Change, Initiative, and the Self Theme Analysis

I found that I was not afraid of the pain that would come. It was another terror that gripped me: that the blade would not cut at all. That it would pass through me, like falling into smoke.

It did not pass through. My skin leapt apart at the blade’s touch, and the pain darted silver and hot as lightning strike. The blood that flowed was red, for I did not have my uncle’s power. The wound seeped for a long time before it began to reknit itself. I sat watching it, and as I watched I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant’s discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant.

The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

“You fools,” I said. “I am the one who made that creature. I did it for pride and vain delusion. And you thank me? Twelve of your men are dead for it, and how many thousands more to come? That drug I gave her is the strongest I have. Do you understand, mortals?” […]

The light from my eyes beat down upon them.

“I will never be free of her. She cannot be changed back, not now, not ever. What she is, she will remain. She will feast on your kind for all eternity. So get up. Get up and get to your oars, and let me not hear you speak again of your imbecile gratitude or I will make you sorry for it.”

The cringed and shook like the weak vessels they were, stuttering to their feet and creeping away […] I yanked off the cloak. I wanted the sun to burn me.

From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs […] If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.

When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

“Why can you not be more peaceful?” I whispered. “Why must it be so hard?”

As if in answer, a vision of my father’s halls drifted up: the sterile earth floor, the black gleam of obsidian […] I had laid quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls […] shake [Helios] for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash […]

Why should [Telegonus] be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

You were ready to fight me to have it. Not if I am willing?

My stomach churned against itself. “Please. Do not make me do this.”

Make you? Child, you have come to me […]

I lifted the blade, touched its tip to the creature’s skin. It tore as flowers tear, ragged and easy. The golden ichor welled up, drifting over my hands. I remember what I thought: surely, I am condemned for this. I can craft all the spells I want, all the magic spears. Yet I will spend the rest of my days watching this creature bleed […]

The darkness around us shimmered with clouds of his gilded blood. Beneath my feet were the bones of a thousand years. I thought I cannot bear this world a moment longer.

Then, child, make another.

“When I was young, I overheard our palace surgeon talking. He said that the medicines he sold were only for show. Most hurts heal by themselves, he said, if you give them enough time […] I took it for a philosophy. I have always been good at waiting, you see. I outlasted the war and the suitors. I outlasted Odysseus’s travels. I told myself that if I were patient enough, I could outlast his restlessness and Athena too […] And while I sat, Telemachus bore his father’s rage year after year. He suffered while I turned my eyes away […] But this world does have true medicines. You are proof of that. You walked the depths for your son. You defied the gods. I think of all the years of my life I wasted on that little man’s boast. I have paid for it, that is only justice, but I have made Telemachus pay as well.”

My island lay around me. My herbs, my house, my animals. And so it would go, I thought, on and on, forever the same. It did not matter if Penelope and Telemachus were kind. It did not matter even if they stayed for their whole lives, if she were the friend I had yearned for and he were something else, it would only be a blink. They would wither, and I would burn their bodies and watch my memories of them fade as everything faded in the endless wash of the centuries […] For me there was nothing. I would go on through the countless millennia, while everyone I met ran through my fingers and I was left with only those who were like me. The Olympians and Titans. My sister and brothers. My father.

I felt something in me then […] I seemed to hear that pale creature in his black depths.

Then, child, make another.

With every step I felt lighter […] I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

Telemachus slept on […] So often on Aiaia, I had wondered how it would feel to touch him.

His eyes opened as if I had spoken the words aloud. They were clear as they always were.

I said, "Scylla was not born a monster. I made her."

His face was in the fire's shadows. "How did it happen?"

There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.