mycursedface

Mauretania Tingitana was what the province was called. Is called. Definitions are hard when the legions are left, and people still live under Roman names. And Phoenician, and, yes, still Amazigh names, and, really, Zili is just another trading town on the outskirts of an empire that mostly forgets about it.

It's a quiet town, a little run down, maybe, but the farms sprawling out over the countryside are still prosperous. It is also a town that remains mostly unaware of Hera's Garden to the north, and the Gorgons' cave in the south.

All six sisters have worked hard at that, magic and protection and twisting of reality until unless someone knows exactly how to get there, finding either sets of triplets is pretty much impossible.

Especially when the sun will set soon.

(Luckily for Epimetheus, the Gorgon girls are out and flying)

Medusa is sitting in a tree, jeans and sundress and hair in braids and no glasses, today. If anyone comes out here, she'll just...close her eyes or something of the like. She's in that kind of mood, contrary and a little out of sorts and have to be outside can't stay need to-

Only, she couldn't think of anything to do, so climbing the tree and watching the lake in the semi-twilight seemed the better alternative to pacing.

Or paying attention to the dull throb of a hangover.

There is a storm, and Medusa isn't in it.

Normally, she would be. Normally, she'd be flying and tumbling and letting lightning hit her. She may or may not be laughing, because sometimes it is best to try and repress the giggles for Ouranos' sake (silly uncle), but Medusa is a storm daemon. Wind and thunder and lightning are what she lives for.

The storm rages for hours, and all she does is sit on Sam's bed. Arms around her legs, chin resting on her knees, wings unfurled just enough so as not to be unnaturally bent, eyes dark and trained on the window.

The storm rages for hours, and all she does is watch.

There is a saying, a quote, maybe call it just plain knowledge that if you cage a bird for too long, they forget how to fly. The open sky scares them. She doesn't know how long she was in that...that places, doesn't want to know, but...

She doesn't want to fly.

Why?

She just doesn't, alright.

(if Sam says something during those hours, and there is no reason why he wouldn't, because he is Sam and worries about her, she doesn't reply.

By the time the thunder stops, she's crying.

By the time the skies clear, she is shy and skittish and quick smiles as normal, but that doesn't make her reddened eyes any better)

The Acropolis is burning.


It is night now, and the glow is turning the clouds above red. A nice red, really, glowing hot even from here, and fading into a dull red. The screams had stopped hours ago (all gone now) and now there is nothing but silence.

(burn, burn, burn the scene of the crime)

At least, from where Medusa is. She is sitting on a rock on a hill a little distance away, hugging her knees to her chest. She's been watching for hours, but the smile on her face is still as bright and guileless as the flames.

(burn, burn, burn away the memories)

Kharis
Kharis is the root of ‘charisma’ and ‘charismatic’ and can simply mean grace or charm. But the original Greek also has a more sexualised connotation – a grace which ignites desire. Kharis was a gift of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love. It is that quality of raw seductive power that Helen possessed above all others. The girls who danced at the Platanistas – led on by the example of their presiding spirit, Helen – were experiencing a rite of passage that made them beautiful in that they were becoming charismatic, sexually mature and sexually available. For them, Helen was not the most ‘beautiful’ woman in the world, she was the most erotic.
-p.56

Beauty
Despite the corpus of created Helens we have surprisingly few clues from antiquity as to what men and woman imagined Helen saw as she looked into her mirrors of gold. When she is described, stock epithets are used; she is ‘white-armed’, her hair is ‘lustrous’ and ‘golden’. The ancients were in no doubt that she existed yet there is no attempt to define, physically and severally, what made her so beautiful. Quintus of Smyrna retelling The Fall of Troy in the 4th century AD writes that ‘shame sat on her dark-blue eyes and cast its flush over her lovely cheeks’. This is about as specific as we get; the further back in history one travels, the more the face that launched a thousand ships is an irrelevance. Helen’s physiognomy is less important than how she made people feel – what her extraordinary charisma made them do. She is not just invisible, she is ineffable.

For classical, pagan antiquity her beauty is too important, too powerful simply to set down, to shackle with portraits or words. Helen’s beauty cannot be defined by face alone. It is literally unspeakable. To witness Helen’s beauty, coming as it does from the gods, verges on a religious experience. When the old men of Troy see her walking along the ramparts, they know that this is a war worth fighting for, but they describe her beauty as ‘terrible’ – like that of a goddess.

‘Terrible beauty’ would have meant more to the ancients than it does to us today – they knew of the dreadful things that could happen if one looked on the transcendental face of a goddess or a monster-woman. The Gorgon’s stare turns her victims to stone; when Actaeon, a young man hunting in the woods, catches sight of the goddess Diana bathing naked in a pool, she turns him into a stag who is then chased down and torn to pieces by his own faithful hounds as unwitting friends urge the dogs on. This is why Helen becomes Byron’s Greek Eve. If we understand the Spartan Queen in the way the ancients did, her beauty cannot simply be viewed, it is coercive: she forces men and woman alike into a state of longing, she forces them to act. Those who look at her cannot walk away unscathed. She catalyses desire. She is an eidolon that burns with projected emotion.

…Considered a gift of the gods, beauty clamoured for attention. In Greek thought everything had an intrinsic meaning, nothing was pointless – beauty had a purpose, it was an active, independent reality, not a passive and nebulous quality that came into being only once it was discerned. Men such as Plato and Aristole, Herodotus and Euripides would have had some trouble with Hume’s oft-repeated sentiment of the 18th century AD – beauty is in the mind of the beholder. For them, nonsense. A discrete entity, beauty could be measured and quantified. It was a psycho-physical parcel that had as much to do with inner character as chest-size. Far from being insubstantial it was thought to wield distinct and determinate power.
pp. 116-117

Medusa is not...okay, maybe she is hiding in Milliways. There are sound reasons for doing so! Including, but not limited to, the fact that Sam's bed is nice.

Still.

She is a creature of air and water and earth, and it's actually nice outside at the moment. Flowers and grass and leaves and warm. Not as warm as home, but acceptable. Which is why she's walking outside dressed in nothing but a white sundress (with a halter neck) and jeans.

Also a nosestud in the shape of a tiny spider. India has...left some impression.

Medusa had spent the morning sparring with Stheno (Euryale had run off to town). Hard and fast and nasty and, in the end, Medusa had snapped her sister's wrist. Stheno had kicked her into a wall; the Gorgon girls had always played rough.

Which is why it's a good thing that they can fix each other.

So, when Medusa walks into the library (a large cavern under the earth, floor to nearly ceiling bookcases with laders with wheels that roll across the shelves, and there are tall, narrow windows to catch the breeze and light), her curls are damp from a shower and she's rolling her shoulder back. Magical healing or no, you do feel sore.

"Lucifer?"

Today her nosering (India left a lasting impression, and it's a look that suits her) is a nosestud, a little golden spider with a ruby on its back , and her walk is marked by the chiming of the tiny bells around her right ankle. Not that it's easy to see said bells, given that Medusa's taste in skirts tends towards flowing things long enough to reach the tops of her feet.