Being a demigod is very taxing for the psyche. You end up seeing things that aren’t there, killing things that aren’t there. Shh, it’s okay; it wasn’t your fault. Step away from the corpses of your children now; let the oracles sanitize the blood and get you ready for atonement. Your penance will take place in ten steps, and last ten years, although because humans like the number twelve best and kings like free labor most, there might be a few extras thrown in.
Most in my line of work believe that this is a process you must embark on blind, for the atonement to matter. I disagree. Here’s what I think you need to know about what’s coming:
1. The slaying will not be the hardest part
That lion will eventually die—whether by your bare hands, or your bombastic confidence, or the blunt end of your club; it doesn’t matter. It will all be Hera’s fault, anyway. That lion was already dead, in a sense, ever since its Moon Goddess of a mother kicked it down to Earth to help Hera; ever since it became a gold-furred pawn in a ferocious game of deity and forgiveness. You’re just the means of delivery, the brute boulder that will block the lion’s ravenous descent upon the good people of Nemea. As a demigod, you’re expected to be either a hero or a monster, and slaying a lion sits conveniently in both slots. So don’t sweat the slaying.
The skinning, though? The skinning is a different story.
Skinning your lion will require precision and premeditation, none of which you have in spades. (That was just an expression—please don’t use a spade to skin a lion. Spades are never that useful, anyway, as you’re bound to find out soon.) Separating impenetrable lion fur from lion flesh is like separating Selene from the tides, or separating your wife’s life-thread from that of your kids. (Don’t think of your kids, bloody and scared of you and screaming, while skinning your lion. It will only upset you—you might even lose a patch of fur in the process.) In the end, some shrewd goddess will grow tired of your failed attempts and come to your aid, pointing out the obvious: skinning the lion of Nemea can only be done using the lion’s own claw. (Don’t forget to thank the goddess for her input. You have enough pantheon problems as it is, and shrewd goddesses are so much harder to skin.) And when you wear the lion’s skin as yours, its golden mane framing your head in borrowed light, remember: you’re only a monster from afar.
2. Two heads are better than one
But depending on the case and whether you’re a hero or a Hydra, two heads can also be much, much worse.
3. Most of the animals in your path are probably an allegory
A female deer with golden antlers and bronze hooves? Yeah, that’s a four-legged stand-in for unattainable knowledge, grace and divine wisdom; a fable about a faulted man’s quest to achieve enlightenment. Still, that won’t make the year you’ll be hunting for it, stalking the golden-antlered thing gently from bough of green to bough of green so as not to scare it, go any faster. It won’t make those nights, where you look at the punctured sky and think of the family you slaughtered while your breath fogs and your heart becomes coated with bile, pass any easier. And when you finally find that damned doe, it certainly won’t make those noxious siblings who wield celestial objects as accessories fight you for it any less. Enlightenment would not be enlightenment without a crown of antlers; dripping with someone’s blood, heavy with hindsight.
4. People will either try to hide you, or hide from you
It started at your birth. Half and half as you were, the rules were still soft, malleable. Who was to decide whether you qualified for a demigod or whether you’d pass as an Olympian, milked by the gods? Your teeth would, apparently; so very human, so very eager, piercing Hera’s skin, damning you from the get-go to a life filled with labors. And so, those who love you will try to hide you from the gods—and those who use you will try to hide from you, even when you do their bidding. Even when you drop the Erymanthian boar in their halls, alive and squealing. Later there will be claims about how they couldn’t tell where the boar ended and where you began, but take these tales for what they are: a reminder that your hybrid existence, your lion-maned shoulders and boar-strength bearing, makes both gods and humans real uncomfortable.
5. I meant what I said about the spade
Spades are normal tools for normal people and, as we’ve established by now, you are neither. Plus, just because you can shovel dung from 3,000 cattle in stables that have not been cleaned in decades, it doesn’t mean you have to. The rivers are right there, begging to be diverted, to help you flush out that king’s corruption. Yes, the stables will be an allegory too.
6. Poison will only be a problem if you let it
From that first instance as a kid, where you turned the snakes sent to kill you into harmless, spineless plushies (“choked them with your baby hands” doesn’t sound as endearing, and could make certain people think that you’re the baddie, considering you also killed your music teacher with his own lyre), you’ve known that serpents can be used. For fun, or for future murders—or, as has so often been the case for you, both. So when you slay the Hydra, you’ll know better than to let all that perfect poison go to waste. You’ll dip your arrows in it; a different kind of skinning of your prey, a different kind of shouldering aspects of the monster for when it should be needed. And look, it’s needed now: these annoying bronze-beaked birds are causing such a ruckus in Stymphalia. (Hydra poison will also be needed in your far future, to dispose of a four-legged suitor who will try to steal wife number three from you. That monster may have the last laugh over you, after all. Don’t worry about it now. Slay those man-eating birds.)
7. Part of your work is paving the path for future heroes
One could argue that, if you don’t capture Minos’s bull and take it away from its natural environment, forcing it to become allegory instead of bovine, it won’t escape. Its allegorical but still very lethal hooves won’t reach Athens, killing Minos’s son who happens to be visiting there. And the horrible tradition of sacrificing nine Athenean youth every nine years to the Minotaur as penance won’t ever begin.
But don’t feel bad about this. Without you, there would be no Theseus, for he will be forged upon this pain, created to clean up this mess your seventh labor leaves behind. You are the archetype, the prototype, the OG demigod hero upon whom all the rest are molded and measured. Your work matters, because it creates more work. Heroes beget more monsters which beget more heroes. That’s how it always has been. Go get that bull.
8. Human flesh is an acquired taste
Who can say if those mares have already acquired it, or if by feeding Diomedes to them you’ll inadvertently broaden their culinary horizons? Who knows what comes first, the devouring of that boy you loved, or your decision to turn herbivore horses into human-flesh-tearing terrors? Don’t try to draw straight lines between your actions and the consequences; time is another thing that’s malleable for demigods, and anyway you’re on step eight on your prescribed path to redemption. Wild horses shouldn’t keep you away from it.
9. Even when things go your way, some light carnage is inevitable
Take Hippolyta and her girdle, for example. Oh, you will. Of course the warrior queen will offer you her warrior belt freely, of course you’ll impress her with your demi-godliness. We don’t even need to wade deep into allegory to understand this one: being who you are, you are entitled to certain things. And yes, it is unfortunate that the Amazons will not be convinced of the consent of this affair and kickstart a process where you’ll have to slay Hippolyta. But such is the nature of warrior women, and history, and heroes. And it will all be Hera’s fault, anyway.
10. Later retellings of your labors will turn this one into an allegory, too
A man who dwelled on a sunset island, along with his dog and cattle? Hardly sounds worthy of Heraklean efforts. But what if the island is so hard to reach, and in such hot lands, that you have to shoot an arrow to the Sun to turn the weather in your favor? What if the man has three heads, or three bodies, or six legs, or all of the above and wings, and what if the man is an allegory for fraud? What if the dog also has two heads, an allegory for duplicity? Now we’re getting somewhere. Now this task makes much more sense.
11. You can carry the whole world on your shoulders, but only for a while
And only so that you trick Atlas into delivering the golden apples to your lap. You are not meant to hold things together, to shoulder blame, to stay rooted in one spot and watch the sunset. Although you could. You could live a quieter life, tending to the garden of Hesperides, helping the earth grow more fruit instead of sowing chaos. Maybe you’ll even consider it, for a while. After all, you’ll have completed your ten tasks, you’ll have achieved penance, so you could live out your sunset years in this sunset garden. But this is not to be, because that dragon will need slaying, and Atlas will be so bafflingly easy to trick—and it will all be Hera’s fault, anyway.
12. Every realm has rules that can be broken
Even the Underworld, with its rivers of fire and its promises of pomegranates. All you need is some luck, and the aid of certain deities who should know better, and nothing is impossible. Not even stealing a dog with two heads (no, three heads, no, three bodies and a serpent for a tail) from his literal death god of an owner. Because that’s what happens after a while, if you never stop to shoulder the blame, if you never draw a straight line between your actions and their consequences, if you believe us laurel-chewing oracles when we tell you that killing your own children is a thing you can atone for: you embody the impossible.
Our time is almost done here, and most clients tend to forget everything but the vaguest tidbits afterward, so this is what I need you to remember from all this: you can break the rules. As you cross the bridge from grieving father, to hero for hire, to monster only from afar, you can call your friends for help. You can drain lovers, divert rivers, trap deities, stretch the limits of geography and myth. You can sacrifice parts of the prey you’ve been tasked to catch (just not all of it, you do need to bring something back for the task to count). You can hold on to a dead lion’s skin and use it as a weighted blanket; you can dip arrows into dead snakes’ poison and aim them toward future foes, you can use the memory of slaughtered family as alibi for feats of heroism.
And everywhere you go, Alcides, son of Alcmene, blood can and will follow. And it’s not your fault; it’s hardly your fault; it’s never ever your fault. You are but the stand-in for gods’ lessons, a straw-man for humanity’s ambitions, a handy shield that stops the eagle from devouring the liver but only when the gods have deemed its appetite sated; a strength that forces monsters out of swamps so that they go on to be monsters someplace else; a fool who will be named after their nemesis and be exalted after death. Because everything you’ll do will be in Hera’s name, and for Hera’s glory, and it will all be Hera’s fault anyway. Won’t it?
Danai Christopoulou (she/they) is a Pushcart Prize nominated and Nebula longlisted Greek SFF author and editor whose fiction has appeared in khōréō, Fusion Fragment, Flame Tree Press and more. Danai’s debut novel, Vile Lady Villains, publishes with Penguin Michael Joseph in March 2026. Find Danai on most social media @danaiwrites
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