Nyktimene by Hannah Van Der Kamp

“Her guilty conscience drives her to shun the eyes of men and the glare of the daylight. She hides her shame in the dark, excluded by all from the clear sky."
—Metamorphosis

The Aegean Sea surrounded Lesbos on all sides; never had it felt this suffocating. Staring out at the vast ocean, suddenly realizing that she had no knowledge of sailing or swimming, she collapsed onto the sand.

The ocean reflected her face and for a moment she felt it could wash away the months. Her heart beat in tandem with the crystalline waves as her fingers ran together. She closed her eyes, contemplating the pads of her fingers adorned with prints, the only things uniquely her own. Delicate presses grew more desperate; if her nails hadn’t been filed to extinction they would have broken skin. Panicked, she was pummeled by the force of memory.

---

Kind and clever hands braided her hair as she hummed, impatient. Nyktimene, princess of Lesbos, was being prepared for her first appearance as a woman. The Fates had cut her mother’s thread when she was a child of only three years. In the ten years since she had grown in beauty and stature, befitting her royal role. A bronze olive branch, the lone token of her mother, was woven into her hair.

“Athena will guide your father to choose the right suitor for you, Princess,” One of her maids spoke kindly as she pulled her steady hands away, “Your mother, Hades commiserate her soul, was certain the olive tree you were birthed beneath indicated the goddess’ favor.”

“Many thanks, Agathe. I will trust in the goddess and the goodness of my father.”

Nyktimene was aware of her mother’s devotion to Athena and her father’s disdain for the goddess. Agathe had told her the story often, when she was small, to help her sleep. When Nyktimene was born a girl, her father suggested she be abandoned so his wife could focus on birthing an heir. It was only her mother’s insistence that Nyktimene was a blessing from Athena that kept her alive. When her mother died without providing him a son, King Epopeus began biding his time until Nyktimene could marry. As she ran a hand over the caramel strands framing her face, she was finally primed to become a daughter worthy of the king.

In a handful of minutes Agathe would be escorting her to the hall to stand before the men vying for her.

“Will you take me to Her before I have to go?” Nyktimene inquired.

“Of course, child. Though you will have to be quick.”

“Many thanks,” Nyktimene squeezed her dear maid’s hand and rose from the vanity.

Upon arriving in the garden’s center, Nyktimene fell to her knees and rested her head in the ankle crook of a statue.

“Athena,” Nyktimene began whispering, “Mother.”

Though the statue was a monument to Athena, not her departed mother, Nyktimene had believed as a child that they were one in the same. Both women were stories of a past she could no longer remember. As the years passed and Nyktimene grew, her mother was never spoken of in their kingdom, so she found solace in the statue as a pseudo monument. She prayed Athena would grant her access to her mother’s ear, hoping the goddess wouldn’t mind sharing with a deeply devoted woman.

“I think I’m ready. But I’m not sure what to do around a man, a husband. Father shows me indifference when he acknowledges me at all. Will that be the way of things with whomever he selects for me? I wish you were here to run your fingers through my hair. Agathe says you did that when I was small. She also tells me you were strong, that you were as steadfast as Athena herself. Grant me some of that today. Please, Mother. Please, Goddess.”

Nyktimene rose before she could allow a tear to fall from skin to stone.

The throne room was lined with men and boys of all ages when Nyktimene took her place beside her father. Her soft eyes scanned the crowd to discern whom her father may choose. Whilst men began presenting themselves and their sons, Nyktimene kept stealing glances at Epopeus to gauge his reaction. She would smile at suitors her age as they shyly puffed their chests and lifted their chins. She tried to keep her eyes down when the suitors neared her father’s age. He wasn’t often a cruel king, nor a cruel father, but she was raised by her maids and overheard devastating stories of what older men did to their wives.

As the final suitor took his place at the back of the hall, her father contemplated silently. Standing, he addressed the men. “I thank you for your gifts and bids for my daughter’s hand. You are all well aware the man I choose will not only wed my daughter but take his place as my heir. Now I see not one man here is fit to run Lesbos, nor marry my Nyktimene. You may all go.”

The hall erupted into shouts of protest and contempt, louder than any she had heard before, even during tournaments. To not select any of the men who had arrived from across Greece to vie for her would dishonor every one of them. Men rushed the dais and Nyktimene feared for her safety. These men who had so recently bowed at her feet and offered gifts to her father were now grabbing for her skirts and shouting curses upon her family. Guards were pushing back the crowd and threatening the feral men with swords as Nyktimene was finally escorted away from the hall and back to her room.

Agathe drew her a bath as she sobbed. Releasing tears for the ruined day, for the instability of her future. As her body became submerged, she sent a prayer to Athena that whatever her father had planned was worth the turmoil she was experiencing now. Her father kept her alive after her mother died. Nyktimene was clever enough to know that he could have remarried and sired a son. He needn’t have waited to marry off his daughter. She had known this and assumed that in leaving his legacy to her Epopeus had seen value in her. But what purpose could he have in denying all her suitors?

“Your father requests you tonight,” In the ten years Agathe had been tending to Nyktimene her hands had never shaken, nor her voice, but today they both faltered. “Athena be with you, Princess. You have her strength, her resolve, and her wit,” she left for a moment and returned with salve and oil. Agathe placed her small finger into the salve and dabbed it to Nyktimene’s lips; dripped the oil across her skin.

“It can help induce sleep. I truly hope, dear, that its effects will not prove to be necessary tonight.”

Adorned in a simple gown and coated in thyme, Nyktimene was escorted to her father.

The first night, she had willed tears not to fall, but it had been unavoidable. Every night after, she strengthened her resolve and learned to dull her senses. The glint in her father’s eyes was one that she had seen directed at servant girls but never at her. The wandering hands. The loosened fabric. He had started slowly, almost reverently, but as the nights went on he became frenzied and vindictive. No man can have you. You’ve grown beautiful. You can bear me the boy you should have been. She’d lashed out with her nails one particularly painful night, and he’d hit her before taking a coarse rock to her nails and grinding them down until they bled. The thyme oils were strong, but it couldn’t produce an instantaneous effect. Each night when he had finally collapsed, asleep, Nyktimene couldn’t move for many minutes.

Weeks passed, perhaps months, before Nyktimene’s greatest fear came to pass. Agathe did all she could to clean her and soothe her. Nyktimene thanked Athena and Artemis and Hera, all the goddesses who watched after women, each month when her bleed would come. The month it did not was the month Nyktimene knew she had to leave Lesbos. She rose from her father’s profane bed a final time and took off from the palace.

---

She was immobile on the sand now as she finally pulled herself from the memory. Mustering her strength she pleaded, calling to Athena to bring sanctuary to the child she had blessed beneath an olive tree nearly fourteen years prior.

She glanced back at her reflection and startled when another woman appeared by her side. Turning, Nyktimene saw the woman’s piercing gray eyes. A goddess, her mother’s goddess, Athena in her divine flesh.

Nyktimene’s chest shuddered as the goddess placed a hand on her chin and Athena immediately retracted her touch.

“You have been wronged, child,” The goddess’ voice was firm yet kind, “In ways unknowable to the naked eye, yet clear in the pained shape of your soul. If you wish it, I will protect you from ever being touched again.”

Nyktimene attempted speech, but her voice had not recovered from the screams. She raised her eyebrows at the goddess. She dared to allow hope and relief to take root in her chest.

Athena snapped an olive branch from her golden cloak, tracing a glittering outline around Nyktimene’s reflection in the rippling water. Gradually, in place of her reflection, was a creature of brown and white and gold. Its small frame reached no higher than the goddess’ mid-calf, but as Nyktimene reached out towards the image, the reflection mimicked her movement, revealing a large feathered wing. Looking from her hand to the wing, gone were the stubby nails ground smooth to their beds and the rings of red around her wrists. In their place were talons as sharp as knives and feathers unblemished. She saw her hair in its feathers. Its face had her shape. Though none was so strikingly similar as its eyes. The eyes staring up at her were her own.

Her mother had loved her eyes. It was one of the only things she remembered. A voice in dreams telling her, You have the most beautiful eyes, baby. The body staring back at her was a weapon, but her mother’s eyes remained.

Nyktimene broke eye contact with the water to gaze upon the goddess, who had been observing silently from her side.

“I can be that?” Her voice raw, but audible.

“You can,” the goddess locked eyes with Nyktimene, “In this form you will be able to see in darkness, to take back the nights that were stolen from you. You will never again be stripped of your will. With these wings you can fly away.” The goddess paused, allowing the young girl to bask in the offer, before continuing her proposal. “You may take this form and leave here with your freedom. Or you can take this form and use it to ensure justice is served to those like your father. You can join me in pursuit of wisdom against deceit.”

Nyktimene took in a long breath, never breaking eye contact with the goddess. In her lifetime she had lost her mother, her innocence, her joy. In this moment, for the first time, she was being offered the opportunity to gain. Gain flight, true sight, a place at the side of her goddess.

She dipped her head in assent.

“Rise, my child. You are defenseless no longer.”

Spurred by the goddess’ remark, Nyktimene willed herself to rise back to Athena’s height and found that there was a new sense of weightlessness in her movement. Nyktimene spun her flexible neck and saw her island as she never had before. Lesbos sprawled before her, no longer a trap. Her soul was no longer confined as the rise and fall of her wings echoed across the beach.

Nyktimene landed on the goddess’ shoulder, and that is where she stayed.