Page 71 of Where Darkness Bloomed
“Priam!” Achilles roared again, his fury shaking the air. His grip tightened on the spear, as if to drive it into Troy’s heart. “Your son lies dead for his offenses against me in this war born of your house. Of your son, Paris.”
Paris hovered beside his father, lips close to the old king’s ear,whispering. When he straightened, his eyes slid back to Achilles, dark and seething.
Achilles raised the spear, the bloodied point gleaming as it rose to Paris. His voice was cold, deadly, as he called out, “I come for you next, prince.”
Color drained from Paris’s face, and he grew white with rage. But it was weak by comparison, a candle guttering in a hurricane’s path. Then desperation lit wildly in his eyes.
Paris lunged, ripping a bow from the hands of a nearby guard. Beside him, Priam cried out in protest, but Paris shrugged off his father’s hands. With practiced ease, he drew the string.
The twang was soft, just a whisper.
The arrow arced, streaking through the air—
It struck the ground at Achilles’s feet with a dull thud. Harmless and spent.
For a moment, Achilles didn’t move.
Then he reached up, drawing his helmet away. The bronze flashed as he cast it aside, revealing the hard lines of his face. He bent, grasping the arrow, and his gaze dragged slowly back to Paris as he straightened.
“You abandon your honor, boy,” he called.
A sharp crack rang out. The arrow splintered in his hand—broken twigs, nothing more. He tossed them aside.
“Just as well. You will find none in me.”
Without another glance, Achilles turned, striding to his chariot. From it, he retrieved a coil of rope. Then, dagger in hand, he knelt beside Hector.
For a heartbeat, he looked at the fallen man.
Then the blade descended, biting deep as it sliced cleanly through the tendons of the heels. The wet squelch of flesh cut the unnerving quiet. Blood soaked the earth in sluggish pools as he tied off the knots.
Once finished, Achilles rose, and his gaze lifted to the terrace a final time.
Paris stood frozen, pale, his form wracked with impotent hatred.
Just behind him—Helen.
The sight of her stilled him, just for a moment.
Tears traced her cheeks, catching the sunlight like water on stone. A dark-haired woman clung to her, weeping into her shoulder, cries vanishing on the wind.
But Helen’s sorrow ran deeper, quiet and fathomless. It did not cry out. It did not tremble. It welled from some hidden place within her, pure and endless, as if drawn from a wellspring the world had long forgotten.
Achilles’s jaw clenched. His eyes traced the tears dripping down her cheeks, her beauty somehow more radiant through the bitterness of grief.
Did she mourn for the widow who clung to her? Or the dead man at his feet?
He didn’t know.
But he knew that look—a crushing weight too vast for words. The same mantle of iron rested on his own shoulders. It had settled there the day Patroclus fell. And now, with Hector’s lifeless body at his feet, it threatened to bring him to his knees beneath its weight.
For a breath, his fury trembled under that darker force. As if his own sorrow rose to meet hers, clawing through his ribs and turning everything—glory, pride, vengeance—to ash.
Grief for Patroclus. For Hector.
For the years lost, the seas of blood consumed by the ground beneath him. For the loss of himself. And, finally—for her. The woman whose anguished eyes had begun to haunt his nights.
The tide swelled inside him, stretching across the plain, reaching toward—
