FIRST EPISODE
Stheno
The way of sisters is more arcane
even
than the ways of gods.
-Erastus of Athens, "The Theater of Sisterhood"
First you must accept that monsters have families.
My mother and father, two ancient sea deities of notorious danger, gave me eight siblings, but we were not raised together. Couldn't be, for we were separated by more than birth order-by our physical shape, our otherworldliness. Human families, by comparison, are so simple. Maybe one child has brown hair, the other blond. Eye color may range over shades of blue. Oh, how mortal parents dramatize these trite differences! Discussing in laborious detail how one learned to walk a whole month before another! Inconceivable!
In my family, some of us had tails.
Deino, Enyo, Pemphredo, Echidna, Ladon, and I share parents, but Medusa and Euryale are my sisters. Just as the Graeae were born together, so were we Gorgons.
We would not be called the Gorgons, however, for many, many years.
My grandparents were primordial beings, the sea and earth themselves, present at the creation of the world. This union between Gaea and her second husband-her own son Pontus-produced my parents. My father, Phorcys, married his sister and female counterpart, Ceto, and all their progeny came to life during the Golden Age of the Titans, well before Zeus was hidden in a mountain cave on Crete and Cronus swallowed the changeling rock.
Yes, I watched Zeus release the monsters of Tartarus and conclude the ten-year campaign against his father, victorious. His lightning bolts became the harbinger of a new era, the Silver Age, where he was lord.
Though well hidden from the fray, I also witnessed the Titans meeting their punishments. Prometheus and the eagle. Atlas and the world. I should have paid closer attention when these so-called Olympians, denizens of the highest mountain, attacked those who wronged them with dogged maliciousness. Maybe then I would have been more prepared for how they treated the rest of us.
On days when I'm especially cynical, I find it almost laughable that I am older than both Poseidon and Athena, who would wreak such havoc upon my life. No respect for elders in the immortal community, I'm afraid. But then again, so much of age is attitude, and it took me far too long to acquire one.
I sound just like my mother. That happens to immortals, too, when we become old.
And I'm getting ahead of myself. I do that sometimes. Time holds little consequence when you occupy forever.
The story of our birth, then.
My mother, Ceto, resided in a watery cave beneath Mount Olympus, connected to her precious seas through endless tunnels and labyrinthine streams. Though my father adored his wife, he did not attend her labor-a messy, menial process, which he considered a female's work. And for reasons inexplicable-both then and now-matters of the womb are unpalatable to masculinity.
I have viewed battlefields covered in unspeakable gore, but I have seen delivery beds far, far worse.
I am extremely old.
At my mother's side stood her first set of triplets, the Graeae, or gray women. Another trio forced to sacrifice their individual identities for group nomenclature. Born with gray hair and skin, Deino, Enyo, and Pemphredo shared one detachable eye and tooth. I never found them ugly, despite that deficiency. Their gray faces were more interesting than unpleasant, and unlike my sisters and me, the Graeae had a gift: the modest ability for prophesy, to guide those who wander or are lost.
Though if they ever deigned to advise us in those early days, we certainly didn't listen.
When Ceto's contractions commenced, my mother summoned Doris, the wife of her other brother, Nereus, for Doris bore the nearly fifty Nereids and thus had plenty of experience with labor.
Still, complications arose.
I emerged first, en caul-within the protective sac indicative of my immortality. My aunt ruptured the bubble and released me, red-faced and stoic, upon the world. Doris smacked my bottom with her aquamarine hand to summon tears, but I refused to cry. I frowned at her repeated efforts, bringing Ceto great felicity.
"This one will be unforgiving!" she laughed between bites, for our mother ate the caul of all her immortal children. With jelly dripping from the corners of her mouth, Ceto named me Stheno, for she knew, even then, that I would be strong.
Euryale followed moments later, screaming incessantly-even within the bloody veil-demanding attention with her first breath. Another family might have greeted her with the affection she so obviously needed, but our callous community only grimaced.
"Make it stop," muttered Deino, no doubt wishing she also shared a retractable ear.
Though separated by mere heartbeats, Euryale would always be my younger sister. We had to organize ourselves somehow; all living beings crave hierarchy, and we were no exception.
"How do they look?" our mother asked, straining to see her new daughters as her older ones performed the rites of delivery, washing and swaddling.
"Ordinary," answered Pemphredo on a sigh.
"Fins? Fangs?"
"None."
"Talons?" wondered Ceto, riding a hope.
"Not even a sharp nail. Ten fingers, ten toes. Two eyes."
Ceto snorted, then winced as she clutched her lower abdomen. "Doris! I feel another!"
This last baby, however, refused to drop.
"It is breech, I think," worried Doris, removing red hands from my mother's birth canal and pushing green hair out of her eyes with a forearm. "I felt a foot."
"Then go in and grab it!" hissed Mother, gnashing her razor-sharp teeth. Ceto wasn't only the goddess of the largest sea creatures, but also the most lethal ones. "The little demon is destroying me!"
Poor Doris shoved an entire arm's length into my mother's belly, grabbed the baby's leg, and yanked. When Doris would later recount the story, she claimed the din of my mother's shrieks blurred the boundary between life and death.
The babe, however, arrived in this world the same way she would leave it.
Voiceless.
She was small and bluish with a shock of dark hair and no caul. A serpentine umbilical cord coiled lethally about her head and neck.
A being born in conflict with itself, choked by its own lifeline.
"Dead," murmured Doris, with greater surprise than sadness. For my kind, death is more a novelty than an emotional experience. Most of us lack the requisite empathy. Soft hearts aren't meant to last forever; it is why immortals grow selfish and cold.
Yet Doris was softer than most, and she held the lifeless babe gently while untangling the cord.
"What a shame," she lamented. "Three would have been a nice number."
Pemphredo, commanding the communal eye, ran a hard look over the cradled corpse, crown to toe, and her lips tightened. She snatched the tiny baby from Doris's arms and tossed it into the abyss. Doris yelped.
"Daughter!" upbraided our mother, slamming fists against the miry stones of her cavern. "I would have liked to see it before you fed my beasts!"
Pemphredo shrugged, for she was not inclined to apology. There had been an ominous aura to my youngest sister, and Pemphredo felt only respite to be rid of the pernicious little presence. Besides, our kind did not romanticize babies. You had to be strong to survive in such a world, and this one was clearly weak.
"You really are vicious," remarked Ceto with some admiration, exonerating Pemphredo's transgression. "Show me the other two, at least."
Deino and Enyo brought Euryale and me into the moonbeams that descended from the cave's natural skylights, casting our neonatal features in an opaline glow.
"They are common."
A failure.
Later, we would be called "human form." No physical deformities, no aberrations of color. We were my parents' most conventionally beautiful offspring-cherubic, even-and, thus, their least impressive.
"They are lovely," corrected Doris, overcompensating. "And their eyes are so unusual!"
"Indeed," Ceto responded sadly, inspecting the four miniscule orbs staring up at her expectantly. Mine were red ocher and Euryale's shone amber. Our mother gave them half a breath of consideration-and tried to find some satisfaction-when the tunnels began to shake, rattling loose stones and dirt from the walls. "Stitch me up, Doris, my husband comes!"
Our brief chance at being special come and gone.
Pemphredo threw the remains of afterbirth to my mother's white-bellied shark, who lingered in a nearby pool, while Doris rinsed and tidied my mother's lower half. Ceto, already beginning to heal, prepared herself for the arrival of my father in his seal-led chariot.
"Bring them to me!" she ordered, flapping her arms impatiently.
Deino and Enyo dutifully-blindly-passed us to our mother, who quickly assembled a maternal tableau: a babe propped in the bend of each scaly arm, her own head tilted downward in a vain attempt at demure. However, to Ceto's disappointment, it wasn't Phorcys emerging from the quaking subterranean depths, but rather, my other sister, the she-dragon Echidna.
Half speckled serpent, half maiden, Echidna was-at that time-my parents' most prolific issue. She resided in the fetid, slimy waters of the most arcane depths below the earth. With her monstrous storm-giant consort, Typhon, Echidna birthed some of the most profligate abominations on land or sea: the Hydra, Cerberus, the Chimera, and the Sphinx.
Ceto respected nobody, but Echidna at least commanded my mother's attention.
And at that moment, Echidna made quite the entrance, heaving with anger, the disposed baby pressed tightly against her chest.
"Who did this?" Echidna demanded, seething, her black eyes darting between Doris, Ceto, and the Graeae.
"I did," responded Pemphredo, insouciant as always. I would later nickname her the Wasp, for she seemed both free of fear and full of sting.
"We did," corrected the other two Graeae, in unison, for it was innately understood-even then-that our family's triplets elicited collective punishment.
"I understand your vision is limited, gray sisters, but your one eye fails you. This infant lives and breathes."
Our mother gasped-I imagine with some amusement. "Pemphredo, you wretch! Hand her to me, Echidna! Now."
Of course, I hold no natural memory of this day, but each time Doris recounted it later, she would pause at this part-linger on the lone heartfelt moment-for Echidna did not want to release the baby. Connections form quickly in my world. Love can be found at first sight and enmity even earlier. The bond between Echidna and my youngest sister was adamantine, instantaneous. Only reluctantly, and with much haggling, did she surrender the child to her rightful mother.
Many times, I have wondered how the trajectory of our lives might have curved if Echidna refused-even if she kept only the one of us. Are we so attached to our fates? To our catastrophes?
Echidna, after all, would suffer so much more than she deserved.
My mother blew her salty breath into the little face, and the baby's eyelids parted, revealing eyes as green as peridot.
"She is different, somehow," Ceto noted, comparing the salvaged babe to my other sister and me. "This one is changed, in a way I can't describe."
"She is mortal," Echidna claimed. "Her immortality was stillborn."
"Unusual," murmured Ceto.
"But possible," added Deino, yielding the wisdom of the eye. "She was not en caul. She will die."
"Of old age. Or sickness," elaborated Enyo.
"Or murder," finished Pemphredo.
"You see her future?"
"Not clearly," Deino replied. "We cannot tell how she will leave this world."
"Or when."
"But she will leave it? You are certain?"
Pemphredo nodded. "Kill the baby now. It will be a mercy." It was an argument born of the most abject pragmatism, and echoed by the other Graeae.
"What can a life mean for one who will die among those who cannot?" wondered Enyo.
"This babe will always be at risk," reasoned Deino. "It will be unfair to the other two sisters, futile, like yoking them to a broken plow."
Ceto deliberated. She operated within her two natures, made manifest in the twin leviathans flanking her at all times. Sometimes she was a whale, tribal and sage. At other times she was a lone shark. Bite first before you are eaten.
"Your daughter lives," contended Echidna. "Infanticide, especially within a family, is an act of great darkness. An anathema, even among our kind."
Ceto pursed her lips. "And what does Nereus's wife think? Do you side with my gray children or my sea dragon?"
Doris shook her head, wisely abstaining from the family's division. "All your children offer cogent counsel, but you are the mother. It is your choice."
Echidna, intrepid and fervent, locked eyes with Ceto. "As such, you will bear the punishment."
It must have been quite a sight: two monsters, mother and child, engaged in a war of wills.
"If you do not make your claim," finished Echidna, "I will keep her."
And it was this statement that spared my sister from becoming chum. I suspect my mother made the decision mostly out of intrigue: What was it about this divisive baby that inspired Echidna's advocacy, her attachment?
"I will acknowledge this mortal, who is somehow a product of me and my brother-husband." Ceto laid us babies upon a bed of woven seaweed, and we squirmed into our familiar positions. Reunited by touch and feel. "Whether she be an honor or a curse, let none of you harm her." And Ceto flicked her wrist, decree delivered.
Echidna lowered her head, as pleased as the Graeae were jealous and Doris was eager to leave.
"What will you call them?"
"Stheno," Ceto began, like the opening of an invocation, as she touched our brows. "Euryale."
And she paused, lingering on the third infant-the babe who almost wasn't. Ceto bared her teeth. "And the little queen."
Pemphredo scoffed.
Then Ceto whispered the name that would become lore when it was still only a name, nothing more.
"Medusa."
Copyright © 2023 by Lauren J. A. Bear. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
