Chapter 60 #2
He leaned close, his voice tickling my ear. “Time to get out of here, Your Majesty. But please don’t mistake this for the end. It’s only the opening move.”
The glow seared brighter, painting the corridor in red and white. I wanted to wrench away, to fight, to burn him with my hate … but my fingers tightened around his as if the choice had never been mine.
The palace shook, flames devouring everything they touched.
And still, Theron only smiled.
The wind howled across the cliffs I’d once looked out on, heavy with salt and something colder. Something ending.
Theron dragged me up the last cruel stretch. My sandals slipped against the red stone, the climb jarring and relentless, but it wasn’t the strain in my legs that consumed me. “You don’t have to do this,” I rasped for the millionth time. “You can’t do this.”
He didn’t answer. Not until we reached the edge, where the red sea kissed the sky. There, he stopped. The moon cast a glow across his midnight hair as he turned, his eyes gazing first at the burning world below us … then to me.
“I must, Helena,” he murmured, his voice edged with certainty.
I blinked, and when my eyes opened again, he was breaking apart.
The gold at his collar flared too bright to bear, searing my vision, then split downward in streams of light.
His skin cracked open like fired clay, but what spilled through was not blood.
Smoke bled out in streams. Fire licked along the fractures, peeling him away strip by strip until the man I knew was nothing but unraveling ash on the wind.
My heart hammered as I stared at him in disbelief.
His eyes were no longer violet but blazing, molten starlight burning from within. His skin glowed as if an eternal sun had kissed it raw, runes alive and pulsing across his chest.
Wings burst from his back, vast and black, their edges smoldering with flame. They unfurled with a sound like tearing sky, spanning wide enough to drown the moonlight before folding close again, shadow curling at their tips.
The air bent around him. The cliff shook beneath us. Lightning spidered across the clouds.
And in that blink, in that breath … the man I’d known was gone.
What stood before me was no mortal. He was terrible. And divine.
Like a god.
“Theron.” I gasped.
A terrible smile broke across his face. “My name is Paris.”
His voice rolled through me, no longer flesh and breath, but the hum of stars collapsing … resonant and impossible. Not just sound, but sensation, thrumming in my veins.
His name scraped along my bones as though I had heard it before, long ago, in whispers I wasn’t meant to remember.
Paris.
Calismae’s voice stirred in my mind, from a story she had once told me in the dark—half warning, half myth.
A prince of Troy who had lived among the gods.
A boy who should have died, yet lived, marked with power that left whole nations silent with fear.
Calismae had said his name was a curse, a harbinger.
That wherever he went, kingdoms fell, and fire followed in his wake.
I’d thought he was just a tale. That nothing could rival Sparta’s God-Slayer.
But I suddenly wondered if he was the disturbance in the East that Menelaus and Achilles had been so worried about.
And now he stood before me, smiling as though he already knew how the tale would end.
“Look at the ash of Menelaus’s empire.” He turned my face, and below us, chaos bloomed.
The dark spires of the palace were no longer stone but torches, their peaks sagging as they melted into rivers of fire. Roofs collapsed inward with a roar, sparks spiraling up into the sky like fleeing souls.
The gardens burned. The rosebushes I had once walked through in quiet were now nothing but blackened stalks hissing in the heat.
Petals, red as blood, shriveled to dust in midair before they ever touched the ground.
The hedges writhed, each branch a vein set alight, pulsing with the inferno as if the earth itself bled.
Even the sea had turned traitor. It caught the fire greedily, tossing back a reflection of crimson waves that broke and re-formed under a sky steeped in smoke. The horizon was no line at all, just flame spilling into flame.
The world below was unrecognizable. A kingdom unmade.
Was Menelaus burning somewhere out there? No chill followed that thought.
Only emptiness.
If the fire took him, if the smoke swallowed him whole, I wouldn’t care.
“Helena!”
My gaze dropped to Achilles, scaling the cliff with his sword clenched tight, terror and fury etched into every line of his face. His golden armor was battered, streaked with soot, and his hair clung damp to his brow. He was battle-worn and desperate as he charged toward us.
“Let her go!” he roared, his voice splitting the night.
“By every god still watching, I will follow you to the ends of the earth. I will tear apart every shadow, burn through every lie, and drag you into the light to end you. I will not stop until she is free. Until nothing remains of you but dust.”
“Achilles!” I screamed.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t reach for him … but my eyes did. They pleaded, straining toward the man who had always seen me as more than a pawn, more than a prize. He had always looked at me as though I were worth saving.
Theron’s—Paris’s—gaze followed mine. Calm. Unbothered. A god watching a mortal rage.
And then …
The cliffs were gone.
The earth dropped away in a rush of wind and terror as his wings unfurled. Their first sweep cracked the air, and the force of it tore me from the ground. My body jolted upward, wrenched into the storm of his power.
Below, Achilles screamed my name. The sound split me open, tore through bone and marrow. It was a call I would never stop answering, too far, too late. His voice carried like the breaking of worlds.
The red cliffs shrank beneath us, the sea churning crimson under the ruin. Roz lifted too, rising on some unseen current, its blue eyes glowing against the dark.
And then there was nothing but sky.
Nothing but wings.
Nothing but the shatters of a life left behind.
We flew.