A/N: Originally posted on HPFF on 11/23/08. Written for NaNoWriMo 2007.

Chapter One: My Mythos

Andromeda.

It is a strange name, one that bites the tongue with its peculiar foreign taste, a taste that it does not lose with all the years of familiarity that may pass. It holds a thousand implications and possibilities, only making it more impossible to pinpoint its true meaning.

The name has a distant and unfamiliar sound to it, one that would make you look up and frown upon hearing it, wondering what kind of girl could belong to such a name. But then you shake your head in indifference and look away, assuming that this mysterious girl and whatever significance her name implies will remain a mystery, that it could never make any difference in your unconnected life. And as you do so you do not notice as she walks serenely by, her dark blanket of hair following slowly after her.

I have made it my business to find out what this most perplexing of names truly means. I have pursued strands of evidence with stalwart determination, but they always seem to cross and tangle themselves until I am lost in an endless knot which I cannot untangle or decipher. One meaning leads inevitably into another, which is faded and replaced by a third, only to lead in time to others with no relevance at all.

Abandoning my failed attempts to trace the etymology, I turn to history. One can find solace in history for its firm foundation of fact. But even this cannot hold true for such a name, which is entwined in myth and speculation, each tale varying greatly from the next, leaving few concrete details to satisfy me.

What I can gather are the remaining fragments of the original story, each scattered over countless retellings of the same tale and slowly lost to time. Andromeda, it is told, was a princess, the prize of her people. She was such a treasure that her mother boasted that she was more beautiful than the sea-dwelling children of the very gods. Out of anger, the god of the sea struck their land, bringing havoc and destruction, and leaving the maiden herself to be devoured by a most heinous beast. But, just in time, she is rescued by an unexpected young hero. He is not the man who she had loved and pledged to marry, but he was the one who saved her, and he was the one who won her in marriage, and they lived long and happily until the end of their days.

Now I am no fool, and I am not one to create ridiculous fantasies for myself just so that I can live in a world of deluded make-believe. I do not believe in happily ever afters, and I have long since accepted that no such ending can be expected for my own story. And yet I hold the tale dear, and recite it to myself on those cold dismal nights when I have nothing else to keep me going. Why is it that I allow myself to give into fantasy in these dark moments, imagining myself to live the life of this fabled princess? Why is it that her strange and yet beautiful name holds such power over me? Why is it that this story brings tears of both hope and despair to my clouded eyes?

Because I am her. I am Andromeda. I may not be a princess, I may not be beautiful, and I may not be prized. But I am Andromeda. An Andromeda of a different kind, a different species. I am Andromeda Black, and I have never known the world of this tale that I tell myself so often.

I try to find parallels, to show how closely my life and hers truly are intertwined and how I too may one day escape my monsters and live happily until the end of my days. But I know this cannot be, and it never will.

For I am no princess of a tale or myth. I am simply Andromeda, the second of the Black sisters – always in search of my true self, but constantly aware that, whether I look in a book of stories or a mirror, it is nowhere to be found.