Chapter Text
The ocean was colder than he thought it would be.
Telemachus slammed into the water with force, a scream dying on his lips as his body was dragged under by the frothing waves. Somewhere above laughter echoed – fading quickly with the sky as the sea surrounded him. There was no chance of swimming to safety, no chance of swimming at all. Telemachus’ hands gripped tightly across his ribs desperately trying to decrease the bleeding, but it was hopeless. The blood trailed away from him in ribbons, dispensing his life force into the sea, the salt stinging against the hole now in his chest. The light became dimmer and the air in his lungs burned he needed oxygen now.
And then-something moved.
The current around him changed, pulled taut like a bowstring. The sea grew still. Heavy. Watching.
From the murk, a shape emerged. Long and vast, gliding through the deep like it belonged to it.
He couldn’t make sense of what it was—just that it moved through the water like it owned it. A man? No… no, not a man. A presence. Ancient. Terrifying.
Poseidon.
The god swam up to him regarding the prince with disgust.
“…Odysseus’s son, I should’ve known.” A deep voice spoke, low and cold and somehow all around him. “What a mess they’ve made of you.”
Telemachus couldn’t reply. His vision had gone fuzzy at the edges, dark blooming like ink across a parchment.
Poseidon tilted his head. “It’s a shame, really. You’re not meant to die yet.”
Telemachus barely registered the hand reaching out.
The moment the god’s fingers touched his chest, pain exploded.
He convulsed, eyes flying wide. Something shifted inside him—bones grinding, snapping. His lungs screamed as they filled with something thicker than air. He tried to curl inward but couldn’t. His legs… his legs—
They didn’t work.
They burned.
It was as though fire had taken root in his bones and was now blooming outward, reshaping him. The muscles along his calves seized and twisted, tendon by tendon, like strings yanked taut. His knees cracked sideways, and a cry bubbled up—but it never left his mouth. The sound was lost in the pressure.
The water was no relief. Every inch of his skin crawled. He could feel the stretch of it behind him—his spine extending, vertebrae pulling like beads on a cord. Flesh warped and rearranged. His legs were fusing together, bone grinding against bone until they merged.
His skin itched and peeled and slid. It shimmered unnaturally. Iridescent patches overtook the pale, blood-mottled flesh, spreading up his thighs like a sickness.
Telemachus couldn’t move.
Couldn’t scream.
He could only feel.
His hips snapped inward, narrowing cruelly. His spine arched, and he felt something rip at the base of it—something new forming, curling, flexing. His legs no longer existed. Where there had once been skin and bone, there was now only the pulsing ache of something wrong, something not his.
He wanted to die.
“Don’t pass out,” Poseidon said, voice dispassionately calm, as if he were guiding him through a ritual. “You need to feel this. All of it.”
The transformation crawled upward. His lower body had become one long, tapering thing—heavy and foreign. He tried to move it, but the nerves weren’t his yet. They fired wrong. He burned and the black spots in his eyes multiplied until that was all he could see.
“You’ll live,” a voice echoed around him “But you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
________________________________________
The world came back slowly, the sounds of the sea and gulls returning, the feel of sand against his body and the waves rolling over him. However, something was wrong. Telemachus could not place a finger on it, his body felt numb, tingling almost. And his legs…something was wrong, they ached with a strange pain. He tried to breath, tried to lift himself up but he fell back against the sand hard, knocking the wind out of his lungs. Looking down made him freeze.
A tail
Long, scaled and wet. It took the place of his legs, a startling sight. Telemachus tried to drag himself away from it, like it wasn’t attached to his own body. As if he could escape his prison now made of his own flesh. To his horror when he tried to move his…. well what used to be his legs, the tail moved instead slapping against the rocks with a sickening thud
That can’t be his.
It couldn’t.
No. No, no, no.
It wasn’t a nightmare, and it hadn’t stopped.
He was no longer human. Not entirely.
Telemachus cried out softly, barely able to make a sound. He tried to move—tried to crawl up the shore, away from the water, away from everything. But the tail—his tail—twisted awkwardly, catching in the sand preventing him from moving.
He didn’t know how to move, didn’t know how to use it.
It was clear what this was now, a punishment. He just didn’t know what he was being punished for yet.
“Hey!”
A voice.
Laughter.
More voices joined in, each causing his blood to run cold. It couldn’t be them, anyone but them
However, looking up made clear
There at the edge of the beach stood several men. Eurymachus, Leocritus, and Ctesippus. Not only were these three of the suitors trying to gain his mothers hand in marriage, they were three of the men that had ganged up on him stabbing him before tossing his body in the sea. And now they were here again, and he couldn’t do anything but watch as they walked towards him. Telemachus could not help but flinch away as one of them stood over him, inspecting his body like one would a strange creature.
“Well, look what the tide dragged in,” Leocritus sneered. “Didn’t we kill you?”
Telemachus flinched at the voice. His breath hitched in his throat and he tried to push himself upright, but his elbows buckled. His arms were too weak, trembling from effort. All he managed was to lift his head—and even that made the world spin.
“I thought we stabbed him in the gut,” Eurymachus said, laughing. “Looks like someone else saved him although I doubt this counts as an act of mercy.”
They were staring. Not at his face—at the thing that stretched out behind him. His tail. Still slick from the sea, still twitching uselessly. It glistened in the sun, scales catching light like shattered glass. Beautiful in a way that made it worse.
“Gods,” Ctesippus muttered, voice edged with both disgust and delight. “He’s some kind of freak.”
As Ctesippus took a step forward Telemachus tried to move away, dragging himself backward with what little strength he had left. His tail caught in the sand, and clumsy. He felt it twitch but couldn’t make it move the way he wanted. Every inch of him burned. His side throbbed where the knife had gone in. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think.
“Stay away,” he gasped, barely audible.
They didn’t listen.
Ctesippus knelt beside him, tilting his head as if admiring a curiosity in a marketplace. “You always were Odysseus’ brat. Looks like the gods finally had enough of your family.”
Telemachus jerked back when he reached out, but he was too slow. Fingers brushed against his tail—just above where it met his waist. He shuddered, a full-body convulsion of revulsion. It wasn’t just touch. It was sensation. He felt it and hat made it real.
“Don’t—don’t touch me.”
The man laughed and ran his hand along the length of the tail, slow and mocking.
The touch disgusted him. Lighting up nerves he didn’t even know existed.
“It’s sensitive, isn’t it?” he said with mock sympathy. “You poor thing.”
Leocritus came up behind him and kicked sand over his body, moving him onto his back
“What the hell are those.”
Before Telemachus could look down to see what they were talking about the suitor reached out and touched him. As soon as his fingers made contact with skin it burned, a strange and unusual sensation that Telemachus could not understand.
Telemachus tried to twist away with a yelp only to be pulled back roughly. The skin against his ribs moved fluttering open in the wind. Looking down at himself confirmed his fears, four large cuts on each side of his chest opened and closed fluttering in the wind.
Gills.
They circled him like carrion birds now, laughing. One of them poked the base of his tail with a stick. Another tugged gently at one of the tattered remains of his torn shirt.
“You think he even remembers how to speak?”
Telemachus wanted to scream. To fight. But his body wouldn’t cooperate. His arms were too weak, and his tail was useless. He tried to roll back on his stomach, tried to drag himself toward the rocks, but one of them shoved him flat again with a foot to the back.
“Where you going, fish-boy?”
He froze.
The boot remained pressed to his spine for a long, awful second before lifting. Just long enough to humiliate him. To remind him that he wasn’t strong. That he wasn’t fast. That he wasn’t anything anymore.
He pressed his cheek to the wet sand, panting. His tail laying useless behind him, twitching pathetically. He could feel each eye on it—on him—as if their gazes burned into his skin.
Ctesippus crouched down, leaning in close until Telemachus could feel hot breath on his ear. “Maybe we should keep you. Put you in a tank. People would pay to see this.”
Telemachus squeezed his eyes shut, bile rising in his throat.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
Because somewhere deep down, part of him believed they would.