Page 160 of Where Darkness Bloomed
His words were met with wrath.
“You speak foolishness,” Paris snapped. “You are a priest of Apollo, but he has not destroyed our enemies.We must honor the other gods to secure their aid as well.”
“Paris, be silent.” King Priam’s voice rose over the hall, quietly commanding. His gnarled hands gripped the arms of his throne as he rose slowly. “Laocoön has long prophesied in Apollo’s name.” The old king’s weary eyes rested on the priest. “His counsel will be heard.”
With a brooding glare, Paris sank back into his seat.
Priam’s gaze shifted. “Chryses,” he said, addressing the man seated across from Laocoön. “You, too, have petitioned Apollo on Troy’s behalf—and the sun god has answered you before. What do you see in this?”
Chryses rose slowly, one hand trailing to his oiled beard in silent thought. He wore no gold, no ornaments, only the plain robes of a priest and the quiet certainty of a man whose prayers had once summoned a god’s wrath.
“The Greek camps lie empty,” he said thoughtfully. “Their ships are gone. A single, drunken straggler where an army once stood.”
The stillness deepened as Chryses paused.
“Let us accept this gift as an omen,” he said at last. “Poseidon’s gaze turns back to Troy in peace.”
The solemn pronouncement broke like a wave through the chamber. Murmurs swelled into a tide of approval.
Only Laocoön and his sons remained silent, their faces grave.
***
From the high window of Paris’s chambers, Helen watched the towering horse roll through the city gates. Drumbeats echoed through the streets, mingling with the roar of the crowd, a swelling current of hollow victory.
But icy tendrils of dread snaked down her spine, cold as death itself.
“It is false,” she said tightly, watching. “They would never abandon their cause—Agamemnon or Menelaus.”
Beside her, Andromache rocked her son, her fingers stroking his soft curls with absent, trembling tenderness. Her sleepless eyes followed Helen’s gaze to the celebration below.
“Then we must be ready to flee,” she said, her voice hollow.
Helen didn’t answer at once. A moment longer, her gaze lingered on the crowd, the revelry. Then she turned, reaching to grip Andromache’s hand. “You must escape,” she said, low and firm. “Save your son. Flee while you can.”
“And you?” Andromache asked, the words barely holding shape.
Helen shook her head slowly. “They will find me.”
It was not fear. Only certainty, as sure as the tide returning to shore. She had lived too long in Menelaus’s shadow to believe otherwise. The Greeks would come—soon.
Achilles had been the last fragile thread of hope. Not for salvation. She was long past such illusions. But for something infinitely more fragile.
Mercy.
She had witnessed the storm he became after Patroclus’s death—rage reborn, a god’s fury stitched into mortal flesh. But beneath the blood, the smoke, the splintered bone, she saw the anguish carved into him.
A wound too deep to close. One that had driven him nearly to madness, and then to vengeance. To Hector.
But when Hector collapsed beneath Achilles’s spear, there had been notriumph in it. No glory or honor. Only silence, a deeper kind of ruin. Another echo of agony reverberating across the plain.
In that moment, Achilles had lifted his head, his eyes finding hers. From where she stood, locked behind Troy’s walls, Helen had met his gaze across distance and death.
Two souls adrift in the wreckage. Strangers in fate, bound by sorrow. The recognition had been brief, but it was enough. Enough to break something open in her.
Enough to hope.
That a man so undone by love, by loss, might yet be moved to mercy. That vengeance might run dry. That he might turn away, taking Agamemnon’s beleaguered army with him, opening her cage door as he left. That fury might give way to something softer. Compassion. Restraint.
