Creatures

Cyclops, sirens, Charybdis — the not-quite-mortal, not-quite-divine.

Polyphemus / pol-i-FEE-mus / One-eyed son of Poseidon. Lives in a cave the size of a hall. Eats men two at a time and washes them down with milk.
Argos Odysseus's old hunting dog. Once fast enough to run down hare and goat on Ithaca. Now a bag of ribs on a dung heap by the gate.
Charybdis A whirlpool that breathes. Every forty breaths a column of sea explodes upward, then the water sucks down hard enough to swallow timbers whole.
Circe's Wolves and Mountain Lions The big predators of Aeaea, tame as house dogs. They press their heads into the strangers' thighs and watch from the shade. They were men once.
Eumaeus's Pigs The swineherd's herd. Penned by size and age, fed and kept for a master twenty years gone. They are the work of loyalty made flesh.
Polyphemus's Flock Great rams and ewes the size of horses. Penned in the cave by night, driven out at dawn. The escape rides under their bellies.
Scylla Six heads on six thin necks, lodged in a cliff face above the strait. She takes six men in four breaths. There is no killing her.
The Cattle of Helios The Sun god's herds on Thrinacia. Fat-flanked, slow-moving, sacred, untouchable. They are the test that destroys the last of the crew.
The Eagle An eagle falling from the sky as if something had torn the world open to let him through. He breaks the geese's necks like reed stems.
The Golden and Silver Guard Dogs Two dogs cast in gold and silver flanking the threshold of Alcinous's palace. Tireless. They never sleep. They never need to.
The Gorgons Never seen. Only feared. The thought of them is what makes Odysseus turn and run from the underworld.
The Great Stag A heavy-shouldered deer at the stream on Circe's island. Wider in the rack than any Odysseus had taken on Ithaca. The first food after five hundred dead.
The Laestrygonians Man-eating giants on a cliff-ringed harbour. They throw boulders at the ships below and spear the swimmers like fishermen working a pool.
The Other Cyclopes Polyphemus's neighbours up the slope. Hear the howling, ask through the rock who hurt him, take his answer at face value, and go back to sleep.
The Raven of the Underworld One bird on a low branch at the edge of the dead world. The only living creature Odysseus sees there. It watches with one wet eye.
The Shades / SHAYD / The hungry mass at the blood pit. Maidens, boys, elders, warriors, things barely human. Eyes black. They rise from the mud and they wail.
The Sirens / SY-renz / Singers on a small jagged island. The sand is white because it is bone. They know everything. They will tell you, if you can reach them.
The Tortured Shades Eternal punishments, glimpsed through the fog deeper in. A liver re-eaten. A stone never reaching the peak. Fruit and water always just out of reach.
The Transformed Crewmen Eurylochus's twenty, turned to swine with one touch of a wand. Their faces stretched, their hands became hooves. Their eyes stayed the same.
The Twenty Geese The geese in Penelope's courtyard, fat on scattered grain. The dream-figure of the suitors eating her stores. Their feathers will scatter like snow.
The White Boar of Mount Parnassus The boar that gave Odysseus his thigh-scar in his youth. A lesson in luck and mortality he carries on his body for the rest of his life.