Here, The World Entire

by Anwen Kya Hayward

"Who are you?" the voice calls back. To answer is to condemn him along with myself, and so I don't. I hear a long, silver sound, a sword being sheathed. "I don't want to hurt you either," he says into the silence. "I want to help you."

He believes it, I know. He believes that I am in danger, that the terror fabled to haunt these caves is close, that its terrible power has me in its grasp. In a way, he's not wrong.

I am not in danger. I am danger. I am closer than he thinks. He is not safe from me as long as he is here. Each of us threatens to unma...

He speaks again. "Tell me who you are!" I hear him take another step, and I recoil. "Please don't come any closer," I beg. "You'll die!"

Silence: I am the monster. He knows I am not to be saved. His steps stop. "I thought you said you didn't want to hurt me?"

He is so brave, and I am so afraid of hurting him. Of him dying – not at my hand, but at my entire self...

"I don't. Please, please, go back outside and I'll speak to you from here. Whatever you've come for – it's yours....

After a moment I hear the man withdraw, and I release a breath I hadn't known that I was holding. "Thank you," I say. When I can tell that he's retreated to a safe distance, I inch forward.

Not close enough to see or be seen, or to remove the shroud of total darkness that the cave has granted me, but close enough to feel as though we inhabit the same space.

"You know who I am, don't you? You must have known to come here." He says...

Call me a monster, I think. Give me a name of your own. I have been called so many things over the centuries. Sometimes I forget which names have been given and which have been taken.

Monster-goddess-Photine. I am that which you say I am. Let me be the monster.

He does not give me a name of my own at all. The name he gives me is not mine...

I wait for what feels like hours, but may only be minutes. I've long been unable to tell the difference. I want him to go. It feels uneasy, this proximity. I haven't been this near someone in so long, and for good reason.

His presence puts me on edge. I feel as though I am walking along the blade of a sword, teetering.

If he is to stay, then I need to know why. If I know why he is here, why he has come, then I can close off his path now. I can tell him that I can't, and I can send...

"That's the thing about being conquered, isn't it? You can choose to identify as something more powerful, if you want to."

It's easy, talking with him. I haven't spoken to anyone like this in as long as I can remember. Certainly not since I was given this body. I'm not sure whether or not this easiness is real, or whether it is a symptom of loneliness.

I think of my mother, who would speak of her life to strangers in the street, would wait in her doorway and call passers-by to listen to her stories.

My mother slept alone. I crawled into her bed once, when I was small and afraid of the dark, and she sent me away. As though pretending that her loneliness w...

And I cannot say anything. I cannot tell him, because my world is not his. I have allowed myself to pretend momentarily that I am not enisled. To forget that I am here because I have to be. That there is a barrier to be crossed, and it must not be crossed.

I pledged my services to the gods when I was a child. I chose Athena. My mother begged me not to leave her.

If I had to leave, she said, I should devote myself to Aphrodite instead, but I had heard tales of how Aphrodite dealt with beautiful girls, and I knew how I looked. I couldn't bring myself to enter the service of a goddess who might make me suffer. No amount of devotion could make that sort of life worthwhile.

My mother hated my choice. Athena was a goddess of men, she said. Athena, with her armour and her battle cries, her tongue that sought to rival men's, her patronage of heroes and cities - she was barely eve...

My mother had two other daughters who now lived with her own mother three villages away, each daughter by a man she had never wanted to lie with, and I wondered how my mother could promise to keep me safe at all when she had been in so much danger all her life.

I lived in the house of Athena until I bled for the first time, and then his name.

"I do remember that she was beautiful," he says, wistful. "Perhaps that's what killed her in the end."

I want to tell him that I know too well the burden of being a beautiful woman in a world full of angry men, but I don't. I want to tell him a great many things, but I don't. There are things that must not be said.

Again, the attempt at turning the world towards me. I wonder what would have happened if I had met Perseus years ago, when my hair was still golden and I still had suitors waiting outside the temple gates, desperate to catch a glimpse of me.

A glimpse I could deny them easily and without consequence. I wonder what Perseus would have seen. If I could have ever lived in a world with him in it.

Athena sent me." The world ends, for a moment. "Then I can't help you," I hiss. "I won't."

"She told me what she did," he says. "I know what happened to you. What she did. I know why you're angry, but she says that it was a punishment," he continues, half gabbling in his attempt at explaining himself. "That you did something wrong. You desecrated her temple."

My body on the temple floor. My dress torn above my hips. Calling out to Athena please understand what his...

"And you believe her?" I'm surprised at how venomous I sound, ev...

"I don't know. I did. Then I met you." A pause for gathering thoughts. "I'm not here on her behalf, you know. I'm not here to help her. She told me to co...

I can't help laughing at that. "Help you to do what? How? I'm help...

There's a long silence before he answers. I remember the last time I saw Athena, as I lay on the temple floor. She was the last thing I saw before I stopped living. I remember how grateful I had been to see her, thinking that she wou...

felt like nothing could hurt me there. Everything here was primordial, incipient. The chaos before all things. Formless and taking all forms. Life had barely touched here, and death was still an unknown.

remember that the sea itself looked living as I stripped myself free from my dress and stepped into the shallows. My hair fanning out around me like seaweed. The water inky and black below, and always changing.

All over my skin. Awash with it. Made anew. This was what I had wanted. All those years watching from a distance, not knowing, and now I knew. We weren't strangers any more, the sea and I. It was remaking me. Sand between my toes, carrying the seabed with me as I stole away. Salt drying into my hair as I made the ha...

The world not even noticing that I was gone. Knowing how it felt to be in the world again, knowing how the world was, and withdrawing. Aching for it.

"I wouldn't let that happen," he says. "I wouldn't let you hide yourself away again."

My heart beats. I notice it. "And how woul...

"Well," he says, slowly. "I see no reason that we couldn't be friends, after. We could keep our eyes closed, or meet in darkness, or cover ourselves. I don't know. We would find a way. I'm not leaving you here afterwards, Medusa. I've told you about me, and I want you ...

About begging Athena please take his name away from me and the silence that followed, the minutes between the silence falling and the curse taking hold. About my statues, lined up at the cave's entrance, warning men to stay away. About Perseus finding me anyway, and staying.

About leaving.

The living wait outside, and I am within and without. I hold death's glare in my gaze, and I am powerless.

There is a periphery between seeing and being seen which I dare not cross. To behold is to be held, and my hands are empty. For fear of being seen, I have never looked.

Always, her name is light.