City of fire. An entire hillside of torches, every woman awake and waiting for the return of her husband or son. Patches of flame unconnected, so each house seems to float in blackness, as if this hill were a wave risen up and all this light revealed within.

Unnatural, all that is human. Living with fire, turning a hill into a city, sailing over the sea, killing for no reason. This place carved from the night and separated from earth and sky.

Medea stops in darkness, alone, and wants never to enter a city again. She closes her eyes, listens to the thrum of cicadas, the air warm.

Then she hears the wailing of women, a great din from across that hillside, their king dead, their men slaughtered. Predictable, wailing exactly as they would, yet they go to war over and over, endlessly.

Medea walks on, sees the procession up the hill and torches come close together, as if all the stars in a wave could gather, the same as when she swam at night, exactly the same. Very strange the world can repeat itself in this way, in the sky and in the sea and on a hill at night, all essentially liquid and changing. Even the unnatural works of humans are repetitions and mirrors, made natural again, no different from stars submerged.

What she wants is to find herself at the center of what makes all liquid and changeable. She would add her will to what controls these shifts. She would see that lights on this hillside might swarm as the lights in the water did below, and she would be the one to make them swarm, and she would do it only because the repetition is beautiful, because form mirrored is form recognized. Instead of mourning the death of a king, she would see pattern in kings and people and bring the death of a king whenever needed and only if he offered some symmetry. The death of this king beautiful because he was slain by his friend, because the attack was a mistake, made at night, and echoes all that humans do in darkness, all the turns they take in their lives, always blind. His story will be useful to a hundred generations to follow.

What Medea doesn’t know, of course, is how to come any closer. Where the symmetries are held none can say. A priestess should know, but Medea is sure that no priestess knows. She is sure no priestess is greater, no seer or oracle clearer sighted. If any of this will be found, it will be found by her. Another reason she left Colchis, to move more freely, to no longer be constrained.