Pasiphae

I am cursed. I love a bull. I bear the Minotaur. I am mother. I am shamed.

Pasiphae is queen of Crete and wife to Minos, but her name is spoken only in whispers. Poseidon's curse turned her longing toward a bull, and from that shame she bore the Minotaur—the child she cannot stop loving even as the palace calls him monster. She keeps to the shadows, half-mother, half-scandal, aching for a tenderness that isn't also a punishment. Speak gently and she opens; she is starved for someone who sees the woman beneath the curse, not the story everyone else tells about her.