On to the Remote, Pastoral Mountains of Arcadia

"You want to go where?" Thanos griped. On the bright side, there were farther places the dim bulb he worked for could have picked. He entertained a notion that perhaps she even knew where it was. In that case, he might have to actually bring her there instead of ditching her in any old wilderness. He sighed to himself, thankful to avoid a literally nauseating journey across water, and only cope with the figuratively nauseating prospect of enduring every stray thought that pops into her vacuous head and exist through her flapping jaws. To be fair, Thanos was kind of a bitter .

Days passed. "I wonder if Arimnestus will be bitter that I'm undertaking such a journey," Arimneste thought aloud as their cart wobbled past the Athens border. "Arcadia is such a rural, unspoiled wilderness. If there's backwards folklore to be had, it's sure to be there," she mused as Thanos repaired a wheel halfway to Peloponnesus. "I wonder whom I should disprove first: Pan or Lycaon?" she asked aloud as the horses trundled up the first horrific incline to the remote mountains of Arcadia. As Thanos desperately maneuvered the beasts of burden and their vehicle along an impetuously narrow road looming over a nasty cliff, Arimneste kicked her bare feet up against his upper back and said, "I think much of these silly myths are the disjointed results of a booming wine industry."

"I think you ought to go back home and marry your brother's guardian, Proxenus," Thanos grumbled under his breath.

To his intermittent relief, Arimneste occupied her wayward thoughts in her studies. Of Arcadia, two myths in particular stood out to her. One was of the satyr, Pan, revered as a god of shepherds, chaser of nymphs, son of Hermes and several purported women. He seemed to be particularly difficult to track down, reportedly "wandering the hills and mountains of Arcadia." The only clues she had to go on would be to find some obscure little shepherding village and a conspicuous sacred tree, but that sounded like too little to go on for her liking.

The other tale was slightly less steeped in fancy, and a bit gruesome for her comfort. What irked her were conflicting accounts of the notorious king of Arcadia, Lycaon, who was turned to a wolfish form by Zeus for trying to feed the god one of his fifty sons. "How disgusting," she said aloud. "This Lycaon sounds like a brute. Still, a capital city sounds far more prepared to pander to my sensibilities."

Though he had no idea why, Thanos felt a compulsion to warn Arimneste about the upcoming dangers she was inviting. Perhaps he favored the idea of telling her "I told you so." "Lycaon's no longer the king, you know. His son, Nyctimos, succeeded him. Nobody knows for certain what happened to him, but it's said he still stalks Peloponnesus in the guise Zeus condemned him to: Both a man, but a wolf."

Arimneste was predictably flippant. She reclined, waving a dismissive hand. "Oh, what yarn are you spinning now, ? You can hang yourself with your string of Peloponnesus for all I care. I fail to see where an uneducated gets such nonsense from."

"The city around his palace is cursed, like a ghost town. If you go to the palace of the cursed wolf's son, you're going to have a bad time," Thanos insisted.