Page 79 of Where Darkness Bloomed (Of Stars and Salt #1)

Sea spray whipped through Odysseus’s hair, tangling it into salt-stiffened curls. Overhead, seagulls wheeled, screeching like restless sea spirits.

He stood at the ship’s helm, steady despite the violent pitch of the waves, calloused hands firm on the railing. His eyes were fixed on the open water, but his thoughts were already leagues ahead.

Toward Ithaca.

Toward home.

Behind him, Troy still smoldered, wind scattering the ash. Ten years of siege. Ten years since he’d seen last Ithaca’s cliffs rising on the horizon. And now, at last, the tide had turned for home.

He had left Ithaca younger, but not a boy.

The crown had settled on his brow six years before Troy, and he’d borne its weight without flinching.

His father, Laertes, still lived, but age had drawn him into quiet retreat.

The affairs of Ithaca—the burden of its people, its wild fields and stony harbors—had become Odysseus’s to command.

Five years into his rule, he had crossed the sea to Sparta for conquest of a gentler kind.

Penelope. Daughter of Icarius, lord of Sparta. Cousin to Helen.

Years earlier, he’d stood at the edge of Sparta’s great hall as a prince, silently observing the storm of Helen’s betrothal. The hall had been a furnace of ambition, filled with gilded gifts and sharpened blades, vows shouted to the rafters.

The air grew thick with the burning scent of hunger—for glory, for her.

Odysseus had watched, unmoved. He’d seen Helen clearly, even then. A radiant beauty, but a flame that burned too bright. Bright enough to blind, to consume .

His gaze had drifted elsewhere.

Penelope had been little more than a child then, no more than twelve. A slip of a girl half-hidden behind a carved pillar, watching with wide, solemn eyes.

But it wasn’t the spectacle she watched most closely. Her gaze had found him.

He’d noticed. Even then.

There had been no understanding in her eyes. Not yet. Only unguarded curiosity, and something gentler still—a shy, tender fascination she’d been too young to name, too innocent to conceal.

No words had passed between them, no acknowledgment. He’d done nothing to encourage the quiet wonder in her gaze. She was far too young. But he remembered.

A handful of years passed. And when the time came, he returned to Sparta without fanfare, but with intent.

By then, Penelope too had drawn suitors. Princes and lords’ sons vied for her hand, eager to align themselves with Spartan blood. A contest calmer than Helen’s, but no less ruthless.

Helen’s beauty had been wildfire—blazing, scorching all who reached for it. But Penelope’s had settled into something altogether different. Deep and calm, like still water. No less capable of drowning a man.

Sons of the Aegean who had once burned for Helen now circled Penelope like moths to a gentler flame.

But it was his name Icarius spoke.

Odysseus.

The young king of harsh, stony Ithaca. A land of salt winds, wild olives, and rugged cliffs.

Around the hall, jaws tightened, shoulders stiffened. Eyes had flicked to him like knives slipping back into sheaths. But Odysseus hadn’t flinched.

He had crossed the sea for this. Endured the long, grinding nights of negotiations behind closed doors for this—for her.

Across the hall, Penelope looked up to find him already watching her. Torchlight danced across her face, kindling the warm color rising in her cheeks.

Marriage contracts were signed in the heavy heat of that relentless summer, binding her to him with ink and obligation.

He was older—twelve years her senior, already bearing the weight of his own throne, though not yet tempered by war.

She had been untouched by hardship, sheltered beneath her father’s name and raised among gentle female companions.

When he lifted her veil at their betrothal, his world narrowed to the intensity of her hazel eyes. No coy shyness, nor meek surrender. Only a quiet courage that twisted something deep in his chest.

And then he left.

Returned to his island, his kingdom, where she would follow.

Weeks later, he stood on Ithaca’s rough shoreline—feet planted in the surf, arms folded across his chest—watching the ship cut through the waves.

There had been no procession with him. No chariot.

No musicians or fanfare. Only the sea’s roar and, behind him, a handful of Ithacan elders.

Solemn witnesses of a kingdom waiting to receive its queen.

While the ship was still far off, his eyes found her standing at the prow.

Wind tangled in her dark hair, lifting it from her shoulders. Her cloak billowed around her like smoke. The sun hung low on the horizon, setting the sea alight in copper and gold. Even in its brilliance, her eyes were darker than he remembered.

The hull scraped against the shore. The gangplank dropped with a groan.

Her attendants disembarked first. Spartan nobles, servants, quiet guardians of her girlhood. They would return across the sea, bearing word of her safe arrival to her father. But she would not return.

When her feet touched Ithacan soil, she looked up—and found him there.

Even wind-lashed and salt-sprayed, she was beautiful.

Not with the polished sheen of girls from distant courts with practiced charm and rehearsed grace.

Her beauty had been wilder somehow, untouched by vanity and unburnished by time.

It held a fierce, quiet purity. Not asking to be seen, yet impossible to ignore.

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them. “My lady.” His voice was steady against the sound of the surf. “Welcome to Ithaca.”

Then he had offered his hand.

A breath had passed between them, just long enough for him to see it flicker in her eyes. Awareness. Sharp recognition of the threshold she now crossed. Everything ahead was unknown to her.

She had been Penelope, daughter of Icarius. Now she would be Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Under his name. Beneath his roof. Within his keeping.

Her fingers touched his—chilled from the voyage, soft against his calloused grasp as he closed his hand around hers .

That first night, she had trembled beneath his touch.

Amid the hush of ancient stone and flickering firelight, he’d approached her slowly.

She stood beside the olive-wood bed—the bed he had carved himself from the living tree that grew up through the palace, its roots sunk deep into Ithacan soil, gnarled and ancient.

Her hair was still damp from the bath, the scent of myrrh and lavender clinging softly to her skin.

It had struck him then, the swift realization that he could not wield tenderness as he did a blade.

He had moved slowly, spoken softly. Held her as if she were something sacred, touching gently as he guided her against him, then took them to the bed.

It was tentative, at first—two strangers, bound by vow but not yet by knowing. The air between them shimmered with nerves and newness. But slowly, like a tide turning, it became inevitable as breath found rhythm and her body answered his.

When he brought her to pleasure—when she arched beneath him, a soft, gasping cry torn from her lips—it echoed through him, fierce and soul-deep. With her pleasure, his own followed, swift and unstoppable. A storm breaking within him, a wave crashing hard against the shore of her body.

As dawn’s first light crept through the window, pale and gold, he found her curled against him.

Her body was tucked into his as though it had always belonged there, her breath warm against his collarbone, her hair spilling in dark ribbons across his bed.

One hand rested over his heart, a quiet claim of her own.

Now, the memory of that night still burned in his chest. He had carried it to Troy like a secret held beneath his armor. The taste of her fear. The sound of her sighs. The fragile bloom of trust that had risen between them in those still, intimate hours—

Now tested mercilessly by time, war, by the gods themselves.

Still, he held onto it with the ferocity of a man who knew the worth of what he’d been given.

Within nine months, she had borne him a son. A strong, clear-eyed boy whose first cries had rung through Ithaca’s halls with promise.

Telemachus.

Odysseus had held him close. Had traced the curve of his cheek with his thumb and pressed a kiss to his downy brow. Then he had turned away, taking up the spear.

His son had been only a month old when he sailed for Troy .

Amid the slaughter of war, Odysseus had buried the memories deep, sealed away beneath duty and survival. Grief was a weakness he could not afford, and longing was a blade that cut too deep.

But now, bound for Ithaca’s shores, the memories surged—vivid, relentless. He ached to see the boy’s face. To find him standing tall beside Penelope, to measure the boy time had carved from the babe he’d once cradled.

His grip tightened on the ship’s rail, knuckles whitening. Around him, his men moved with surety of seasoned sailors, hauling in heavy oars, laying them flat across the deck. The rhythmic creak of the timbers was muffled by the sea’s roar.

But Odysseus heard none of it.

His eyes were locked on the horizon, where a black wall of storm clouds brewed. An iron knot twisted in his stomach, coiling tighter with each breath.

“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.”

Athena’s stern warning echoed sharply in his ears. And with it, more memories.

The terrified screams of Trojan children, piercing and short-lived. And then, the brutal silence that followed. The groans of women dragged to the ground, their cries swallowed by the earth. The brittle wails of the old, too weak to flee, falling beneath blades slick with blood.

He and his men had not joined the massacre. They had crept from the horse and opened the gates, letting Agamemnon’s army pour inside. But as bloodlust and vengeance overtook Troy, Odysseus had turned his men from the streets, ordering them to the treasuries instead.

Yet, the stain of it clung to him still.

No act of restraint could wash it clean.

He saw it every time he closed his eyes. Troy engulfed in flames. Towers collapsing like broken ribs, streets running red with innocent blood. The wind had carried the screams, flinging them into the night sky like offerings to the gods. Smoke had blotted out the stars.

And at the center of it all—his creation.

The horse.

An omen of doom, not salvation.

His mind had conceived it. His men, his hands had built it. He had outwitted Troy. But it wasn’t victory that followed .

It was annihilation, tasting of ash.

Now, as the storm rolled toward them, the same bitterness rose in his throat.

Odysseus ran a hand through his tangled hair, his jaw tightening. Above the horizon, the sky began to boil. Black clouds roiled against the shadowy sea, churning furiously.

Deep in his bones, he felt it—Poseidon’s wrath, vast and ancient. The same unseen current that had begun pulling at him the moment his ship left Troy.

The sea surged beneath the hull, heaving like a leviathan rising from the deep. The wind tore across the waves, lashing at the sails. The ship groaned, every board shuddering as the first roll of thunder shook the sky like a war cry.

One of the temples his men had plundered had belonged to the sea god. He remembered it too vividly—

Outside the temple, a bronze statue of a rearing horse gleamed in Poseidon’s honor, proud and noble. And behind it, monstrous and obscene, his horse. A grotesque echo. A perversion of Poseidon’s sacred gift to mankind, twisted into a vessel of slaughter.

Now, the reckoning had come.

Odysseus’s gaze remained fixed on the horizon.

“Secure the oars. Lower the sail,” he ordered over the waves slapping against the hull. “We go below.”

The wind shrieked in answer, wild and vengeful, as he descended into the belly of the ship.