🔶✨Amber Crown, Bosphorus Soul: A Mythic Fantasy Short Story🔶✨
Archive Description
A mythic fantasy set along the Bosphorus, where memory fractures, gods bargain with truth, and a woman fights to reclaim the life stolen from her.
This story explores sovereignty, remembrance, and the quiet power of returning to yourself.
Before You Read:
This tale touches on murder, stalking, and violence woven through a mythic frame. Honor your boundaries as you step into this world.
🔶✨Amber Crown, Bosphorus Soul: A Mythic Fantasy Short Story🔶✨
Each year, on the anniversary of my death, I return to my grave in Istanbul. The olive tree leans toward me, its roots tangled with sand and memory. At the headstone rests a lone glass object—amber‑colored, warm, humming softly. I’ve never discovered who leaves it—only that it brings me peace, and feels like a promise. When I close my fingers around the shard, it warms in my hand, and the sea inside me wakes. The Bosphorus beckons. This time, I answer.
Behind me, the Redemption Games ignite again—swords clash, spells erupt, the undead rise to seize their destiny. The crowd’s roar spills over the cemetery walls. I do not raise my sword. The Games thunder at my back as I turn toward the well—where I died, and where my memories remain.
Something pulls at me as I approach the dry, encrusted stone. The shard hums through my veins, urging me to look. I hesitate. Why? The well ran dry the night I was murdered here. I never imagined Istanbul—the city my soul adored—would become my death knell.
I peer into the darkness and see a desert forming where there should be nothing. Two pairs of footprints cross the sand, side by side. My familiar, Appy—a fiery Corso‑Boxer mix—pads to my side. He senses my hesitation and nudges his head against my thigh, grounding me. I smile down at him and bury my fingers in his fur.
“Calliope, the game is about to begin,” he says, his voice low and rough. “This is your last chance to beat Nicodemus for your mortality… or you’ll be trapped with Athena forever, a pawn in her Redemption Games.” “I know,” I say, squeezing his fur tighter. The footprints drag at me, familiar in a way I don’t want to name. “These footprints—they feel like mine.” “Ouch, Calliope, you’re yanking out my fur.” He wriggles free with an indignant shake. “Forget the footprints. If you don’t move, you’ll lose everything. Is that what you want?”
He’s irritable because he’s right. I ache for mortality with the same intensity as the hum surging through my body. The shard’s power is addictive, pulling my gaze back to the footprints in the sand, as if they hold a truth only they can reveal. “Appy, just one more minute,” I say. He snorts. Time means nothing after a century in a graveyard the living are too afraid to enter, but for him, my “one more minute” has stretched across years.
Steel clashes. Magic flares—red, orange, yellow—lighting up the sky as the crowd roars. I raise my hand. Purple power surges from my fingers, crackling like thunder. “Are you insane?” Appy whispers. “You’ll attract the gods. Athena won’t forgive this.” “I don’t care,” I say, though a small part of me knows I should. Athena could burn my soul to ash in the Burning Sea while her uncle Hades applauds. I’ll face the Goddess of War later.
I cross my fingers, close my eyes, and silently pray—not to the gods, but to the universe itself—that I will never be a pawn in their Redemption Games again. Mortality, here I come.
I have to believe Apollo will help me. He promised me mortality if I uncovered the portal that dried up over a century ago. “Appy, trust me,” I say, trying to sound steadier than I feel. He whines, tail flicking, unconvinced. “Apollo will keep his promise. He’ll give me my life back.”
The vision in the well shifts. Sand blows across the scene, erasing the footprints. The hum in my veins sharpens. I lay my hand over the rough stone rim, and the desert answers with wind, with memory, with fire. The wind howls. The sky darkens. Across the sand, a figure appears—blood dripping from his cheek, eyes blazing with fury.
Nicodemus stands there, sneering, the cut on his cheek weeping crimson. “You chose the sun over justice,” he says. “Now burn.” Appy growls low at my side. The Games have already begun. The sand shifts beneath my feet. The first trial has begun.
“Don’t die yet, Calliope. The Games have only just begun,” he says, slamming my head into the sand. “Do you remember that fall day by the Bosphorus, the first time you smiled at me? I knew you would always be mine.” His voice drags me backward in time.
The scent of salt and sunshine returns. I’m back on the edge of the pier, sitting with my lunch, feet dangling over the water, stealing a quiet moment before returning to the library and its endless stream of students. The autumn sun rests heavy on my shoulders, as if to say, Enjoy this. Winter is coming.
I look up and see him for the first time—a burly man with golden curls, standing just far enough away to pretend he stumbled upon me by accident. Nicodemus. He haunts me for the next fifty years of my immortality.
Back then, a strange hum whistled through my bones—a warning—but I did what “nice girls” are taught to do: I ignored it. I nodded, smiled politely, and tried to enjoy the rest of my day.
“I don’t remember that day, Nic,” I lie now, sand in my mouth as his fingers twist in my curls, his nails piercing my scalp. I enrage him. Good. Rage is his Achilles’ heel. “Same old Nic,” I add, breath ragged.
He yanks me upright by my hair. Clumps of hair and skin tear away, but I don’t cry out. There’s no point. Tonight will be different. Athena will burn. Nicodemus will fall.
“Calliope, don’t antagonize him,” Appy snarls, fangs dripping, ready to tear the gangrenous flesh from my enemy’s skeletal frame. But I didn’t come here just to survive. I came to end this.
“Remind me, Nic,” I say. “Remind me of the day you took my life.” I remember every detail. Immortality gives you infinite nights to relive the brutality.
“My memory is fuzzy,” I gasp as he shoves me against the olive tree that appears every night, its trunk waiting like a witness. My skull cracks against the bark. Tears claw at my eyes, begging to fall. I lock them away. When I win, I will shed my tears. But not for Athena, who trapped me here to watch my death on repeat for her own voyeuristic pleasure.
My intuition hums in time with the shard. I wrap my arms around the tree. Vibrant colors explode behind my eyes. A younger version of me steps forward—on the cusp of everything, living and loving Istanbul. The scent of orange blossoms and the spices of cardamom and cinnamon swirl around me.
Taste blooms on my tongue—smoke and fruit. I’m back on the pier again, sun on my skin, olives on my tongue. The taste is the same as the night I died. The night he smiled at me like I already belonged to him. I open my eyes.
A single olive hangs from a low branch. That is new. I reach up and pluck it. It rests in my palm, small and impossibly alive. He’s close again. The cat‑and‑mouse game he’s played with me for fifty years ends tonight. I tuck the olive—hope—into my pocket.
A small, disbelieving smile tugs at my lips. Nothing ever grows in this desert wasteland, but something has changed. The acrid air that usually swirls around us during battle now smells of citrus—sweet and sharp, effervescent instead of foul. Bubbly. A laugh escapes me.
Appy tilts his head, ears twitching. “Calliope, what’s wrong with you? You don’t seem like yourself.” He’s right. I don’t feel like myself. I feel free. And freedom, after fifty years of death, terrifies me.
The olive pulses against my leg. The letter returns. The words that undid me. Not just fruit—memory, promise, rupture. I wrap my fingers around it and feel the hum shift. Grief coils at the edge of my vision, waiting for permission to be seen.
I see her—my younger self—again, staring down at a letter. Tears slide down her face as each word shatters her world. The letter sends her to the cemetery. To the well. To the moment that undoes her.
I crouch beside the olive tree, the shard humming in my hand. The letter unfolds inside me like a wound—brittle, aching, alive.
“Dear Calliope, I have to go back to Bodrum. My family needs me. I never intended to hurt you…“
Each line strips away another layer of glamour. The ink shimmers, then cracks. The citrus scent turns to ash. The voice I mourned for fifty years twists—soft vowels harden, tenderness curdles.
“Calliope, that day on the Bosphorus when we met and you smiled at me—I knew you would always be mine.”
My breath catches. That line isn’t Güneş. It’s Nicodemus. The glamour masked his obsession and his bargain with Athena. Güneş never wrote these words. Or worse: he did exist, and they erased him.
The shard pulses in my palm, and the truth settles like a stone in my chest. The crown didn’t vanish; it shattered. Memory was the battlefield, and I was the prize.
Nicodemus steps from the dunes—gaunt, furious. Athena hovers behind him, silent, glowing, watching as if this is theater and I am her favorite tragedy. “You read it,” he hisses. “You know now. But it changes nothing.”
I stand my ground. The shard hums louder. It changes everything. You didn’t just steal my life. You rewrote it. But I remember now.
Appy growls, close enough that I feel the vibration in my bones. The olive tree blooms—impossible flowers unfurl in the desert heat. The air shimmers with fire and salt.
Athena steps forward, eyes locked on the shard. “The crown was mine,” she says. “He vowed me dominion over memory.” I laugh—soft, bitter, sovereign. “He promised you a lie,” I say. “The crown was forged from love, sand, and fire. From Güneş.”
I kneel and place the shard at the base of the tree. The earth shudders. The shard sinks into the roots, and the desert trembles. Heat fractures. A breeze rises from nowhere—cool, salt‑heavy, familiar. It brushes my skin like a hand I once held. Istanbul returns to me.
Light erupts from the ground—amber and blue—splitting the sky in a jagged line shaped like the Bosphorus. Appy presses against my leg, his voice softer now. “You’re not fighting to win anymore,” he says. “You’re fighting to remember.”
Nicodemus screams as the wind tears at him. Athena vanishes, her form scattering like smoke. The desert exhales.
I walk along the pier in Istanbul. Seagulls wheel overhead. The Bosphorus shimmers, fractured with light, as if the world itself carries a scar. I pass the cemetery where I died. A lone glass object rests on my gravestone—a fragment of a crown, warm when I touch it. I keep walking.
The wind carries salt and memory. I think of Güneş—not just the boy I loved, but the artist he might have become. My grandfather worked with sand, shaping it into perfect works of blown glass. He said fire was memory’s twin, and that every fracture held a story. I wonder if Güneş learned from him, or if the memory was planted in me by the gods. Either way, the glass remembers.
At the end of the pier, a young artist stands at an easel, painting a still life: a broken crown of amber glass, a crack shaped like the Bosphorus carved across the canvas. I stop beside him. He looks up—sun‑kissed curls, deep brown eyes. “It’s beautiful,” I say.
He smiles and gestures toward the painting. “He used to say the Bosphorus was a crack in the world,” he says. “My grandfather shaped glass from sand. Said fire was memory’s twin.”
The words drift over me like salt wind. A whisper from a life I lost. A name I know before he speaks it. GĂĽneĹź.
I step closer and reach into my pocket. The shard presses against my fingers. I take it out and place it gently on the canvas. It fits perfectly into the crown’s empty setting.
The crown is amber. The soul is mine. The Bosphorus remembers. The crack shimmers. The sea responds.
I smile—for myself. For Güneş.
A Quiet Closing
This story extends my ongoing exploration of fracture, identity, and the quiet resilience that gathers in the spaces of what’s been taken. My fiction and creative nonfiction move alongside each other, each revealing a different facet of the same voice finding its way home. Thank you for reading, for witnessing, and for remaining. If you’d like to explore more of my work, you can visit my Portfolio page before continuing on Substack.
If you want, I can shape a slightly more mythic version, a softer one, or a version tailored specifically for your website archive.
- exploration of divergence
- creative nonfiction alongside fiction
- visit my Portfolio page
- continue reading on Substack