Heroes and Mortals

Eleven of the most enduring figures in Greek mythology. Eleven complete novels. One volume. Daedalus - He threw his nephew from a rooftop and built the Labyrinth and made wings of wax and feathers and watched his son fall into the sea. The gift and the shadow came from the same hands. The craft was the most direct expression of what he was. The shadow was equally real. Icarus - He flew. That is the essential fact.
Before the warning and after the warning and through the warning and past it - he flew, and the flying was the most completely real thing that had ever happened to him. He would not have chosen differently. The Labyrinth - His name was Asterion. The starry one. He lived in the dark and listened to the music from above and remembered his mother's holding. He was not the monster of the conventional account.
He was the thing the world could not accommodate. Medusa - She had been beautiful before she was monstrous. Poseidon violated her in Athena's temple and Athena transformed her. She lived on an island at the edge of the world with her sisters who were never afraid of her gaze. The story looks different from her side. Jason and the Fleece - He assembled the greatest crew in history and sailed to the ends of the earth and retrieved the Golden Fleece.
He did all of this primarily through Medea, who gave up everything for him, and whom he left for the princess of Corinth when a better offer came. Sisyphus - He chained Death and tricked Persephone and was given the boulder. He found the angle in the punishment. The descent was the angle. The gods gave him the descent because the punishment required the rolling back, and the rolling back required the descent, and the descent gave him time to think.
He has been thinking during every descent for eternity. Narcissus - He was not vain. He was the being who had never felt love until he found at the pool the one love he had ever felt - and found it was unrequitable. The tragedy was not that he loved himself. The tragedy was that the first love of his life was the one love that could never be returned. Orion - He was the greatest hunter in the world, too large and too capable for the ordinary mortal world to contain.
The hunt with Artemis was the only context large enough. He was placed among the stars when he died. The constellation is the permanent version of everything he was. Midas - He asked for the golden touch and received it exactly as asked and found that it was the worst possible gift. He turned his daughter to gold. He prayed to Dionysus to take the gift back. He washed in the river Pactolus. He planted new roses.
Atalanta - She was exposed on a mountainside because her father wanted a son. She survived. She became the fastest runner in the world. She set the foot-race as the condition for marriage. She picked up the golden apples because she wanted to. She was most herself running. Oedipus - He did everything right and it made no difference. He investigated the murder of Laius with more determination than anyone else would have investigated it.
He found the truth. The truth was that he was the murderer. He had not known. The guilt was real regardless. Both are true. Eleven complete works of literary mythology fiction from I. Ioakim's Heroes and Mortals series.