Chapter Text
It's not the first time she's been here.
Far from it, really.
The first time had been after she'd broken ties with her first people, and left them, taking nothing but the clothes on her back and the broken axe she'd inherited. The worship had been—
She'd needed to leave.
And so she'd walked off the steppe, walked down the mountains, walked until she'd forgotten her name, until she'd hit a sea, and then she'd joined some men on a boat and kept going, and then she'd wound up on this island[1].
They'd helped her, is the crux of it. She'd learned their language, the shape of it in her mouth and the way she could write the meanings in the soil or in clay[2], learned that when raiders came, when the sea people attacked, she could heft her axe and make a difference on her own. The double axe had been a symbol in those alphabets[3], and it had felt like home. It had felt like she'd had a place here, like she'd amongst her first people, like she hadn't had in the uncountable years since the first time someone saw her fail to die and started holding her above and apart.
They'd given her a name too, in the local language. She's between names, at the moment, but she remembers. To be named is to be known. She'd been known here. Asona[4], they'd called her, after her axe.
She saved a lot of people. She killed a lot of people, too, and sometimes that's the two blades of the axe.
They'd fixed her axe. The metalsmith had looked at it and asked if she'd wished to keep the double head, and she'd said yes, and he'd reforged them, more in the Keftian[5], style than that of her first people, and her axe had been hers again.
She'd stayed here too long, perhaps, the first time. Long enough for it to feel like a home, for the mountains and the beaches and the specific taste of the air to be familiar. Long enough for people to notice that she was ageless and deathless.
When the whispers had become too great, both from the townspeople she lifted her axe for and from the priestesses who sought her out from time to time, she'd left the same way she'd come: a boat, late at night, with only the clothes on her back and the axe she'd carried.
She's nameless again. She remembers the name she was given here, but she no longer uses it. It's a home she cannot claim.
I've learned my lesson since then, she thinks, looking around. The style hasn't changed too much; the influx of Achaean[6] culture, the new language and alphabet, the new way of dress. She half-misses what she wore when she was last here, loose and leaving her torso free[11] , but oh well; the world moves on. She does too.
The air is different, still clear to most senses, but she can tell how it is slightly thicker with smoke and industry. The sun off the sea is the same, glinting blue and bright, welcoming. The same smell of the markets: raw fish, charcoal octopus, mud and piss and guts.
She'd heard that, while she was gone, a mountain had blown its head and turned the sky to ash for weeks. When she'd asked about some of the smaller settlements on other parts of the island, she'd gotten blank looks. This city, though, one she knows, is still standing.
She looks at a pot on display, the octopus on it beautifully rendered and lifelike, and smiles. Destruction may have rained from the sky, but they are still here. Changed, but still here.
There is still a double axe in their script. It's familiar, even though she can no longer read it[7] . They write double axes everywhere, now.
"Excuse me," she says to a hawker in the market. She uses mainland Elliniká[8] , rather than her now-outdated Keftiu, but she's pleased to see he understands. "What do the axes mean?"
"The goddess!" he explains. "She of the dead, tomb-marker, fate-decider."
"A new god?" she asks, feeling her heart stutter some needless beats. Her axe is wrapped in leather as part of her pack. He cannot see it.
She is not their god. She does not want to be a god of anyone, not again. Not ever again. She left that behind long ago, in the middle of the night, with nothing but her axe and the clothes on her back.
He shakes his head. "A very old god," he says. "Much older than you or I. The mark of the double axe marks protection from death[9]. You must have seen a shrine; there are many here and elsewhere. You can also see it at the palace, and on tombs."
"I must have missed it," she says, faintly. This cannot be happening again. She does not want to be a goddess. She just wants to be someone who lives, someone who helps, someone who sits beneath the terebinth trees in the sun and licks honey from her fingers, human[10].
The hawker calls out to someone else in the modern language of the island. They rush over, showing her a tray full of tiny axes, all double-headed, crude mirrors of the one she carries. "To leave at a shrine," he says, in broken Elliniká, "protection."
"My thanks," she says, and buys one, to mark herself as deathless. There's nothing else she can do.
It's like a shock of cold water, a blade in the back. It's another lesson to learn: she cannot control how she is remembered. She can make lasting change, but she can never stay.
In some ways, she supposes, she haunts them. She lives at every corner, scratched into stone. It feels like the reverse. It feels like they haunt her, like she haunts herself.
She leaves the next day, heading towards a distant rumour of war.
She'll never stay anywhere that long ever again.