CIRCE: Older than the stories (The Olympus Cycle) by IOAKIM IOAKIM

She is not the dangerous woman on the dangerous island. She is the woman who has been watching heroes arrive and depart for longer than the Greek world has had a name for heroes. CIRCE is the daughter of the sun and the granddaughter of the ocean. She lives at the intersection of the world's routes, on an island that receives whatever the sea brings — the stranded, the frightened, the arrogant, the lost. She has the craft that transforms: the knowledge of plants and fire and the honest nature of things, the ability to reveal what a person actually is beneath the performance of what they want to be. This is her account. Not the one the heroes told — the sorceress, the witch, the obstacle to be negotiated with and escaped from. Her own account: the practitioner at the intersection, the woman who has been here before the age of heroes and will be here after it ends, whose knowledge is deeper than any quest and whose life is longer than any epic. She meets Odysseus. She meets Medea. She meets Daedalus and Glaucus and the ordinary sailors who arrive needing what the island offers. She offers the same thing to all of them: the honest reflection that reveals what is actually there. Some of them can bear what it shows them. Some cannot. CIRCE is a novel of the very long practice — of what knowledge becomes when it has been held for centuries, what wisdom looks like when it has no destination but the continuing of itself, and what it means to be the one who watches the world pass through without passing through it herself. The fires are burning. The herbs are growing. She is still here. Read more