When Narcissus gazed into the pond, and saw the wonder of the universe in the beauty of his own reflection, all meaning was drained from his physical flesh. At that exact moment of realization, he withered into nothingness, for his image had superceded his presence in reality. A single flower grew in his place, one which bore his name, and its own reflection served as its roots.
All tagged hellenoia
The waters of the River Lethe are said to wash clean the memories of the recently deceased. This process returns them to a tabula rasa state of mind, after which point their souls can migrate to new bodies. What is not clear from myth alone, however, is the mechanism by which the Lethe's waters perform this function. The living often assume that these memories simply dissolve into the imbibed fluid, as though they were merely salt.
In 1987, a cassette tape emerged which contained the last known recording of the Song of the Sirens. The origins of the tape are uncertain: it was found abandoned in a secure deposit box of a bank in Gibraltar by an officer in the British Navy. Though the box was registered in his name, he insisted that a number of artifacts discovered inside, including the tape, were not his own.
The suitcase orbited baggage claim for three hours before someone finally claimed it. Of course, it hadn’t actually been his to begin with, but he was the sort of thief with eyes for the things that happened to steal themselves. Its label told him that it was meant to have arrived in LaGuardia (LGA) from Athens (ATH), yet here it was in Miami (MIA), scattered among the domestic arrivals.
Towards the end of the twentieth century, several gigantic teeth were found mellified in a pit of ancient lobster honey. A team of paleontologists cleaned away the sea-green ooze, which, by their account, had gone undisturbed for at least five-hundred thousand years. Initial reports suggested that they belonged to an unknown creature which died while attempting to swallow an entire lobster hive at once.
The compound eyes of a fly grant it the ability to see the world in front of it split into possibilities. For this reason, it is difficult to swat a fly with a hand that it can readily see, as it can then simply leap forward into a permutation of reality in which it survives. Though it witnesses its own death in several lenses of its eyes, by sacrificing those possible futures, the insect is able to prolong its own life.
“I’ll have a glass of ambrosia,” the stranger requested.
“Yeah? What kind?” asked the bartender.
“The original recipe.”
“Do you know how many drinks have that name?”
“The original recipe. Do I need to spell it out for you?”
Marble statues only remain still from a human perspective. From their own, they crawl forth from mountains in their infancy, who raise them like mothers with their volcanic milk. Despite being wrought from stone, they find their own skin to be soft, and it rises and falls as they breathe.
They exist along a separate axis of time, one that hosts its own songs, empires, and gods. When they die in our world, they crumble to dust; in theirs, they bleed black lava.