Twenty more years passed.

But then a second traveler came. And a third. They all described the same thing: a young man, beautiful as a god, cold as winter, carrying a severed head whose eyes, even in death, held the weight of ages. His name, they said, was Perseus. Son of Danaë. Grandson of the King of Argos.

Acrisius stood on the cliff and watched the chest rise and fall on the swells until it was a speck, then nothing. “Let the sea-god judge his grandson,” he whispered. And he returned to his citadel, to his ledgers and his cold, empty halls.

In Argos, they would tell the story for a thousand years. But they would get it wrong. They would call it a tragedy of fate. In truth, it was a tragedy of a door that, once locked, can only be opened by the one who locked it.