THE TROPE OF THE DEAD MOTHER:

NAME: ANTICLEA, DAUGHTER OF AUTOLYCUS.
ALIAS(ES): THE LICH.
STATUS: UNDEAD. IT SHOULD BE NOTED, SHE IS PERMANENTLY LOCKED OUT OF THE UNDERWORLD, AND THEREFORE EVEN IF HER BODY WERE DESTROYED ON EARTH, SHE WOULD REMAIN IN SPIRIT FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY.
SPECIES: FORMERLY HUMAN WITH DIVINE LINEAGE, CURRENTLY UNDEAD (LICH). DEMIGOD.
CAPABILITIES: IMMORTALITY. SHAPESHIFTING & ILLUSIORY ABILITIES, CAN MANIPULATE THE PERCEPTION OF ITEMS TO SOME DEGREE. THESE POWERS INTENSIFY WITH AGE - THEY DO NOT EXIST AFTER HER INITIAL RETURN, BUT SHE ONLY BEGINS TO DISCOVER THEM YEARS AFTER LEAVING ITHACA.
MARITAL STATUS: MARRIED TO LAERTES (FORMERLY).
ORIENTATION: LESBIAN.
CURRENT LOCATION: UNKNOWN – AWAY, NOW, FROM ITHACA, HER FORMER HOME.

... RESURRECTED.

It was during the span of summers spent with her father where Anticlea learned the value of wit, and of a quick hand. She caught on to the ways in which a thief's skillset is distinctly needed as a woman managing her way through the world. A woman whose fate could only be that of mourning wife, dead mother. It took no oracle's eye to see what laid before her: it was all, by every account, boring and belabored. It was all useless. Nothing, she knew, would come of her mind. This was something she was especially sure of as she birthed her first and only son, Odysseus, who shone so brightly in her eyes that she knew herself then to be doomed to falling into so critical a pitfall. Love.

To understand the horror this brought to our dear mother of protagonists, we must analyze the events which lead to it. Which, to her death, Anticlea has refused to disclose.

Anticlea was the daughter of Autolycus and a woman – the woman has a name, but in this grand tradition of patriarch warranting the only credit, what use is her name? The point was that Anticlea was born to Autolycus, the son of Hermes, a shapeshifting robber of infamy who left many debts unsettled. A wolf of a man, in fact, who Anticlea looked up to with an admiring eye. It was with her mother she spent most of her time, but her father's presence was the only thing she eagerly awaited. All else garnered a stony countenance, a haughty insensitivity.

As she aged, Anticlea became a stunning woman, though cold towards most. She would end up marrying Laertes, a king, which felt to her to be a clever move. It all felt to be a game of chess, which made it simple to choose her actions one after another. Cautiously and with a certain genius. But, of course, chess is easier to predict – most games are, and life is, quite unfortunately, not a game.

While engaged to Laertes, a man spurned by Anticlea's father plotted a revenge which involved the daughter herself. As it stands, daughter being property, a non-woman, it felt to be one of the utmost insults. This man, Sisyphus, kidnapped dear Anticlea, and assaulted her in the process. This, however, she took to her grave – after being saved from the abduction, she hid the fact she had become pregnant by her captor, and succeeded in passing it off as Laertes' doing once they were married, something she pushed to hasten.

Her son, Odysseus, was the most glorious thing to ever happen to her, she thought. The love she held for him even outshone her jealousy for his being born a man. It would be, therefore, that she would see him raised to perfection: a warrior & king, a golden child.

Following the Trojan War, where her son fought valiantly and furthered his cemented legend, Anticlea was at a loss. The loneliness she felt in Ithaca, with nothing but the prospect of waiting, staring, watching the waves . . . it was enough to, and it surely did, kill her. After ten long years, believing her son to be dead and never returned, she made her choice, and walked into the ocean. For what was there left for her? She was meant, in fact, to be the dead mother. It was her self-fulfilling prophecy. She was full of rage and grief, a watery emotion which overtook every nook and cranny of her body. She was, in totality, overcome by it.

In death, she entered the Underworld, intangible and wandering, with a paranoid eye always on the souls she came past, spying for her son. Again and again she was left wanting and sick with the fact she could not find him. The thought he was still alive did not cross her mind, until she saw him for herself, a trespasser of Hades.

It ought to have elicited a feeling of relief, or love, and certainly, in parts, it did. But what built in the short minutes following her watching her son depart, after he tried, in vain, to embrace her fading spirit, was anger. Anger for the fact she was now nothing. That she had thrown herself away, and not even been capable of once more embracing her son. That she was a tragedy, at every angle, and suddenly every notion of her living existence came back in full force, reminding her how she was never given the chance to be something more than a daughter, wife and mother. It was cruelty, and she begged, pleaded, with her grandfather Hermes, asking him why she had to be cursed with such a feeble embodiment. Why she, with her cleverness and cunning, was nothing more than a prop for others. It felt unjust, unearned . . .

The grief, overwhelming and magnificent, which had once been directed at the loss of her son, now shone instead with a tragic gaze towards herself, and the loss of her own body, her own will. So moved by the wailing sobs she cried out, her grandfather mourned alongside her, and, it is contested on whether wittingly or not, he offered her a second chance – upon his back she climbed, and then it was a sudden awakening:

The tears on her cheeks turned to foam and salt, and her sense of taste returned, only to be clogged with water. She could feel the weight in her lungs of the ocean inside them, to find herself having been thrust back into her body, her once decaying body, which now found new life as it crawled, seemingly helplessly, along the sand.

And there was born the lich Anticlea.

Her return was taken as an omen, her being believed to be specter, and for a while she was offered, as was tradition, blood to sate her as they searched for her body so as to give her a proper burial. After all, Odysseus himself knew his mother's fate was sure, as he had seen her in the Underworld, and so her presence was nothing short of alarming. As years passed and she was proven to be unwilling to fade back into the world of the dead, the plight was given up, and thinking her to be stuck there, Odysseus and Penelope began to burn her clothes and items so as to encourage separation. It was, of course, an action borne of love, but Anticlea did take it as a slight, for as many times she would voice her humanity, it fell on ears unwilling to listen.

But this was a blessing, she thought, perhaps even one from her grandfather – for it allowed her the independence she had ached for her entire life, to be severed from her duties as a mother and as a wife. And so, she left, with no parade and no warning, so silently the family might have thought their rituals had worked.