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

and herself sliding up the sides, further away from the water of the well of souls. Apollon moved without moving—keeping pace with her descending ascent, as though the world was warping around him rather than himself moving through it.

Seeing she had calmed, the frenzy over, Apollon said, “You are now leaving behind the realm of mankind, and entering into that of the soul. The body is a trap and you have escaped into the world of pure thought where knowledge and revelation lie.”

“I don’t understand,” Isme choked, but what she was thinking and did not say was: You stood there and watched me flail and scream and did nothing to help me.

“I do not expect you to, not at first,” Apollon said, and gave no indication that he could read her thoughts; or, if he could, that he cared what she was thinking. His eyes gazed at her steadily, without blinking, almost looking through her as though she was not really there. They were golden, and Isme was reminded of Kleto.

Apollon said, “Now you will return to who you should have been. Welcome, my child Apollonis.”

Isme let the word track across her mind—the name, Apollonis, meaning “from Apollon,” the typical name given to a daughter when the father did not want to come up with a special name—Briseis was the daughter of Brises, Chryseis the daughter of Chryses—and she realized that she was not named after her true father...

“That is not my name,” Isme told him, correcting without thinking, otherwise she would have known not to speak this way to a god. “I am Isme, daughter of Epimetheus.”

“No,” said Apollon, and there was neither condemnation nor gentleness in his voice. “That is the name forced upon you by the ones who stole you from me.”

This claim seemed so extraordinary that Isme forgot where she was, that she was slipping up down a long tunnel, and may well be dying—but then when she came back to herself, she recognized first the insult: the implication that Apollon did not recognize her for herself, and that her father was someone who had no claim.

She recalled when her father had first told her of her origins, that she had been born to a man and woman across the sea in a land she did not know. She had wondered whether he expected her to react poorly to such news—and the feeling of her own determination rising within her, that one revelation was not enough to change her thirteen years under Epimetheus’s steady guiding hand. The same determination was surging within her now—

“That is not my name,” said Isme. One was not supposed to speak to the gods with disrespect, for that was to scorn the entire cosmos—but she knew who she was talking to and said everything anyway. “I am not the child of a thief. My birth mother and her husband cast me away, and my grandmother handed me over to my father.”

Apollon did not look surprised by any of this outburst. Instead, he said, “You were not cast out.” He let those words linger in the air and Isme could not think of what to say in response. He continued, “When you were brought to my temple, and the prophecy of your future knowledge was spoken, you were dedicated to me. But in the night you were stolen and handed off to those who preferred to keep your knowledge for themselves.”

Isme was not quite willing to call a god a liar directly. So she said nothing, and instead reached out and seized at the rock she was sliding—down? up?—along. The first few tries failed but then she caught and felt her wrists strain nearly out of their sockets. But she stopped falling. Apollon hovered beside her like a nervous bird.

Though his face did not look at all concerned.

“Your real name is Apollonis,” he continued. “There have been many Apollonis. Through the ages you and your sisters Cephisso and Borysthenis have served me. Sometimes you three are called by other names, like Nete or Mese or Hypate. You have died and returned to dust and come back up again, my most faithful daughters always bringing news straight from the source of all knowledge and life: the grave below.”

“I...” Isme began, but words seemed to tumble through her like the cascade of waves in a storm, never stopping long enough to let her truly think. After many tries she managed, “Are you saying that I have lived before? That I have gone down into the underworld like all mortals, and then somehow come up to the living again?”

Isme had listened to the old woman in the temple at Delphi and began to grasp that knowledge came from the underworld—the idea that she herself also came from there...

“A question with a suitably complicated answer,” said Apollon. “What is a person, god, object or thing, except what it does and functions as? If a king rules a city well, and dies, and his son or even a stranger takes up the same rule, life in the city not changing nor the goodness of her rulers, has the original king truly died? Or is kingship an office, and the individual inhabiting the throne merely a figurehead for the true power?”

“I don’t know,” said Isme, who was considering herself suitably bewildered. Yet even as she said this, she could feel her mind stretching, reaching out to take hold of the corner of his question, drawing the whole fabric of it closer to examine each individual thread. She did not understand now—but perhaps if she thought deeply enough she would.

“You know very little,” Apollon said, in agreement with Isme’s thoughts. “But with the transformation of your mind, the opening of this gateway and your ascent into the realm beyond the physical, soon you will know more than any mortal. You will become a prophetess at Delphi, speaking what others do not understand.”

Things others do not understand, Isme thought—and almost asked: Like the end of this world? But she did