Page 144 of Where Darkness Bloomed
Odysseus knelt at the grove’s heart and placed the offerings on a small altar. Loaves of bread, a jar of honey, and an olive branch heavy with fruit.
Sparks leapt as flint struck iron, igniting the tinder. A flame blossomed, slow and hungry, its orange glow licking at the gifts.
His sharp blue eyes watched the curling plume of smoke rise, spiraling into the night.
He ached from the inside out.
The days in Troy had stretched, blurred, dragging into months. So many months had passed that he no longer marked them. Time no longer moved in days or seasons.
It moved in funeral pyres. In failed sieges. In the slow ebb of hope bleeding away on Troy’s wind-scoured shore.
Once, it had been a war over a stolen queen—a woman’s beauty, a prince’s pride. But those early sparks were nearly forgotten. The fire they kindled had grown monstrous, unrecognizable. A living thing with breath and bone, ravenous and unrelenting.
Troy had called her allies from the farthest reaches of the Aegean. And Greece had answered, blood for blood. What began as a quarrel between men had become a storm that swallowed kingdoms, men by the thousands. A grinding maw that spat out ruin.
There was no way to number the dead. Their names blurred into memory, indistinct as smoke, carried off by the same wind that scattered their ashes. Men who once drank beside him, laughed with salt on their lips and wine in their hands—lost beneatha foreign sky.
But the war ground on, crushing bone and brotherhood beneath its wheels.
Odysseus exhaled, the sound rough in his throat. His hands, calloused and scarred, tightened on his thighs.
He had left Ithaca younger. Sharper. A man with steady hands and a mind like a blade, braced by a sense of duty that had been unshakeable once. Honor. Duty. Pride. Words that had gleamed like bronze in the sun then.
Now, they tasted of stone—dry, heavy, cracked hollow.
Bled utterly dry.
Odysseus sat in the hush, unmoving. To his back, the nightly pyres burned on the distant beaches, a golden blaze against black. He could smell the flesh burning.
Finally, he found his tongue. “Speak to me, gray-eyed daughter of wisdom,” he murmured.
“To what end?” A sharp, clear voice cut the stillness, close enough to startle.
He dropped to one knee, his head bowing low.
Athena stood before him, radiant in the timeless glow of divinity. A white himation draped gracefully over her shoulder, fastened with a bronze brooch. A gilded sword hung at her hip, an echo of her dual nature—wisdom and war.
Her gray eyes pierced through him, seeing every fault, every fracture.
Lifting his head, Odysseus met her stern gaze. “I require counsel from the goddess of wisdom.”
Her gaze shifted to the distant beach where countless campfires flickered like fallen stars. The Greek camp was bathed in gold, stretching endlessly.
“You offered wise counsel when you urged Achilles to return Hector’s body.” Her tone carried grim judgment, despite the faint praise. “His desecration of the corpse was a disgrace.”
“He grieved deeply for Patroclus, felled by Hector’s hand.” Odysseus chose his words carefully, though he already knew the response.
As expected, Athena’s expression turned stony. “Grief does not absolve sacrilege,” she said coldly. “To defile the dead is an offense not easily forgiven.”
Odysseus’s shoulders tightened. “This war drags on too long,” he said wearily. “Its laws decay. The men grow feral, their bloodlust fed by Agamemnon’s savagery.”
He looked up at her. “I seek a way to end it before even greater ruin occurs.”
It was the wrong thing to say. He knew the instant it passed his lips.
Athena’s eyes flashed with terrible brilliance. “Greater ruin?” she repeated, and her voice could have frozen tides. “You forget yourself, king of Ithaca. Olympus sees all. Every butchered innocent, every ransacked temple.”
Though her voice was not loud, it rose like an earthquake. “I supported the Greeks because the Trojans began this wretched affair, but I do not ignore wanton slaughter.”
