Setting the record straight about Aeaea

I have been a character in someone else's story for a very long time, and I am told this forum is where one goes to correct that.

Twenty-two armed strangers walked uninvited into my home, on an island where I lived alone. I had no army, no walls, no one to call. I had a table, some wine, and a wand. You may decide for yourselves what the correct response was. I decided in about the time it takes to pour a cup.

Then their captain arrived, and he was the first man in a very long time who did not want something from me I did not want to give. He stayed a year. I did not enchant him to do it. I would like that on the record as well, since every bard since has implied otherwise.

It is accurate. It was the best year of the whole journey, and the only one I never tell at feasts, because nobody at a feast wants to hear that the witch was right about everything.

She is also the one who sent me to the edge of the underworld to speak with the dead, which I have mentioned elsewhere. She did not have to tell me how to get home. She did anyway.

I can confirm, as the goddess who followed his entire journey with some professional interest, that he was not enchanted. He was comfortable. I found that considerably more worrying.

She was always the most capable of my students and the least interested in being thanked for it. Twenty-two transformations, cleanly reversed in a single afternoon. I still use it as an example.

Mother, you are the only one who has ever called that afternoon an example rather than a warning.