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"Who dares enter my cave?! Leave, mortal, or perish."
Adrasteia trembled slightly but stood her ground. She knew that of all the perils she had faced on her journey, this moment would be the most difficult. She took a deep breath.
"I will do neither, guardian of Athena."
"A woman! No, you must leave. It is not safe for you here, and if you dare speak that name to me again you will not receive a third warning."
"I speak only the truth, that is my promise to you Medusa."
It was Medusa's turn to tremble, but her response was one of rage, rather than fear.
"The gods have no use for my truth, why should I have any use for yours? Leave!"
Adrasteia felt a single tear slip from her eye as her fear was replaced with a grief so deep it felt a physical thing. She knew that tone. She had heard the same rage and hurt in the voices of so many. Too many.
"The truth has many perspectives" she said. "For the gods and for us."
Medusa scoffed, still facing the wall of her cave. This woman was bold and rude, but still a woman and rudeness alone was not enough for her to turn her gaze upon a sister.
"How can there be different perspectives on my curse?" she demanded. "The goddess I vowed to serve and protect damned me in her own temple! Damned me twice, for she did not protect me when I was hers!"
"Yes" Adrasteia replied, "yes that is the story the men tell. But the women, we whisper another. For us, we dry each other's tears with shaking hands and murmured stories of you."
"Of me?!? What of my tale could offer comfort to any woman?"
Medusa's rage was reborn at the utterance of such a preposterous statement. Comfort? Comfort indeed, to be banished from all that is good and beautiful, isolated even from the hope of love and life.
Adrasteia smiled. This was the reason she had come. The reason she had left her home and undertaken a journey of such peril and seeming futility. She approached the sound of the gorgon's voice and tentatively reached out a hand, applying gentle pressure to the shoulder she found.
"It is safe to turn to me. I cannot fall victim to the power of your gaze. Please, sit with me and I will explain."
Medusa shivered at the touch she had been so long denied. She knew it was a death sentence for her to acquiesce to the beseeching tone of the one behind her, but the urge was too strong. What if the maiden was speaking the truth, as she had promised? What if she had some charm or protection, some token of the gods themselves that would allow Medusa even a brief moment of respite from the agony of her loneliness? No, she could not deny such a request.
Slowly she turned to face the stranger in her midst. And upon seeing her for the first time she could not hold back the gasp of wonder that seemed to fall of it's own accord from her lips. The woman was standing less than a pēchys from her, wearing a soft, hopeful smile and a linen chiton. That gentle smile was like a ray of afternoon sun breaking through the cloudy grayness of her world and Medusa felt something deep inside her come awake for the first time in years. Trust. This woman was showing her trust, like she hadn't been gifted since her days in the temple. It was such a jarring gift that it took a moment for Medusa to realize that smile was not stone. It was still soft and warm and living. In shock, she jerked her gaze up to the woman's eyes and felt her own fill with tears as a sob wrenched itself from somewhere deep in her chest.
Blind. The woman was blind. The milky white of her affliction paled the green of her eyes but made them no less stunning framed by her dark lashes and nut-brown skin. A token of the gods indeed. A curse of her own that provided this beautiful gift for Medusa. She began to understand an inkling of the womans meaning of perspective.
"What is your name?" she breathed.
"Adrasteia" came the almost laughing reply. "My name is Adrasteia. And now that you have seen me, may I see you as well?"
Adrasteia raised her hand toward the stunned face before her by way of explanation.
Medusa, for the first time since soft footsteps had disturbed the quiet of her alleged "peace," smiled as she gladly consented to the touch.
"Adrasteia. Courage. I can see you were gifted a suiting name. Yes, yes you may touch me."
Adrasteia gently ran her fingers over the enraptured face before her. Her mind slowly painted for her a picture of arched eyebrows over almond eyes with soft lashes. A straight, regal nose framed by high, graceful cheekbones. The softness of Medusa's cheeks was rounded by the smiling of her full lips. Adrasteia's own smile widened in response to that of the monster under her fingertips.
"You are beautiful. If men are now stunned by your gaze, surely they were prior stunned by your loveliness."
Medusa chuckled a bit ruefully as she blushed at the praise.
"Were you able to see them, surely you would note similar reactions to your own passing, Adrasteia. Let us sit, I find I need to hear an explanation of your assertions and I fear we've become distracted by our introductions, wonderful though they were."
They remained facing each other, woman and gorgon, as they each gracefully sank to the ground. Somehow they each found it a comfort to entwine their fingers and they spoke on this new level, both of height and of trust.
"Yes," Adrasteia began "explanation is why I came. You need to know. You deserve to know." She took a deep breath and squeezed the hands holding hers, somehow needing to both give and receive comfort in preparation for such hard words. Hard words not because of their form, but because of their cause.
"The men tell your tale much as you do. They speak of broken vows and a monstrous curse. Of a woman twisted by Athena's rage into a monster who murders all who dare look upon her face."
Medusa's own face hardened like stone at these words. She knew them to be true. They were the words she, herself had spit in anger only minutes ago. Spit, for even after all this time they were foul on her tongue.
"You said the women tell it differently." was the only utterance she could manage without again betraying her rage.
To her shock, Adrastreia's smile returned at this statement.
"Yes," she continued. "Yes the women tell it differently. I am sorry to put it bluntly, but you were raped in the temple of your goddess, by her own uncle. It was a terrible thing, but not an isolated one. Many of us have experienced unspeakable brutality at the hands of the men we should be able to trust. The priests tell us it is the duty of the men of Greece to protect us. Many do. But enough do not that we have all held at least one woman or girl while they wept their pain silently into our peplos. In years past, the only words of comfort we had to offer felt empty, ringing hollow into the gulf of such pain. But now we have you."
At this, Medusa could no longer hold her silence. The pain, the anger, the sorrow, it all exploded forth in disbelief.
"How?!? Tell me how Poseiden's rape and Athena's cold betrayal could possibly be twisted into some perverse comfort? What do you tell each other? That if even the gods are so weak you mustn't blame mortal men for their trespasses? Is such filth actually an easement of anyone's hurt?!"
Adrasteia reeled back slightly in shock, both at the words themselves and the vehemence with which they were spoken.
"No!" She raised her voice for the first time in objection to such an idea. "No, Medusa, we speak not of tolerance for the men, but of protection of each other. We speak of how Athena was so enraged by her uncle's desecration of one she loved so dearly that she gifted her priestess with eternal safety from ever again enduring such indignity at the whims or wants of anyone. We dare utter to each other of the one of us who is forever safe, and the love Athena must hold for you to provide such protection. We say that if the goddess of wisdom herself, goddess of strength and justice and civilization itself, if Athena sees such an act in her temple and declares so clearly "Never again!" then we all must be justified in our anger and pain at these actions upon our own bodies, in the temples of our own homes, and courtyards, and streets. We are justified and in your tale we are vindicated. We are, in some small way, made whole again in knowing we did not deserve it and we need not tolerate it. If you can turn men to stone for daring encroach on what is yours, then by the gods we can rise to the defense of ourselves and each other, by whatever means possible!"
The grip of their hands were broken as Medusa reeled back in shock, tearing her hands away to cover her gaping mouth. Her shoulders began to rise and fall as she sucked in desperate breathes that quickly turned to racking sobs. Distressed, Adrasteia rushed to wrap her strong arms around the weeping gorgon, as she had so many times wrapped them around others who's cries had also echoed the rending of their very souls. This was not what she had wanted. She had meant to bring a message of gratitude, not new pain! What could she say? What words do you murmur to the one who has been the source of your comfort? All she could think to do was stroke the heaving back under her palm and declare how sorry she was, over and over.
After a few moments her words began to penetrate through the fog of emotion and take shape within Medusa's understanding. As soon as she was able to grasp their meaning her arms flew around the anguished woman practically in her lap.
"No, no please don't be sorry! Don't apologize for this! I weep tears of joy Adrasteia. The first true joy I have felt all these years since that fateful day!"
"Joy?" Adrasteia tentatively questioned. "You do not hate me for bringing these accounts to you?"
"I could never hate someone with such a beautiful heart. Never. I did not know that such love could ever be, that such strength could be born from such ugliness as rape. Different perspective indeed! The idea that my goddess may yet love me...that I am not hideous, not grotesque in the eyes of those who share this burden in their own hearts...there is nothing, NOTHING anyone could ever give me more wonderous and beautiful as that. And you came all this way to give me this. Adrasteia I will never be able to repay you for this, but I will gladly find a way to try."
Adrasteia laughed a tiny laugh that was somehow also a sniffle as she wiped the tears gathered in her own eyes.
"If that is truly how you feel, may I make a request?"
"You may ask anything of me, dear one, and if it is in my power to give I will do so." came the quick reply.
"I cannot ever return home" she explained. "I was cast out for refusing the advances of the Polemarch Archon. He had me declared a heretic and claimed my blindness was proof of disfavor from Athena herself. I was driven from the city and decided that if I could not return home, I could still do some good in the world by coming here and telling you all I have shared. I think perhaps I needed to know there was still some light in what has become, for me, a very dark world indeed. I thought if I could bring that to you, it would be worth it. And it was. But now I have nowhere to go."
Medusa shook her head in wonder at this incredible person, wonder that after all her trials she would somehow be granted this privilege.
"Please," she said softly, running the backs of her fingers over Adrasteia's cheek in comfort, "stay here with me. You will be forever safe, I can promise you that. Safe and cherished for the wonder you are, and all you may yet become."
The tension melted from Adrasteia's face and the pain slowly faded from her unseeing eyes as she raised a hand to grasp the one caressing her face. She turned her face down a moment before gathering her courage once more and leaning forward, closer to the kindred soul before her.
"May I...?"
Two broken women sat in the safety and comfort of an island cave, one smiling tentatively while the other's smile widened in the heights of previously undared hope, and the jagged pieces of two fractured hearts began reaching for each other, healing each other, completing each other as a single "yes" was whispered from a monsters lips the moment before they met a woman's.