Page 62 of Where Darkness Bloomed (Of Stars and Salt #1)
Above the oak grove, stars burned cold and bright through the tangled branches.
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 beneath a 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.”
She paused, a silence heavy with the promise of retribution.
“Zeus forbids our interference for now.” A vengeful note haunted her words. “But such actions will have consequences. The scales will demand balance.”
An icy shiver skittered down Odysseus’s spine, raising the hairs on his neck.
“Goddess,” he implored, rising to his feet. “Help me to end it.”
She fixed him with a stare that pared flesh and bone, peering into his soul. He weathered it, fighting the instinct to retreat, his feet planted firmly against the ground.
At last, she spoke. “Wield my wisdom with care. When this ends, you too will be judged accordingly,” she warned.
Then she turned toward Troy, its proud walls outlined in distant torchlight. “The Trojans seek favor from amongst the gods.”
“We all do, my lady,” Odysseus replied flatly.
“Devotion can be a weapon if wielded correctly.”
He frowned. “The Trojans have long worshipped Apollo, and they thrive under his care. Thousands of men have fallen to plagues and arrows guided by his hand.”
“Yes.” Her eyes glinted silver beneath the moonlight. “But even now, Troy also prays to another. One who turned his back on the city long ago.”
Odysseus’s gaze turned to the sea, where black waves lapped restlessly against the shore.
“Poseidon.”
Athena nodded. “They watch for his sign. Their priests will be quick to see it, eager for hope. Use this.” Her voice cooled then, growing stern with warning. “But hear me, king of Ithaca—the gods do not condone butchery. If you stand among those who indulge it, you will share in their doom.”
A breath of wind passed. She was gone.
Odysseus stood alone once more beside a smoldering heap of ash, her words still echoing in the night. Slowly, he turned and strode back toward the camp.
The fires had burned low. Only the sentries remained awake, stationed along the perimeters. One nodded as he passed—a boy, barely grown, his helmet too wide for his brow.
Odysseus said nothing, only met the boy’s eyes. Then moved on.
At the camp’s edge, he halted.
Troy loomed in the distance. Its walls were awash in firelight, every stone steeped in defiance. Those walls were as formidable now as they’d been the day he leapt from the ship, his sandals in the surf, war in his blood.
Massive. Impenetrable.
A gift from Poseidon to a long-dead king.
But the sea god’s blessings had soured the day Laomedon broke his vow to build Poseidon’s temple at the city’s heart. Instead, the foolish king had raised up a palace in his own name.
Odysseus’s eyes swept the wall’s breadth, twice the height of Ithaca’s. Thicker than anyone knew. For years now, those walls had endured every assault. No blade, no fire, no siegecraft had cracked them.
Agamemnon had tried. Again and again. Reckless, blood-drunk assaults, driven more by pride than strategy. And Troy had answered with all manner of death: boiling pitch, searing oil, showers of arrows. A lethal tide poured from the ramparts, staining the air with the stench of melted flesh.
Achilles and his Myrmidons had refused to take part in such senseless carnage. Grim and silent, they watched as the Greek host bashed itself against stone. Even then, Odysseus had seen it as they had—
Troy would not be taken by force.
The Greeks were left circling a corpse that refused to die.
With a sigh, Odysseus raked a hand through his hair, damp with sea-salt and sweat. Short of Priam himself swinging open the gates in surrender, they would never breach the city.
A flicker of motion snagged his gaze.
Above Troy, a banner snapped in the wind. A blue flag marked with a white horse, stark against the night sky.
It was Hector’s insignia, flown in honor of the slain prince. The Breaker of Horses, a nickname earned by Hector’s mastery of the chariot.
Ironic, Odysseus mused bitterly, that a horse—the emblem of the dead prince—was also the sacred animal of Poseidon. The god who had once blessed this city, only to abandon it .
Then a whisper, soft as wind through reeds.
“Devotion can be a weapon, if wielded correctly.”
Athena’s words curled through his mind.
Odysseus’s gaze sharpened, tracing the shape of the horse emblazoned on the banner. A thought rooted itself then—spreading slowly in his mind, dark and sinuous as smoke.
Like a blade sliding into its sheath, the pieces snapped into place.
The sentries on the ridge watched, bewildered, as the king of Ithaca suddenly turned on his heel and sprinted toward the beach, sand spraying behind him, a sandal lost in his wake.