She uses the torch to part the crowd, steps over bodies, veers away from all who lurch and leer and yell incomprehensible things. Ritual dissolved and collapsed. Men shouting in each other’s faces in different languages, understanding nothing, crazed grins that deny the dead and anything sacred. Cyzicus and Cleite buried now in stone, in silence, separated from the living, beginning the slow count of endless days and nights undistinguished. Medea is surprised to feel an overwhelming loneliness, as if she too is buried in stone and cannot be reached. Coldness without end, absence forever of warmth and light and movement.

Nothing binds her to anyone. If she dies, not one person in this world will mourn. She walks alone and invisible down that hill from stone into mire and then into forest, a shape only that passes through air and leaves no trace, seems not to touch ground.

Trees in torchlight shifting to the side, following their shadows, circling behind her, leaning in from above. Her breath held, fear immediate. Running now, and the flame a hive, angry and loud, feeding on nothing. A noise too close, hiding all that comes near. Medea runs as fast as she can, flying through that night, every slope veering and tipping and the world itself shaken by every hard footfall.

Lost and no path, only blind flight until a hill falls toward a mirror, a sea too calm to be called a sea, only a pool of dark water waiting and catching flame.

No sign of the Argo, no sign of her father. No other lights. She runs along the very edge, in sand and rock, her feet nearly in the water, where the trees won’t reach her, and hopes she’s going the right direction, nothing familiar, no moon to guide. Pounding along the shore.

Shadow. The Argo begins as shadow, some felt weight in darkness, some part of the mirror that won’t reflect, dull surface hung in the air then warming, taking shape and color, a deep brown to match flame.

Some creature impossible, a curve suspended between water and sky, waiting. It seems she could simply walk across the water to reach it. All distance gone, and liquid become solid, light the only element. Whatever surface we can see can hold us.

But the water at her ankles now cool and refusing, and she finds the small boat they use to ferry. She’s careful with the torch as she slips the oars into their loops of leather and pushes away from shore.

Unbelievable that she ran in fear. The forest at night is where she has lived all her life. It must be her father. Out there somewhere, and she can feel him coming closer. Source of fear. She knows it’s time to run.

Argonauts forgetting, pausing for too long, lying drunken on a foreign hillside as if all the world is theirs. They don’t understand her father and what he will do.