From These Same Trees
Perseus has been on the surface for all of five minutes and he is already causing a storm.
He can't remember the last time he stood on this beach, or what used to be the beach before it fell to the sea, isn't even sure of when he was last this close to the land. He would work it out almost automatically if he stopped to think about it for more than a moment, but this is something he has no interest in doing. As much as the rising winds off the coast are a manifestation of his anger, they are also his protection. They keep unwanted thoughts from entering his mind while he reaches for his home, drawing strength from the iciest depths of the ocean as he tries to understand what has become of this place that a boy called Percy once loved.
There's no way of knowing with certainty what is the case: are his memories unreliable, being remnants of his mortal self, or has Montauk really changed so much in his time away? The ocean has eaten at the land, consuming sand and grass and concrete all the same, his father's domain greedily expanding and the soft greenery offering only feeble resistance. He can tell from his place on the shoreline that most of the housing in the area is abandoned, but there are a few human shapes that he can sense pulsing with blood a little way inland. Once, there was a cabin here where he stayed. If it still exists, he does not recognise it.
How does it dare? How does this place dare to alter, when Perseus himself has been frozen in place for centuries that mean as little as days?
With a wave of his hand, he drags the sea back from the land as though unveiling it. A younger Perseus might have done it more slowly, more carefully, but this one takes a kind of satisfaction in seeing the fish that have ventured to the very edge of the sea suddenly stranded, flopping helplessly on the dry land, drowning in the air as their gills try and fail to process the oxygen they need from it. He feels their pain and shares in it, hears them crying out for him: Lord, Lord, help us – and he does nothing.
Who was there when he was crying out? Who was there when the air was snatched from Perseus' lungs? Only his father, who could not return it to him. Poseidon's only answer was to remove the need to breathe at all, to capture Perseus as he was then for all eternity: to turn his son into a god.
There is an ache, of a kind, in Perseus' gut. He senses it like he is watching it happen to someone else, albeit maybe someone of whom he was once fond. He realises that his father was right, that his place is indeed deep in the sea, that he should not have ventured up to the surface. Here, he is both Prometheus, bound and helpless against the pain to which the open air exposes him, and the eagle, morbidly gorging himself on that same pain.
He looks along the stretch of wet sand where he once walked as a child, covered in the scum of his father's kingdom and the detritus of the humans who had treated the world as if they owned it. He fought to save them once, he remembers. He thinks on this for a moment, but he is not sure why he would have done so. Perhaps it is something to ask his father, when he returns.
The humans will learn, in time, to whom this place belongs. He releases the sea, and the tide resumes its relentless march, the waves doubling in size. It will save most of the animals that he has stranded, but not all.
He knows that he must be careful, that there are more powerful gods who will be displeased if his anger stretches as far as the camp of half-bloods a little further along the island, if he is responsible for snuffing out such fragile lives as those, but Montauk itself belonged to Sally Jackson and to the boy who was called Percy, and with both of them gone it belongs now to Perseus.
And yet it has changed. The sand has shifted and the weak soil has allowed itself to be consumed by the sea and the people have moved on as though the world has any right to continue turning on its axis, as though life must go on, as though nothing of note has happened.
Perseus has learned the hard way that there is no need for life to go on. If the grief is strong enough, if the cause is right, then it can stop the whole universe in its tracks. He is sixteen years old, now and forever. He has not eaten, he has not breathed in or out, he has not set foot on dry land, for a millenium. His world now is the part of the ocean so deep that it is always night, that a mortal would be crushed to nothing by the pressure, and that his father's family only trepidly explore when they need him to destroy something or someone, though they treat him like an exotic pet when they see him and are not sorry when he returns to his stasis in the trench.
He closes his eyes and once more drags the sea back from the land, further this time, building layers upon layers of water as he forms the beginnings of a tsunami to cover this place, a tide that will come in and never recede.
If this place will not show the respect that it should, if it will insist on change, insist on harbouring human lives, on carrying on as normal, if it will not stop for death -
The mortals here do not know what grief is, not the way that Perseus does.
He will teach them, and though he may never return to this place again, they will not forget.
I read the excellent but bleak Philip Larkin poem 'An April Sunday Brings the Snow' about his father's death and it made me sad.
Then I wrote this.
All reviews as always massively appreciated.
Cross-posted on AO3.
