A to Z: Atalanta and Ariadne

 

    I haven't done this challenge in quite a few years now (I'd have to go digging around on my old Wordpress blog to see which years I did, and I don't feel like bothering 😅) so I may be a bit rusty with it, but I'm going to try my best!

    You may be thinking, based on the title of the post, that you know who I'm about to talk about.  But actually you don't.  (Unless you're one of a very tiny number of people.  Which is unlikely.)

    Because I'm not talking about the famed huntress Atalanta, nor about Ariadne, the daughter of King Minos who helped Theseus through the labyrinth.  Nope, I'm talking about two original characters of mine who were named after those two.

    Allow me to take you back in time all the way to 2014.

    (Yeah, you were probably expecting a much older date there, huh?)

    I was pondering, as often I do, a miniscule part of a familiar tale and wondering about the details that might have happened around it.

    Specifically, on that particular occasion I was thinking about the time, late in the Trojan War, that Achilles was briefly exiled for having slain Thersites because Thersites was mocking Achilles for mourning the Amazon queen he had just killed.

    All murderers in the Greek heroic age had to be exiled, lest the stain of their murder cause plagues and other disasters, and then they needed to be purified by a king before they could safely return home.  Well, the Greek army at Troy didn't want to take any risks of Achilles being away for long, so they sent a king (specifically, Odysseus) with him to purify him so he could immediately turn right back around and return to the war with as little time lost as possible.  They made their way to the nearest non-enemy city they could reach, specifically Methymna on the island of Lesbos, which Achilles had conquered personally much earlier in the war.  (Not that that's saying much:  Achilles personally conquered most of the towns within a few days' reach of the Achaian camp!)

    Anyway, in the myth that's all there is to it:  they go there, Odysseus purifies him, and they go back to the war so Achilles can die a few weeks (or possibly days) later.  But--and here's where it got interesting to me--these are two particularly libidinous individuals, even for Greek mythology.  So I found myself wondering what happened while they were on Lesbos, away from all the prying eyes back in the camp.

    Even as I starting thinking that maybe they got a bit too 'friendly' with some of the girls serving them whatever refreshments the surviving locals provided them, I realized I was already naming the daughters they were going to father on said girls.  🤣

    Usually, when I find myself doing that, I accept the inevitable, and that's what I did this time, too:  I sat down to start writing the stories of those girls, Atalanta (the daughter of Achilles) and Ariadne (the daughter of Odysseus).

    My initial thought had been just a short story of the girls escaping slavery and finding the Amazons to become warriors.  (Actually, in my most initial thought, they were probably the daughters of servants rather than slaves, but it didn't take me long to realize that given the cultures in the Mediterranean in the Late Bronze Age (or in the Greek Heroic Age), there were far more slaves than servants, and if they were just going to have their way with a girl and then sail off home again, the girl would be a slave, not a free woman.  (Technically it's a violation of proper procedure for a guest to be served by a slave rather than by a woman of the host's family (in the Iliad, the kings have their concubines pour the drinks, suggesting that it's the wife's job, which makes it particularly telling that when Achilles plays host to a few of the others, it's Patroclos who is pouring the drinks) but...I think I made an excuse in the finished product that Achilles felt their host and his family "looked too Trojan" and therefore they were being served by a pair of Achaian slave girls...))

    That, uh, didn't end up being what I wrote at all.  In fact, by the time I finished the first writing session--which I got so excited about that I ended up writing literally all night (didn't even realize it had gotten that late until I noticed there was sunlight coming in the window)--it had mutated into a roughly Young Adult novel with those two girls as two of the three protagonists.  (The third being Eurysakes, the son of Aias of Salamis.  He's an actual figure from the myths, but I'll go into more detail in a few days... 😉)

    By the end of 2014, I had written an entire series of seven novels, all set in my own special blend of the Greek Heroic Age and the actual Late Bronze Age.  Instead of the girls just fighting bandits or whatever, they eventually faced off against a foe of unimaginable age and power, and rather than just staying in the region of Troy, they went not only to Greece itself but also to Babylon, Egypt, and even the Alps.

    In direct contrast to the typical tropes of Young Adult series, though, I very purposefully did not have any of the three pair off with each other.  At the time, I went through myriad contortions to explain just why Atalanta didn't want to get involved with anyone.  Thankfully, 2014 was also the year I realized I was asexual and aromantic, so in rewrites I was able to make Atalanta aroace without it being awkward.  Uh, except for the fact that they didn't have the concept of asexual or aromantic, so she has trouble explaining her lack of interest.  A year or so later, I attempted briefly to write an unnecessary eighth book, in which they were going to visit the capital of the Hittite empire, and in the writing of that, I suddenly realized what I somehow had missed in the course of the first seven, that Ariadne was in love with Atalanta, romantically (and possibly sexually), a fact that Ariadne was not willing to admit to consciously, of course.

    But then nothing else happened with any of it, and I just set it all aside for years.

    Then 2020 happened.  The COVID lockdown cost me my job, and after years of having a lot of my time taken up at work, suddenly I had nothing but time to myself.  One of the ways I spent that time (on top of a lot of gaming, lol) was that I revisited some of my old writing projects to see if any of them were worth trying to rewrite.

    And after rereading the adventures of Atalanta and Ariadne, I decided that their story really was worth telling properly.

    Okay, I'm pretty sure I'm not capable of telling it "properly," but it deserved another go-round, and one that ended up with me actually releasing the story to the public.

    So I set about that, and since one of my other lockdown projects was getting into some lightweight game development, I decided to add some interactivity, making the novels into...well, calling them "interactive fiction" seems a bit presumptuous.  More like "novels with periodic bursts of menu choices that mostly lead to sudden and horrible death."  So, Dragon's Lair in text form in between long stretches of just ordinary fiction, in other words.  Though the first chapter of the first novel was a bit different, since my initial draft had been so eager to get them off on their adventures that their time in Methymna had been summed up in about two scenes, and they had escaped with very little indication that anything had truly changed to make it worth the risk.  In the new version, they have firm proof that they'll be separated, and possibly that Atalanta will be killed, so they have good reason to risk their lives by trying to escape.

    But I should be talking about the characters themselves, not the novels and how they came to be.

    Atalanta has a real father-worship complex, and while they were living in Methymna, she frequently identified herself to all and sundry as the daughter of Achilles.  Most of the locals--who are Hittites, more or less--don't believe her at all (in fact, many don't even speak Achaian, though both girls do speak some Hittite) but Achaian guests visiting her master's palace often do believe her, because she's the spitting image of Achilles when he was a teenage boy.  She's often impulsive to the point of being reckless, many mistake her lack of knowledge for stupidity, and she is deeply devoted to her family.  Which means just Ariadne at first, but soon this is expanded to include Eurysakes, who is her second cousin.  (Following the post-Iliadic tradition wherein Telamon, father of Aias, was the brother of Peleus, Achilles' father.)  Despite her massive physical strength and her considerable skill at fighting, she has a cowardly side, and panics easily.  Once she's panicking, she can't speak properly and keeps swapping words around as she's trying to talk.  She's a bit naïve, but sometimes comes through with a deep or biting observation that her more cynical cousin misses.  Her preferred weapon is the spear, but she's also good with a sword.

    Ariadne is the opposite of Atalanta in many ways.  She prefers thinking and talking to action, and her father complex is a negative one:  she hates the very idea of Odysseus and continually looks for any and all explanations that make her the daughter of anyone other than Odysseus.  She can actually read--which is extremely impressive considering that they live in the Late Bronze Age, and therefore the writing system she's having to work with is Linear B, rather than the simple and easy-to-use Greek alphabet--and makes it a habit to gather information wherever she goes.  After their escape, her desire to act cautiously sometimes almost paralyzes her, leaving her unable to act because she can't see which is the "correct" path.  Unlike Atalanta's asexuality, Ariadne is a lesbian in the modern metaphorical sense as well as in the literal sense of "a person from the island of Lesbos."  However, she's smitten with Atalanta (but unable to understand her feelings) and thus doesn't quite respond to any of the other ladies who are interested in her.  Well, I say that, but I also left it sort of vague that she might have messed around with a few in between books.  (Probably not past the smooching stage, though.  She's too young.)  She's a skilled musician, and her weapon of choice is the bow.  (In fact, she's basically useless with anything else.)

    I don't have any art of them, exactly, but in the first game (which was done with Twine rather than Ren'py, for the few people who have any idea what either of those are 🤣) I had some art on the frame that was a (heavily reconstructed) Mycenaean fresco which I then modified in Photoshop (or was it GIMP?) to make one of the people in the chariot have red hair, thus to suggest/imply that the two women are Atalanta and Ariadne.  (They're said to be female due to the color of their skin, because Mycenaean and Minoan fresco artists borrowed the Egyptian style of giving women white skin and men skin in shades of tan and brown.)  This is that modified fresco:

Modified fresco from Tiryns.  Click to go to the Wikimedia Commons page for the original photo

    Before closing the post with links to the first two books/games (the third is hopefully going to be released sometime this month, or maybe next month if I get bogged down in other stuff), I thought I'd share some passages I'm particularly fond of.

    It's actually a bit hard to find good segments that aren't too excessively long and don't either need massive amounts of set-up and/or spoil the plot, though. 😅  But here's a short bit from not long after they've arrived in the partially rebuilt Troy, and are in the agora.  (In keeping with the way the myths were written, I've ascribed a certain amount of Mycenaean/Greek material culture to Troy, despite that it was Hittite territory.)

         Atalanta wanted desperately to say something to comfort the old woman, but what could she possibly say that wouldn’t ring false and hollow on her lips?  She had grown up her whole life relishing the tales of her father slaughtering the Trojans with his divine strength.  How could she now say anything to comfort one of the miserable survivors?   Listening to the tales of her father’s heroism, it had been hard to think about things like what would happen to the innocent after the war was over.
         “Perhaps we should leave our prayers for later,” Ariadne said, shaking her head.  “Ma’am, could you recommend someone who might be able to trade us a bit to eat?  We haven’t eaten since early this morning.”
         The old woman smiled, and set her hand on Ariadne’s arm.  “It’s simple fare for a growing lad like yourself, but I could provide you some fine bread.”
         “That would be delightful,” Ariadne answered her, smiling.
          The old woman, now looking quite pleased, led the way back down the stairs, and over to a small cloth spread on the agora, where an even older man was sitting surrounded by loaves of coarse bread.  He was in the midst of negotiating with a harried-looking woman who wanted to trade eggs for loaves.  Atalanta chuckled to herself as they walked.  She would bet anything that Ariadne already knew that the old woman had food to trade when she asked that question.  It had been a good way to change the subject, and it made the old lady happy.  It didn’t really do as much as Atalanta would have liked to alleviate the guilt she was feeling over the suffering of these people so many years after her father had made war on them, though…

    One moment I want to share is kind of a weird self-reference.  It's the moment when Atalanta obtains her father's spear.  (Because of course I had to have that happen, lol.)  This is her reaction to the sight of Achilles' spear, which was so mighty that even Patroclos wasn't able to wield it:

         Atalanta’s eyes didn’t want to leave the spear in the man’s hand.  Its shaft was long, sleek, and well-polished to a deep black hue.  The spearhead was brightly polished bronze, forking to two points that both looked very sharp indeed, and it met the shaft with a ring of pure gold.  “I…it’s beautiful…” she finally said, fighting against herself.  She wanted to take it from his hands.  She wanted to touch it to make sure it was real.  And yes, she did want to try using it against an enemy.  A spear like that looked like it could kill a giant or a cyclops with a single blow!  It could probably cut through armor like a rock through water.  “But is it really all right for me to have it?” she asked.  Even if it was left over from the war, a spear like that must have been worth more than a dozen oxen.

    And this is how I had Neoptolemos react to the sight of his father's spear in Ilios, a novel (of sorts) I wrote about the Trojan War back in 2011, for my very first ever NaNoWriMo.  (That novel was briefly available via LeanPub, but I took it down years ago because it just...was not good.  Parts of it I really like, and other parts make me cringe just to think of them.  Many chapters were slated for complete replacement (it was a collection of short stories, essentially, chronicling the entire war, each chapter narrated by a different character) and I just never got around to that.  Plus at this point I would want to rewrite other chapters to put the romance between Patroclos and Achilles more to the forefront, and...it's just not worth it, in the long run.  Especially because for some reason I kept wanting people to narrate their own deaths, which is just not smart storytelling.  Fortunately, I reused some of the best bits elsewhere already...)

         Odysseus took up a long spear that leaned nearby, and laid it, too, at my feet.  I'd never seen anything like that spear before.  Its handle was black ash wood, and it was ringed with gold at the place where the handle met the blade.  Strangest of all, the blade was split at the tip, giving it two points, like a snake's tongue, and both tips looked deadly sharp.
         [several paragraphs dedicated to Achilles' armor snipped here]
         I picked up the spear, and caressed it.  So many enemies had watered it with their blood...I wanted to bury it in even more enemies, letting its seeds grow within the soil of their bodies.  I wanted to watch death blossom around the end of the spear.

    One of the recurring themes in the novels about Atalanta and Ariadne is how both girls are much better people than their fathers, and especially how much better Atalanta is than her half-brother Neoptolemos.  Not necessarily in combat (or in strategy, in Ariadne's case), but as people.  Thus I ended up adding this half-reference to an earlier work of my own that's no longer out there, just...kind of because, you know?  (The bit about Achilles' spear being forked comes from Early Greek Myth by Timothy Gantz, a major reference work that basically catalogs all known ancient works.  In that, it's mentioned that one of the theories regarding why only Achilles could use his spear (mentioned in the Iliad, when Patroclos was preparing to go out to battle in his armor) was that it had two points.  At least one modern author has interpreted that to mean one point on each end, but I was glad to see that the devs who made the excellent game Hades had followed the same interpretation I did, making Achilles' spear forked.  (They had clearly consulted Gantz, btw, because they came to the exact same interpretation I did regarding the Orphic Zagreus.  I've seen various later works that describe the Orphic Zagreus in terms that do not even suggest that interpretation, and in some cases rather actively contradict it.))

    The following paragraph is a good example of how devoted to Atalanta Ariadne is.  It comes after Atalanta became terribly angry at hearing people telling a rather insulting story about Achilles (regarding his time in disguise on Scyros, which I'll be talking more about in a few days).  Rather than venting her anger at those people, she went outside and started punching a rock.  This paragraph takes place after she returns.

         The dried smears on Atalanta’s face when she came back inside confirmed Ariadne’s worst fears, as did traces of blood on her knuckles.  If she couldn’t find a way to cure her cousin of this unreasoning attachment to the man she thought was her father, their travels in Anatolia were likely to end with them both dead.  And even if they managed to get safely to Hellas, then what?  In some places, claiming Achilles as a father might get Atalanta a warm reception, but in others the falsehood would be quickly and easily spotted, and would win her only a hot death.  But right now wasn’t the time to deal with that, not while Atalanta was still upset.  Ariadne took her aside before they ate and helped clean the tear trails off her face, and the blood off her hands.  Atalanta winced whenever Ariadne touched her fingers; she must have been punching something particularly hard this time.

    It takes her a very long time to let go of her insistence that their fathers were lying when they claimed to be Achilles and Odysseus; it's pretty late into book two before Ariadne is faced with proof that she can't dismiss.  A few paragraphs later, another aspect to Ariadne's devotion is highlighted:

         The longer the meal went on, the more Ariadne understood the rumors that Apollo was Althaia’s father, rather than her mother’s husband.  Althaia, like her mother, was bright and beautiful, seeming to glow in the light.  Her father was entirely lacking in beauty, and the light shied away from him, as if it only wanted to shine on beauties like Althaia, Chryseis, and—of course!—Atalanta.  The thin firelight played through her hair, braiding into it until it appeared to be true flame, dancing and glowing on its own.  Ariadne found it hard not to stare, in fact; she had never really seen Atalanta in this type of light before to appreciate how well it complimented her.

    And yes, the Chryseis in question is that Chryseis.  (If the name does not mean anything to you, don't worry about it. 🤣  The Trojan War is one of my obsessions, strangely, so it's hard for me to gauge how well normal people know or don't know the characters who feature in various portions of it.)  All seven of the novels about Atalanta and Ariadne feature lots of cameos of people from the war, as well as tales of people and places that played a role.  Being set in and around Troy, obviously the first novel is especially filled with such cameos and tales.  Book two being set in Aiolia (modern-day Thessaly), where Achilles was born, is obviously also filled with such cameos and tales.  Book three has them going first to Athens and then Thrace, so there's...well, there's cameos in the first part, but after they get to Thrace it's mostly focused on other stuff.  And after that their travels take them to even more distant ports, again reducing the number of cameos.

    Okay, one last passage from the first novel.  From the pinnacle of my self-indulgence, the scene wherein Apollo goes to Atalanta in a dream to confront her with the reality of what a butcher her father was, only for her to remain blithely certain that her father was, overall, a good person.

         Apollo sighed.  “Your filial devotion to such a beast of a father is so misplaced that it merits much more than a mere apology,” he said, “but at least your reaction is more appropriate than that of Neoptolemos.”
         “You showed this to him, too?”
          “After he refused to sacrifice to me, I did make a few things clear to him, yes,” Apollo said, with a frown.  “He defended his father’s actions—and then not only repeated them but made them look mild by comparison when he slaughtered Priam and his youngest son on my father’s altar.”
         Atalanta shuddered.  She’d heard the tales—who hadn’t?—but hearing them always put a cold chill down her back to think she shared any blood with such a monster.  “And then you killed him, too, to avenge them?”
         “No, avenging Priam would have been my father’s place.  I slew Neoptolemos for entirely new crimes he had committed against me,” Apollo said, with a terrifyingly cold smile.  “Would you like to see?”
          “Um, no, not really, actually,” Atalanta said, with a nervous laugh.  “I believe you.”  Everyone had heard what terrible things her half-brother had done in the war, and some of the rumors she had heard of his death at Delphi had said he’d been sacking the place in vengeance for Apollo’s role in Achilles’ death…
         Apollo sighed, looking disappointed.  “I was looking forward to that,” he said, so quietly that Atalanta was sure she wasn’t supposed to hear it.  The sulky tone of his voice made her want to laugh, but she didn’t want to anger him any further, so she held back her laughter.
         Atalanta bit her lip a moment, wondering if the slight lightening of his mood meant it would be okay for her to ask the question that was burning in her mind, or if she should hold her tongue.  But she couldn’t hold it in.  She had to know.  “Are you planning on tormenting me for my father’s actions?” she asked.  “The way Hera tormented Heracles for being her husband’s illegitimate child?”  Not that any of that ever made sense to Atalanta; it didn’t at all fit with the way the goddess was described by her priestesses whenever they had come to Methymna.
          Apollo scowled at her in disgust.  “Don’t associate me with such unthinking behavior, mortal,” he said coldly.  “Most of those tales are completely exaggerated anyway.  Heracles blaming others for misfortunes of his own making, mostly.”  He snorted, shaking his head.  “He was close friends with that filthy liar Autolycos, after all.  It shouldn’t surprise you that he picked up some of his deceitful ways.”
          “I just want to know if I should look forward to a life full of torment,” Atalanta said, more than a little confused by the sudden hatred Apollo was displaying towards Ariadne’s ancestor.  “Is that so wrong?”
         He laughed a single, short and rather mean-spirited laugh.  “You’re the daughter of Achilles.  What other kind of life could you possibly expect?”  Apollo shook his head.  “But your torment won’t be of my doing, so long as you never cross me.  Because if you do…you will suffer for every sin.  Not just your own, but your father’s and your brother’s.”

    I have fun with how very human the Greek gods often act.  🤣  I also like to take opportunities to do what little I can to counter some of the baked-in misogyny of the myths, thus the line about how Hera didn't actually do much tormenting of Heracles, and he just liked to claim she was persecuting him.  That's much more in keeping with her role in the actual ancient Greek religion.

    ....

    Hmm.  I seem to have meandered to a halt.

    Well, in absence of anything else concrete to say, I suppose I should just provide the links in case anyone has not been thoroughly repulsed by my random and unfocused driveling.  All versions of these novels are available completely free, whether experiencing them online or downloading them for reading later.

    Book One, Scions of Troy, can be found here on itch.io, where it can either be experienced as a lightly interactive fiction or downloaded as an extremely ad hoc ebook consisting of a "download whole work" file from AO3.  It can also just be outright read on AO3, obviously.  AO3 has the most up-to-date version of the text (because I spotted a missing quotation mark while I was looking for the passages above, and added it in, but didn't think that was enough to bother updating the itch.io versions), but I recommend the interactive version, truthfully, because in addition to the novel's full text there's also a glossary (of about 30k words!) and some mini-essays on the culture and setting available after the conclusion of the text.  (Also the image that I tried to copy-paste onto AO3 stopped working at some point, and I don't recall if it made it into the ebook version successfully, so there's that, too.)  The only caveat about the interactive version is that in this one I had several spots where part of the interactivity was to get to view one of two scenes that played out simultaneously.  This was a very bad idea, and a trap I did not fall into again in the making the next two interactive.  However, one can always start the chapter over and hastily scroll to get back to the decision point to experience the other path.  (There's also the save and load feature, but I'm not sure how well it works, as I just copy-pasted the text and didn't spend long testing what I had produced.  Part of the reason I didn't want to stick with Twine as I moved forward.)

    The plot of the first book (probably should have talked about this sooner, lol!) is that after Atalanta and Ariadne escape slavery on Lesbos and meet up with Eurysakes in the ruins of the Achaian camp, the three of them head to the partially rebuilt Troy.  They're welcomed to court (because Eurysakes is acting as envoy for his uncle, who is a king in Cypros, the major source of copper for bronze) and soon after set out to deal with some bandits that have been plaguing the area around Mount Ida.  One things leads to another, and soon they're caught up in a plot that not only threatens Troy, but might put the gods themselves at risk.  The (non-interactive form of the) novel is about 139k words long.

    Book Two, The Golden God of Aiolia, can also be found on itch.io, in the same lightly interactive and ad hoc ebook formats...though I changed the engine I was using for the interactive version, so the text is much, much bigger for this one, which hopefully makes it easier to read, and moving backwards to earlier text is much easier.  (Also, the save game function definitely works properly.)  The text is also on AO3.  As with the first book, I recommend the interactive version so as to have access to the glossary.  (Both can be "played" online in the browser, though it does take a while for The Golden God of Aiolia to load, because of the way the Web version of Ren'py games work.)

    The plot of book two is that news reaches the cousins' ears that someone has pillaged the oracle at Delphi and stolen the armor of Achilles, where it had been resting since the death of Neoptolemos.  Worst of all, the thief claims to be Achilles himself, back from the dead!  Atalanta can't stand to hear her father's name so besmirched, so she's determined to retrieve the armor and clear his name.  Eurysakes is equally invested in that armor for different reasons, so Ariadne can only go along with them and try to keep it from turning into a disaster.  It turns out, however, that the thief is no simple bandit, and there are much worse threats lurking in the shadows.  The (non-interactive form of this) novel is only about 100k words long.

    Book Three, The Martial Maenads, will hopefully soon be available on itch.io and AO3, as I got its new draft basically ready a year ago, before my heart palpitations put my game dev career (if you can call it that) on hold until my health situation could be resolved.  But I think I've more or less got a handle on said health situation now, so I'm starting to get back to work on it.  (As of this writing, a few days before posting time, it only needed about half of the glossary, about 2/3s of the summary of book 2, and a healthy dose of double-checking for typos and other minor adjustments to the text.  The glossary shouldn't be much more than a few hours of concerted effort, but the summary is slow going, and will probably require two passes, because I seem to be putting way too much detail into the summary, so I need to boil it down further. 😅)

        The plot of book three is that a visit to Athens for the Festival of Athene leads to unexpected complications when it turns out that Odysseus is also in town for the festival, and the trio have to consult the witch Kirke to look for a solution.  She, in turn, sends them to Thrace, to deal with...actually, I'll be talking about that threat tomorrow, so I'll just leave it at this today. 😉  This novel is about 110k words.  (Not sure off-hand if that was with the interactive portions or not; I just looked at the count on the file in Word. 😅)

    Book Four is the one in which they visit Babylon, so unfortunately it'll take a while to do the rewrite on that one, since I'll have to do some research first.  (Especially since I originally had them pass through a Phoenician city on the way there, which is not geographically plausible.  In the new draft, they'll be going through Tarsus, so that'll require even more research, because I don't know diddly about the Late Bronze Age reality of Tarsus.  Okay, actually, I don't need to do that much research, because I just looked it up and it was a Hittite city, so a lot of my earlier research will suffice.  Well, that's something anyway.  But there's still all that research into Babylon.  So much of the current draft has things like [I don't know what that would look like so I'll skip it for now] whenever they reach a new place. 😭)  I'm looking forward to getting it out there, though, because its original prologue (the prologue is always set more-or-less during the war) was garbage, and about a year or so ago I wrote it a new one (actually, I wrote three or four of them, but most of them were also garbage) and I really like it, so I'm eager to share it with others.

    Book Five is one of my favorites in the series.  They visit both Egypt and Crete in it...and I'll be talking more about it later because of that.  🤣  (Fair warning:  I will in fact be talking about this series a lot over the coming month.)

    Book Six is another of my favorites.  In that one they visit Mycenae and Sparta.  And again I'll be talking about it later on because of that...

    Book Seven is the summation of their adventure, and the biggest of their battles, and I feel like rewriting it will probably be a nightmare as I don't think I did nearly enough research into several aspects of the story.  But that's definitely a very long way off, unfortunately...

    And now I think I really am out of things to say.  So I guess I'll just end this post here.