Her father would pull the sun into its place and pull it down again, do his father’s work. Bronze and fire and gold, all forms of the sun. Endless rage, and no reason, no stopping, the burning away of all. Her father descended from this, and she too. Demigods. Humans beyond human law.

By his decree, men buried not in the ground but in the air, strung from trees in untanned ox hides. Twisting forever above, the women below. He would balance earth and air. He believes he can do that. His rage now a simple disbelief that any of this could happen and to him. All of it foretold, but he didn’t think to fear his daughters, feared only his son. Men visible, hung and rotting in their sacks and remembered, women invisible below.

Already he’s drawing closer. Medea clings to the bulwark and sternpost and fears tumbling over the side, as if what she has done could claim her at any moment, pull her into black water. Kneeling in her brother, wet against her thighs. Smell of blood and viscera, sacrifice. A smell she’s known all her life. To Helios the sun, and to other gods, to Hekate. Jason an able witch, slitting a lamb’s throat to Hekate, burning a pyre, inviting serpents to writhe in the oaks above and hellhounds to howl, walking away with the strength to not look back. Her own strength failing. Kneeling in her brother’s remains too much.

Lurch of each wave a sideways push, her face over water, hull falling away, caving. She can almost wish for this, to slip beneath the surface, cold and airless, silent, without motion except a gradual fall. All the world gone, the sun mute. A place even her father would not reach her.

Hekate, dark one, make this darkness last. Medea speaks in a tongue no man on the Argo can understand. Widen this sea and let this blood that drips from our decks thicken and slow my father. Blood of the sun. My own blood, my own brother. I give you this.

Medea can see the waters coagulate and bind, waves slow and flatten, wind lose its hold, her father mired by what came from his own veins. The sun held below the surface of the sea, swallowed and never rebirthed. Held by Nute, blue god of the Egyptians, ancient god, ancient woman, older than the sun. Helios swallowed each night and sailing through the pathways of Nute’s body toward birth but tricked this time by vanity. The sun wanting human form, wanting descendants and generations to worship. That blood now made into an anchor, the pathways become endless, and no light.