You don’t know much, but you do know this: you’re two snakes and you’re here to kill this baby.

Simple. In and out and back to wherever two snakes go in time to do whatever you want, you marvelous pair of murder worms, you. The baby is asleep and there’s even an extra baby so maybe you’ll get a little bonus for going above and beyond. You are two pairs of snakes and you are pumped.

Only. Well. Look, mistakes were made, you didn’t have the complete picture, certain key facts were left out of the briefing you didn’t get. When the baby you are totally jazzed to strangle wakes up and throttles you to death with his pudgy hands, you feel hard done by. Used, even. Just the first bump on some wailing asshole’s heroic journey.

You didn’t know much, but you did know this: you were two snakes and you still had so much to give the world.

“Abimelech asked, would it not be better to be ruled by one man, rather than seventy? Remember that I am your blood, your brother, your son.”

When the younger gods fought amongst themselves, turned knives and teeth against their children, I took pity on the oldest and hid her away in the far reaches of my kingdom where ever the light cannot reach. I taught her the oldest ways, the language that can only be spoken in the darkness, the spells that brought motion to an unmoving world.

Both of us were built for love, and loyalty, but even then her future pressed down upon her like so many atmospheres of water. Constancy itself, she would never find constancy, nor in shape nor mood, but find herself exiled among the rivers of the air, the mutable, everchanging tides of the heavens. Married now to a man, now to a bull, now to a flicker of gold, she will learn to change herself, into smaller things, flies that bite, eyes that peep from a feather’s end.

We took her in, as I said, my man and I, and gave her safety, a bed, the knowledge we had. Time, most of all: time after her double wombing, time before marriage taught her petulance, time to be herself, to be alone, to owe no one nothing and be owed nothing in return. We had space; no greater kingdom save the earth itself, no less need than the night that came before and will follow after. We had many daughters, and she, Queen of the Gods, was but one among them.

We would never have been friends.

Different worlds, different expectations, how should we have crossed that gap? History and tradition are wider than any winedark sea.

Still: we might not have been enemies. What was he to me, or I to him, beyond the convenience of a moment’s politicking? A marriage against a civil war, no more, and such things are as honored in the breach as in the observance; swear us safe and powerful and i would as liefer lived my own life as live hers.

I cannot find it in me to fault her, even now. Did she not do as much or worse for his weal? Was it not his place to weigh costs and futures? He claimed a throne; what were we but kingdoms?

We would never have been friends, but we might have been more than sisters. Now, past burning, I can see her rage, value her fury: were things different, I might have done the same. But nothing is more damning than what need not have been. Sister mine, Medea, these men have turned us one against the other; your only sin was their success!

The city was raw as a scraped knee when the strangers came, pleading to be let in. They were trouble, innocent trouble, and I told him so: safer to camp in the hills overlooking the plain, and I told them so, but he knew what was right and took them in regardless. Here where we live piled one upon the other there was no hope of privacy, and nowhere to run. “You risk their lives with this kindness,” I said, “and ours.” But he took them in regardless.

Salt, he said, bring them salt, and I brought what we had, enough for the four of us in our humility but not for honored guests. Bring more, he said; have faith, he said; the Lord will provide, he said. “There is no more salt,” I said. “You see it all there before you,” I said. Go you and find some, he said, so full of generosity, so what could I do but go and beg from our neighbors? And thus the secret spread, as I knew it must.

The rest you know: the city swarmed up like a kicked anthill, and he offered us over to their jaws, to no avail and no credit. We fled for our lives, into the hills overlooking the plain, for safety, for safety. “I told you so,” I said. Don’t look back, he said; doom comes in remembering.

got away from him. Even that moment of anticlimax does not, cannot, exist. The hill starts to fall away into the sky, he starts to hope, in spite of himself, that this time is different, that he’s finally worked enough, strived enough, that he’s beaten them, that he’s won, and then—

There is no gap, no irritated, weary trudge down the hill. Too chaotic by far, that, too much chance for the boulder to build up speed, to escape. So, instead: he is merely mid-stride, lungs and legs already half-jelly, shoulder and neck pressed against the uneven surface of the rock, at the bottom of the hill, looking up, that half-moment of triumph still ringing in his ears.

He can’t be sure that he has done this before, that this isn’t the first time he’s set himself against the hill, the boulder, the gods. Time is slippery, here; the light never changes, the asphodel never crumples beneath him, the boulder never wears a track into the hip of the hillside. Memory is clear, clear and perfect, and the sentence laid upon him as fresh as yesterday.

Let him be perfectly clear: the boulder never