Chapter 1 #3
One of the girls scrambled to obey, nearly knocking over a pitcher in her rush. The door slammed shut, but it was too late. The water had turned murky again, streaked with grit and silt, like I’d been soaking in a vat of rust or ancient blood.
I blinked at the damage. Streaks of red clung to my skin, smeared across my arms and chest like war paint. I’d been drowned and dusted like a side of meat. Even this, just getting ready, had become a struggle. A testament to how far we’d fallen. When even a bath became a battlefield …
Calismae muttered something vile under her breath as she yanked me up by the elbow, dripping and dazed.
She gave the water a murderous glance, as if she could beat it back into clarity with willpower alone.
“Forget another rinse. We don’t have time for a fresh fill,” she growled, using a linen cloth to wipe the red stains off me.
“Ow!” I yelped as Calismae yanked a comb through my hair. “You know, if you rip it all out, there won’t be anything left to braid.”
Calismae sniffed and tugged even harder, muttering about knots and sacrilege. I winced and wrapped the rough fabric tighter around myself, trying to imagine a world where getting your hair combed wasn’t a form of corporal punishment.
A guttural blast throbbed through the air, pressing against every surface until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
I froze. Calismae’s comb slipped from her fingers and hit the floor with a clatter. The windows shook and the nearest oil lamp stuttered, then went out, smoke curling toward the ceiling like a dying breath.
Calismae’s hand stayed twisted in my braid, fingers stiff, knuckles white. She trembled against my scalp, and I felt the moment she stopped breathing. Not from panic … but from knowing.
A second blast surged through the manor … louder this time, stretched too long like it hated the silence between. I gasped, my knees buckling, and I reached blindly, my fingers clutching at the edge of Calismae’s robes. She didn’t shake me off. She didn’t move at all.
I knew that sound. Gods. Everyone did.
It was sewn into the marrow of every Spartan bone.
The Aetherthorn. One of the last pulses of the gods’ magic, repurposed by Menelaus into something far worse … a weapon of obedience.
Its cry unfurled through the walls like smoke, like shadow, slithering under doors and into lungs, threading through skin and soul.
With it came the pull.
Not a sound anymore, but a sensation. A force. An invisible thread jerked tight beneath my ribs, yanking at the blood that pulsed just beneath my skin. My whole body seized with it. I wasn’t moving yet … but something inside me was.
That call couldn’t be ignored. Not by anyone born on Spartan soil.
Every Spartan, from the highest noble to the lowest gutter-born, had given a drop of blood to the Aetherthorn of their village at birth. It was our tradition. Our law. Our curse.
Across the room, one of the girls dropped the armful of linens she’d been folding.
Her hands hovered in the air, fingers twitching like she didn’t know how to use them anymore.
The other girl staggered back from the hearth, knocking over a basin that echoed too loud in the sudden silence.
Her eyes were wide, her lips moving soundlessly—praying, maybe, or cursing.
Neither of them moved toward the door. But neither of them stood still either. They hovered in that strange, breathless place between flight and surrender.
Beyond the room, footsteps stuttered in the corridor. A shout. Something fragile hit the ground and broke. The kind of chaos that only came when everyone felt the same fear and didn’t know where to put it.
And still, the pull throbbed inside me. Toward it. Like the Aetherthorn was under the floor. Like it had teeth, and it had already bitten down.
“Gods preserve us.” Calismae staggered against the wall, one hand braced on the stone, the other curled into a claw against her side. Her breath rasped in her throat. She was trying to resist the pull, teeth bared in fury rather than fear, but her shoulders were trembling.
Growling, she let go and snatched a robe from the peg beside the hearth, throwing it around my shoulders.
“Today of all days,” she spat.
“Why is it calling now?” I gasped. The words burst out of me, ragged and too loud. “What’s happening?”
Calismae shook her head. “Move.”
“But—”
“Now, Helena.”
There was no room for argument in her voice. No softness. No motherly patience.
She stalked toward the door and I stumbled after her, pulling the robe tighter around my frame. It was made of thin wool, barely enough to hold out the chill that was seeping into me, not from the wind, but from something deeper. Something colder.
We moved through the halls of the manor in silence, our footsteps muffled against the stone. The air felt thick. Not just with dust, but with tension. Each corridor felt narrower than the last, each turn more suffocating.
We passed a window. The glass was thick with grime, streaked red from the dust storms that never stopped whispering over Sparta’s bones. I turned my head, just enough to glimpse the outside.
Shapes moved. Dozens—no, hundreds—of blurry figures funneling past the manor, all heading in the same direction like leaves pulled by a current.
Calismae’s grip on my arm was iron. She wasn’t guiding me … she was dragging me, and I was barely keeping pace.
The third call was coming.
It pressed against the edges of my awareness like a wave preparing to crash. My body was already bracing for impact—shoulders tight, lungs aching, every muscle coiled like I could somehow outrun a sound.
Because once the third cry came, it would be done. The spell sealed. The choice gone.
And we would all obey and come to heel.
Whether we wanted to or not.