Twelve children sit at Aeolus’s tables on the floating bronze island. Six sons married to six daughters. The food and the wine never cease. They want stories. Every night their father leans forward and does not interrupt, and the children forget to eat, rapt in the telling. They are god-adjacent rather than gods proper, born of a god-favored king and his sister-wife, raised inside their father’s enclosed paradise, their lives a sealed loop of wind and feast and song. They never leave the bronze walls. They have nowhere to go and no one to be except each other. They listen to ten years of Troy as if they have been waiting for a voice from outside the world, which they have. Then Odysseus sails away with the bag of winds, and the door closes behind him, and the children go back to dinner.
Aeolus's Twelve Children
Six sons married to six daughters on the bronze island. Aeolus's children, who never left their father's hall and never stopped eating.