Special Episode - The SEEKER: Chapter One

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The SEEKER blends inspirational Visionary Fiction with Mythic Fiction in this epic reimagining of the tale of Icarus. In his plunge from glory, rather than perishing in the waters of the Aegean, Icarus is rescued by a passing mariner, fictional demigod Amitayus, who is unaware of his own divinity. The two embark on an epic odyssey, braving impediments only Zeus himself could whip up, as Amitayus seeks the truth that will earn him a place in Elysium. Told through the lens of Greek Classicism, The SEEKER puts a modern spin on classic archetypes that lend it unmatched spiritual resonance.

Dominick Domingo is a veteran Disney Feature Animation artist and live-action filmmaker whose award-winning narrative nonfiction essays and short stories have been included in anthologies. His Young Adult Fantasy trilogy The Nameless Prince launched in 2012 through Twilight Times Books and has been capturing imaginations since. The Seeker represents Dominick’s foray into Mythic Visionary Fiction. It is a universal parable about Transformation that speaks to the jo

Chapters

• 0:00 Fogged Memory Of A Vanishing Mother
• 4:15 Life On Milos And A Father’s Silence
• 9:25 The Wharf Confrontation And Accusation
• 13:15 Fight, Riptide, And An Ominous Rescue
• 17:35 Dinner, Rules Of Silence, And Shame
• 21:15 Praise At The Harbor And A Warning
• 24:55 Training, Travels, And Wider Horizons
• 28:55 Doubting The Gods And Carving Beauty

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:45

Chapter 1 I have but one memory of my mother. It's fog shrouded and vague, diffused about the edges like an unfinished fresco on chipping plaster. The image visits me still. In the faded tableau, I'm five. A single white cloud sails by, a lonely ship in a vast sea. My mother is with me, laughing with her toes in the sand. It's just her and I. The stolen moment marks the rare occasion my father has given her leave without chaperone. Her golden locks flutter in the breeze, the few that have escaped her woolen headscarf. All at once she's standing. She says she wants to feel the tide between her toes. She leaves her shoes on her blanket and romps down the steady grade to a margin of dark and compact sand slick with reflections. I feel safe. It's just her and I, my father's ill temper nowhere in the vicinity to dampen our spirits. I lay back on the soft cotton blanket, fired up by the sun. It's warm on my belly, but a subtle breeze tempers its wrath, forging tiny bumps. Her song comes to me amid the crashing waves and whistling wind. A lullaby. Her rich velvet tones mingle with the song of the sea, overtaking it entirely. She's singing for me alone, I know, the way only a mother can sing to her son. The soothing alto of her maternal voice soars with the enchanting melody, one I've never heard but which rings as familiar and comforting as her touch. Moments pass, or an eternity, I've dozed off. When I start awake, bolting upright, she's nowhere to be seen. Her shoes are still beside me on the woven blanket. And then I spot her on the crest of the neighboring dune. She's facing northward up the coast, gazing off at the point where the road out of Adamis merges with heaven. Her woolen headscarf hangs loosely in her grasp. Strands of honey laden hair float on the wind, scattering golden light. For a split second, she turns over one shoulder and her eyes lock with mine. The inscrutable look in them haunts me to this day, something between profound regret and the elation of one standing on the brink of freedom. And then she dashes beyond the bone white hill crest, and is gone. It's the last time I see her. The memory visits me on countless occasions over the years, but it's always foggy, as though seen through layers of etched glass. So much so that I wonder if I dreamt it or invented it altogether. I was named Amateus. My father says I was born at sea. On the Zeiton, his barge to be precise. Any details beyond that seem to escape the man. His eyes grow cloudy with any mention of the past. The folks in town are no different, with their downcast eyes and abrupt stilted silence whenever I pass. I suppose it's warranted all things considered. After all, it's shameful to be motherless. More virtuous to replace gossip with silence. I'll be nineteen years of age before I learn of my divine heritage. Until then, my mother, or the idea of her, remains of the earthly variety, no different than anyone else's. There comes a day I learned to put her memory to rest, to keep her name from my tongue and self-preservation. Before the age of seven, every cell of me knew I'd done something to make her leave. Something unforgivable. I bore the guilt without voicing it to my father, sensing the man shouldered his own burden. After all, what kind of man is abandoned by his wife with no explanation? Oh I've heard the conjecture from the lips of cruel children at school, repeated from those of unscrupulous parents. She fell in love and ran off with another man. She was abducted by a lusty deity or sacrificed by the gods, or threw herself off a cliff and was swept out to sea. The worst of the hypotheses has not yet occurred to me as I descend the rickety stairs from a bustling wharf, at once rickety and polished by the sea. Father is overseeing the unloading of cargo from the Zeitens bins, shouting commands to the longshoremen and dock workers in Adamus's port. It's the only one on the tiny island of Milos, our home. At seven, I'm too young to be of any help. I've been told as much. I'd just be underfoot. So I wander to the beach, where white sands swell and dip as if to mimic the surf. From above, I've caught a glint among the littering of broken shells expelled by the sea, where white foam churns against slick, darkened sediment. It's abalone, perhaps, or something equally alluring, the iridescent shell of some as yet undiscovered sea creature spawned by Tethys herself. As my toes meet the sand, the familiar smell of brine infuses all, as much like home to me as the waving seaweed forests that entangle the wharf's pilings. But today, the cool ocean breeze carries an exotic bomb. Something indefinable from further out to sea. I've nearly reached the lacy fringe of tide when a raspy voice calls out from beneath the wharf. Damn it! I've been looking for you. I turn. Three silhouettes trudge across dank silt, blocking the square of bleached out light between barnacle encrusted pilings. The largest of them takes the lead. When it emerges into stark sunlight, I see that it's Dmitri, a boy from school. He is three years older and twice my size. The others, my age, tag along like hungry lampreys. My heels stir the sand, readying themselves to flee at a familiar instinct. I defy them, boring into coarse sediment and standing my ground. I've been looking for you because I want to share something with you, Dimitri explains. He's halfway across the gritty stretch that separates me from the wharf, and I can read the stain of duplicity in his glacier blue eyes. There is nothing charitable in whatever he has to share. On approach, he cocks a thick eyebrow, lending menace to a crooked, disingenuous smile. Dimitri is ten, but swarthy fuzz has already appeared on his upper lip, which glistens with the sweat of impending puberty. He's beginning to lose the roundness I share with his two lampreys. His towering frame is wiry and agile. I say nothing. He plants himself before me on the suddenly tenuous slope of beach. The horizon tilts, laying claim on my equilibrium. Still I hold fast and wait. I've just heard the most intriguing news, he begins, relishing each syllable. The sun nearly blinds me as I look up at him, waiting for the rest. My heart accelerates. It comes from a very reliable source, he assures me. The other boys are looking down, one of them flicking sand with his foot in reluctance. I wait. Today's news could not sting worse than any other tidbit of cruel gossip he's been sure to impart. Seems there's a record of your father's arrest. Back when you were but a runt. The charges, you ask? Well, it's not easy for me to tell you this, Amateus, but we're talking about nothing less than murder. The other boy's eyes dart to me, unable to pass up the chance to relish my reaction, then back to the sand. I continue to squint into Helios' fiery crown, refusing to blink. My jaw tightens, lower lip girding so as not to tremble. My heels grind the sand. Yes, it seems he put your very own mother in a shallow grave. I refuse to give Dimitri the reaction he seeks. I've heard that one already, I lie, turning away toward the rushing tide. The good news, he calls after me, is that there's also a record of his release. The revenue his shipping service brings in is too valuable to City Hall. Nice break. It's not true, I protest, despite myself. Suddenly I'm flying across the sand, having wheeled about like a puppet on a string. An unearthly force takes over, launching me headlong at full velocity so that the crown of my head meets Dimitri's flat stomach, hard as granite. Even so, he topples back into the sand. I quickly straddle him. My fists punch incessantly of their own accord, unable to or not wanting to curb the rage that surfaced from nowhere. The only lucid part of me is shocked at my own strength. The lampreys jump in and pry me from Dimitri. The two of them manage to fling my thrashing form into the sand beside him. In a split second he has recovered his faculties and pounced, is now pummeling me with twice the force I was able to muster. Blood courses through every inch of me, searing my skin and setting my temples to throbbing. Only later will I feel the blood pooling in my mouth. For the moment I am only vaguely aware the mouthfuls of sand I spit between blows are stained crimson. It seems an eternity my opponent maintains the upper hand, slugging and jabbing, me hot on the face and ears ringing, sure my jaw has been unhinged. The lampreys croon victoriously, kicking sand. Dimitri is slick with sweat now. I'm cloaked by the smell of it. I manage somehow to wriggle from beneath his slippery mass. In an instant I'm standing again, fists at the ready. The three of them circle loath to advance at my ready fists for stance alone. We should call a truce, I hear myself say. Suddenly a coward? Dimitri taunts. A moment ago you thought yourself a hero. Who's the coward? I challenge him. Three on one is not fair. You should pick on someone your own size. Dimitri can conjure no comeback. I turn my attention to his goons. None of this is true. You know it in your hearts. They avert their eyes. The three continue circling, the two younger boys glancing to their leader intermittently for cues. I appeal to their reticence. Be true to your hearts, what you know to be right. He's not worth your allegiance. My lips form the words of their own accord, me unaware of their source and baffled by the sudden calm that comes over me. My fists relax. The inexplicable confidence compels me to fix my gaze on each boy in turn. As if in compliance, they back away, lowering their fists. Dimitri's knuckles only gird. He looks from one boy to the other, thick brows merging in a crushing scowl. What now you two are but spineless jellyfish? If the boys were conflicted only seconds before, the effect grows millionfold and they turn on their heels. In a flash, they're running across what remains of the beach toward Adamas. The unearthly calm I'll later recognize as faith turns me on my own heels. I find myself continuing on, not toward Adamus or home, but northward along the beach, toward the glimmering jumble of broken shells that's caught my attention. If anything rational drives me, it's a refusal to give the matter further attention. I resolve to go about my day. I do not look back. I do not turn as the tide ebbs, reeling out to sea at startling speed and bearing the beach, nor as clumps of seaweed divulge themselves, strewn across it like flax spangling the cosmos, nor even as the surge of tide mounts, the sound of it whipping up in a grand crescendo, the din as alarming as a tempest come without warning, the surge of sucking sea and riotous tumbling of waves, the reeling of tons of briny water back out to sea. It is only Dimitri's cries that make me turn. A riptide has spirited him far from shore, far beyond the longest pier in the wharf. When my father returns from port, I retire to my room so he won't see my welts or the blackened eye that sheds acidy tears from within. Sophia, our domestic, has prepared dinner. I can hear the clinking of bronzeware as she sets the table. I gaze into the warbled oval mirror in my bedchamber. I did not inherit my father's swarthy coloring nor my mother's honey hued fairness. From what I can tell, I've inherited an equal measure. I've neither golden locks to refract the sun nor dark ones to absorb it. My own hair is something in between, a sort of chestnut brown. This much remains familiar in my buckled reflection. The rest is scarcely recognizable. One of my normally wide sapphire eyes is swollen closed, as if to shut out the world. My jaw no longer clicks. Swelling has fixed it in place, lent a hot thickness to it that denotes age and experience. I feel I'm gazing upon a future version of myself, one that would send Dimitri running away across the sand. Amateus! My father's voice jars me back into the present. Sophia has served dinner a good five minutes previous. My father's voice resounds throughout the rough hewn cavern that is our home. You will come to the table, Amateus. I obey, fixing my eyes to the floor in hopes he won't notice my bloated and disheveled appearance. Once seated, I gaze at the cypress tabletop. I can feel his eyes searching me. Ciro and Nico saw what happened, he says simply. He's referring to the dock workers who have loaded and unloaded the Zeitin as far back as I can recall. They saw all from the wharf. I feel shameful. And then they were proud of you. For the first time my eyes raise from the coarse grain of the table, catching light. I'm fond of Cyril and Nico. The news lightens my heart, but the look in my father's eye is stern and forbidding. I know to hold my tongue. I will not repeat the rumor nor justify my self defense with the sordidness of it. It's too far fetched to consider. It's but a corner of my mind that tortures me with curiosity. The inkling that there might be a grain of truth in it. You must continue to be strong, my father commands, cementing my silence. You must pay them no mind. I know better than to look to my father for comfort or shelter. I've long since learned there's no solace to be had there. The man is not cruel, but he seems vacant and empty to me, like a dried up spring or an extinct volcano. Toiling away at sea and in the various ports seems all he can manage, putting food on the table and a roof over our heads. I'd say he is content to meet our basic needs, but he's not. He's merely resigned to it, longing for nothing more. Hear me, boy, he says with finality, heavy brows vanquishing me with a scowl. Your mother will not be returning, that is all you need to know. You must never let her name pass your lips, even to defend against lies. You must never mention her again. Ever. The deep well of purple blood drains over the next few days, fading to a blotchy crimson and then diffusing altogether. With it, my hooded eye begins to open. Only a faint remnant of trauma remains when I return to Muzik and Adamus. As lessons come to a close, I spot Sophia waiting on the edge of the open rotunda in the town center, adjusting her woolen headscarf in the slight breeze that has whipped up. I restore my tablet and stylus to the designated storage chest and join her. Your father has asked that I bring you to harbor, she informs me, her smile warm but inscrutable. I'm taken with a reticence I hardly recognize. It's only on rare occasion he wants me there at the wharf, when Sophia has other engagements and cannot stay on to prepare dinner, or if father has other plans for us. When I reach the pier, I wave goodbye to Sophia and turn toward the Zeitin. My father is occupied on board securing her cargo bins. The longshoremen have just finished unloading a shipment. It's Nico and Cyril who bound across warped planks to greet me, grinning mischievously. Before I can escape, Nico has grabbed me about the midsection and thrown me over a hulking shoulder. Cyril wastes no time in tickling me until on the verge of tears. Doing so has been a ritual as long as I can recall. Even now, these men are gargantuan and heroic to me. Cyril with his deep set eyes and dimpled smile, Nico with his strong jaw and protruding chin, long coal black hair tied back, save for one unruly strand. I find joy in being tossed about. In their hulking arms, I'm impervious to the world. Truly it's the only place I felt safe. I've no reason to believe in the gods or demigods of myth. Not a one has been spotted on our tiny island of Milos. These men are the closest thing to gods in my world. Mortal heroes.

unknown: 18:17

Ha!

SPEAKER_00: 18:18

You sure gave that menace what he had coming. Cyril lauds once I've caught my breath. Never seen anything like it. And the urchin was twice your size. I find myself suddenly sheepish, though their admiration and respect anoints like a bomb. I know full well diplomacy is always preferable to physical violence. As much as I wish to bask in the men's praise, a smidgen of shame taints the glory. That kid would have done you in, Nico assures me. And then, faced with my blank expression, did you not see? When my back was turned, he informs me, Dimitri found a large rock, laced with sharp muscles and barnacles no less, and was poised to heft it against my skull when the tide carried him out. The sea goddess intervened at just the right moment, he concludes. The gods want you alive. I smile at the thought of it. Amateus, Nico begins, lowering his voice to a gentle whisper. You must always remember this. Here he takes me by the shoulders, his strong grip reassuring and insistent at once. You have something special a power within that is undeniable. Cyril nods in affirmation, his deep set eyes full of equal urgency. But it will always be a threat to some. After a moment, Cyril's determined look yields to the broad dimpled smile I know. After plucking that terror from the water, he assures me, we gave him a good talking to. Dimitri leaves me alone after that. A few years later, Tera will erupt and deforest our island. The Cypress trade will dry up, forcing Dimitri's father to find another trade and move the family to Crete. In the meantime, surely at my father's urging, the longshoremen teach me to spar. Under their tutelage, I learn swordsmanship and wrestling. The skills they impart will prove far more practical than the javelin, archery, and sling training I receive at Gamnistique. I have no plans to go to war, short of a Mycenaean invasion, but I'll surely have the military skills for it should such an eventuality come to pass. When I'm a bit older I begin working alongside the dock workers, loading timber onto the flat bed of my father's barge. I accompany him to Creta Nicaria and Cyprus, even so far as Syria and Egypt. He employs a tutor during these longer trips, lest my education suffer. The novelty of the world beyond Milos captivates me. The sights and sounds and aromas of the places I glimpse on our travels continue to live in my imagination, long after returning home. I fancy they await my return, continuing to exist even when I'm halfway across the Aegean. They persist behind my fluttering lids as I lay in bed at night. I often dream of flying, soaring over Atomis with its winding streets full of petty provincial gossip. The villagers' words no longer sting. There was a day when the cruel lies of neighborhood children seemed plausible, when anything seems plausible. In childhood, all the world is strange and new and chaotic. But with distance, having glimpsed the world beyond the Greek Isles, something in me begins to understand what drives the deceit, to read weakness and ill intent into the petty lore proffered by Adamus' villagers. In school I learn of the gods, tucked away on Mount Olympus and loath to reveal themselves until provoked. I learn of the great mortal heroes who've been granted immortality as demigods in the great paradise known as Elysium. But I have little use for gods and men, no stake in their supposed contracts. I know that men invented gods to explain nature. I know kings align themselves with fabricated gods to usurp power from the masses. Just as frequently, gods are used to account for inexplicable pregnancies, women claiming to have been raped by Zeus disguised as a swan or an egret. No, I have no use for gods. My feet are firmly planted on the earth. Still, I find little fulfillment in the purposeless utility. Act of chipping wood to and fro. Only when a chunk of cypress wood is whittled into a thing of beauty do I feel life has meaning. I take to carving away at it in our den at home, never sharing my creations, but admiring them in solitude in my tiny cavernous bedchamber. And then one day Thera unleashes her fury. The great eruption levels forests in her vicinity, disintegrating entire islands and erasing them from memory. Melos is distant enough that only clouds of ash are to blame for her deforestation and tainted soil. Many in town say it is the gods who have released such wrath on Cyclades, punishing its inhabitants for their ill deeds and wickedness. As much as I resent the pettiness I have witnessed with my own eyes, I refuse to believe it is so. Oh, I continue to use the references to deities built into our language and customs, saying that Helios and his chariots light the sky by day and Selene illuminates the night. There's little harm in it. But I attribute no ill intent to the gods, no punishing wrath or vain whimsy. I may never know the true nature of the universe, but I refuse to personify the invisible. My pondering nature, combined with having been stung by pettiness, compels me to retreat, to seek solace within. The stillness of creation appeals to me, the very reason whittling becomes such a precious respite. It's like hacking away at the unsavory, shedding all that imbues life with bitterness to reveal the true beauty at its core. One day at fourteen I forge my most prized creation to date. It's a lyre, carved over the course of several days. I know nothing of crafting musical instruments, but the elegant silhouette appears on its own, as though it's lived in the gnarled knotted wood and borne itself into being despite my ineptness. I take great care applying gold leaf and stringing the instrument. Afterward a musician in town lays fingers upon it, saying it's playable and of the finest quality he's seen. I return home from musique one day to find the lyre missing. Panic besieges my heart, and I ransack our home, thinking perhaps I've forgotten where I last left it. When Father returns home, I lament that the instrument has gone missing. I've taken it to market, he declares with a broad grin. My heart sinks. Father says he's made a good penny for it. Am I not proud? He assures me I should be, that I have a talent, one that could aid in putting a roof over our heads. Since the deforestation we haven't any means. Father shares half of the profits with me. But I remain heartbroken somehow. A few signets do not heal the loss, the gaping wound that serves as a reminder of what has been torn for me. From that day forward, I never again find myself inspired to carve wood. It's not disillusionment that sets in over time, so much as a sense of futility. Throughout childhood, I've been subjected to the least tasteful human compulsion. Gossip. The experience has left me with a less than high opinion of humans. Having been robbed of the muse to create, hosting no conception of Hades or Elysium, and incapable of entertaining such vain notions, there seems little point to life. Enduring it seems purposeless, without reward. At the tender age of seventeen, I find myself paralyzed, as though waiting out a prison sentence. I haven't the perspective to know that adolescence is marred by jadedness, and the art of contentment is something one masters much later in life. For the moment, I've thrown my hands in the air. It's in this state of surrender that I happen upon a secluded inlet, a tiny chink in Melos's broad, undulating shore of polished igneous fringed with alabaster sands. Here, the volcanic contours of bone-white cliffs swell and dip, each drift fringed with succulent verbena that spill over like low-hanging fruit. Stark blue nothingness imposes itself just beyond the rolling crests, both near and far at once. I'm captivated. I take to retiring in the shrouded cove daily, seeking refuge in the peaceful lull of waves and the still meditative silence. I dream of being abroad, partaking in the sights and sounds and aromas that colored my youth but now seem worlds away. I bask in the reverie, wedged between pristine volcanic cliffs. I trace their careening contours with my eyes, marveling at the light that refracts off their paleness, fragmenting into a spectrum of iridescent hues so much richer than the bleached-out dunes themselves. More than that, there's something comforting about the churning of waves in concert with the whistling wind. The song of the sea beckons me. Ineffable but familiar as my own soul. The constant stalward thrashing speaks of eternity. While the rest of the world is fleeting, the sea will always be there, I know. All else will be devoured by flux or dissipate with the sands of time. But the tide will remain, carving away, shaping and reshaping the shore. I haven't spoken of my mother since Father's stern warning instilled fear in me at the age of seven. But I'm lucid about my feelings of abandonment. They're likely the reason the beach appeals to me so its promise of permanence. It's here in the tiny alcove one afternoon, eyes caressing the crests of high dunes, that I make the connection. I realize for the first time that the very same outline I've been tracing with my eyes, the one spilling over with succulents and framed by an eternity of blue, is etched deep in my memory. It's where I last saw her.