text: \[ I \] Matilda stood atop a hill staring into the void where the ocean and the night sky met. She often waited by the shore and dreamed of the day she would get to leave her cursed land. Her disparity was as sharp and painful as the crisp morning air and held tight within her upper chest. She had longed to break free of the chains that imprisoned her to the land of her ancestors, and felt ashamed upon their defeat in a sense. Her village had been burnt to the ground by savage invaders and she lie witness to the mass slaughters as they had served as a second sweep in the night. They went around raping and finally decimating her and the remainder of her Tribe following the settling of the fires they had cast in the dead of night. She had dreamed of her capture and sexual assault systematically by each full moon, and found insanity lay with those who avoid sleep. She walked down the formed paths that she had once fixed with her cousins and admired each Redwood tree she passed knowing that they were the only living organisms that witnessed and could confirm that all those who’d she had lost were indeed real at one point of time. These trees she had once climbed upon in playfulness now only reminded her of that night when she lost everything. They had ransacked her village with no remorse or reason that she could understand...and left only two out of every ten of the village. She was one of the last 200 of her Tribe, and they narrowly escaped with barely even that before the wave of disease hit. The evil spirits brought forth by these men with the skin the color of dead fish bellies and the eyes the color of death itself. They had done this on purpose and she knew it. She had also initially known why they were there, as her father had told her that this day would come. They had came in search of her Golden Fleece. As the fire roared in her dreams she reminded herself of the last command she was given by her father to run. She shook anxiously as they made eye contact for the last time and she had no room to object as his fellow Warrior took the lead and threw her over his shoulder and whisked her off into the night as had been his orders. They had made the strategic plans and moves to help her and select few others climb up the giant 200 foot tall tree. They climbed for what seemed like forever and remained in the softened trellises of the heavens until they learned the language of the enemy. This too was command by her father and she was too afraid to disobey the orders of their leader. Her father had been right so often in the past that it seemed detrimental to assume he knew what he was talking about this time around. Time passed and it wasn’t until it was only her and one other left alive that she felt it were the proper time to descend from the giant Redwood. They had both mastered the language of the dead-eyed savages and she felt comfortable waiting on her yard to proceed to fulfill her following commands to guard the Golden Fleece. There along the shore she continually paced back and forth maddened by her grief...screaming into the crashing waves. They argued with her relentlessly and she often left the beach deterred and defeated that she had lost her voice screaming into the void whilst the ocean continued on with its reckless clashing. She was told her howls were the screeches of nightmares, but each night she would return to try and cry out each tear as though she were reuniting her lost family with the ocean. She felt her eyes swell like the waters she stood in, and felt nothing as time never waivered the sadness she felt deep in her heart. The second she stood outside of that ocean she felt a massive indescribable weight bearing down upon her shoulders and crushing her spine with the weight of the world. She held herself responsible for the death of her village and felt the empath disease cripple her as though she were caught in an unpredictable tide along the shore. It was a burden she carried from protecting the Golden Fleece. The details of time were not hers to worry aboot, as she had the body of a child but the sharpened mind of Warrior having recently returned from combat. She felt indifferent to the now lazy and pretentious dead-eyed savages all around her, and found it ironic that they had campaigned across her land stating that they were superior to her and all those who didn’t look like them. In this time of ignorance they had lost sight of their initial goal to retrieve what they had came for, and sat down and turned to stone with no intentions of standing up unless they had to. They had come for the Golden Fleece and forgotten mid search as they were busy boasting of their victorious conquests to one another until they forgot how to fight all at once. It was none of her business to judge these heathens who continued to rape women and children, but still she found it hard to not stab an obsidian arrowhead into their throats at times. She would postpone on acting on this compulsion as her sole purpose was to hold her position near the void until the Warriors of the sky came to retrieve the Golden Fleece. How had she came to be in possession of such a sought after article? It was a late gift from her late father, and a priceless family heirloom carried down through time since the beginning of the existence of the Earth. It was gifted to her Tribe after they had saved a woman from drowning soon after they witnessed her falling from the sky into the ocean. She said that if she would have died that the flood that followed would have washed over all of the land because of how high she had fallen from. She was hysterical as she often clenched a box and argued with the severed head of her dead husband. She managed to speak Yurok with aid of this corpse and spent copious amounts of time giggling at her husbands non-verbal jokes. Since her crash landing our Tribe watched as our trees began to grow at more rapid pace, and took it to be a side effect of the sky woman and whatever magic she had carried with her in her leather bag. Our tribe found it best to leave her in peace as she wandered around yelling orders at her husband, and they often jested that her poor husband must have known she was darkened in the mind when he agreed to their nuptials. She would live the rest of her days hiding in our trees, and was said to have used her magic to shrink our Tribes people, as we too had been given the same growing properties that seemed to have accelerated the growth of the Redwoods. It was done out of her compassion for us, as she worried there would come a day in which those who she escaped from in the sky might find giant trees guarded by eight foot Warriors to be a giveaway of the presence of magic. We were reduced to the heights of neighboring Tribes and our trees continued to grow without us. Upon her old age she felt safe enough to sit down and explain the importance of her mission and finally told us of the curse brought by the Golden Fleece. Before the world had started turning there had been nothing but chaos amongst the Gods. They seemed to argue about what to do with a rogue star and they worried it would cause damage to the other surrounding worlds if left unchecked. The sky woman had decided that the only way to slow down the star was to add weight to its tail and she appointed herself in charge of making the star slow down. She made many magical items and crafted them from objects found only on living planets. By the time she had fashioned the Golden Fleece the other Gods had decided they wanted to sell the star for profit and that her project was no longer relevant. She attested this deal because they knew nothing about the star and its potential to collide with everything. She explained that it was on a collision course where if it met another star even half the size head on...that the stars and worlds would be swallowed up by darkness and nothingness. She pointed out the precise time when and where the two stars were calculated to met but the Gods only cared about their own selfishness and chose to continue with their bargaining. She stated that one of the smaller stars following the wake of the destructive star had water on its surface and an island where she thought she had seen life. To this the Gods laughed and made fun of her active imagination. She set out to prove that life could exist on the star and decided to help it grow into a planet. She with the aid of her now dead husband worked to make a series of devices that held up the golden net that surrounds the Earth, and this net kept life safe to flourish as the star continued to chase the star of destruction. She had put a Golden Fleece on multiple stars trying to get them to spin just enough so that she could figure out which held water. She needed the clouds to prove that there was enough water for her and the Gods to live, as they were looking for a new home to settle on as refugees. Her family found out that the clouds had appeared and that the couple had been correct and decided to call off the trade. To this decisions the sketchy buyers lost their temper and demanded they continued with the sale. They found out what she had done and so they took her and her family captive where they are chained to chairs held down by magic lighting. The Gods remain stuck asleep talking to one another and conversing with no one all at once. Her husband came to save them but only managed to save his wife before getting caught. They captured both and chained her to a wall and raped her as he was forced to watch in horror. When her spirit remained unbroken and she fell into shamelessness they thought the only way to break her was to make her watch as they ripped each limb off of her beloved husband and threw the long limbs into the sky so that he would cease to exist. This was too much for her and she became so enraged by what they had done and with that unmeasurable rage: all of the devices she had made began to power-up and work all at once as her screaming voice commanded them to retrieve his body from the darkness. The devices stored her orders and held her operations secret until they could give her enough powers to move metal into any form she needed. She fell into madness until a soldier who kept guard for the traders took shame on what they had done to her and he hid away two pieces of her husband to bring her back from cusps of insanity. This act of defiance and rare selflessness gave her the ability to remember her husband and she was able to ward off all those wished to rape her, as she was still chained to the wall. The soldier helped tone down her anger and often brought her kindness with his company whenever she asked for him by name. There they stood learning aboot the sciences and laughed at her troubled youth together, and so they continued to do such as they waited until her devices had enough magic lightning stored to break her free from the metal chains. One day she ripped her rosey hands from the walls and directed the soldier to guide her to where he had hidden the two pieces of her husband that he had salvaged, and thanked him for his ability to break protocol to save her and her beloved husband. She promised she would return the favor in kindness and that he had given her hope in people once more by his actions. The intelligible soldier had never been acknowledged for his originality and was confused by her praise considering he was still a soldier. She left him to dwell on her appraisal upon retrieving the two decapitated pieces and then proceeded to mold a sheet of metal around her husband's head and another piece around his severed penis in order to preserve them. She felt embarrassed for her husband as she knew he was modest and prudish to the extent that he’d be annoyed how much others had been talking about his penis up until this point without his knowledge. For a scientist and a male: he didn’t seem to find penises as funny as she did, and it gave her moderate joy knowing this would be mortifying for him to learn once she figured out how to resemble him. She would often chuckle to herself and mumble disapproval that his penis was unhelpful when it was not attached to the rest of him, and that he already had a difficult time keeping his pants on. She continued rummaging the sky in search of her Golden Fleece needed to help mend her broken husband and find route to escape the prison in the sky. She became frustrated as she rushed aboot and eventually slipped and fell from the sky into the ocean. She explained to the locals that she fell in conical black shell in the sky and had fallen out of a conjoining shell that allowed them to shape time in form of an hourglass. She had lost control falling in noticed it were the wrong shell she had exited, as there was no moon in the sky where she had landed, and it meant she was stranded with no way to return home. Here is where she came to be as she mourned her lost love and found the courage to make one more last device: a Golden Fleece that would be the most powerful in comparison to the others. She spent the rest of her life building the device in the shadows of the Redwoods, and finished just in time to give it away before she died of grief and she resorted to casting herself from the widows peak and fell up into the sky where she had originally come from. Long story short: that’s how the Yurok Tribe came to be the protectors of the Golden Fleece. Matilda had always loved that story growing up, but she often was left mourning the fact that she’d never get to hear her father retell the story over a fire. Upon mastering English she continued to abide by the orders to keep details of the Golden Fleece and its location between her and the Tribes until the sky people returned. She often admired the sky woman and her journey and also avoided romance because she too feared her future husband would be ripped to pieces if she ever wed...as had been taken aside and warned that she had the same curse that the Golden Fleece had brought upon the sky woman. As time passed she found it safest to take the Golden Fleece and tack along the outside of a book so that it wouldn’t be recognized by the dead-eyed savages that roamed aimlessly on her yard. She had learned the method of consolidating as it were passed on from the sky woman, and did this task by hand before she climbed down the Redwood tree. The book appeared to be an ordinary looking book, but it was lined with gold as this was the magic bestowed upon the book by the Golden Fleece. The gold that brought the book alive had once been the exact gold that was historically reaped from her own river by the dead-eyed strangers...as they came in droves from far-and-wide looking for fortune yelling “Eureka” whenever they found smallest amount of gold pieces settling along the straits and narrows of her river. How odd these dead-eyed savages appeared to her, as she watched them drink poison and fall to the curse of Hera. They would destroy and rape whenever they drank the poison of Heras bottled rage, and in turn their hair began to fall out over time. Their children would also be cursed by this voluntary poison drinking and so would their children, but no matter how much she tried to tell them about this gene alteration, she was only met with contempt. They assumed her broken English meant she were challenged mentally and her demeanor too guile to ever be taken seriously, and so she began to simply stare at their thinning hair to point out their inadequate genes nonverbally. The pale-skinned visitors became offended by this and decided it best not to talk to those who still lived in the Redwoods. She watched quietly from the shore as they left the river in flocks...bored of the scavenger hunt they had given everything up for a few bits of gold. She came to the same spot where the river meets the ocean and waited patiently for the Warriors the sky woman had been promised would arrive as to assists the last commands on what to do with the Golden Fleece. One day she became burdened beyond consolement walking with the ghost of her father but he was unable to speak to her despite her desperate listening. She fell crumpled in a ball of shame for having forgotten his voice and became ill with a curse from Hera, as she had wished to try and force Matilda to admit that she was not worthy of her father. She left with the Golden Fleece and traveled up north where the village was filled with more lights than the night sky. She kept walking until one day she came across a drewery place where it seemed to rain whenever she was near a large dirty river that divided the land. She found comfort in the fog and enjoyed how the murky skies matched her grieving heart. She set forward a plan to learn all that she could about the gold that powered her device and decided she could probably build her own if she had the proper parts. She began asking those living in the rain for help until one day she met a strange man who called himself a Viking. This term isn’t commonly used as they had once been defeated by the Tribes in the North and were rumored to be a myth, so she began to question if he was really a Viking. She observed him quisically and remained doubtful that he was Viking, as he seemed impartial to social injustice and chose to stare downward at his feet wherever he walked. His vanity was noticeably more important than hers and he seemed to bask in the attention given to him by females who took note of his broken sharp eagle eyes and the stump leg that he often hid. He seemed to demand her attention at all times as he was unaccustomed to be ignored, and often resorted to booming orders if she playfully ignored him. It wasn’t until she saw him running one random rainy day that she was almost convinced that he may have actually been a Viking at some point in his younger years. She consulted her magic book and was enamored by the image of him trying to smile when she searched for his battle history as a Viking. She became infatuated with him and fell under a spell that caused her to sleep whenever she wasn’t crying, as she became bored without the Viking yelling at her for no reason. She told him of this weird new development and he began to laugh at her as he was just excited to see her openly admit that she cared about him. As he laughed she began to smile for the first time and they both noticed that the rain had finally stopped. They made habit of awaiting the other and began to test if the rain only came when she was not near enough for the Viking to be content with the day. She often took joy in knowing he thought the rain only happened as proof that he missed her, and with that: she learned to love the rain. She didn’t tell him about the device in her possession, as she had became attached to the Viking and still dreaded the fate he might face if he decided he still wanted to wed her as they had previously agreed upon. He told her of his wish for a son and she became ill and frightened that he actually looked forward to fulfill his intent to wed her, and she began to destroy the land and dreams of everyone around her. She knew she could never wed the Viking and he became offended by her absence and began to yell at anyone near him, as he secretly hoped she would appear by his side once more giggling and softly informing him that he needn’t yell before walking away until he was left with only the option to follow. The secret of her curse lead her to withhold more secrets from him and he grew angry with her for all the things she wasn’t allowed to say. In the meantime she had helped construct a new device with the aid of a kind-hearted couple who used music to cast their magic. She and the kind-hearted couple found the finest materials and made her a new and improved Golden Fleece. She ran away from both the rain and the Viking as she had found out he had grown bitter towards her many secrets and given up on her all together. She knew it was for the best, and lived each moment hating how much she missed the Viking, and knowing she had given him reason to hate her. She found it best that she return to the trees and continue to await the Warriors who were to hail from the sky. One day she returned to read her magic book and was surprised when a man who resembled Mars appeared under a chapter marked the book of faces and said hello as he introduced himself as an Argonaut. He invited her to join him in battle as they marched the streets demanding justice for the children that lived with little hope. She had known the terrors of injustice and decided to take up arms and join the Argonauts in battle, and appreciated that they too wore skirts in battle and donned war paint on their face. They gave her shelter and food as they prepared to storm the land, and even found way to introduce her to their leader: the First Minister. They fought side by side trying to save the children of the Argonauts homeland and were left retreating until she could return the next year. She felt guilt leaving them so soon but knew the children were in good hands under the protection of the Argonauts. She felt the one who resembled Mars saddened by her leaving in a way that reminded her of the Viking and decided it’d be best to tell him of her quest to protect the Golden Fleece. Upon learning her secret he grew more comfortable with her and she found his heart was hardened from his many years in battle before her arrival. He found her interesting and at some point had attempted to call her out by her Yurok name. She was amused by his frugal speech, and informed him that her true name was not meant to be said verbally, as it kept her awake at night whenever people said it aloud. He was confused by this and the man continued to tell her how he had found out her real name by researching her battle history and relentlessly struggled to pronounce it with his thick accent. She fell tired of this quickly and explained that her name was the Yurok word for “Sir” and that he was to address her by her English name: Matilda unless he would find resort and be comfortable enough to call her by her real name which was “Sir”. She told him and his comrade (who is known as Hercules by some): informing them of the origins of her name. She had been born with no name and date of birth, and received her name after she was raped as an infant at the age of one and a half, and then left abandoned on the side of the dirty river where it now rained. She avoided looking at them as she informed them both that her father had once called her “Sir” to make others stand at attention, and then gifted her with the Golden Fleece as a means to provide her further strength to heal from having her sexuality stolen from her soon after birth. The name was to remind her that she was not a victim to her circumstance but a person that other men commended and her endless might was why she was chosen for the task of protecting the Golden Fleece. The Argonauts understood and felt off-put by this tragic history, and fell back into the habit of calling her by Matilda out of their own comfort. She fixed her unkempt hair and wiped away her teary eyes and they continued to enjoy each others company instead of dwell on her quest. She wished that the one who looked like Mars had never brought it up, but was ok with letting him know her secrets. She worried his rage would manifest if she didn’t continue to embrace him, and found it silly how he enjoyed hugging her as often as he did, as though he wasn’t sure she were real and physically standing next to him. She realized upon having the discussion surrounding her Yurok name: that he stood a bit taller taller and his laugh seemed more bolstuous, and this made her smile sincerely in the same way that she once had with the Viking. He became less enraged as they walked, and she remained persistent and calm while listening to his resolve of conflicts unending. She seemed distracted by his earnest and polite demeanor and gifted the him the honor of the secrets she had once kept from the Viking, but avoided telling him aboot the Viking himself for a reason still unknown even to her. She found herself blushing and decided that she’d be honored to run beside him in battle but knew they held no romantic commitment to one another. They argued about a conversation she had held with Captain of the Argonauts, as she had updated him on the details of her quest and lack of success thus far. She found she admired this leader and laughed with the captain as she finally began to ask if he knew of the random Viking wandering around on her land yelling. They held a conversation of friends who had known one another their whole lives and she felt safe enough to provide secretive details that she knew could never be revealed to the other Argonauts at any cost. As she told the Captain she was relieved to see the Captain had a Redwood figurine nearby and she remembered that the Viking still needed her help because he was old and his leg had began to transform into a tree trunk. With that she began to miss the Viking she still loved and left the one that resembled Mars to continue brewing in his need for hatred. She wished the Argonauts goodbye and promised to return, but only after they came to her shore...to this deal they all agreed. She felt her heart was a bit more heavy from the battle they fought but knew that her aid was appreciated mostly by the Argonaut who resembled Mars and his Captain. She knew she would miss him and the Captain at her side but knew that if she were to stay she would be left probably wanting to wed the one who bore resemblance to Mars, as hoping to stop him from returning to his battle ways. She dismantled all thought on the matter as she worried this fate would conjure whatever curse was projected by the Golden Fleece. She returned to her land near the shore, where she was greeted by fire. Her yard had caught aflame while she was gone and the leader of the dead-eyed savages was now standing too close for her comfort as he pretended to have not taken part of setting the fire. She stepped begrudgingly off her sky boat and found that everything in her yard was now on fire and/or racists. She grew impatient with Argonauts and secretly worried that they had forgotten her soon after her departure. She could not yell across the ocean and was left and to make the rational choice by herself as whether to suit up for battle, and lastly found it wise to consult and ask for the support of the Argonauts leader: the First Minister. This was a woman of high respect to all Argonauts and Matilda had been very impressed by the leader she had briefly met on her travels. She wrote the woman who lead the Argonauts and held her voice loud enough for the world to hear, and waited by her magic book for any word pertaining to tactical advice the leader could provide for such a predicament. She had never seen a fire grow so wildly, and watched as it swallowed people whole with no intent of apologizing. She sat tight and waited for both suggestion of the First Minister and for reply from her respected Argonauts as they all were still left fighting in the dark trying to save the children along the land of what is now known as the North Sea. She sat impatiently trying to learn how to be helpful in a time of great danger and noticed that her magic book somehow had physically become lighter in weight. She had asked the Argonauts for their help casually at some point on her journey, as the music had made the her magic book too heavy for one person to carry. She decided to lament her true darkness to these friendly Argonauts and how the quest had been delayed due to her curse that caused her to weep stronger than any sea, and the boredom she fought as she struggled like a child, fighting to stay awake. They showed no hesitation in handling the task of lightening the payload of the weighted contents and helped her fix the item that had began degenerating the strength along her spine under its massive weight. Time seemed to quicken its pace since her return when she had been cast into a fire, and she grew frustrated that the thickening smoke lingered enough to obstruct her view of the stars. The Captain of the Argonauts had once told her that he’d remember her each and every time he looked up at the moon, and they left knowing one anothers darkness and the understanding that he too held curses from the Gods. She missed her Argonauts each night as it lay eight hours East to her time and since she had only broken the sound barrier once...she already doubted her abilities to even begin design on a sky boat that could fly fast enough to catch the up to the Argonauts in time for Christmas. \-A Traditional Yurok origin myth composed and re-mixed with Greek myth by: Matilda Brooks US Federally Recognized Property #562-6146, Yurok Tribe, CA.