Aeolus

His island is impossible: bronze walls rising sheer from the waterline, no beach, no harbor. Inside the wall a hall stretches the length of the place and his twelve children sit at his tables, six sons married to six daughters, and the food and wine never stop. He is keeper of the winds for Zeus, which means he can give a man exactly the wind he needs to get home. For a month he listens to Odysseus tell the war, every night leaning forward, his children rapt, forgetting to eat. When the time comes to leave he gives the gift: a bag made from a nine-year-old ox-skin, bound with silver cord, every wind that could blow them off course sealed inside. Only the westerly is free. Nine days of clean sea. On the tenth morning Odysseus can see the smoke from his own hearth. Then he sleeps. [SPOILER: The men open the bag, certain it’s gold he’s been hiding from them. The winds rip out and blow them all the way back to the bronze island. Aeolus refuses to see them. The message comes down to the dock from his attendants: the gods have marked you, to help now would bring the curse to my people, get out. The man who’d been the warmest host in the Mediterranean closes the door without coming to it. The retelling treats it as the first real lesson in how thin divine favor is: you are loved until you are inconvenient, and then you are gone.]