The forest will remake her, as it always has. Breath and blood and wind and isolation. The simple act of walking and hearing only her own footsteps. But there must be water, also, and the sound of water, a return to what she knows. Displaced now, hollow.

Medea runs again, realizing how far she must travel today. The larger mountains and thicker forest not close. And she must not be caught alone. Hittites farther inland, an empty place here, she’s always been told, but those goatherds’ huts belong to someone.

Fear the best way to run, endless fuel. She imagines men with spears running after her, and she no longer touches ground. She’s done this all her life, chased by phantom men. Wearing masks like her father, faceless, soundless, apparitions relentless and always coming closer.

Her father a threat from the very beginning, an enemy before she was born. The power of every king balanced by a terrible prophecy. Her father told by his father, Helios, that his own children would scheme against him. Pelias warned about Jason. Even the gods do not like the power of kings. Even the gods would have them destroyed.

Kings always blind. Her father not considering his daughters, believing a threat only in a son. Daughters to him no more than a tool to bind other peoples through marriage. Unwilling emissaries, their will never considered. Soon enough she would have been sent to the Hittites or Egyptians or anyone else and forgotten, never to return home.

Outcast. This is what she has chosen, and it would have been chosen for her anyway. Her father an enemy later if not now, marriage not powerful enough to prevent war.

It should have been her father she cut into pieces, hacking at his limbs, all power gone, but she loves him, too, only because he’s her father. Cruel trick of the gods, to bind children.

Deeper into the forest, and Medea runs without looking back. She knows she will never be lost. She holds the shape of every pathway inside her, the shape of mountains. All felt and known for as long as she can remember. No moss here, no ferns, no cliff faces covered in bright green, no streams with gold, and the trees are not the same, but she would recognize any forest, even if all were changed. And she will find wetter ground here. She will find what she needs for Hekate: moss and root and mushroom and berry and bark and rot and spoor and what lives in these places blind and trackless and mute and forgotten.

On the next ridge she finds spruce, pushes her way through lower dead branches, coiled, snapping against her, and follows game trails down into a ravine.

Shadowed and the sound of wind lost somewhere above. Earth dark, rich, breaking beneath her feet. Steep slopes and she’s sliding with every step.