Belne's Love. It happens in a fantasy version of Spain, full of cantadores and toreadores and gypsies and fortune tellers. There are women around, fiery and passionate, but the focus is very much on the men. We have Vicente, the young innocent who frequents a certain café and whose life becomes entangled with that of the other denizens. Jaen, an apparently blind gypsy musician and fortune teller. A.W. (Gardie) a mysterious man in black who is something more than mortal, because his wounds heal at once and his powers of tarot divination are eerie. There's El Aldo (Aldow), a dancer and toreador, with his long blond ponytail. Lastly, there's the flamboyant Juan, who tempts fate by calling himself El Duende (Belne), the demon. Happening in and around the evenings at the café is a ghost story involving Argentina, the Silver One, a woman who appears on moonless nights and dances to the damnation of any man who sees her. El Duende, for unknown reasons, attempts to destroy this ghost.