Part One: Sea

Chapter I

Sally Jackson had not had an easy life. At the age of five, Sally had been orphaned. A plane flying 150 miles south of Lake Ontario was felled at 3 A.M, leaving her parents, along with every other passenger aboard that flight, dead. Consequently, Sally was sent to live with her uncle, who, during Sally's last year of high school, was diagnosed with cancer, forcing Sally to drop out of school to support the growing bill generated by the cancer treatments. But once more, Lady Luck was absent, and in her place, Death came to pay a visit to Sally Jackson. After the death of Uncle Rich, Sally had been left with no family, no money and no high school diploma. Sally expected her life to continue on this thread of constant disappointment and general uselessness, until, for the first time in her life it seemed, something went right.

Her newfound trend of good luck started when Sally found that Uncle Rich had a beachfront property she had never been informed of. It must have been built when Sally was still living with her parents and the place was coated in sand and absent of any furniture but it was more peaceful here than in the crowded corner of the half-way house she had been living in since the death of her uncle. Surrounded by battered women and others with stories far more shattering than her own did not help the feelings of loneliness and hopelessness that tried to drown her every day. Somehow, miraculously, walking on the vast shores beside the sea made the troubles of her life seem insignificant. Sally sometimes thought that the waves could simply wash over the jagged shores of her life and smooth them out like they had done to the sand that now presses comfortingly against her toes. Being here Sally feels for the first time in a long time that things maybe could get better.

And so Sally spent as much time at her little beach house as she could, coming on weekends and days off she got from the dinner she worked at in Manhattan. She began to feel at home in that ramshackle little cottage on the beach, and soon the seagulls and sand crabs became her new family. The sea in its expansiveness filled the void of loneliness that for so long seemed too deep to escape from. With the beach creatures and the unfailing pounding of the waves on the shore she, mercifully, did not feel alone.

/

Two years after the discovery of her beach sanctuary, Sally found herself sitting on the beach, the sound of the water beating hypnotically against the smooth sand lulling her into a sleep-like state- still aware and conscious, but completely engulfed in her thoughts. That's why she decided she must be hallucinating when she saw the large man, with a three-pronged trident walk onto the shores from the depths of the ocean. She blinked hard several times, rubbing her eyes and when the man didn't disappear with the rest of her dream-like thoughts, she stood up and walked to meet him.

Before she had a chance to formulate how to ask if he had walked out of the depths of the ocean without sounding crazy, the man spoke. "It seems like every time I come to walk this shore, you are already here."

"Well that's one way to say 'come here often?', I suppose." Sally replied, confused by his statement. She had never seen this man on her slice of shore before. She saw humor - and was that a hint of flirtation? - glinting in his eyes. Eyes the color of the emerald sea lapping at his ankles. The man was young, a bit older than her, maybe mid 20s, and undeniably attractive. The shadow of a jet black beard covered his face and Sally couldn't help thinking like he looked like a pirate. Something in the way he held himself told her that despite his pleasant demeanor, this man was dangerous. He radiated power in waves, gentle and strong like the calm sea. Then she remembered the four foot tall three-pronged trident the man held casually in his left hand. "You going fishing or something?" She asked, casual tone belying her growing sense of wariness.

"I was not planning on it. I came up here to think. I find the waves are much more soothing from above than below, at times." He spoke in a deep rumble that seemed to match the tone of the ocean itself. In the same way that the birds and the sea comforted her, this man made Sally feel not alone. "Well then," she replied, "sit down with me, I could use some company." He sat, placing his trident in the sand next to him, reminding her of its bizarre presence.

"Why on earth do you have a trident?" Sally inquired, somehow not as uncomfortable as she should have been in this increasingly odd interaction. It was as if the waves had lulled her into a dream where even the most outrageous events seem plausible.

The man looked at her with that same humorous and - she was now certain of this - flirtatious gaze. "It's my symbol of power. I never leave the sea without it." Never leave the sea …? Who is this guy and what does he want with me?

"Are you going to stop being weird and cryptic or do I need to bring out my pepper spray?" Sally demanded in a voice that was more flirtatious and less threatening than she anticipated.

Seemingly bolstered by Sallys' accidentally coy tone, the man laughed out loud and sunk into a more relaxed posture beside her as if the feeble threat of pepper spray had been an inside joke the two of them shared. Sally did not understand the humor of it but was captivated by his laugh and found it -annoyingly - infectious.

"I could give you straight forward answers but you would not believe me." The man told her, eyes staring out into the sea. "Oh yeah?" Sally retorted, "Try me." The man looked over to her and studied her face for a few moments before his expression set in satisfaction, as if he had found what he was looking for.

"I have had many names but I prefer Poseidon." His head lolled on his shoulder and he stared into her eyes and flashed her a ridiculously mischievous grin before continuing. "You know, lord of the seas."

Sally snorted before replying, "Someone's full of himself."

"I told you that you would not believe me." The man, Poseidon, replied. An edge of challenge in his voice that made Sally foolishly want to abandon any logical thought and indulge this man. Against her better judgement, she did just that. "Convince me then."

"I thought you'd never ask." The man was suddenly standing in front of her, though her eyes had not registered him rising, and offered her his hand. Curiosity won the war against better judgment and Sally placed her much smaller hand into his.

What followed was ethereal and soft around the edges, hard to recall with exact clarity. The harsh glow of the sun was suddenly softened, a sheet of turquoise water rising to form a sphere around the two of them. The water flowed as if she was watching the underside of a wave pass over her and within the impossible depths she saw beautiful things. Sally could still see the world beyond this conjured wave through less than a foot of water, and yet somehow the space within that foot was the infinite ocean. Metallic fish swam past so quickly the schools merged into solid lines of gold, copper, silver, and turquoise. Sea turtles with backs so large she could have sat side by side with the man next to her floated about in lazy rings. Eels, sharks, and creatures she could not identify streaked by, muscles flexing in fierce shows of power. Breaking the trance Sally seemed to have fallen in, the man's voice asked softly, humorously, "Are you convinced?" And the whole sphere of water fell down around her.

Sally found herself sitting where she had been before, wiping water from her eyes. She could not decide if she was soaked from the wave that was now rushing past her to return to the ocean or if the man had truly summoned that infinite sphere of water around them only to disappear, taking the magical depths of the ocean with him.

/

In the days that followed, Sally had convinced herself that the encounter with that strange man, Poseidon, had happened entirely in her head, a dream that she had woken from when that wave pounded into her. And yet … somewhere in the back of her mind a voice of doubt kept screaming that the odd encounter had been real. She ignored the voice like she always did when she encountered things she did not understand until, a month later, she had a chance to return to the sea.

Sally almost dropped her keys when she walked up to her beach cottage to find the man sitting casually on the porch steps, looking out over the ocean as if his presence was nothing out of the ordinary. "I was starting to think you weren't going to come back." The man said casually.

"What did you do to me that day on the beach?" Sally demanded violently. "How did you do that thing with the water?" Her tone the complete opposite of Poseidon's casual drawl. She came rushing at him, unsure of what she meant to do but meaning to get some real answers whatever it took. Before she could reach him, the man had stood up and was holding a sphere of water in his palm as if it were an apple. Then the sphere began to levitate and Sally stopped dead in her tracks. "Now I know I'm going insane" she declared matter of factly, and the man just chuckled.

"I know this is not the strangest thing you have ever seen. You have the Sight. Think about other times you have seen things you found hard to believe." He paused, as if to let her call these occurrences to mind. "You are not crazy and neither am I. You simply see the world as it truly is. You have a gift." Only then did Sally begin to consider the possibility that the voice in her head was right - had always been right. Growing up, she had seen things others could not. First her parents then her uncle put it down as an overactive imagination and after long enough, she began to believe them. Every one-eyed homeless man, every chicken-human hybrid lady meandering around with the pigeons, every insane, scary, impossible thing she had been forced to ignore her entire life - could all of these things have been real? She began to entertain the possibility that everyone else was wrong, imagining things. She was not the crazy one. The desire to not be alone in the terrifying world only she had ever seen drove her to accept what this man -Poseidon- was saying. "Explain more, please." Sally asked him. And he did. Slowly through story after story, Sally learned about the land of the gods, of Olympus. Of the truth in the myths her parents and uncle read to her as a child. Poseidon gave her permission to believe what her eyes had been trying to convince her mind of for over 20 years. As he spoke, Sally soon found herself falling into a sense of comfort, of safety, something she hadn't felt since before her uncle was diagnosed.

Every chance she got from then on, Sally went to the beach and softly whispered his name, knowing Poseidon would hear her and come. And every time she called, Poseidon came. Once he had answered all of her questions about the world of gods and monsters that Sally had always seen but never understood, they began talking about other things. About the life Sally wanted for herself and Poseidon's favorite sea creatures. About Sally's greatest regrets and Poseidon's greatest fears. The conversations were easy and delightful, and Poseidon's gentle manner and propensity to flash that quirky, mischievous grin at her made Sally feel things she did not know she could feel. Sally soon found herself falling in love with the man who smelled of the sea.