#medea atlantis

[we-were-just-children]

Fate draws Jason and Medea together across mountains and deserts, anger and betrayal, loyalty and love. Their fates are entwined and they are powerless to fight it.

[we-were-just-children]

Her mood is cruel, her nature dangerous.

Her will is fierce and intractable...

This passion of hers is an irresistible flood.

- Euripides, Medea.

[we-were-just-children]

Medea

Fear had been as present as her heartbeat for as long as Medea could remember. As if her very soul had been bathed in terror and anguish before it found its earthly vessel, she felt it at her core every minute of every day.

From the day she could comprehend such notions, she’d known that all those around her wanted her dead. They feared her power, her father, King Aeetes, had told her again and again. They feared the sorcery that flowed through her veins like fire; they feared the glow that Hecate’s touch had left upon her spirit; they feared the fact that her frail and feeble human body was not strong enough to contain the great power that the Gods had bestowed upon her.

As a child, she’d wondered if it had been an error on the Gods’ part, to make her powers stronger than their vessel. As she grew into a young woman, she realized it was more cruelty and carelessness than fault.

The people of Colchis shrunk away as she appeared on the dais beside her father. Her tutors instructed her distantly from the far side of the room. Her maids and her servants never met her eyes when they spoke, never touched her when they dressed her, never gave her so much as a smile or a kind gaze. She had no playmates for all the lords and nobles of the city struck the fear of the Gods into their children until young girls burst into tears at the sight of her and the boys played at capturing and killing the Witch of Colchis.

Her father instructed his young daughter that the only way to win the trust of her people was to suppress her magic, to hide her power and disguise her strength. She dug her fingernails into her palms until ribbons of blood ran from her fists as she tried to hold the wild sorcery inside her trembling and feverish body. She drove the visions from her mind with days of prayer on aching knees, only to have the Gods send them back to her with a vengeance every time she drifted into uneasy sleep. Every time she woke screaming from the images of her burning city, her father’s skeletal hand reaching an accusing finger, her mother’s blood soaking the sheets of her bed, the appearance of a strange boy in a world she could not understand, Pasiphae was there with words of comfort, the touch on her clammy skin that she never felt from others, the reassurances that the Gods were not punishing her.

The day she murdered her father, she was convinced it was punishment. Three day. Three days she had managed to hold the fire inside as it tore at her heart until all she could hear was the blood pounding in her skull and all she could feel was the searing pain across her ribs. Three days she had managed to be at court without the ground shaking with her fear or the monkeys screeching as she passed. Three days and her father didn’t even notice. Preoccupied with the war on the western border, he grew angry when she slipped into his chambers, interrupting his meditation and commune with Gods. Her cheek burning with his handprint and her skull ringing from the blow, she felt the heartbeat in which she lost control. The rope of fire that had wrapped itself around her chest snapped across the room like a burning, searing whip. Invisible to the guards but blinding to Medea and Pasiphae, it curled around Aeetes’ throat, vaporizing the air in his lungs and squeezing the life from his body before he hit the ground with thud that resonated in Medea’s whole body. Her night terror materialized before her as she gazed in sickened horror at his hand, finger outstretched in silent accusation.