CIRCE

Her heads squealed and bucked, as if trying to haul it back up again. But it only sank further, as inexorably as if it were weighted with stones. I could see now the beginnings of her legs, those twelve monstrous tentacles stretching away from her body into the mist. She kept them hidden always, Hermes had told me, coiled in the cave among the bone

I was seeing before me again that rocky mass that had been Scylla. She was gone, truly gone. For the first time in centuries, I was not lashed to that flood of misery and grief. No more souls would walk to the underworld written with my name.

The flowers could do nothing to him. He was himself already. I would not see a hair changed.

A Room of One’s Own,

This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun.

Then the darkness parted, and he came. Huge he was, white and gray, burned onto the depths like an afterimage of the sun. His silent wings rippled, rills of current flowing off their tips. His eyes were thin and slitted like a cat’s, his mouth a bloodless slash. I stared. When I had stepped into the water, I had told myself that this would be only

I had said I would do anything for him, and now I would prove it and hold up the sky.

The slit of his mouth opened in silent laughter. What could you have that I want?

“Still,” I said, “I must try. For my son.” It is impossible.