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Calypso was alone again.
She had spent enough of her life stranded on an island that she could not break away from that she should have come back to the feeling with open arms, but she found that she just couldn’t do that anymore. She knew what it was like to live in the proximity of another person, even if Odysseus had hated her with a passion that she hadn’t been able to understand in the slightest. It had been so wonderful to be able to see another living being that thought and felt on the same wavelength of her instead of trying to make one-sided conversation with the animals that inhabited the island alongside her.
She had long since watched him disappear into the waves on the raft that they had made for him. Hearing Hermes tell her that Odysseus was allowed to leave and return to civilization and her family when she had never been given the same privilege hurt almost as much as the realization that the promise she would be visited was a lie.
Calypso didn’t know how long she had been standing on the shore of her island, but she would stay there for as long as she needed to. Something deep inside of her was hoping that if she stayed there for long enough, then the love of her life would return to her like she had hoped. She knew that Odysseus would prefer to be with his wife and son, he had told her as much every time that she had tried to do something nice for him, but he was the only person that she had ever known. She wanted to hold him and have him hold her in return, like she had seen her mother and father do. He had always panicked when she had crawled into the bed in the cave with him, but she had never understood why. All Calypso knew was that when two people cared very deeply for each other or were very powerful and needed to share that power to protect themselves, they got married and married people slept together in the same bed.
Her mind was constantly consumed with Odysseus and what he might have been doing as her island bobbed and floated through the sea. The land mass was large enough that she wasn’t able to feel the motion, but she knew that she was moving because of what she could see on the far distant horizon and the way that the stars above her head shifted.
Eventually, she knew that she had to move on with her life. Her feet ached from the sand turning hard and packed down beneath them, her stomach grumbled with a need for food since she had spent many days and nights without anything other than a sob pushing past her mouth.
She stepped forward and then just couldn’t stop until she had walked into the sea. The rapids around the island were grabbing at her and trying to force her back onto the shore. She had tried this many times before, she had even tried to let the rolling waves beneath the surface drag her further and further under until there was no air for her to pull into her lungs. It was clear that the tides around her island dragged it around so that it was harder for people to find her and served a dual purpose of keeping her on her island, and alive.
Calypso pushed and pushed at the waves as she tried to get further away from the place where she had been held captive for the most of the life that she remembered. She just wanted to be free, she wanted to be able to talk to other people and experience all the things that Odysseus had told her about during the good days where he could stand to be around her.
It was to no avail and she was soon washed up back on the shore. She beat her fists against the sand and screamed at an uncaring sky, desperately hoping that one of the gods would come down just to tell her to be quiet. Maybe then she would be able to grab one of the feathers from Hermes’ winged shoes and use it to get just far enough away from her island that she would be free.
She didn’t want to be here again. She didn’t want to be alone, toiling away her days by refining the small magicks that she had already known how to use when she was a child and weaving more elaborate tapestries than any mortal would be able to do in their short lives. She wanted to be able to talk to someone, to care for them like a woman should, and to be judged or held or whatever another person wanted to do to her.
Another night and day cycle passed before the island began to slow, narrowly avoiding two massive cliffs and the being that existed at the top. Calypso stared heavenward to where she could see the black, undulating shape peaking out from the cave at the top of the cliff. She rose to her feet as she tried to reach for it with nothing more than her hand.
Odysseus had spoken of the beasts that he’d had to fight before he was banished to her island as his punishment for killing the Sacred Cattle of the Sun God. He had told her of the men he had sacrificed with six burning torches to a being that was cursed, full of monstrous heads and a voice that could permeate directly into one’s mind.
Just as she had thought it would, one of the heads darted down from the cliff towards her. She felt it touch her hand before a searing pain radiated down her arm, needle-like teeth digging into the flesh of her arm. She chose not to pay attention to the hot ichor that was leaking towards her shoulder and instead yanked as hard as she could.
Calypso yanked her hand back with all the ferocity and strength that she could muster. She had not eaten or drank anything in days and she had just been half drowned by the tides that kept her chained to her island. Still, she knew that there was a being at the top of those cliffs and she was determined to not be alone again.
She didn’t care if the monster that she was dragging towards her sanctuary ended up trying to kill her or could barely speak in full sentences. Companionship was companionship, and an attacker would be more interesting than the days that she spent all on her own. She pulled and pulled until her muscles ached and there was nothing but anger left inside of her.
The goddess gripped that feeling as tightly as she could and then used it as fuel to continue her fight. She screamed until he throat hurt, until the birds on her island had taken flight to get to the furthest reaches away from her where they could be safe, and it had multiplied the strength inside of her by four times.
Suddenly, whatever had been keeping the being chained to the top of the cliff broke free and sent it tumbling down towards the ground. She hurried backwards as quickly as her legs would take her and then stumbled so that she skidded backwards in the packed sand and left an indentation in her wake.
A resounded boom scattered more sand than she knew the entire beach contained into every direction imaginable. The beast that she had pulled down from the top of the cliffs had six heads that were connected to very long necks, one of which still had its long teeth dug into her flesh. The skin on the necks and heads was somehow both furry and scaly as it crept back into the main body. There was something that looked like a mortal woman from the waist up. Downward, the body was a seething mass of tentacles and other appendages that were too grotesque to look at for longer than a couple of seconds.
The woman was beautiful, though. Her mouth stretched a bit too far and her eyes were just a bit too wide, warped by the monstrousness that had encased her when she had enraged whatever god had decided to turn her into the beast. She had a shock of black hair that fell in front of her face and then down long behind her back until it melted into the monster part of her body. Her skin was pale from the lack of sunlight that her lifetime in a cave had caused, but the undertone was what Odysseus had had.
Calypso slowly rose to her feet, still ignoring the head that was trying to tear pieces of her flesh from her body. It wouldn’t work, she knew that it wouldn’t. There was no way to kill her when she was on her island because it was her sacred land, and the gods wanted to keep her alive for as long as they could to continue to torture her. She tread forward nervously, unsure what the reaction of the woman was going to be when she became aware of what had happened to her.
Eventually, the beast looked up at her with glowing amber eyes. “Hello there,” it purred directly into her mind. She had heard gods do that to her before, her own father had been very fond of doing that after he had been defeated but before the war was over. This was so much different than those had been.
The words crept up the base of her spine and then curled into each other inside of her mind, making their home there. It wasn’t the ethereal and sacred speech that she had grown used to from the deities that she had once called her friends. This was something wrong, bastardized, and so addicting that she never wanted to let it go.
“Hello,” Calypso replied. She could feel the tendrils of magic from the being in front of her already reaching out through the air and the ground to encase her. The beast wanted to lull her into a sense of eerie calm so that she would be easier to consume and devour. She was not a mortal, she could not be lulled into anything, but it did give her a clue as to what was going on.
When Odysseus had come to her island, he had been encased in more types of magic than she had known existed in the entire world. There had been that of his past patron, which was so deeply embedded into his system that it wasn’t a shock to her when she heard how wrong his life had turned after their fight. There had been a curse from the god of the seas, which was the last magic that she had picked up on because it was so familiar to her that it was hard to recognize as something that needed to be registered. There had been a few more blessings and curses from other gods, like Hermes and Zeus, but there was a magic that felt very unfamiliar to her.
Circe, the enchantress that had once seduced Hermes and called men to her island only to turn them into pigs for the slaughter, had blessed Odysseus on his journey. He told her that he had passed a test by mentioning Poseidon and refusing to sleep with her, which had been the story that taught her about what married couples actually did when they were in bed together.
The magic then had felt similar to the way that the magic on this beast felt to her now. Instead of being smooth and forgiving, pliable in a strange sense, it felt sharp and jagged. This was not the blessing that her beloved King of Ithaca had received, it was a curse. It wrapped around the woman that was poking out from the head of a beast like the ivy that choked out some of the trees in the forests that decorated the top of her island.
Calypso sat down on the sandy beach that they had landed on and took the head of the monster into her hand. “You’re not so scary,” she murmured. She hooked the edge of her finger underneath the gums and then pulled so that it was forced to release the hold that it had on her arm and she could move freely again. She didn’t blame the beast for biting her when she knew the kind of magical hunger that it had been imbued with, nothing would ever be enough to fill the gaping pit that had been placed in its stomach.
Once the monster was no longer biting her, she placed her hand on either side of the scaled-furred head and placed it down in her lap. She ran her fingers through the fringe on the top of the beast’s head and then began to sing gently. She didn’t know what the words she was saying meant, it was part of the old language that her parents had never gotten a chance to speak to her. She knew that it was a lullaby of some kind, the one that her mother would sing to her when the fighting outside of their door began to get too intense to ignore easily.
She wove magic into the words that were spilling through her lips. She wanted the beast in her lap to stop thrashing and to calm so that she could unweave the briars of magic that were digging into its flesh. It was the only way that it and the woman would be free of the curse that had been placed upon them.
A more naive person would have assumed that the curse was for a good reason instead of being for something flippant and not worthy of a lifetime of torment, but Calypso was living her own version of it in that very moment. She knew that the woman had very likely spited the gods by not doing what they wanted from her in a timely fashion or the secret way that they wanted. She was going to help this monster the way that she wished someone would have come and helped her. If she could not be saved herself, then she would save as many people as crossed her path as possible.
By the time that the song was over, the magic had woven deep into the curse that was placed over the head in her lap. She was able to wrap her hands around the invisible strands and pull with all her might. Her muscles ached from the literal pulling that she had done to get the beast down onto her island, but she very easily ignored it and continued with her movements.
Finally, finally, the magic that was wrapped around the beast’s head broke free and left something else entirely in her lap. She had seen an animal like this before in one of the paintings that Odysseus had made on the cliffs near their bathing pond and then remembered the name. The dog had short ears that flopped down near the edges of its head, its mar slightly open so that the sharp teeth it had for tearing and attacking were on display. The fur was just as black as it had been when it was part of the monster she had pulled from the cliff.
The dog slowly moved onto its feet, shaking slightly. It let out a soft yip, as if testing the voice that it had regained now that the spell on it had been broken. Calypso smiled when she began to yip and bark more, telling Calypso all about what had happened to her.
She didn’t know much about who had cast the spell or why it had happened, but she remembered the feeling and the hunger that had consumed her full force. The goddess was glad that she had been able to retain her ability to speak with beings who did not say things in the same language as she did. Calypso cradled the dog’s face in her hands and kissed the top of her short-haired head to reassure her that she was okay. Laika knelt down next to her for a moment before she rushed off to play in the waves and sand, something that she had loved to do before she had been cursed and something that she had not been able to do since.
Calypso had more work to do and turned back to the beast. She was able to catch each of the five remaining heads and do to them what she had done to Laika. There were two more dogs, a snake, and a pair of hunting falcons. It explained why the coating of the heads had been a mix of scales, feathers, and fur, once she had gotten them all free. The birds rushed off to soar and spread their wings on the crisp ocean air with a promise that they would return soon. The three dogs played with each other and ran as fast as their stiff legs would let them. The snake curled around Calypso to thank her for what she had done for it, before it disappeared into the undergrowth of the jungle so that it could do whatever it was that snakes did with their time.
The last thing that she had to do was finish getting the woman out from the gasps of the curse. It was all centered around her, it had simply taken the animals that had been near her and then wrapped them up in the messy magic. The goddess may not have been exposed to a lot of the modern magic that the gods used, but she knew a curse that was fueled by raw emotion instead of critical thought when she saw it.
Calypso knelt down in front of the woman, who was still spitting and speaking unimaginably terrible things directly into her mind. She was more than used to that by now since Odysseus had spent pretty much his entire time on the island telling Calypso how much he hated her and how much he wished that he could be quite literally anywhere else.
She placed both of her hands down onto the monster and then let out a slow breath. She focused her magic on the weavings that still encased the woman and began to undo them. It was as simple as finding the ends of the twine and pulling them so that the entire thing came unraveled, just like when something that she had spun got too messed up to weave into fabric.
“You’re alright,” Calypso reminded the woman as she continued to undo each bit of the curse that had tied her up for an unknown amount of time.
When it was finally done, the woman underneath the curse was revealed to her in all of her beauty. Her hair was chestnut brown and naturally curled so that it fell into ringlets around her face. Her skin was creamy with lack of sun, but it had the same warm undertones that every other mortal’s had when they were from this part of the world. Her face was delicate with sharp cheekbones and jaw, but cherry-red cheeks and full black eyelashes. Her eyes were almost black they were so brown, deep and rich in a way that sucked Calypso right into them.
“Thank you,” the woman whispered. She was shaking with the effort that the curse had taken on her body, but the anger and fear that she’d had before were all gone. “Thank you so much.”
“It was my pleasure,” Calypso said softly. She traced her fingers over the side of the woman’s face and then asked, “Can you tell me your name?”
“Scylla, they called me Scylla both when I was a monster and when I was a human,” she replied. Her eyes fluttered before she collapsed forward onto the goddess. The curse, and the subsequent breaking of it that Calypso had done, had worn her out to the point where she could no longer keep herself awake.
That was fine by her. She lifted the woman and brought her back to the cave so that she could sleep on something that wasn’t the sand.
---
Over the next few days, she did the same thing for Scylla that she had done for Odysseus. She washed the sand off of her first, then dressed her in a fresh chiton and comfortable underclothes. There were two beds in the cave, since she had made another one for Odysseus after finding out what he had always expected to happen when they slept beside each other, so Scylla got the one that was more plush and comfortable than the other.
It was far easier to do her regular chores when she knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, at least for a time. She knew that she had been sent away onto an island where no one could find her and only permitted to have a guest because she was a terrible person to be around and she made those that she cared for absolutely miserable. Scylla had been through far more than her fair share of things, so she hoped that when the woman woke up she would be able to recover quickly so that the gods could send her on the journey back to wherever it was that she had come from.
It had been about a week by the time that Scylla woke up for more than a couple of minutes. Calypso had been just outside of the cave entrance at her cooking fire while she prepared some soup for dinner. She had scoured the ocean for seaweed until she had enough of it to make a very nourishing soup. It wasn’t something that her last guest had ever liked when he was recovering from his own wound, but she was kind of hoping that things would be different with her new guest.
She heard stirring inside and so dumped a ladle full into the bowl in her hand before she entered back into the cave. “Welcome back to the land of the waking,” she said softly. “My name is Calypso, I’m the goddess that maintains this island and all the life within it. I brought you down from the cliffs when I heard your voice, you sounded like you were in pain.”
“I was, I was in such horrible pain,” Scylla whispered. It was as if she were scared that if she said it too loudly, someone or something would hear her and hurt her for her disobedience and defiance. Calypso knew the feeling, she had rarely even spoken of the gods or what had brought her to the island right after her banishment because she was worried it would extend her sentence.
She no longer cared about that, she knew that she was never getting free of the damned place and she might as well let her anger free. It was going to eat her inside otherwise. “You never should have gone through something like that,” she shook her head. “I’m sorry that you did. Hopefully another one of the gods will come to get you soon. It’s what happened with the last visitor that I had on this island, so I’m sure that the same will happen for you.”
Instead of looking joyous that she would get to return to the mainland and whatever life she had dreamed for herself, the woman wilted slightly. “Right, of course. I’m sure that there’s a family out there that would be willing to take me in until I can devote myself to a temple. Do you know of any goddesses that are looking for a priestess?”
“I don’t. I’ve never been to the mainland,” Calypso shook her head.
“What about you?” Scylla asked as she shifted on the bed so that she was sitting a bit forward. “Does anyone within your temple need an assistant?”
“I have no followers,” Calypso shook her head. She used the term goddess loosely when she was defining herself. She was a daughter of the titans like the Olympians and many of the other gods were, but she had no one that asked her for favors or followed her like she bestow blessings on them. She only had the magic that her island needed from her because she kept the flora and fauna of her prison thriving in the only way that she could.
“Well that simply won’t do at all!” Scylla gasped. “You are such a kind goddess, you saved me and the animals that were transformed with me. You-you brought me to a bed and gave me clean clothes,” she looked down at herself as she realized everything that had happened while she had been asleep.
Her face fell and tears began to well in her beautiful brown eyes. “I suppose that you wouldn’t want a monster like me as a follower, would you?”
“You’re no more a monster than I am,” Calypso said quickly. Odysseus had often told her how horrible the gods were, herself included, and reminded her how much he hated her at every single turn that he could.
“I have killed people,” Scylla argued.
“You did that because you had to, you were spelled to think of nothing more than the magical hunger that had been placed on a body that was no longer yours,” Calypso huffed. She was very upset with the witch that had done that to this poor woman, she was beginning to think that was what had tainted Odysseus in the first place. “Nothing like that will be done to you if you choose to stay on my island,” she promised.
Just like that, the two of them decided that they would live with each other and maintain the island side by side. Scylla had a different method of weaving than Calypso did, she had been taught by experts and masters according to her. They harvested food and ate the way that Calypso had before Odysseus had come to her life and began to demand meat. They maintained the island well, making sure that the animals were healthy and well taken care of while removing parasite plants from the places that they shouldn’t be
They had started off sleeping in separate beds like Calypso had with Odysseus before he had left, but when the winter time came that changed. They curled under thick blankets together and whispered words of stories that they had dreamed of or that Scylla had heard before she had been transformed. Some days, all the woman could do was cry into Calypso’s arms and she was alright with that.
“Are you certain that I am not a monster?” Scylla would ask.
“In the eyes of many, you are,” Calypso would reply. It was the truth, she would never lie to the woman that she had pulled to the cliffs and scraped against magic to free.
“But to you?”
“Never, never in my eyes would you be a monster,” she would answer. Then their lips would meet and it would be tender, heartfelt, and one of the best things that Calypso had ever felt in her entire life.