Epilogue
It’s just past dawn when the young woman climbs the steps.
Above, the sky blushes pink, the color of the woman’s lips.
Golden light illuminates her dark brown skin as she approaches her sister’s bedchamber, humming a familiar melody that comes from deep in her throat.
Euryale pays no mind to the air’s unnatural stillness, nor does she heed the gulls who’ve found places to perch on the sills of the palace’s open windows. The seabirds watch, and they wait.
She opens the bedchamber door and then she screams.
Euryale falls to her knees, throws her head back in anguish.
She wails until cracks splinter through the bedchamber, until the age-old walls of the palace crumble to fine dust. She pounds her fist into the marble until every living creature within miles flees, until the island itself splits in two like a gaping wound.
She whimpers and cradles her sister’s limp body, letting sticky red blood soak her tunic.
Through the mad haze of grief, Euryale understands that her sister Medusa is dead and that her screams will not bring life back to her corpse, nor bring back the head that’s been severed from her body.
Stheno’s grief is different. She does not go to see her sister’s body; she hears Euryale’s screams, and she knows.
She has always known that her mortal sister would be taken from her eventually.
She does not weep for her youngest sister, but she rages.
She finds the island’s remaining trees and wraps her arms around their trunks, ripping them out by their roots.
She stalks the halls of the palace, turning every slave to stone until there are none left.
She glares at the sky and shouts curses in every human tongue she knows until the muscles in her throat ache and she cannot speak at all.
She sees a lion stalking along the coast and thinks to kill it, but something stops her.
It is the first and only time she shows true mercy.
—
As the sun sets on their now-broken island, Stheno and Euryale begin to plot.
For the first time in all their years, they leave home.
They seek out their kin first, question every god and goddess who belongs to the Sea Court.
In time, a name is whispered. Stheno and Euryale learn that their sister’s murderer is a favored champion of the gray-eyed bitch; he has golden hair and all his patron’s cunning.
Already, he has spread accounts of his triumph far and wide, and that is how they learn that it was the Olympians who helped him.
It was Hades who gave him the cloak of invisibility, Hermes who clad his feet in winged sandals.
Hephaestus gave him the sword he used to behead their sister, but it was Athena’s gift that mattered most. It was her shield, forged in bronze, that the Murderer used to sneak up on Medusa while she slept.
The shield reflected her gaze, so that she could not turn her murderer to stone even if she tried.
Of course, she did not try; she died defenseless, in her sleep.
When he tells his story at feasts, the Murderer brags that the killing was easily done.
Stheno and Euryale learn that he kept their sister’s head and now parades it on that same bronze shield like some obscene prize.
This, they cannot abide.
They sacrifice the last of their island’s trees and build a raft from rattan wood.
First, they sail along the Aithiopian coast, and when that yields them nothing, they expand their hunt.
They stalk through steaming jungles full of strange and terrible creatures, march for years across scorching desert sand that blisters their feet.
In their search, they turn a thousand men to stone, but they never find the one they want.
When they reach the snow-covered steppes of a frigid and utterly foreign wasteland, it is Euryale who at last admits defeat and tells Stheno they must go home. They never find their sister’s head.
—
The world changes slowly. In the end, the old gods win their battle, but lose the greater war.
The mortals they thought would worship them forever keep the faith for only a few more centuries before they turn to newer, shinier gods.
The older gods’ strength is bled from them slowly, until they are little more than incorporeal wisps on the breeze.
The minor gods—like Phorcys and Ceto—are the first to disappear, but in a matter of decades, Zeus is gone, too.
There are only whispers of Athena’s fate; some say she clung desperately to the last vestiges of her power until it was gone and then flung herself into the depths of Tartarus.
—
The two young women—who will always be young women—are unaffected by these changes.
They are not goddesses, not reliant on anyone’s faith, and so they enjoy a certain immunity.
Their years turn to decades, which then become centuries, and somewhere in that gradual passing of time, their island disappears from the maps.
Men forget the terrors of the infamous Gorgons, and they are reduced to mere myth.
Euryale and Stheno do not mind this. These days, they spend much of their immortality sitting on the island’s shoreline, basking in the sun.
They always take care to save a place between them for their baby sister, the one men called Medusa, the one they simply called Meddy.
They watch in silence as her true story is lost, as poets pen newer, more inventive ones.
They listen as men give her new names—maiden, mistress, monster, legend.
Stheno and Euryale understand that their sister is a myth now, and nothing at all like the girl they once knew. They do not mind.
They remember her for who she truly was, and that is enough.