#dolious

Perseus was sure that the sun shone brightest over Serifos in all the world. Not that Perseus had known anything past the shores of neighboring Kythnos, but even with his limited world-view, he was convinced of that truth. There was a pressure to the heat of the sun’s rays, that pounded and punished mercilessly upon their gold-burnished shoulders and their dark heads come the noon tide.  Blinding and blaring and beautiful all at once, peculiar to the Cyclades, but most of all to his home island.

The fisherman’s son had been sure that nothing would ever be as brilliant as the sun. Until he’d met Eriounios. The boy with hair paler than Helios’s chariot in the summertime, who sat with his leg tucked easily under him, his brow hardly creased as his delicate, willowy fingers untangled knots and tangles in his father’s nets with such ease, Perseus wasn’t sure he wasn’t reweaving them before his eyes.

Even in the darkened twilight, deeper than the indigos that decorated his mother’s favorite amphorae, Eri seemed to hold the light of the sun, like a lamp. The way polished bronze caught the light of the moon. Glowing. Perseus lagged back from the handful of boys navigating the narrow alleys, to stay by his side. “Are you going to eat first?”  he asked, a little too excitedly. Festivals always did put him in the best moods. “Or dancing first, you think?”

The hour was late, and far advanced. His companions were already silent, asleep in their straw beds, too deep in their slumber to hear the soft rap of knuckles that struck the front door. Gladio rose, lighting an oil lamp to guide his way down the obscurity of the hallway, to the door which he opened with the delay of caution.

Beyond the threshold stood a man of unfamiliar form, swathed in a wine-dark himation and the black of night, the hunch of his shoulders intimating the weariness he wore upon them. A traveler. 

It was not uncommon to receive them at the temple, where they would be granted a bowl of food and the shelter of the sanctuary’s roof. It was hardly usual to receive them here, in the little houses whee the attendants lived, removed as they were, and hardly equipped to handle little else but those who inhabited them mainly for sleep.

But a guest was sacred, as was his right to hospitality, and it was with a smile that Gladio opened the door and gesture for the stranger to enter. “Be welcome to my home,” he greeted him, motioning to the hearth that still burned bright, the remnants of the night’s paltry stew fortuitously still boiling away.