Ariadne

by Jennifer Saint

Gods might enjoy mortal skill in hunting or music or weaving, but they were always alert to hubris—and woe betide a human whose skills came close to those of the divine.

What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.

It did not feel momentous, yet when I tore my eyes away from his, I found that nothing looked quite the same, as though the world had fractured and sheared away from itself to reshape in almost—but not quite—the same formation. As though I had looked at a waterfall and realized with a faint jolt that the water flowing over the rock was ever-changing, that it would never be the same water again.

“Does she grieve the beast?” he asked. “Or with its death, does she grieve what it represented? What was done to her all those years ago, that so scattered her mind, perhaps now it is ended she can afford to mourn it?”

I had thought he brought salvation with him. Instead he had traded my existing bondage for another.

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.”

I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness, and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze.”

I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.