Chapter1
They said Sparta bled itself dry when Menelaus forced out the gods.
But blood remembers.
It seeps into the soil, stains the stone, clings to what remains.
And everywhere I looked, I saw it, the memory painted into everything we called home.
The scarred earth outside my window was red. The dust spiraling, lazy and sun-streaked, through the air? Red. Even the sea, churning beyond the edge of our scorched hills, bled to match it. A red so deep it swallowed the sun at dusk and spat it back out in veins of rust.
I even dreamt in red.
The air was still this morning, unnervingly so. I leaned against the balcony railing of our aging manor house, one of the few left standing, and let my eyes trace the place where land met cursed sea.
For just a breath, I imagined I was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Somewhere with green hills and cold rivers and skies that didn’t taste like iron on your tongue.
But pretending had its limits.
Truth, like rot, always clawed its way back to the surface, rising with the monsoon floods, red as the blood they carried.
That was what it looked like when the storms swept in: the sky splitting open, red water rushing past our gates. It seeped through the stone, finding every fault, every fracture, until the walls themselves seemed to bleed.
They said our land wasn’t always like this. Once, Sparta’s glory belonged to all of us. Until Menelaus decided it should belong to him alone. He drove out the gods and took their place. Now the only thing left shining here was his throne.
Sparta was dying.
Or maybe it was already dead, and we were too stubborn to admit it.
Because Sparta’s land wasn’t the only thing dying.Wewere dying … in more ways than one.
If the curse the gods had left behind didn’t kill our bodies, it hardly mattered, because our spirit was dying too.
Like the land, we were fading away more and more every day, as though our spirits were being bled into the soil. As though the weight of waiting for the end was becoming too much, and fear, slow and unrelenting, was creeping into our lungs and coaxing them still.
We weren’t screaming toward our end. We weren’t running.
We were dulling.
I watched it happen. I watched voices grow quieter, laughter stretch thinner, smiles wilt before they fully bloomed. Children who used to run, now stood. Songs that once lifted through the dusk died on dry lips.
We moved through each day like echoes.
And I felt it, sinking into the marrow of me. Our fire, the thing that made usSpartan, was dying. Flickering low. Not smote by gods. Not taken in a blaze.
But unraveled.
I felt every thread come loose. Every light go out. We weren’t just losing our strength. We were forgetting we ever had it.
It was a splinter running through my ribs as I stared out to the distance. A quiet, aching question no one else dared ask aloud: Was this it? Was this all our lives were?
A group of children trudged past the crumbling gate below me, their footsteps dragging. I watched from the balcony, arms braced on the stone, and the weight of their suffering settled heavy in my chest.
They kept their heads lowered, shoulders curved tight as if bracing. They didn’t glance at the manor until one of the youngest, a girl with a lopsided braid and a tear in her hem, stepped out of line with a bundle of dried rushes in her arms.
An offering for me, of course. I was Helena of Amyklai, after all. The famed beauty who was going to save them.
She knelt, her knees pressing into the red-cracked dust, and laid the rushes down hesitantly, as if she might be punished for offering too little. The bundle was brittle and sun-bleached, plucked from a dying field, but still she arranged them carefully alongside the other offerings.
