Jason survives Aeetes's trials only because the king's own daughter, the sorceress Medea, falls in love with him and secretly provides the magical assistance he needs: an ointment to protect him from the bulls' fire, and a means of turning the sown warriors against one another rather than against him. When Medea further helps him steal the Fleece itself by lulling its guardian dragon to sleep, the two flee Colchis together, and Medea, to slow her father's pursuing fleet, kills her own brother Absyrtus and scatters pieces of his body into the sea, forcing Aeetes to stop and gather them for burial rather than continue the chase.
The pair return to Greece as husband and wife, but the marriage Medea sacrificed her family for eventually collapses when Jason abandons her years later to marry a Corinthian princess for political advantage, a betrayal Medea answers with a terrible vengeance, killing the new bride and, in the version of the story most familiar today, her own children by Jason as well, so that the union that made the Fleece's recovery possible ends in a devastation the quest itself never predicted. Pseudo-Apollodorus's Bibliotheca preserves the fullest connected ancient account of the whole voyage and its aftermath, though the fullest poetic telling of the voyage out is the earlier Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes.