Old myths keep calling me back because they never feel finished.
We inherit them as though they are fixed objects: Persephone was abducted. Medusa was a monster. Gaia was Mother Earth. Erebus belonged to darkness and Hemera to daylight. The stories arrive already interpreted for us, their characters assigned their roles thousands of years before we encounter them. Yet whenever I return to those myths, I find myself wondering what might exist just outside the version we were given.
That is where the fascination begins for me. I am less interested in changing the events simply for the sake of novelty than in changing the angle of view. What happens when the person traditionally acted upon is allowed to choose? What if the monster remembers events differently? What if a figure we have reduced to an archetype is allowed desire, contradiction, vulnerability or agency? And what if an ancient story is lifted out of its original setting altogether and placed somewhere unexpectedly modern?
Those questions led me in four very different directions.
The Abduction of Persephone
In The Abduction of Persephone: The Untold Story, I asked what would happen if Persephone chose to descend into the Underworld. Not as a passive victim, but as a young woman bored with the life prescribed for her and hungry for something more. Here is an extract from my story:
As if sensing her excitement, the ground vibrated then the meadow split along a neat seam.
What is this?
From the gaping chasm sprang a gold chariot the size of a mortal farmer’s hut. In it was something clothed in black, although it was difficult to tell through the swirl of violet smoke.
Persephone took a step back just as three things happened at once: the chariot’s four horses screamed like operatic ghosts; the meadow’s bees disappeared; the violet smoke dissipated, revealing a large man with curly black horns growing from the sides of his forehead.
Hades, Ruler of the Underworld, rose like a judgment.
His black cloak was impeccable. His face was sharply chiseled and his eyes offered a warm red glow. His long curly black hair settled across his shoulders. He lifted a hand, and the air hushed as if it had been trained, then he glared at Persephone.
“Hades, right? I’ve heard of you.”
Hades bowed, ever so slightly.
“You’re getting ash on the flowers,” Persephone said, glancing at the ground. Suddenly, she cared about the flowers. She mourned them briefly, then stared at her visitor.
Hades disembarked his chariot, then reset his shoulders, ready to reassert his power.
“Persephone, by ancient right, by shadow law, and by the treaties no one reads—”
“Oh gods, you rehearsed this greeting,” Persephone interrupted. “How many times?”
Medusa
In Medusa: The Untold Story, the familiar account of the slain snake-headed monster gives way to another possibility: perhaps Medusa was a visionary so ahead of her time, the people needed to demonize her. But the land itself remembered differently.
Wind still combs the dunes into spirals at dawn, carving patient signatures of Medusa’s name. Travelers who follow those curves sometimes hear chords beneath their feet and mistake them for the grumble of shifting earth.
The Spiral Tower has been swallowed by the desert and buried by centuries of sand. But if you stand in the right place and press your ear to stone, you will hear it hum like the last string of a lyre plucked long ago. The desert is not kind, but it is honest, and it does not easily forget a voice that once spoke with it.
The stars remember, too. Pegasus strides among them, his wings forever unfurled, a guide for sailors who swear they have always known his pattern. But his arc is no accident. It is the spiral written large, the same curve that rose from Medusa’s hands when she coaxed walls from sand. Those who look closely, on clear nights, see that his stars never quite stand still, but shimmer as his wings beat against the dark.
Aetherion is harder to name because he does not belong to maps. But he is there in the ways that light bends when stories are about to fracture: a glimmer at the corner of an eye; a glint in a mirror that makes you pause because you see yourself as strange and beautiful instead of small. He is the moment just before certainty falters. He is the quiet rebellion against a lie told for too long.
And what of Perseus, whose story grew tall while Medusa’s was buried? He is still stone. In secret places where sandstorms briefly lift their veils, travelers speak of a figure half-swallowed by dunes: a man caught mid-accusation, his mouth open around a word that never made it free. They cannot say if he was a hero or a traitor, and the desert will not tell them. It lets him stand as a lesson that stories, like men, can be stopped mid-breath and left unfinished.
This is Medusa’s justice.
Not the roar of vengeance, but the steadiness of a truth too large to be destroyed. Let them call her a monster and let them praise Perseus as a victor. No one will argue. But when the wind is tired of its own voice, when stars lean close, when a listener with patience rests their cheek to stone, Medusa will answer. Not with anger, nor with a plea, but with the same certainty that rose through her.
Gaia and Apollo
Gaia and Apollo takes the myth of Gaia as primordial mother and personification of Earth, then allows her something mythology so often denies its maternal figures: desire. In her own version of events, Apollo’s presence awakens a longing she has never associated with kin. Here is an extract:
Before I tell you about Apollo, I must confess something difficult. The mothers in stories are often vessels of warning, mouths of curse, and wombs of draconian consequence. And we are not permitted feelings such as desire. But when I first felt the clarity of Apollo’s stride upon my slopes, when his sandals printed order into the dust, I felt something I had never associated with kin: longing.
I did not long for his body, for I still had Uranus as my husband, and the sea as my lovers and the rivers as apprentices. I longed for what Apollo carried: a distilled version of myself. He was the part of me that separates, measures, and sings a single note through the cacophony until the cacophony aligns.
This became the seed of my sorrow. For what you desire in your descendants may be exactly what undoes your firstborns.
Night and Day
And in Night & Day: The Story of Erebus and Hemera, I began with the ancient impossibility of Darkness and Daylight, the primordial gods who could meet only at twilight. I translated their story into a contemporary one about a trauma surgeon working the night shift and an assassin brought into his hospital with a gunshot wound: two people whose connection is defined, once again, by the brevity of the time in which their worlds can overlap. Here is an extract:
Erebus held a chart he did not need, as if it were a passport to enter the ICU. Nyx offered him a look that was both permission and a warning. He accepted the permission and tried to miss the warning. Seeing Hemera awake, he approached her bed.
Night suited her, he mused. Color had found its way back into her skin around her eyes. Her gaze was the kind that takes inventory without unsettling the subject. Her body was slower than her mind. She waited for recovery without complaint. Erebus greeted her with the professional economy of words that meant more than they said.
“Any pain?” he asked.
“It’s bearable,” Hemera replied. “And it’s honest.”
Erebus nodded sagely, silently dwelling on the honesty of pain. It tells the body what the body needs to know. He reviewed Hemera’s vitals, listened to her chest, and checked her dressing. The sounds under the stethoscope were clean, the sort that rewards diligence. He felt satisfied, until he felt something else; something that refused to be named.
Before he knew it, he had said, “I feel like I know you, and that I’m not supposed to,” he said.
Hemera looked at him, then down at her hands.
“I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “You may keep it or discard it. It won’t change the past and it might not change the future. It will, however, tell the truth about the present.”
Erebus stilled himself.
“I’m a killer,” Hemera said. “A paid assassin.”
The room did not flinch. The monitors did not protest. Night had heard confessions stranger than that. But the air shifted, as if a long hallway had opened behind her words.
Erebus did not move. He had a practice of keeping his face unchanged when patients said the things that would alter them. Still, the word found a seam and slipped beneath the skin of his restraint.
Four ancient myths retold
What these four stories share is neither plot nor setting. What connects them is the impulse to look again at old assumptions and ask if something else might have been true. Another voice, another choice, another way of understanding power, love, shadow, transformation and consequence could have remained burried throughout the ages. As the author, I felt compelled to dig them up and give them some light and air.
If you enjoy reading ancient myths retold, download my free illustrated reader’s guide, Weird Worlds, from Gumroad.