She realizes only too late that she’ll never see the light rise behind these mountains again, that she’s missed seeing them transform in the light, that she’s looked too long at the water and lost her home. Already the ridges and peaks are edged in white, losing substance and depth. All is being flattened and won’t return again.

Her grandfather would erase all. White glare each morning an oblivion. Distance gone. Shape and shadow and being. Eyes without use, and this water an open desert with no refuge.

Forest at the edge of her home, original forest, wet with mist, rising steeply, mountain after mountain without end. No flattening of distance but each fold expanding, each ravine become larger. Moss and fern. Gnarled old roots black and intertwined. Needles dense above, branches twisted and the tops gone from sight. Places even her grandfather can’t reach. Deadfall and dark rock, caves in those mountains and the forest itself a cave. Her home. In that stillness, walking beneath those trees. Cold breath, all sound muted, always watched and alone, a place on the edge of panic, as if the forest might swallow or she could be hunted. Wolf and bear. And the overwhelming sense of being alive, the thud of a heart beating. A strange freedom not given to girls, but one she took anyway, walking out alone at night even when she was very young. A home she always knew was hers, antidote to the sun, escape from her father, a place instead of a mother. A refuge she can’t imagine herself without, lost and gone now, and she knows she’ll never return, that she’s made herself an outcast and will be a stranger even to herself. Why she did this, she doesn’t know. Love the erasure of everything else, a blinding worse even than the sun.

Madness without thought. One act and then another, inevitable, unstoppable, never questioned. He appeared from nowhere, came out of the fog at the edge of the city. Strange fog for this season, late burning, and so he and his men were able to anchor in the river and walk through groves where the dead hung in their ox hides and come right to her home unchallenged. Jason stood before her, unlikely, something she could not have imagined. A half-god, favored, a gift. Given to her, gazing at her. And from that first moment, all was set in motion. All subversion of her father’s plans, the many ways she would help Jason and his men, all as if it were already accomplished. Not fate, but something waiting inside her. Fate no more than a brute plow dragged along, but this was something wanted, sprung from desire unknown and released, a recognition. The closest Medea has ever known to truth. The most certain moment of her life.