Page 34 of Where Darkness Bloomed
“Slaughter.” Achilles’s eyes hardened, growing sharp as the sword sheathed at his hip. “Death.”
Reaching up, he pulled his helmet away, tucking it beneath his arm. His gaze tipped up, meeting the sapphire eyes watching from the wall.
He let her feel it then. The full weight of his gaze. The inevitability of his violence. The certainty of it.
But she didn’t look away.
The color of open sea, her eyes held his steadily. And within them, Achilles saw something that stilled him.
Sorrow.
Sharp. Profound. So deep, it seemed to bleed from her very soul.
Grief and beauty twined in her like ash and gold, weaving into something terrible yet wonderous. For a moment, she looked more divine than mortal, crowned with a radiance that spoke not of desire, but ruin. The tragic recipient of a goddess’s unwanted favor.
For the first time since his feet landed in Troy’s surf, Achilles felt a twinge of surprise.
Helen of Troy’s sorrow could have broken a thousand hearts.
Chapter 16
Helen of Troy.
The title echoed in her mind like a curse.
The Trojans called her that. The Greeks now, too.
But she was notof Troy. She had never been. She was Helen of Sparta, daughter of King Tyndareus—though, more truthfully, of Zeus. A queen by marriage to Menelaus.
Until that night.
Her life had never been a joyful one. But Paris’s actions had damned Troy—and her along with it. When Agamemnon’s army blackened Troy’s horizon like a plague, the Trojans had rightfully looked to her with loathing.
Across the weeks, the months, reports began pouring in. Each one more horrifying than the last.
The Greeks tore through the countryside, leaving nothing in their wake. Villages burned. Fields once golden with wheat were choked, darkened by smoke. The old, the defenseless, women... children—slaughtered. Ripped from their homes, put to the sword or taken as spoils.
Inside Troy’s walls, unrest simmered. Then it boiled.
Crowds gathered outside the palace gates, cries growing louder with each passing day. At first, they begged. But when their pleas were met with silence, they screamed. For her return. For peace. For their dead sons, brothers, relatives.
Within the palace, tempers frayed.
Paris’s fury reached her ears, even through the bolted door, as Priam’s advisors implored him to no avail.
Then Hector came. Not in a whisper, but with thunder in his voice as he stormed through the palace. He stood before his father and brother still in his armor, streaked with dust from the field, feet planted against the stone.
His voice rang through the halls loud enough to shake the columns. “We cannot sacrifice all of Troy for the pride of one man!”
The words had struck like bronze—harsh, inevitable, echoing the battle he had just returned from. It was the cry of a commander fighting to hold back the tide with bloodied, bare hands.
Even the priests, the same ones who had once called her a gift of the gods, advised with solemn eyes and whispered warnings.
Send her back, they all said.End the bloodshed. Save the city.
But still, Paris refused. His wounded pride curdled into something brittle, growing more obstinate with each sunrise. Even as the seasons changed around them. Even as the sky turned black with smoke from endless funeral pyres.
His stubbornness was a blade, a dagger poised at Troy’s heart.
