The mornings on Aeaea are thick with mist and memory.

You wake to both. The sea sighs against the rocks below the cliffs, tireless as ever, and gulls wheel like omens overhead. The sky is half-dream, half-light—honeyed, pale, streaked with the ghosts of stars not yet fully gone. You swing your legs from the pallet and plant your bare feet on the cool stone. The scent of thyme and brine clings to everything here, even your skin. You are beginning to smell like the island. You are not sure if it's worth going home anymore.

Circe is already in the garden.

She moves through the stalks like smoke—silent, silver-gowned, her hair unbound. She does not turn when you approach, but she knows you are there. She always knows.

"Mind your step," she says. "The henbane has grown unruly."

You obey without reply, brushing past a cluster of fennel with careful fingers. The plants here are not tame. Some of them watch. Once, you touched a blossom too boldly and spent three days speaking in gibberish. You’ve since learned reverence.

"Here." She holds out a clay bowl filled with the damp petals of something deep purple and unpleasantly sweet. You take it, the chill of it seeping into your palms. “You will grind these. Slowly. Until they remember their shape before they were plucked.”

You ask what shape, because it is early, and she is not always generous with answers.

Her eyes, when they flick toward you, are drowsy-lidded and amber-bright.

“Ask them.”

The mortar is carved from volcanic rock, heavy in your hands. You set it on the flat stone slab between you, lower yourself to your knees. The petals smear under the pestle with a rich, staining sound, and the smell rises—heady, cloying, like overripe grapes and something older.

Circe hums as she tends to another plant—no song you know, nothing human. You’ve heard her sing in the old tongue only once, and it made your teeth ache.

The island is quiet today. No shipwrecks, no desperate prayers, no brash-voiced kings drunk on their own cleverness. Only the sound of your grinding, the hiss of the wind in the laurel leaves, the sea breathing in and out.

You have lived here long enough to forget how long. Aeaea does that to you.

It steals time, like the tide steals footprints.

Circe rises, brushing a curl from her brow with a thumb stained green. She surveys your work—not with approval, not with criticism, simply with eyes that see.

“Passable,” she murmurs. “But careless near the rim.”

She turns from you, then hesitates—just once, like the pause between thunder and rain.

“You are learning. Not swift, but still. Here," she points, "you must be gentle. These flowers are poison, as are gods and men—but that has never stopped either."