Page 18 of Where Darkness Bloomed (Of Stars and Salt #1)

On a rocky outcropping near Troy, Achilles stood beneath the morning sun, its glare searing the bronzed skin of his arms. His sea-green eyes climbed Troy’s walls, roving for weaknesses he knew did not exist.

Behind him, footsteps crunched over loose stone.

“What do you think, my lord?” Eudorus, his lieutenant, appeared at his side. Grim-faced, he followed Achilles’s gaze.

Achilles didn’t answer right away. Instead, he watched with stony skepticism as Agamemnon’s folly unfolded. Before them, soldiers heaved massive ladders against the towering walls, poised to climb to their deaths.

“I think we will stand here a thousand years before a single soldier takes Troy that way,” Achilles replied dryly, as the soldiers began to climb.

The screams came quickly.

Boiling pitch tipped over Troy’s parapets, raining down in thick, black waves over the ladders. Flesh sizzled, searing off the bone. Soldiers flailed, shrieking on the way down, their bodies smashing into the earth with wet, bone-crunching thuds.

“A fucking waste.” Achilles turned away in disgust. “After how many months?”

He spat into the dirt, eyes flicking toward the Greek encampment where the king lounged beneath a linen canopy, sipping wine like a bloated tick, oblivious to the carnage.

“Agamemnon can feed the pyres with his own men,” he said darkly. “Mine won’t burn for his vanity.”

“Priam watches.” Eudorus nodded up to the high battlements.

Achilles cocked an eye upward, spotting the old king standing like a solemn statue on the royal balcony. The morning sun crowned his white hair, a halo of light around his head. Slowly, Priam raised his hand.

A signal.

On command, fire streaked the sky.

Arrows rained down from Troy’s upper walls.

The flaming shafts punched through flesh and wood, setting men and ladders ablaze.

Oil-slicked wood erupted in a rush of flame and agony, bodies writhing as they burned.

Charred flesh and melting fat filled the air, thick and choking, as Agamemnon’s plan turned to ash.

Achilles watched, his mouth twisting with disdain. “Priam knows he has nothing to fear today.” Then he scoffed. “Difficult to say who the greater fool is, the Trojan king or the Greek.”

Eudorus’s brow creased. “Priam has done nothing.”

“Precisely,” Achilles replied coldly, his gaze shifting back to the elderly king watching from the high terrace. “His whelp stole another’s wife, inviting ruin to his gates. Any other would have sent her back with a chest of gold. And the son’s head in a sack.”

“Priam loves his sons.”

“And Troy will bleed for it.”

Eudorus’s lips twitched. “Perhaps the Spartan queen bewitched them both.”

Achilles snorted. “Paris is young—led by his cock, bewitched by open thighs.”

“You think the queen went willingly?”

He tilted his head, considering. “A fool’s gamble, if she did. Trading a king for a second-born prince who hides behind his brother’s sword.”

Eudorus’s gaze shifted again. “You have an audience.”

Achilles followed his gaze back to the terrace, where another figure had joined Priam on the balcony.

The morning sun wove gold into her hair, falling in loose curls down her back. A young woman draped in deep blue, her chiton gathered at the shoulder with a pin of glittering abalone.

Helen.

The rumors had not lied. She was no mortal beauty.

She was a spark born of the gods—a flame so bright it had set the world on fire.

Even from across the battlefield, Achilles could feel her beauty like a pull in his blood. Otherworldly, ethereal, untouchable. Like witnessing a constellation wrenched from the heavens and cast down to earth.

He’d heard the stories in his youth. Tales passed around campfires and training fields, the legend traded between warriors starved for a woman’s touch.

A girl—sired by Zeus himself, touched by Aphrodite’s hand.

A beauty so radiant she bent kingdoms to their knees.

A prize sought by kings and warriors alike, courted by a legion of suitors.

Back then, he had been sequestered on Mount Pelion with Patroclus, sweat-soaked and pressed hard by Chiron’s grueling training. He’d dismissed the tale as a bard’s embellishment—a pretty myth to pass the long nights.

Yet now, she stood before him. No longer a girl of myth, but flesh and blood. The woman whose very existence had torn kingdoms apart.

Achilles’s eyes narrowed as he watched her. Though it scarcely mattered, Eudorus’s question lingered like a thorn in his flesh: had the woman above truly chosen this? Traded brutish Menelaus for the untried Trojan boy?

And if she had— gods , had she known the cost?

The thought coiled in his mind, dark and bitter as poison.

Between them, the battlefield burned. As it had every day since the Greeks first set foot on Trojan soil, so many months ago.

She stood apart from Priam on the terrace, fingers knotted in the hem of her chiton. Her stunning face was shadowed, her gaze lingering over the charred bodies burning among ladders, smeared with sticky tar.

Achilles watched as her head turned, eyes closing briefly as if to block out the carnage. A slow, shuddering breath expanded her chest. When her gaze lifted again, it swept the field. The earth and torn banners, the rising smoke, and Agamemnon’s canopy.

Then her eyes found him. And stopped.

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” Eudorus murmured, a rare note of awe threading his voice.

Achilles’s reply was scornful. “The face that brought thousands to die.”

Eudorus still watched the balcony. “She admires you,” he observed.

Above them, Helen’s gaze was still fixed in his direction. But he knew better.

“No.” He folded his arms, his feet braced against the earth. “She fears me. She fears what I am.”

Lust and fear were different beasts, and he knew their scents well. The woman above him kept the company of fear. It clung to her like a dark veil, lived in her rigid shoulders, her guarded gaze. He could read it on her body as plainly as he could smell it in the air before battle.

“What are you, my lord?”

“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.