Aries

In the forsaken dawn, where the shadows danced like specters on the walls of a crumbling castle, Athamas' indifference was a whispered promise of doom. His wife Nephele's eyes, once bright as stars in the night sky, had grown dull with grief, her heart heavy with the weight of two children, torn from her grasp by the cruel hand of fate. In the darkness of their chambers, a figure emerged, shrouded in mist and smoke. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, appeared to Nephele, his eyes gleaming like lanterns in the night. He brought with him a gift, a ram with a fleece as golden as the sun and its breath as sweet as the scent of incense. With a wave of his hand, Nephele set the children adrift on the waves, trusting that the ram would guide them to a sanctuary from the treacherous tides. And so it was. The ram vaulted into the air, his hooves pounding the earth like a drumbeat in the darkness, and Phryxus and Helle were borne aloft, their tiny hands grasping for the void. As they sailed across the Hellespont, the girl's eyes grew wide with terror, her voice a mere whisper as she cried out to her mother. And then, like a specter from the underworld, she fell from the ram's back into the abyss, her body disappearing beneath the waves like a leaf torn from the branch of life. The ram continued on his course, guided by the whispers of the wind and the shadows that danced upon the walls of his heart. He crossed the strait, a narrow passage between two continents, until he reached the kingdom of Colchis, where Phryxus was welcomed as a prince by the king's daughter, Aeetes. Aeetes, with hands stained with blood from his sacrificial rituals, received Phryxus warmly and offered him the Golden Fleece, that treasure forged in the depths of the underworld. And when he gazed upon its radiance, he knew that it was a gift from the gods themselves, imbued with the power to heal even the deepest wounds. But Phryxus's joy was short-lived. As he raised the fleece to his lips, the dragon that guarded it stirred, its eyes aglow like embers in the dark. The beast awakened from its slumber, its claws snapping like a whip as it prepared to unleash its fury upon the prince and his mother. And so, Jason and Medea, the sorceress who had lured the dragon into a false sense of security, descended upon Colchis with a plan to capture the fleece. But the beast was not so easily fooled, and as the Argonauts closed in, it unleashed its full fury upon them, sending shivers down their spines like the whispers of the damned. In that moment, the darkness closed in around them, and the world seemed to shrink to a single, twisted point where only the dragon's roar echoed through the ages.