I blew out a breath, forcing the tension from my shoulders. Worrying wouldn’t clean the mud from my hem or untangle the knots in my hair. I’d win anyway—mud, blood, and all. Even if I looked like I’d just stepped off the battlefield.
My mother flinched, her body going rigid as she leaned toward the window. Her breath hitched. I turned, followed her gaze … and my own breath caught hard in my throat.
There it was.
Menelaus’s palace.
It cleaved the sky like a gash, jagged and brazen, built from stone scorched past color. Not just black … darker, deeper. The towers rose like claws, spires stabbing upward in defiance.
My whole life, I’d gazed at it from my bedroom window. Always on the horizon, constant as a star. But now, seeing it rear up from the earth like it meant to pierce the sky, I understood. Of course it was visible from the western sea. Of course, the stories said it could be seen from anywhere.
It was impossibly tall, almost unnatural in its defiance of the earth beneath it.
People also claimed the foundation had been laid over a battlefield so utterly ruined by slaughter that the stone itself was altered—the site of one of the last great battles between Menelaus and the gods. They said what soaked into the earth that day was not mortal blood but something divine, and that its echo still lingered beneath the palace, leaching upward through the bedrock. Not staining it, but stripping it of light, leaving the stone dense and starved, as if a buried heart still pulsed below, awake and waiting.
I used to scoff at those stories, call them fairy tales for frightened children. But up close, with the spires rising above me … I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Fairy tale or nightmare, it didn’t matter. My stomach twisted, fear coiling beneath my ribs—but I shoved it down, swallowed it whole. I had to survive this place. More than that … I had to make it mine.
My mother began tugging at her dress, trying to straighten the fabric. She smoothed her skirt with quick, agitated sweeps, swiping at the dust streaking the folds and picking at the tear near her hip where thorns had snagged her during her search. Her hands flew up to her braid, attempting to tame the stray wisps of hair fluttering like frayed threads in the breeze.
Her gaze flicked to me when she noticed me watching her, scanning my face, my clothes, taking in the mud-caked, torn dress, the bloodstained sleeve on my cloak, the tangled mess my hair had become.
She took a deep breath. “This isn’t ideal,” she muttered, more to herself than to me. Her fingers twitched like she wanted to fix it all but didn’t know where to start. “We’ll have to hope someone in the palace can make you presentable before the Trial ceremony begins.”
Her words were clipped, but underneath the irritation, I heard it—that edge of worry.
I straightened my spine even more. “It doesn’t matter.”
She looked at me again. I met her eyes.
“I’ll make it work,” I said. “No matter what I’m wearing.”
A beat passed. Then she gave a tight nod, the corner of her mouth barely twitching. “You have to,” she said, turning back to the window. “They’ll be sharpening their teeth already.”
The palace gates loomed ahead, banded in thick veins of gold that caught the rising sun and blazed like fire. Two armored guards stood on either side, spears angled just enough to make the message clear.Welcome. Try something, and die.
I shifted in my seat, biting down on my lip anxiously.
As theokhèmarolled forward, the gates creaked open. That gold … so much gold, it flared bright, almost blinding. It wasn’t just decoration. It was indulgence. A gleaming, deliberate show of wealth forged while the rest of us ate rationed grain and threw our dead out in the sun to rot.
The air on the other side felt heavy with the stench of power. The palace beyond was worse than the gates—gleaming columns, carved beasts, fountains spilling water like Menelaus’s power included pissing luxury.
All I could think was: How many mouths could’ve been fed with just one of those golden bands? How many lives saved?
It wasn’t grandeur. It was glittering cruelty.
The palace towered above everything, its dark clay walls rising from the ground like they’d grown from the earth itself. I’d always assumed the whole thing was obsidian, like its name.
I was wrong.
As we drew closer, the illusion peeled back. Beneath the shadowed façade, white stone gleamed through in places—terraces spilling out like ribs, curved walls jutting from the rock like vertebrae. Not polished. Not painted. Raw, exposed … the color of bone.
It unsettled me more than the dark stone surrounding it.
There was something hungry about it. Like the palace was wearing its bloodstained skin too proudly, while the truth of it, the pale, cold structure beneath, waited quietly to be seen.
Friezes adorned the outer walls—scenes of legends I half remembered from childhood lessons. Titans rising from the sea. Monsters chained beneath the earth. Heroes crowned in victory. But where I knew other faces should have been—Zeus,Heracles, the old kings of myth—there was only one. The same face stamped into every coin, engraved into every statue, painted on every banner.
