The Drowned Heart

Odysseus

This isn’t the end, Odysseus. You can’t give up now.

I sat cross-legged on the heaving deck, the stump of a jury-rigged mast digging into my back. Ahead, the horizon stretched out, a flat, gray line refusing to offer the comfort of land. Nine days of drifting. Nine days since the sky had cracked open and Zeus had sent his thunderbolt to punish us.

I closed my eyes, but the memory burned against the back of my lids. The sharp, metallic tang of lightning-scorched air and charred flesh. The screams of my men cut short as the black sea swallowed them. Eurylochus had begged for his mother. Perimedes had reached for me.

It had all been pointless. I had been the King of Ithaca, the sacker of cities. I was a man of logic in a world gone mad. But logic had died with my crew. Now, I captained a graveyard.

A wave slapped against the side of the raft, spraying cold brine into my face. I didn’t wipe it away. The salt stinging my cracked lips felt more real than my own name.

“Just a little farther,” I rasped. Rusted from disuse, my voice sounded like it belonged to a stranger.

I looked at the stars emerging through the breaking storm clouds. I steered by memory and instinct, aiming for the narrow strait that had been the death of so many sailors. It was a suicide run, but it was the only path home.

Home.

The word ached in my chest, a phantom limb I couldn’t stop reaching for. Home meant Penelope. My beautiful wife. I pictured her weaving at her loom, the firelight catching the silver in her hair. She was an Omega of the old world, soft, constant, the anchor to my drifting ship.

But the sea between us had changed.

In my father's time, the Bard Orpheus had broken the laws of nature to chase Eurydice into the Underworld. Since then, the world had grown wilder. We called it the “Bard’s Curse,” but it was a reshaping of nature itself. Men were waking up with aggression that shattered bones. Women were developing scents that could launch a thousand ships.

I had resisted it. I remained a Beta, a man of wits. While Achilles succumbed to screaming, blood-mad ruts, I planned. I survived because I didn’t force the world to kneel. I tricked it into letting me pass.

But wits couldn’t stop a thunderbolt and couldn’t sway the ocean into taking me to my wife. All I had left was hope.

A few hours after sunrise, I felt the first shift. The deep, rhythmic rolling of the open ocean gave way to a subtle, insistent drag from the north. The raft began to pick up speed, no longer just drifting but being drawn forward. This was it. The pull of the strait.

Soon, the clean scent of the open ocean vanished, replaced by a fetid odor of stagnant rot and ancient, wet stone. Then came the sound. Not the crash of waves, but a low groan that vibrated up through the timbers of the raft.

Two black smudges appeared on the horizon, slowly growing into the sheer cliffs that marked the passage.

I gripped the steering oar, my knuckles white. The current was strong now, a river within the sea, pulling me directly into the narrow throat of blackness flanked by the cliffs. To my right, the caves that housed Scylla, silent and waiting. To my left...

The sea boiled. A massive, circular depression scarred the surface, spinning with a violence that made the timber shudder.

Charybdis.

In the old stories, she was a whirlpool. A hazard of tides and geography. But as I stared into the widening maw of the vortex, I saw the truth of this new, broken world. She was an Omega. An ancient, unseen beast, driven mad by a cycle of hunger that never ended.

The sea tilted.

The entire horizon dropped away to my left, sliding down into a funnel of spinning black glass. My raft groaned, the ox-hide lashings screaming under the strain.

I jammed the steering oar into the churning surface, fighting for leverage. The wood snapped in my hands, and the broken shaft spun away, disappearing into the foam.

“Greedy,” I whispered.

I scrambled to the high side of the raft, gripping the mast stump. Below me, the vortex widened. Through the translucent walls, I saw shadows moving in the deep, massive and undulating shapes that had no place in a sane ocean. The passage itself pulsed with the slow, rhythmic clench of a living thing.

Then, the raft hit the outer ring. The world dissolved into dizzying motion, the violent rotation pinning me to the deck.

I looked up. The sky had become a blur, but one thing remained stationary. A wild fig tree, growing impossibly from the cliff face.

Jump, my instincts screamed.

I launched myself upward just as the raft shattered below me. My hands clawed at the air. Rough bark tore into my palms. I slammed into the branch, wrapping my legs around the wood in a desperate lock.

Below me, the remains of my raft vanished into the dark gullet. I hung there, panting. Alive. Safe.

Then, the tree jolted. A low, thrumming purr vibrated up through the wood and into my chest. Beneath me, the eye of the whirlpool widened, the sea swelling upward against the pull of the earth.

Charybdis knew I was there. She could smell the intruder. Not an Alpha to be mated with, but prey to be devoured.

The branch cracked with the sound of a ship’s mast snapping in a gale. A dry, violent betrayal, the echo of the land rejecting me one last time. The world dropped out from under me. And I fell.

When I hit the surface, it didn’t feel like water. It was thick, dense, like slamming into a wall of cold, living gristle. The current grabbed me, and the roar of the wind vanished, replaced by a deep, pulsing thunder. I tumbled through the dark, spinning uncontrollably.

The salt stung my eyes, but I forced myself to open them anyway. The walls of the vortex were the slick, muscular lining of a throat. Pulsing green veins of witch-light were embedded in the flesh of the tide. Armoring this gullet were rows of bony, barnacle-like ridges designed to shred and pulp whatever Charybdis swallowed, grinding ceaselessly against each other.

I was being consumed, eaten alive by a creature that lived for instinct. I’d never find my way to Penelope, after all.

My lungs screamed. The instinct to inhale was a frantic beast in my chest, battering against my ribs. I was a man of will, but there was only so much I could endure.

The pressure spiked, squeezing the remaining air from my blood. My eardrums popped, and my vision grayed at the edges. My struggles grew weaker, my limbs heavy with the onset of death.

And in that fading, silent moment, the darkness shifted. The mindless hunger of the whirlpool vanished, replaced by something ancient. Something colder. A presence that did not belong to the beast, but to the abyss itself.

“The little man who blinded my son.” The voice vibrated in the marrow of my bones. “The little king who thought wits could protect him from a god. How far he has fallen.”

It was him. Poseidon. The king of the seas.

He manifested from the sheer nothingness, an awe-inspiring power that even Charybdis couldn’t combat. Two eyes opened in the gloom, glowing and vicious, watching my struggle with the dispassionate gaze of a shark.

I couldn’t speak, but my mind refused to dim. “You’ve been trying to drown me for ten years,” I sent into the crushing dark. “I’m still here.”

Laughter rippled through the water, as destructive as Charybdis’s appetites. “Death is boring, Odysseus. And you... are interesting. You hold on when you should break.”

The current shifted, Charybdis beginning to savor her meal. It wasn’t mercy. It was just added pain, prolonging the agony. Poseidon was controlling her. Or… Was he?

I looked past the god, into the glowing rot of Charybdis’s gut. The walls of the vortex were leeching the color from the sea itself. The Bard’s Curse had made her a parasite. She was an Omega without a mate, her heat burning a hole in the world.

“She’s eating you, too,” I sent with a panicked thought. “Look. She’s a disease in your own body. You are the Sea, but you can’t cut out your own heart without bleeding to death.”

The pressure around me hesitated. It wasn’t much, but it was something. I’d been right, and this was my chance.

“I am mortal. External. Give me the strength to survive this, and I will leash the monsters you cannot control. I will serve you.”

It was a lie, but I’d always been excellent at deceit. It had been one of my strongest weapons throughout the war, and it could still serve me well.

This time, it didn’t work. “Always the trickster,” the god mused. “You think you can bargain with the deep? You think you can use your clever little Beta mind to talk your way out of Charybdis’s throat?”

The water thickened around me. “You cannot outsmart a god, or a primordial force, Odysseus. You cannot trick hunger. You can only dominate it.”

The current tightened, crushing the last bubble of air from my chest.

“You want to survive? Then you cannot be the man of wits anymore. To live through this, you must be the Alpha.”

The essence of the abyss rushed into my mouth, thick and cold, forcing my jaw open. It flooded my lungs, burning away the tender flesh built for air.

My chest convulsed, my ribs snapping and reforming. My skin tore and sealed over, slick and cold as a fish’s belly. The familiar heat of my blood was stolen, replaced by the chill of the endless depths.

And then my mind broke.

The calm, rational center of my being was swept away. In its place, a primal aggression roared to life. A surge of dominance, purer and darker than anything I had ever felt, flooded my brain.

It didn’t feel like madness. It felt like tyranny, like being ripped apart and rebuilt anew. Remade… but wrong.

Breathe, Poseidon commanded. Breathe the salt.

I couldn’t refuse him, not anymore. I took a breath, and icy, terrible power surged through my veins. My vision cleared, and suddenly I could see everything with predatory clarity.

My new instincts didn’t want to think. They didn’t want to plan an escape. They wanted to grab the throat of the world and force it to yield.

I flexed my fingers, and the water obeyed. I reached out, gripping the gullet of the vortex with a hand made of pure current. “Submit.”

It wasn’t a request. It was the Alpha command. I’d heard it used countless times before, and had despised everyone who’d tried to force my submission. Now, it was my voice.

“Spit me out,” I ordered, as sharp and ruthless as Poseidon's trident.

The force of my new power slammed into the beast’s psyche. Charybdis convulsed. The massive, rotating walls of flesh shuddered. The monster fought me, still intent on crushing the creature who’d dared to taunt her. But I was no longer that man, and Poseidon’s gift was stronger than Charybdis’s desire to consume me.

The vortex reversed, and I willed the ocean to reject me. Charybdis let out one last, gurgling cry, and then I was shooting upward like a stone from a sling.

I burst from the sea into a world of chaos and stinging rain. For a disoriented heartbeat, I was airborne. Then, I slammed down onto a jagged piece of wreckage, a large piece of driftwood that must have once belonged to larger vessel. No doubt, sailors far less fortunate than me had once tried to go through the strait.

The timber groaned and spun under my weight, threatening to throw me back into the churn. But miraculously, the ocean now failed to swallow me and my little refuge whole.

I lay there, gasping, my body a map of fresh pain. The air felt agonizingly cold against the raw flesh of my throat. I coughed, and a spray of seawater and blood spattered the wet wood.

The storm howled, but the sound was different now, distant. The wind that should have chilled me to the bone felt like a strange caress against my new skin. Slowly, shakily, I pushed myself to my feet, swaying on the unstable debris.

That’s when I saw them. My hands.

They glowed with a faint, green light, the mark of the abyss. I clenched my fists, and the churning waves around my wreckage quieted, settling as if soothed by my presence.

A laugh bubbled in my throat, jagged and wild and utterly inhuman. I had survived. I had tricked a god. Impossibly, I’d escaped the ruthless jaws of fate yet again.

A worm of discomfort writhed at the back of my mind. It seemed… too easy. After all, why would Poseidon grant me such an impossible boon? I was his enemy. No, something was wrong.

I turned toward the distant shore, and a horrifying sensation washed over me.

The land looked… dry. Brittle. A place where the air was thin and empty, where the ground was a stagnant, dead thing. The thought of stepping onto the sand made me itch with a deep panic.

I looked down at the black, churning sea. It called to me. Home, it whispered. That same thought, the word I’d always associated with Penelope. It was no longer hers.

The realization hit me with the force of a rogue wave. I hadn’t fooled him. For once, my wits had failed me. It was Poseidon who had played the trick.

Poseidon had saved my life by making me the one thing I hated. He’d turned the man of wits into a beast of instinct. I could no longer live in the world I had so desperately fought for. He’d given me a kingdom, but it was the one I’d never wanted.

I sank to my knees on the wet timber, the victory turning to ash in my mouth. I would go back to Penelope. I would fight this curse with every breath in my reshaped body. I would defy the god who had remade me.

But as the wreckage drifted toward the shore, I knew the war wasn’t over. It had just moved inside my own skin.

I was the Alpha of the Deep. And I was terrified that the man who loved Penelope had already drowned.