Jason and the Argonauts

 

Into the furthest of strange waters the ship was brought, and the voyagers felt a numbing dread settle upon them fine as a film of mildew settling into the creases of their faces. Gazing dumbly at the vastness, they began to discern in the naked sea a visage of the natural world eons later described by Houellebecq as a blank face — stupid and hostile, a void with no message to convey to humans. They had escaped the danger that had hemmed them in, but the Argonauts were not content; covenants had been broken, and blood had been shed in a bad cause. And as they went on through the wool-thick silence finally the voice of the ship was heard. To the prow they stumbled; holding up their hands, they prayed, in their agony the voice of the Argo condemned the wrath of Hera upon them.

But Hera granted them an eldritch mercy. She would let them live — not upon the lands of men nor in the halls of Olympus, not even to descend the valley of Acherusia to pass into the realm of Hades, but further still beneath the waking world of sun and stars. She bound them to the silent depths of the ocean, enshrined and interred in something resembling youth but in exile, neither asleep nor awake, to make kin with the Kraken and its kind, primordial invertebrates who dwell where no light reaches. Here they remain, unshaped by taxpayer timelines, expiration dates, circadian timelines, information timelines, the rate of radioactive decay, the rate of pixel decay, the lifespan of Soviet concrete, the lifespan of whichever dictator may be present in the collective psyche, the time it takes for a language to become extinct, ice sheet time, mountain-time, DNA-time, star-time; lingering like clouds on the face of memory, submerged among the world’s oldest shadows, hemming the edges of dreams.