On their way to Caledonia, the woman and her companion began to teach things to each other. The woman began to teach the man how to hunt as she did. She taught him the ways of tracking— finding the scent on the breeze, and following the direction of the wind to know from where it was coming. She taught him to use his eyes, how to scan the floor of the forest for signs of life coming through— how the passing of a deer or a fox was no different from the passing of a river, eating away at the silt, leaving its shape upon the Earth. She taught him how to step more quietly. She taught him how to keep his own scent masked with mud, and how to best keep out of sight as he made the final approach to his prey.
“This will help you in our hunt for the boar,” she told him. “Every advantage is an advantage, and every advantage will be welcome, if the beast is indeed as terrible as you’ve told me.”
Meleager began to teach the woman about the various towns and cities past the edges of this wilderness, in the places where the Gods’ names were known, the places with laws and kings. Meleager taught the woman the laws that most mattered, would most matter to her, probably. He taught her the names of the kings of the nearby kingdoms, and he told her bits and pieces of their stories and the stories of their families, their divine lineages, whatever he could manage to remember. “It is a great mess of facts and half-facts, histories and claims,” he told her, “but if you are to walk the streets of these cities, these things cannot hurt to know.”
He taught her also how to wrestle and box. That was the other thing he had to offer. In the mornings and the evenings, the woman taught him hunting, and in the afternoon, he taught her wrestling and boxing. Every day, his hunting improved. And every day, her wrestling and boxing improved, though however hard she practiced, and however hard she tried, she could not even once manage to put the man on his back.
“I am stronger than you,” he told her, when he saw that she was becoming frustrated. “I am a man, that is the body I have been given. That is the shape of things. And I am more skilled than you as well. I have been doing this since I was just a boy. You have been doing this for barely a week. You are expecting the wrong sort of victory for yourself, I think. Every second longer that it takes for me to defeat you should be a triumph in your eyes— and every bout we have, it takes me one second longer.”
But still, the woman was frustrated.
Meanwhile, every day, the she-wolf’s wounds were healing up a little better, just as the wound to her thigh had healed up day by day when the woman had first found her upon the dirt. That would was nothing more than a scar now, and these were fading. By the time the woman was finally able to land a good hit on Meleager while boxing— not enough to put him down, send him reeling, but a hit, enough for him to say that she had properly hit him— by that time, Leto was able to try walking again. Just a few tottering steps, but not nothing.
Bit by bit, on and on, time passed, like a river, like a river, it left its shape upon the little group. Eastwards and Eastwards and Eastwards, they went, into each day’s Sunrise, away from each day’s Sunset. And bit by bit, on and on, the forests started to thin. They gave way to meadows. They gave way to fields. The woman had never seen such a thing before. All that wheat, growing in rows. It was not at all like the clumping and winding of the trees. “From wheat comes bread,” said Meleager. “From bread comes happiness.”
There were oxen and horses, tied in ropes, pulling what Meleager called “carts and ploughs”.
“Why do they pull?”— nowhere on the woman’s mountainside did any of the animals live in ropes and pull things. Every creature did its own work. The foxes did not build nests for the birds. The wolves did not dig burrows for the foxes.
“They are fed, bathed, kept in warm, soft places,” explained the man. “They work happily and come to love the people who work alongside them.”
That night, they did not sleep in the woods, but instead they slept in a town. It was not the first time that the woman had been in a town— she had stumbled upon a town during her first few days wandering away from the mountainside, the town that the shadows had first passed through on the way to reach her mother. She saw the places where the greater shadow’s foot had fallen. She saw the shattered bones and other leftovers of the six people who had been crushed to death. What else could it have been? But she had seen no people— all of the houses had been abandoned. Aside from odd bits of cloth and furniture here and there, she found nothing inside them.
This town, though, this town was full and alive. There were men and women and children, running all about, and animals as well, cattle and horses and goats in the streets and on the grass alongside them. There was chatter, a hundred times the careful hush of the forests, everyone was talking to everybody. Nobody was bothering to keep quiet. Nobody was bothering to keep out of sight. People walked up and down the street, right through the centers of everything, in plain view. It was another world altogether. She had never seen such a thing before, never— she hadn’t even been able to imagine it, never mind all the laws and stories Meleager had been trying to tell her about such places.
And no one here had ever seen such a thing as her. All the people who saw her passing, they stared— and all the people saw her passing, each and every one of them. Instantly, their gaze caught the Moonlight shine of her hair, and even if they didn’t notice her right away, even if they’d been looking some other direction, it only took a moment or so for a friend or a sibling or a neighbor to give them a nudge and a whisper to look, look at that, have you ever seen anything like that before? And the beautiful she-wolf with the death-black tail… was that the infamous Leto? Children began to follow the woman as she went, running behind her, building up the courage to dash up to her and pull on one of her fingers or the hem of her tunic and discover for themselves if she was real or just a phantasm, just one of so many stories they had heard or made up and told to each other. Some of them shouted after her, asking where she had come from, what was her name, what made her hair shine like that?— and her eyes, too, look, her eyes were shining, too!— was she magical?— was she the child of a God?— was she a Goddess herself?— which of the Goddesses was she?— was that really Leto the she-wolf she was traveling with, the she-wolf of so many stories and problems?— how was such a wolf coming so calmly alongside her?— where was the danger and menace of all those stories?— how had she managed to tame such a wolf?— was that a special magic, too, to tame a fearsome creature like that? The woman began to wonder if perhaps all of the people out in the world were like Meleager, asking questions upon questions upon questions, on and on and on— like children, like she had been as a child, wide eyed and chasing after whatever shined, perhaps that was the way of other people, asking questions and trying to jump up to the Moon.
Soon, though, the eyes began to burn her, and the whispers, they cut into her skin. The woman found herself pulling up her fawn-pelt over her head to hide her hair, keeping her gaze turned towards the ground to avert the shine of her eyes. But it was already too late. The whispers were already traveling throughout the whole town. By mid-afternoon, every last person knew that someone strange and wonderful had come among them.
By early evening, all the people had converged upon Meleager and the woman and the wolf in the center of the town, and all of them were clamoring for the chance to speak with the Goddess, or perhaps the child of a God, or perhaps something else? What could she possibly be? Everyone was talking over each other, begging the wolf and the woman and Meleager to choose their house to stay in tonight, grace their hearth with their presence. There would be food, and warmth, and every comfort given. But Meleager kindly and gently turned them down, all of them. He knew the woman and especially the wolf were so much more accustomed to sleeping outdoors, in the open air. And he knew that when they did finally reach Caledonia, his family would not take this same no for an answer— there was no chance at all that they would allow the woman to sleep outside as she preferred; better to give her this comfort now, while she could still have it.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
So they slept that night in the center of the town, by a great fire, with all of the people gathered around, keeping on and on with all of their questions. “I am a child of the dead stars above,” the woman told them, and she pointed at the old she-bear, her most beloved mother. “It is the stars that made me as I am, it is the stars that shine so beautiful and pale through my eyes and my hair and my blood. It is the stars who taught me all that I know.”
The people called her “Starchild”, just as Meleager called her “Starchild”, just as she had now begun to call herself “Starchild”, in her own head, in her thoughts she was “Starchild”, nothing of the Half Moon, that “Artemis” and Her cold, loveless light.
The old men and women of the village declared that this was a great and important story that was happening now, this woman coming here to be among them as she passed through. They declared that everyone here was to remember this for the rest of their lives, and to pass it down across the generations. The young children of the village declared that the woman must play with them, and they brought all manner of toys and things to the town center to present to her. They played games of catch, and games of racing, and games of archery, and the children and all the other people marveled at the woman’s speed with her feet and accuracy with her bow and all the amazing things that she could do. And the woman, she had never felt anything like this. She had never been so eruptively praised. She had never been so drowningly admired. It was all too much— and at the same time, none of it seemed like quite enough. There was always more and more and more coming to her, coming at her, and she drank it up and drank it up and drank it up. It really was true, wasn’t it?— that she was exceptional? It was never something that had occurred to her on the mountainside, because she had never really been anything there but the only one of her kind. She had always just been different, just as the Moon had blessed her to be— or really, as the Moon had cursed her to be, because being so different meant that there was nothing about her herself that made her special. She was the only one on the mountainside with a bow and arrow or a knife, or who was able to trap fish in a net, or who was able to make salves and ointments from the herbs and grasses. Those things had been special because of what everything else wasn’t, not because of what she was. But now… now it all meant something.
Meleager sat to the side for most of it, smiling and watching until he became tired enough to close his eyes and recline against the side of a house. Leto was curled up next to him, resting off the noise and action of the day, a little too much for her. For hours and hours, she’d had all sorts of people coming up to touch her, pet her, comment upon her beautiful silver fur and death-black tail, wonder if she was really the terrible Leto they had heard so much about, so gentle and easily accepting it all— but in her eyes, they saw it, the waiting ferocity. It was really her. And such a strange detente, now, after all the chaos she had caused. People were bringing her bits of pork or beef to eat. Children were bringing her sticks to chew on. People were admiring the sharpness of her teeth and her claws, her lean muscle, her raw power. But she was not nearly so happy to be praised as the woman was. It didn’t matter one bit what people thought of her.
All through the night, the party carried on. There was delicious bread and wine, nothing like which the woman had ever tasted— she soon found herself giggling and slurring as she told and told the great stories of her life to all those curious, gathered to hear— how she had been left on the mountaintop, raised by the old she-bear and the Half Moon. She wasn’t bothering to hide her parentage now, she wasn’t thinking to, she couldn’t think to, her mind clouding as it was from drink after drink. She talked about her first hunt, her first kill, how she had carved her fawn-pelt to cover her hair. She talked about the Half Moon gifting her the bow and the knife and the belt.
She talked about the shadows that had come, and the death of her most beloved mother, the old she-bear. She talked about how the Moon had cut her off from taking her revenge. She talked about no forgiveness for that. Ever.
And she listened, too, to the stories of the village.
“You can see that hill there, in the distance— barely, in this low evening light, you can see it, but once, it was a beacon for our village,” told one of the older men. “Once, there was a great ram living upon it with fleece of pure gold— or more than gold even, for gold upon the neck or the wrist shines only in the light it is given. But this golden fleece upon the ram, it shone all on its own, with its very own light— like your hair and eyes, Starchild, this ram dazzled in the night. Even from here, a mile at least, you could see it.”
“It sounds incredible,” said the woman, trying her best to imagine it.
“It was incredible. It was magnificent, the way it glowed— always, you could see it, moving about, and know just where it was. It was beloved by our village, held as sacred, and it was forbidden to hunt it, or even to cause it any sort of trouble or displeasure. We came to feel as though it was watching over us— and perhaps it was. It was certainly a good-natured creature, the sort of divinely-touched creature to gladly watch over people.”
The old man told the woman a story of two heroes who had once come to the village.
“Sons of the old king of Boeotia, Athamas, long dead now— Phrixis and Helle were their names, those sons, those heroes.”
Another word the woman had never known. “What do you mean by ‘heroes’?” she asked, and the old man had to pause for a long time to think about how to answer. He was not used to anyone asking the meaning of “hero”, “hero” had so long been a thing simply known to everybody, or a thing the children learned without being told. Finally, though, he spoke again.
“A hero is many things. A great warrior. A wise scholar. A kind savior. A hero is what changes the shape of the world with the swing of the sword or the thrust of the spear. A hero walks the Earth wreathed in glory and legend. There is no other way to explain it aside from that, that will have to do.”
“Fine, then,” said the woman. She knew nothing still of “glory”, and nothing of “legend”, they were just sounds, not words. She did not know the meaning of “warrior”. But to change the shape of the world… this was a thing she could understand. “So what became of these heroes, Phrixis and Helle?”
“They passed through here after a great shipwreck had left them stranded far from home. Boeotia, their kingdom, can be found a great distance from here, across a raging and cruel sea. It is no easy thing to come from there to here, and after triumphantly making the trip and doing the other things that they had come to do, their rightful business as heroes, it was an even more difficult thing to come back.”
In the man’s story, he spoke of a curse that had fallen upon the land of Boeotia so that the crops wouldn’t grow, and a prophecy that the only way to undo the curse would be for those two sons, Phrixis and Helle, to make a deadly and terrifying quest here, across that sea.
“They very nearly died along the way,” the man said, “each of them, many times. They told us many things that they had faced. Great monsters and whirlpools. Floating islands crashing together like grinding teeth, crushing anything between them. Eternal, light-choking darkness, a place where the Sun and the Moon can never reach, that must be navigated in blindness and despair. But despite all this, they washed up alive unto the shores of this land and built the shrine they had been told was needed. And then they wandered, searching for a way home. That wandering is what brought us to our village, here. And when they saw the great ram shining in the night from that hill, there, they saw it as a sign sent upon them by the Gods Themselves.”
“And so what did they do?” asked the woman.
“They travelled together to the hillside to meet the ram, to fall to their knees before it and beg for its help, whatever form that might have taken.”
“And so what did the ram do?” asked the woman. She was beginning to become quite curious, despite the heavy liquor sloshing behind her eyes, between her ears.
“The ram took pity on them, of course. It was a kind guardian spirit. It sprouted great golden wings to match its great golden fleece. It allowed them to climb upon its back. And away it flew with them. Away and away and away, beyond the horizon.” The old man shook his head sadly. “We never saw it again. But a year later, we did see that.”— he pointed up, into the sky. There, a cluster of stars in the shape of a ram. “We saw that, and we simply knew. It could have been any ram up there in the sky as dead stars, but it wasn’t any ram. It was the ram of the distant hillside, and we knew that as surely as we knew our own names. And until you had come here and told us of the shadows that had menaced your mountainside, we had never been able to understand. But now, it is clear…”
“The ram was killed by the shadow hunter,” nodded the woman. “Just as my mother was killed. Just as so many living things are being killed.”
There was fresh determination rising within her. Fresh anger, fresh thirst for blood as vengeance. She swore to the old man and to all the rest of the village that was still awake that she would avenge the great golden ram just as she would avenge her mother, that she would make the shadow suffer his due agony twice over for it. And the next morning, despite the pounding in her head and the lethargy in her limbs and the churning of her stomach, she rose from the ground where she had slept, and she travelled onwards with Meleager and Leto, towards the East, towards Caledonia.
She had promised to help with the great hunt for the terrible boar, and she was going to keep her word. But that was a thing that would be quickly handled and done, and once she was done with it, she would double down on her mad chase after the shadows.
She would visit hell itself upon them. With her bow and her knife and the poison-thorned tree of death inside of her, she would change the shape of the world. She would cut away that which she despised. For the first time since being a child, she found herself wanting to become again, as children always want to become.
She was going to become a hero.
