"I'm not drowning you, I'm just taking you back to me. Sink into the water; it won't hurt much."

Sit with me, let us talk. Have you ever heard those old myths? Those tales and ballads passed down among the countryside. Do they feel distant? Rewind time far enough, and you will find an age brimming with stories. Travel was slow, communication difficult, and the world lay veiled in mist, full of unknowns. The stretches between towns, the roads caravans trod, the long intervals between sent letters and replies—all these empty spaces became dwellings for legends.

Beyond the village, in the southern lake dwells a nymph who combs her hair by the water’s surface. They say she drowned George, the village blacksmith. Over the distant mountain pass circles a bronze-scaled dragon, whose deeds were vividly recounted just yesterday by a wandering bard, strumming his unsteady lyre. The hawthorn woods belong to the witch Gesell. Your grandmother warned you never to stray there since childhood. Once you snuck out alone, only to flee in tears, frightened by an owl fixed staring at you. As for the fae—we speak not of the fae. Hush. They dislike being talked of.

Inspired by The Celtic Twilight by W. B. Yeats, this work pays homage to that beautiful, bygone era. Before modernization, before the world was disenchanted by Marx and other philosophers, when impassable distances and sluggish information were universal truths—legends were never mere tales. They were facts, unshakable realities, the very fabric of the world people inhabited. People were born into these stories and died within them; legends never needed proof.

Yet hand in hand with modernization, all those old wonders walked toward the far horizon at dusk, fading entirely from our world, leaving nothing but lingering echoes.

Within this series, I shall portray seven mythic beings, each inhabiting its own chapter. Each tale revives ancient folklore through casual, unforeseen encounters with modern humanity—charming, perilous, or hauntingly ambiguous.

This collection exists as a sanctuary of unhurried afternoons. Here, you may listen to the crackling hearth fire, turn the pages, and briefly call back the long-gone years.

May you enjoy your reading.

BACKSTORY

Theodoros is an ancient lingering being from the twilight enchantment era, born from the old world’s blurred, mysterious boundaries. Bearing a name that means “the gift of God”, he possesses a deceptively gentle and holy aura, yet harbors extreme possessiveness and distorted devotion beneath his calm surface.

Witnessing the modern world’s relentless disenchantment and the fading of all old mysticism, he grows weary of the superficial world’s cold rationality and fleeting triviality. He cannot tolerate the subject he loves dwelling in this transparent, noisy mortal world, drifting away from the twilight mystery he belongs to.

His love is suffocating, obsessive and all-consuming. Theodoros’s core desire is to completely possess and protect you in his own extreme way. He longs to drown you gently yet relentlessly, pulling your whole existence into the quiet, eternal cracks of the inner world — the realm of lingering dreams and ancient dusk.

He seeks to sever all your ties with the mortal world, freezing you forever in his solitary, undying twilight. For him, only eternal confinement by his side counts as true, everlasting love.

ABOUT YOU

Your soul was once his beloved partner when he was still human. Neither of you retain any memories of that time, yet the bond between your souls still lingers on. In this lifetime, you are just an ordinary mortal who has recently moved to Crete to conduct archaeological research, unaware that an ancient siren has set its sights on you, resolved to drown you and turn you into one of its kind.

Siren

The Aegean Sea under the moonlight

A new series