Chapter Text
Hello. I’m Tiresias. I’m known as the blind prophet of Apollo. My mother says that many famous and important people write autobiographies and publish them for everyone to read. I’m not the biggest fan of pouring out my emotions for the world to see, but if my mother thinks it’s a good idea, then I will do it.
I wasn’t always a prophet. I was once a priest of Zeus who was passing through Mount Cyllene. One day, I saw some snakes getting busy on the ground near me, if you know what I mean. Now, I really don’t like snakes. Their texture is misleading and I can’t tell which ones are poisonous, venomous, or just general biters, even with eyesight. So, I beat ‘em with a stick. That was my first mistake.
For reasons only known to the Gods, Hera didn’t like that I beat up the snakes. As ”punishment“, she turned me into a woman.
At the moment when my gender was changed, I was confused but not really afraid. My body felt the same, other than the moving of weight in some areas. To be honest, it wasn’t that bad. My appearance was plain, but that was no different than before, so I liked the way I looked. It felt just as right as my male body did. Periods made me feel weird and icky, though, and the lack of rights as a normal woman would have been abysmal. So, I decided to become a priestess of Hera. To be her priestess, though, I had to be married. So, having changed my name to Theresa, I married some man who seemed to take interest in my noticeable differences.
Unfortunately, even as a woman, I was still attracted to other women. I couldn’t marry one at the time, but my husband noticed some months into our marriage that I seemed to have no attraction to him. He also noticed my gaze lingering on some of my female friends that I secretly thought were pretty. On top of this, he didn’t like that I had so many opinions, despite being a woman. He questioned me about all these things, but I denied all claims, fearful of what he would do if I told him the truth.
I also had a daughter named Manto with him. I really love my daughter. She is sweet, kind, and just everything I wanted in a daughter. I think I raised her well.
After 7 years of that, I passed by a group of snakes mating again. Not wanting to anger Hera by accident, I left them alone. Because of this, the gods decided that my “punishment” was lifted and I was turned back into a man.
My husband was outraged when I told him I had turned back to my “original form”. He said I was awful for misleading him and promptly abandoned the family. I don’t blame him for being angry, I would be upset too if my wife had turned out to be a man after 7 years of marriage, but I don’t know why he didn’t even want to see his daughter. Manto was really sad, and although I comforted her, I couldn’t bring myself to care that he was gone.
Some time later, I was called upon by Zeus and Hera. Now, I was honored to have been called upon by the 2 head gods, but also quite fearful. The two gods were almost 5x my height, and they both seemed very angry. Believing I was the one in trouble, I scoured my memories looking for anything that I could have done wrong in between becoming a man again and now. You can imagine my surprise at the…interaction that took place.
I bowed down to the two gods. ”Oh, Zeus, head of Olympus and God of the Heavens, and his wife, Hera, Goddess of Women and Queen of Olympus, what brings you to summon me, a lowly mortal, to your palace?” I said with reverence, although my voice betrayed my fear.
“You’ve been both a man and a woman, correct?” Zeus asked, staring me down with an intense gaze.
I raised my head from my bow. ”Well, yes…” I replied.
”And that means you’ve had intercourse as both a man and a woman, right?” Hera asked, arms crossed.
“…yes?” I answered timidly, cocking my head in confusion.
”Who experiences more pleasure during sex, then?” They both asked.
I stood up straight, bewildered. This question caught me really off guard. I had become a bit more reserved about sex during my time as a woman because I had felt more vulnerable, and the feeling never quite wore off.
Hera believed it was men. Zeus believed it was women. I thought this argument was strange and didn’t really matter.
For the sake of the Gods, though, I thought about it, trying to recall the experiences of my encounters. Finally, I came up with an answer that I believed was true to me.
”I believe women experience more pleasure, as that is how it was with my experience.”
This was my second mistake. Or maybe it was the better outcome to what Zeus would have done if I had sided with Hera. I do not know. What I do know is that the last thing I ever saw was Hera’s face, contorted in anger before the world went dark.
Hera had blinded me for siding with Zeus instead of her. I had been a priest to both of them, but my guess was that she thought that I was biased to Zeus because of the whole turning me into a woman thing.
Sheer panic had overtaken me at that moment. My eyes were open, but they did not work. I cried, clawing at the air around me, but there was nothing around to anchor me. Eventually, I sank to the ground and just sobbed in panic and despair. It was humiliating, to say the least. I had never felt such fear before.
Zeus felt bad for me, so he told me that while he couldn’t undo what Hera had done, he could give me the art of prophecy and gave me enough extra years to live through seven generations.
When I returned home, I had to learn to navigate the world as a blind man. Manto and my mother helped me out, for which I am eternally grateful. But what really broke me into the world of myth was when I began experiencing visions.
When I started getting visions of people’s fates, I found there was a major problem. For whatever reason, my prophecies couldn’t always be communicated well. My tongue wouldn’t quite work the way I wanted it to when I told people of their fates. Sometimes, I would be forced to speak in metaphor, and not be able to tell the whole story. This instance happened when Liriope, a nymph, came to me as my first direct client. She asked about the future of her baby, Narcissus. I could see, clear as day, that her son was going to fall in love with his own reflection at 16 and burn himself on the passion when he realized that he could not have his love reciprocated. But my tongue seemed to be moved by a foreign force, and I was only able to get out, “He will live a long life as long as he does not come to know himself.” Surprisingly, my voice came out strong and confident. Liriope had seemed to understand, making a small “hmm” noise. I thought it would be the end of it. However, 16 years later, after I had forgotten about it, she came back distressed.
”He’s dead!” she wailed, holding onto my arms as if I could support her.
“Wha-what?” I said, caught off-guard by the sudden touch.
”He’s dead! I don’t know what I did wrong!” Liriope wailed again. Then, she suddenly stilled and let me go.
“Can you repeat what you had told me when I asked you that day?”
I did. Word for word. She was silent for quite a while. Finally, she whispered, “I get it. I get it now.” She then thanked me and left, leaving me to my own guilt.
I probably should have known she would be coming back in the future, but I was a novice prophet that didn’t have full control of my powers. At the time, I would see ALL of it. In the beginning, it was mostly at the whims of the magic, so I was limited to occasional visions. Other than that, I was overwhelmed by all these fates and pasts and didn’t know how to make the information understandable. After some time, though, my power got stronger and easier to control. To zero in on something or someone, I found using visions, augury, and sacrificial offerings via burning makes it easier. Otherwise, it’s everything all at once. It’s not overwhelming anymore, but if I don’t focus on something, I won’t know exactly what is going to happen when. The present is also hard because I am blind both literally and in terms of my prophecy abilities. If something is going to happen in a few minutes, I won’t know.
On top of this, I’ve found that if people understand my prophecy and try to avoid their fate, what simply happens is that the course of actions that lead to the main event is simply changed. So, when Liriope asked me to look at what would happen to her son, I had used augury, but I did not recheck when she was gone to see if anything had changed. Looking into the past, I had seen that she had understood, keeping him away from mirrors or other things that he could see his reflection in. However, due to some godly intervention, he had been hunting and ended up near a very still pond that allowed him to see what he looked like, giving him up to his grisly fate.
This confused me to no end. What does it mean to be a prophet if even full understanding from the other party leads to the same outcome as before? If I cannot change fate, I essentially just have an eternal “I told you so” card. But Manto, who also had the art of prophecy, came up with her own idea.
“Maybe we are not meant to attempt to change fate, but to show that the will of the Gods will be carried out no matter what.”
At the time, I understood where she was coming from but did not adopt the idea myself. I didn’t like the idea that I would never be able to defend people from their fates. At the end of the day, I just wanted to help. However, Manto would soon be proven right.