Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) by H.C. Southwark (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

Isme found she had a dozen rebuttals, from insults to pleading for mercy, but instead she glanced at the still-fading sky and said, “Do you know where my father is?”

“I am not following him,” said the voice. There was no condemnation, nor obviousness, in its tone. It was not reminding her of something it knew she already knew—it was simply stating a fact as though commenting on the weather.

“I know that,” snapped Isme, surprised with her harshness. Heaving a breath, she forced her body to turn and expose her back to the thing, to step forward. “Can you help me find him? Or at least find a place where people can help me?” Her mind leapt, and she added, “The actors from the caravan—they would help.”

“But they are at the festival,” reasoned the voice. “I heard the same prophetic warning as you last night, did I not?”

Isme almost stepped a foot wrong, but her ankle was strong enough to bear the burden at the odd angle. She continued forward, mind running ahead of her to the end of the street, another turn that led gods knew where. She said, “I must find him.”

There was a pause. The soft pat of footsteps behind her ceased, as though the voice had halted and was considering. It said, “If you do this, you will start a chain of events that cannot be stopped. Remember your lesson from the island and the turtles.”

Stay hidden on the island and don’t go to the beach alone—I broke that promise, Isme thought, and others paid for it. But then I was also told to not let a mainlander see what my voice can do, and I broke that promise with Kleto. Yet here I am.

The world was a strange thing. First, she could commit a wrongdoing and receive the worst of all punishments; someone else, dying in her stead. But then she could do the same and be set free. Like the world had no rules of justice, and yet at the same time did; had a harsh sort of justice that was as unrelenting as the invisible stalker behind her. And yet did not.

A universe of order—where one did a bad thing, and one saw the consequences. And a universe of chaos—where one’s actions did not even cause reactions.

Nobody knows the future. In that moment, certainty came to her, a small voice whispering that the reason prophets spoke in riddles was because those gave them wiggle room to escape being accused of lying if the prophecy did not come true.

Then she remembered the stories—such thinking was what stupid people who disbelieved prophecies used to justify themselves in making bad decisions.

And yet above all this swirling of thoughts came only a simple image: the creases at the corners of her father’s beady eyes, whenever he smiled at her.

“If you won’t help me,” she said to the voice, “I’ll find him on my own. I don’t care about the festival or Apollon’s priestess choosing me—or anything but my father.”

As she said this an immense relief swelled within her, as though all her concerns of all these days had been washed away by the waves at the beach back home. The same thing she had felt when her father had told Isme of her birth: that she had been born to another man, Orpheus king of song, and the sudden fear that she and her father were not connected. But they were.

He was more than Epimetheus, father of all mankind. He was also her father.

Behind her, the voice sighed. Then it said, “Turn right, and then when you reach the street of people, turn left at the next fork.”

And that did bring Isme pause. She said, without turning to look, “Why are you helping me? Didn’t you just try to warn me about the priestess and ceremony?”

“You know the consequences,” said the voice. And no more.

Isme told herself that she was not running down the street, and that her mind was not racing, trying to figure out what the voice from the woods hoped to accomplish.

And that the sound behind her was not of feet following.

~

A press of people, all at once. Isme swerved between them, wondering how the voice from the woods could still be following even through this crowd. Though she could not hear it with all the noise of people, she did not bother to question whether it was still there. But she did wonder if it felt as out of place among people as she did. Maybe that was why it always went silent when people were around—

She reached the intersection that the voice in the woods had told her, and wondered—for there were already people around her on this street, and so why should she turn left? Yet, she thought, the voice from the woods had never hurt her... not yet at least.

And so Isme turned left, as she had been instructed.

Halfway down the street Isme bumped into the hip of another woman as she passed, turned to say her apologies—that was what people did in stories, anyway—

But Pelagia’s doe-eyes were on her. “Isme! You came!”

Isme said only, “Have you seen my father? He has gone missing.”

Whatever Pelagia was about to prattle, she dropped the topic like a live coal. “Did you get separated? Maybe he’s waiting for you back where you slept.”

“I just came from there,” Isme said. “He’s been missing all day.”

And then Pelagia had her by the arm, threading through the crowd. Isme let herself be guided, unsure of their destination, but the press of people became thicker, and then they were stopping before a tent on a small grassy area—Pelagia ducked in, and Isme had no choice but to follow—

She saw golden hair, loose and flowing like a river of sunlight, and Pelagia said, “Kleto, Isme says her father is missing—”

But she faltered and fell silent when Kleto turned her head and the other two women saw: she had a bruise on the side of her face, extending from her