Saturday, 8 August 2026

Special Guest Blogger: Perseus

My life was mostly just me trying not to be turned to stone or eaten but i was the son of Zeus, if you believe my notoriously unreliable family tree. Slayer of monsters. Husband of the truly magnificent and blessedly low-maintenance Andromeda. And, apparently, the guy who invented putting an eye out, then taking it.
You've seen the statues and the epic poems they make it all seem grand and destiny-driven whereas my fate mostly awaited me trying to avoid being minced, petrified, or generally having a very bad day.
Dumped in a chest with my mum, Danaë, after Zeus knocked up another mortal, we washed ashore on Seriphos, where King Polydectes, a man whose charm rivalled a particularly mouldy goat cheese, took us in. He eventually got a bit handsy with my mother, which, as a strapping young lad, I naturally took exception to so he plotted to rid himself of me by sending me on an impossible quest to bring back the head of the Gorgon Medusa.
So, I'm stuck with this truly impossible quest and my first port of call was the gods because apparently, they love a good impossible quest, especially when it involves someone else doing the heavy lifting.
Hermes rocks up, looking all casual in his winged sandals and tosses me his sandals, then Athena hands me her highly polished shield and even Hades, the benevolent uncle, even loans me his helmet of invisibility.
So, I'm kitted out and my first stop is the three old crones with one eye and one tooth between them and I literally had to yoink their eye mid-pass to get any informnation from them then off to Medusa's lair and tiptoeing around a cave full of statues who clearly didn't get the don't look memo.
Suddenly there she was, Medusa, having a really bad hair day and using Athena's shield as a rearview mirror, I crept up and just like that, the most dreaded monster in all of Greece was headless and it was stuffed into a bag.
So, now I'm flying home, courtesy of Hermes' sandals, with a Gorgon's head clanking around in my bag when i noticed something truly peculiar. A stunningly beautiful woman, Andromeda, chained to a rock, about to be devoured by a sea monster.
Now, I'm not going to lie, she was a looker. Even chained to a rock, with impending doom looming, she still had that beauty thing going on and a deep-seated desire not to appear a total coward, kicked in.
The fight with Cetus wasn't some elegant dance of blades, It was more like a grapple with a very large, very angry, very slimy fish before he finally went down.
The King Cepheus and Queen Cassiopeia were, understandably, a bit sheepish about the whole sacrificing our only daughter thing and gave me her hand in marriage and after that, life with Andromeda was surprisingly normal for a demigod. We had kids, founded cities (Mycenae, ever heard of it?), and generally tried to steer clear of anything that involved more sea monsters or divine intervention or being turned into a full sized garden gnome.

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