At least it would’ve felt real. Brutal, but alive. Better than the air in this silk-lined coffin. Better than sitting knee-to-knee with the specter who’d raised me.
I looked at my mother … and winced. It hurt, like always. But I forced the reaction down, burying it where all the other aches lived.
She’d been cursed with a fated mate.
And I do mean cursed. People liked to romanticize it—two souls destined, divinely woven. But I’d watched the aftermath. I’d seen what it did. What it took.
When my father died, she didn’t shatter. She eroded, methodically, like something sacred being undone seam by seam, until only fabric remained. Mourning robes. And a face I barely recognized behind black veils and colder silences.
Before that, I had never believed in fated mates. I’d thought it was a pretty lie, some old myth we told ourselves to make suffering poetic. But now? Now I did believe. And I wanted no part of it.
Let someone else unravel for love. Let someone else be hollowed out by it. I’d seen enough of what devotion left behind.
After watching my mother, it wasn’t a hardship to give up true love for the crown. It felt like strategy. Because I knew now that nothing emptied a person like love that ended. And I had no intention of being emptied.
I watched her across theokhèma, and I wondered how much longer she’d last. Every day, she seemed to fade more, bit by bit, like sand scraping away at a statue. I didn’t know what would be worse—waking up and finding her gone, or watching her disappear slowly, until all that remained was a robe full of dust and silence.
Either way, she was already halfway gone. And I was already alone.
She sighed, shifting on the padded bench like even my presence exhausted her. Her hands moved automatically, pulling the mourning drapery tighter around her shoulders, cocooning herself in grief like it was the only thing she had left that still fit. If she was upset about what happened in the agora this morning, I couldn’t tell. Since she was always in a perpetual state of mourning.
Grief had become her second skin.
I wanted to scream. To grab her shoulders and shake her until she saw me … really saw me.Talk to me.Say something.
But I’d done that before. I’d begged before. All it ever got me was silence.
So I stayed quiet.
Like always.
Theokhèmajolted beneath us, a sudden shudder that pulled a frown from my lips. I leaned forward slightly, listening to the muffled thud of trunks being loaded into the back—my trunks. Everything I’d need for the Trials.
We lurched forward, the jergins surging into motion with startling speed, faster than anything that massive had a right to move. They scuttled in harsh, rhythmic bursts, and soon the manor was swallowed behind a curtain of dust.
We had only traveled a few stadia when I heard a scream.
I didn’t see them—whoever it was—but I could picture the shape of a rag-covered figure hurling themselves out of the way, just barely escaping the crushing weight of the jergins’ claws. They never slowed once a journey began.
I’d seen what happened to those who didn’t move fast enough. Once, a child had wandered too close to the edge of the road. The beasts mistook her for prey. Their blunt teeth sank into her side and tore her nearly in half before the driver’s whip cracked loud enough to jolt them from their frenzy.
I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to shove down the memory. The way her little hand had twitched. The way the dust turned dark with blood.
But when I opened them, what lay ahead was no better.
There was only one path out of the village, and it cut straight through the Silent Way.
It wasn’t just a place. It was where we took our cursed.
The Dread was a sickness the gods had left behind when Menelaus forced them out, a punishment scored into the land like a wound that never closed. Every Spartan village had its version of the Silent Way, a ring of ruin circling the village like a noose. This was ours. The place where Amyklai’s prayers went to die.
The Dread didn’t care who you were. It didn’t care if you had a family, a future. It passed over one person like cold mist and left them untouched, blinking in confusion … and then tore the next apart, blood dripping from their eyes, ears, and mouth in steady crimson rivulets, so violent it soaked the dirt beneath them like the earth itself was bleeding.
I’d seen that too.
Arete, a girl I used to race with through the olive groves, had come stumbling back into town one morning, wild-eyed and whole. I’d watched from the window as her brother ran to meet her.
The Dread’s red mist had appeared and taken him before he could even scream.
