Betwixt the craggy promontory
And the wine-dark sea:
Lo, the sightless cavern!
Deep, dank, demonic.
Once Echidna dwelt there,
The dreadful demoness,
Known for tempestuous beauty,
Feared for her bubonic body!
It was Typhaos,
The defiant dragon — smokeless fire and chaos,
Who loved her for her most hated guile,
Guile of rattling tail that made gods wrought her exhile.
In his bottomless abysses she saw
Infernal compassion and monstrous care,
All the heads breathing eldritch empathy,
A tale telling tumultous romance.
In her cold love, that suffocates freedom,
He found his hateful hope,
Solace that shames slumber,
A murderous marriage with fiery freedom.
In their unholy, unseen union,
Sprang the aweful hounds,
The baleful Chimaera, sinful Hydra,
Only to be the pawns of ungodly gods’ commands.
In a fatal day of a fallen winter,
Zeus slaughtered Typhaos,
With Hermes’s wiles and no honour;
He became ashes,
Ash art — his sinful love for Echidna!
She wailed, bewailed — she left;
She hearkened Prometheus’s accursed prophecy,
Prophecy that plagued her with hideous hopes,
Of his return, to conjure up again,
And embrace her tragic tail tavern.
