In Her Golden Eyes

by Isabel Wagner

Content Warnings: Body Horror, Death, Implication of Assault and Sexual Content

The poets write of my jealousy, but do not mention my love. 

I no longer begrudge them their bias. It is easier to imagine me jealous. The spiteful sorceress, the scheming witch. My darkest qualities siphoned from my soul and presented as the whole truth.

And, perhaps, I was jealous. Jealous of the way my father’s light limned her hair until it shone like polished bronze. Jealous of the way sea foam clung to her delicate skin, caressed her gentle limbs. Of the way she moved through the world like it was built for her, like every joy and blessing were hers to devour.

Including me.

I shall tell you my truth of things. Long before the island, the swine, the man of many turns, and the stories your world remembers me by. An early thread in the skein of my immortal life. Her golden beauty, his brine-soaked desire, and my love, transmuted to jealousy by those who would shroud me in my flaws.

For when men hold the pen, the ink is not kind to women.

🝊

The figs were still small and green on their branches when I first saw her bathing in the pool. 

I had made my home in Colchis, my brother’s lands, in a seaside grove hidden from the heat of my father’s gaze. The nearest town was a day’s journey north, but I never wandered into the fertile valley. I was content in the weeds, dirt beneath my nails as I gathered the tools of my trade. 

I understood the language of nature before the language of man. Mugwort and mint, yarrow and sage. All the many children of the earth whispered their true essence to me, and I learned how to reveal it. Drying, crushing, fermenting, boiling. My mortar and pestle gave me a power that I was not meant to possess. Power that was not inherited, and therefore wholly mine to control.

I loved my work. I believed I could love nothing more.

As I rinsed my soil-stained skin in a pool near my cottage, basket of fresh rosemary nestled in the crook of my elbow, ripples pulled my attention. A fish, I thought. But then, auburn hair crested the water’s surface, followed by bare, creamy skin and a face that only the gods could have molded.

I knew immortal beauty when I saw it. My father’s halls had been filled with beautiful and terrible creatures.

The nymph stepped gently onto the silty banks, her eyes closed as she wrung out shimmering hair. It had been so long since another person wandered through my hidden grove that her nakedness astonished me. Zephyrus whispered a breeze through the trees, and I watched gooseflesh prickle across the beautiful bend and curve of her body.  

On instinct, I edged back. A branch snapped. Her eyes flashed open and met mine, shining and golden. She made no move to cover herself. Instead, she offered me a brilliant smile.

“The water is lovely today. Won’t you join me?”

I clutched my basket to my chest and continued creeping back through the greenery. 

“Wait,” she called. “I mean you no harm.”

Flashes of my father’s marbled halls swam, dizzyingly, through my mind. The slap of bare feet, the naiads’ tinkling laughter as they chased me, their spindly fingers pinching cruelly at my skin. I knew the games her kind played. They delighted in humiliation. Gorged on its bitter ache. 

I would not be her victim. 

And so I ran.

🝊

Days later, I sat at my workbench, crushing rosemary sprigs as dried thyme boiled in honeyed wine, when the cottage door’s rusted hinges screamed. 

My paring knife was in my hand in an instant. 

A girl stumbled through the threshold, hunched and wheezing. When she lifted her head, my grip loosened. The knife hit the floor with a dull thud. 

Before me, the nymph from the pool struggled to hold up a tattered tunic. Red lines, bright as ripe pomegranate seeds, crisscrossed her skin beneath the fabric. Blood bloomed from her bottom lip. Marks left by the covetous fingers of a god—perhaps a man—so sure the world was theirs to take. 

“I have nowhere else to go,” she whispered.

Fear swam in her golden eyes and I saw myself reflected: the young girl who hid behind columns to avoid becoming a lesser god’s toy. The woman who hid at the edge of society to keep herself safe. I knew what it was to be hunted by powerful beings. She and I were the same.

My misplaced fear from before evaporated like smoke. 

I dragged my wooden chair beside the hearth. “Sit. The fumes will calm you.” 

She stepped forward, struggling to keep herself covered by her ruined clothes. It seemed silly, considering her willingness to bare herself at the pool. But then, her body had been her power. Now, it showed weakness. Now, it was a source of shame. 

I turned back to my workbench. “I have a balm that can ease your pain.”  

“I can not pay you.”

I scoffed, plucking a jar from the precariously stacked shelves. Rosemary and aloe. A soothing balm, one I had made for the deer I freed from nomadic hunters’ traps. “I do not work for anything so tawdry as coin. Here. Give me your arm.”  

I examined the scrape near her wrist, turning it back and forth in the light. I swiped on a thin layer of balm. Split skin restitched itself. Red faded to pink, faded to smooth cream. I could not help but grin. 

The nymph let out a sigh woven with relief and awe. “How did you learn this magic?”

“The halls of my father’s palace were not kind to me,” I said, dipping my fingers into the jar. “I spent most of my childhood in the gardens, speaking with the herbs. They’re good listeners.” 

With calloused hands, I rubbed the balm into the rest of her wounds. My fingers passed over her arms, her chest, the deep gash near her throat. I could feel the nymph’s eyes on me as I worked. When I finished, she stretched languidly, reaching her arms over her head and around her back. In the firelight, her clear skin shone like honey. I was overcome with the ridiculous desire to bottle its essence, add it to my collection, drink from it to feel her warmth again. 

I paused, eyes widening at these unfamiliar thoughts. I could hardly stand to be around other beings, but something about her eroded my defenses.

As twilight cloaked the cottage in its bruised shadow, I refused to let her return to the woods. 

“Tomorrow you may go,” I said. “Tonight, take my bed.” 

Cicadas chattered in the grove, a frenetic song that plucked my nerves as we went about our nightly rituals. She braided her long hair with deft fingers. I piled my thickest winter blankets on the floor beside my bed. She wrapped herself in one of my spare robes, her ruined tunic burning in the hearth, while I savored the dregs of my valerian root tea. We orbited each other like hesitant planets, meeting only with a brush of skin, a brief flash of downturned eyes. 

After I had doused the candles and settled into my makeshift cot, her voice broke through the silence.

“May I know your name?”

My name is a loaded thing. Hawk, to some. Encircle, to others. Snaring and predatory. Fitting for the myth they have made of me. But that came later. In the small cottage, it passed through my lips without worry. 

“Circe,” I said. “And yours?” 

She leaned over the side of the bed and smiled, blinking those wondrous golden eyes. 

“Scylla.”

🝊

Scylla did not leave the next morning. Nor the following. I allowed her to stay under the guise of recovery. As the days passed, my flimsy excuse gave way to the truth. 

I had grown fond of the brightness she brought to my cottage. 

She took to gardening and gathering quickly. The loom proved a challenge, so I showed her the art of basket weaving instead. She mended my herb baskets with ease. While she worked, she would sing. Where my voice was reedy, hers carried like a lyre, and I found the song helped me focus. 

At my father’s palace, to be alone was to be safe. 

With Scylla, I learned a different way to be. 

I do not know when I moved from my makeshift cot to the bed. It was an unspoken thing. One night, as we spun our orbits, Scylla pulled back the covers and bade me enter. Selene’s silver glow, filtering through the open window, turned her fair skin white as the moly flower. My desire burned dark as its root.

The hot press of her lips on mine dissolved the last of my hesitation. I lost all sense of where her body ended and mine began. Just as fire turns herbs to ash, we were reduced to essence and purified in each other’s embrace. 

🝊

“Why do you not share your talents with the townsfolk?”

Scylla knelt beside me in the grove, plucking mushrooms from the soft undergrowth while I explained their uses. 

“My work is my own.” The answer came swiftly. One I had repeated to myself countless times. “I seek knowledge, not obligation. Becoming beholden to the needs of others would only slow me down.”

She rolled a mushroom between her fingers. 

“And besides,” I continued. “I have much to learn before this power is worth much of anything.” I had repeated those words countless times, too. They rumbled with my father’s deep timbre.

“You can learn by helping,” Scylla said, fixing me with her piercing stare. “Power of any kind is a rare thing to have in this world, and even rarer in the hands of one who does not wish to abuse it. You should not keep your talents hidden.” 

“I do not hide,” I snapped, rising to my feet. 

Even I could hear the petulance staining my lie.

🝊

When the first townswoman rapped at my door, I answered with my paring knife raised. 

“Are—are you her? The healer?” She wrung her hands fearfully. 

Irritation crawled up my spine. I whipped my head toward Scylla, braiding willow leaves by the hearth. She flashed an innocent smile, but her golden eyes twinkled. 

I wanted to groan, to turn the woman out, and never again open my door to a stranger. But I could sense the pain radiating from her. Ribs, broken. A bruise tracing the hollow of her eye.  

“Sit by the hearth. I have a tonic that can set bones.” 

More women came after. Many more.

Scylla was correct, of course. I did learn. They sought all sorts of remedies—for themselves, their children, their loved ones—that pushed my knowledge to its limits. Days were for consults and gathering. Nights became my haven for experimentation. Scylla took to sleeping with a band of cloth around her eyes so as not to be disturbed by flickering candlelight. 

My power flourished, but that was not all that changed. 

For the first time in my immortal life, I felt needed. 

News of my talents spread quickly through the valley. The woman in the grove who coaxed miracles from herbs. I had no interest in traveling, but Scylla, bright Scylla, was all too eager to be my merchant. 

Most days, she returned with the only payment I required. Stories. A shepherd’s son, plagued by nightmares, now sleeping soundly with a satchel of lavender under his pillow. The aging baker, hands once too gnarled to move, kneading as she had in her youth with the help of turmeric paste. 

There were other days, however, that Scylla brought fear through our doorway. Hollowed eyes, leaden feet, the scent of brine clinging to her hair. On those days, she did not kiss me until she had bathed in the pool, scrubbed her fair skin raw with rough moss. 

I trusted her to tell me in her own time. But then she returned with more than just fear. 

“Darling, who hurts you?” I asked, rubbing a rosemary tincture into the bruises circling her wrists. 

Plush lips brushed the column of my throat. A distraction. 

I stood from the bed. “Why do you keep this from me? Why do you not let me offer aid greater than mere healing balms?” My voice trembled. With anger or fear, I did not know. 

She rolled her wrists. “This is the curse of my birth. Nymphs are beautiful prey. Playthings fated to run until we’re caught.”

“Your beauty can also be your power,” I countered. “Beauty has swayed even the strongest of men.”

“What about when those men decide to use their strength?” She raised her wrists into the sun’s dying light. I could not help but think of my father. “Beauty is a power without teeth.” 

“Then I shall protect you. My magic, my herbs, can have the teeth you need.” I knelt between her bare thighs, resting my palms against her cool skin.

“Thank you, Circe,” she whispered. “But I do not wish to be a helpless thing forever.” 

🝊

One late summer afternoon, I busied myself packing satchels of mugwort tea while Scylla was out. It had become one of my most popular offerings, dispersed among the many women who wanted their wombs untainted by roaming men.

The cottage door swung open in an unnatural rush. Power crackled through the air, followed by the suffocating scent of the sea. I did not reach for my paring knife. This was a god’s touch, tugging me forward. Someone was calling, and I had learned in my father’s house that gods did not call pleasantly twice. 

He waited at the edge of the pool, the same place I had first seen Scylla. Algae-soaked hair, thick and green as kelp, hung in clumps around his hardened face, knotted with small fish and shells. Brawny muscles flexed as he lounged atop a smooth rock, tail flicking languidly in the water. The sour brine of his skin slithered up my nose and burned my sinuses.

He said his name was Glaucus. 

He said he required my aid. 

A nymph had caught his eye but feared his form. He needed a potion to sway her guarded heart to see the truth of their fated love. 

I knew he spoke of my Scylla. 

Fury wrapped my tongue in stinging barbs, but I kept quiet. I was not yet sure enough in my power to deny a god outright, even one who had once been mortal. 

I had heard the tale of his ascension. A humble fisherman and lover of the sea who ate a magical herb, leaped into the waves, and was welcomed as a god. Transformed by the power of his devotion. Taught that his yearning, his longing, would deliver whatever his heart desired.

That type of boon does not come without its curses. 

In his muddy eyes, I could see he believed he owned her already. That he was entitled to her love simply by virtue of being a god. He wanted her, and so he would have her. The world had never denied him. He did not expect it to start now. 

But I was not the world. 

A plan began to crystallize in my mind.

🝊

Scylla did not react when I told her about the visitor from the sea.  

“I will not let him take you.” 

“He is a god.” Her gaze drifted somewhere I could not follow. “He takes what he wants.”

“You forget that I, too, have the blood of gods within me. But more than that, I have my witchcraft.”

We spent the next day gathering potent herbs from the darkest corners of my garden. Wolfsbane, asphodel, moly. We would prepare two vials, I explained. One, a decoy filled with rose water, to lure him close. The second, a monstrous poison, to pour into the pool before his arrival. A poison that would turn god to monster, revealing the truth he could not see. Scylla was quiet during our work. Without her bright optimism, a long-dormant fear flared within my gut. 

The fear that, no matter how my magic had grown, I could never rival a god.

That night, under the swollen moon, I whispered the intent of my plan while the dark elixir bubbled in an iron cauldron. 

How, when Glaucus swam into the pool to retrieve the love potion, the poisoned waters would paralyze him. His brawny skin would burst open as the hunger in his soul turned tangible, clotting into six violent heads with rows of gnashing teeth, layered upon his shoulders like a royal mantle. His tail, of which he was so proud, would split and tangle into twelve flailing tentacles. How the tides would carry him to the cave of his eternal rest, where he would snap up men who thought they owned the seas, leaving young nymphs free.

As I spoke, the firelight glittered in Scylla’s golden eyes, turning them molten. 

When we tumbled into bed, Eos just reaching her rosy fingers across the sky, Scylla whispered into my wild hair, “Never again let man or god convince you that you are powerless.” 

🝊

Seemingly overnight, autumn had kissed our grove with its crisp tongue. Leaves rustled a gentle sigh as we picked our way toward the pool. Fat figs swung heavily on their branches. We would need to harvest soon.

That morning, in the hearth’s tender light, I had urged Scylla to stay behind. The plan would not work if Glaucus saw her with me. He needed to believe I served his interests. She brushed my concern aside.

“I have hidden long enough,” she said, stoppering the vial of rose water. “I will retreat within the trees when he arrives, but I deserve to see this justice done.”

So there we stood, together at the pool’s edge, bare toes nestled in damp grass. 

Glaucus was to retrieve the love potion when my father’s chariot reached its zenith. Some part of me, a dark part, reveled in the thought that Helios might bear witness to my power. How surprised he would be to know the fearful girl he spurned now wore her fear as Heracles wore the pelt of the Nemean Lion.

I offered Scylla the poison vial. She shook her head. 

“Do this for me, won’t you?”

I had never been able to deny her. I would not start now.

Dark and thick as tar, the elixir dissolved into the clear water, turning it murky. Shadowed. Like a fish had churned up silt. Like a maiden had rinsed her laundry. When Glaucus swam into the tainted waters, he would be none the wiser.

The sun rose higher, rays of light slicing through the trees. 

We sat in wait as the hunters do.

Scylla laid her head in my lap, letting me weave small braids into her hair to occupy my nervous fingers. She was more beautiful now than when I had first seen her bathing. Now, I knew the constellation of freckles that bloomed across her nose after long days tending the garden. I knew she bit her lip when she was deep in thought, knew she would only drink tea with honey. I had memorized the rhythm of her breath during sleep and learned how to match mine to its gentle song. All the little magics that made up the woman I loved.

For a precious eternity, the grove was still. 

Then Zephyrus exhaled, carrying the tang of brine on his late-summer breath. 

My ribs constricted around my heart. “He is coming. Go, before he sees you.”

Scylla nodded as we stood. She brushed her lips against my neck, the spot she loved most, then grabbed my hands in an unwavering grip. 

“You have given me a gift, Circe. Never doubt that, not for one moment.”

I rubbed my thumb across her fingers, my brow furrowing. Something strange flickered in her golden eyes. “And what gift is that, my dear?”

Scylla smiled sadly. “Teeth of my own.” 

She stepped into the water. 

🝊

You know what follows. The poets got that part correct, at least. 

But even as the poisoned water seeped into her skin and cracked her open like a rotten fig, even as her spine stretched taller than the willow trees, as her many necks flailed and barking dogs burst from her waist, even through my echoing shrieks and tears, I still saw her beauty. 

When an unsuspecting Glaucus arrived and she tore him apart with her violent mouths, staining the pool with his ichor, I could not bring myself to fear her. Only to delight in his punishment. A different end than I had planned, but just as fitting. 

A vengeance that was as much mine as it was hers.

Monstrous thing that Scylla became, I would never see her as such.

In her scales I saw the shimmer of her luminous skin, only stronger. Her tentacles swayed as her hips had, powerful and mesmerizing. I saw all of her, clearer than before, and was overwhelmed by love. She had her teeth at last.

As the tides pulled her seaward, Scylla turned her six heads to look at me.

And in her golden eyes, I saw peace.

🜁🜄🜂🜃

Isabel Wagner (she/her) is a writer, editor, and marketer based in Los Angeles who writes darkly decadent fantasy. She studied Psychology and Folklore & Mythology at Harvard University, then honed her craft with a creative writing residential program at the University of Oxford. She is currently working on her debut fantasy novel and, when time permits, haunting local music venues and bookstores. Her most recent work has been published online by Woodland Writers.