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The plain before the walls of Troy lay under a sky the color of congealed blood, the earth glutted and black, dark with the blood of men, churned to mire by the wheels of chariots and the feet of the dying. The Scamander's waters, once clear, now ran thick and sluggish, clogged with corpses and broken bronze, as the river god himself had raged against Achilles in earlier days. Ravens wheeled in black flocks, patient scavengers alongside the dogs that slunk between the heaped dead, tearing at soft eyes and exposed entrails. The air reeked of opened bellies—hot steam rising from spilled guts, the iron tang of gore mingled with the sweet-rot stink of flesh already turning beneath the first flies. Somewhere a gutted horse still screamed, a high, tearing sound like bronze scraped across stone, echoing the cries of men whose throats had been cut hours before.
Bodies lay in grotesque attitudes: some face-down in the mud, shields splintered beneath them; others on their backs, staring sightless at the emerging stars, mouths agape as if still shouting defiance. Spears protruded from chests like saplings; arrows bristled from necks and groins. Here a warrior clutched his severed arm; there another lay curled around the wound that had spilled his bowels in pale, steaming ropes. The battlefield was a vast charnel house, where the living had fled and only the dead remained to keep their silent vigil.
Eurylochus of Thessaly, once a man broad of shoulder and strong enough to wrestle bulls in the fields above his stone house, now lay pinned to this foreign dirt by the spear that had undone him. It had come in the press of the final clash—an Achaean throw, arcing high over the locked shields of the Myrmidons. The broad iron head punched through his bronze cuirass just below the ribs, tore through padded linen and muscle, ripped into bowel and lung, and lodged deep against his spine.
Around him, the clash raged on unchecked, a maelstrom of bronze and blood. The Achaeans pressed like wolves upon a faltering herd. Vision blurred by sweat and the fire in his side, he caught fragments of the slaughter: Thessalians who had shared wine beneath the oaks of home, oath-bound in the old way, now breaking like dry reeds before the Myrmidons' silent, locked advance.
Polydorus flashed across the field—broad, ever ready with a jest, dreaming aloud of his fields waiting unplowed. A spear took him clean through the throat; crimson arced high, raining on enemy shields. One bubbling surge, eyes swollen in final shock, face twisted—then he fell, still as quarried stone. The image lingered, sharp as the barbs grinding inside, a promise of return now dust on this foreign plain.
Young Iphitus wheeled close, barely past boyhood, once a guest at winter hearths. His horses foamed under desperate lash, a last rally cry lost in the din. An arrow struck true—cracking bone, shaft jutting rearward, gray matter dripping slow. He slumped across the reins, dragged lifeless, mangled to pulp beneath iron rims. The sight echoed older laughter, feasts cut short, futures spilled like seed on barren ground.
The air throbbed with ruin's chorus: shields grinding stone on stone, axes biting helmets to spill steaming brains, brief shrieks as guts uncoiled in slick loops, stench rising—acrid bowels, hot iron blood, fear's sour sweat thick as fog from the Scamander. Each clamor drove deeper than the spear, merging flesh-torment with the vast, slow unraveling of all that had been carried across the sea.
Twilight screams rose raw: faces from boyhood hunts, harvest tables—ringed now, felled without pause. One arm sheared in red fountain, sword still clutched as the body dropped, shock claiming swift. Another's belly torn navel to breastbone, pale innards tumbling—eyes glazing instant amid enemy laughter, form folding like discarded wool. The sounds and sights pressed heavy, heavier than cooling blood soaking the mud beneath him.
The ground shuddered under fleeing boots, bog treacherous with viscera squelching. Fallen lay drowned in shallow crimson pools, lungs pierced silent, ravens already tearing soft eyes with wet, deliberate pops. Each tremor jarred the shaft, sharpening the solitude amid the rout, bonds of years severed in heartbeats.
Ranks splintered, allies scattered like chaff on wind, banners trampled deep. Myrmidons surged with guttural roars, spears reaping clean: heads rolling free, torsos rent to bare ribs cracked like eggshells, hearts stilled in moments amid the wreckage. All that had been shared—mirth, oaths, the long voyage—reduced to offal steaming under indifferent stars.
Achaean cries swelled triumphant, crashing like waves over broken remnants, hope swallowed in the gore that crept ever closer. Alone amid the charnel tide, body racked and awareness unsparing, the full weight settled inexorable.
Dark blood pulsed in steady, viscous streams down his thigh, soaking the dust into black mud that clung to his greaves like grave soil. His guts, partially spilled, lay cooling beside him in pale coils, glistening under the faint starlight. Each breath was a separate agony: the barbs sawed across raw tissue, shattered ribs ground against one another with wet clicks, and the spear shaft shifted with every involuntary shudder, sending fresh fire through his core.
He tasted death on his tongue—copper, bile, the dust of the Scamander plain carried on the wind from the Hellespont. Flies crawled across his lips, drinking from the blood-flecked corners of his mouth. His fingers, once capable of bending horn bows, scrabbled weakly now in the filth, nails splitting as they clawed for purchase that would never come. The pain was no longer sharp; it had become a vast, slow grinding, a white-hot wheel turning endlessly inside his ruined body.
In the long hours since the battle's end, memories had come unbidden, flashing like bronze in sunlight. He remembered the morning of his wounding clearly: the Myrmidons advancing in silence, shields locked, spears a moving forest. He remembered his own shout as he drove his blade through a Trojan's throat, feeling the hot spill across his knuckles. He remembered the vineyards of Thessaly in spring, the silver-green olive leaves under moonlight, the scent of crushed thyme beneath his wife Clymene's bare feet as they lay together beneath the tree he had planted before sailing for Troy. He remembered his son—barely three when he left—riding his shoulders, small hands tangled in his beard, calling him "bear" in a voice like birdsong. These memories arrived not as comfort but as accusation: all lost now, wasted on this plain where dogs feasted on heroes.
He thought, too, of the long voyage from Aulis, the black ships drawn up on the beach, the sacrifices to Artemis that had bought them wind. He thought of the years of siege—the raids, the duels before the walls, the night watches under indifferent stars. He had fought beside greater men—Ajax, Diomedes, Odysseus—and held his own. Yet here he lay, unnamed in the songs that would be sung, just another shade for Hades' vast house.
Night deepened fully. The temperature plummeted; the blood cooling on his skin felt like hardening wax. He shivered violently, which only ground the spear deeper. A low moan escaped him—half animal, half prayer to gods who had long turned their faces away.
Then the darkness beside him thickened, gathered, took deliberate form.
Melinoë emerged from the veil between worlds, stepping lightly over the corpses as though the mud held no claim on her.
She was saffron-cloaked, the veil the color of quince flesh glowing faintly like lamplight through tomb dust. One half of her form was radiant—skin pale as Parian marble, hair a river of midnight shot with starlight, limbs graceful and manifest. The other half was absolute void: black that devoured light, so that her left arm, her left breast, half her face seemed erased, a hole torn in the fabric of night. Where the halves met, the boundary writhed like smoke rising from a fresh barrow grave. Her eyes—one gray as winter storm over the Aegean, one red as banked coals in a funeral pyre—regarded the dying man with the calm of deep, unchanging earth.
She moved without sound. The mud did not cling to her bare feet. The flies did not settle. The scent that accompanied her cut through the battlefield reek: damp cavern stone, crushed pomegranate seeds, night-blooming nicotiana, resinous cypress forest, and beneath it all the sweetened rot of ancient graves.
Eurylochus felt her presence first as a pressure behind his eyes, then as a sudden taste of myrrh and river water on his tongue. When he turned his head—slowly, each movement agony—he beheld her dual form and felt his faltering heart stutter.
She knelt beside him. The air around her was colder than the night wind yet carried the warmth of soil after rain. Her fingers—cool silk on one side, intangible void on the other—brushed the blood-slick spear shaft without staining.
"You suffer beyond the measure mortals were meant to bear," she said. Her voice was layered, many-voiced: the hush of wind through asphodel stalks, the distant keening of mourning women at a prothesis, the low rumble of the Cocytus far below, and something that vibrated in the bones rather than the ears. "I am Melinoë, bringer of night-wandering phantoms, driver of madness to mortals. Yet madness may also be mercy when the body's debt is too cruel."
He tried to speak. Only a wet rattle emerged, pink with lung-blood.
She leaned closer. Strands of her hair brushed his cheek—one side cool silk, the other a falling into nothingness. "The bright gods feast on Olympus and turn from this plain. But my father's realm is just, and the road to it need not always be torment. Your flesh must pay its due—the spear, the blood, the slow release of breath. But your mind… that I can lift free."
In her mismatched eyes he saw both his mother's tenderness on the day he sailed and the blank indifference of the grave. He saw, too, flashes of other battlefields she had walked—Marathon, Thermopylae, fields yet unborn—harvesting souls with the same calm.
"Will I… see my wife again? My son?" he rasped, voice a broken reed.
Melinoë was silent a moment, as though listening to distant judgment. "The underworld is wide. Most shades drift pale and forgetful through the Asphodel Meadows, where white flowers grow ankle-deep and memory fades like mist. There life is neither torment nor bliss—only a dim echo of earthly days. For the blessed, Elysium awaits: the Elysian plain at the ends of the earth, where no snow falls, no heavy storm, only the soft breath of Zephyrus blowing cool from Oceanus, carrying honey-sweet airs. There heroes feast and play at lyre and dice forever. There are islands of the blessed, where the good soul, after trials, finds meadows red with roses, shaded by frankincense trees, heavy with golden fruit; where some ride horses, others play athletics, others crown themselves with flowers beside tables laden with eternal wine."
She paused. "Your deeds will be weighed—your courage here, your kindness in Thessaly, the oaths kept, the lies told. My father Hades does not cheat the scales; no soul is wronged."
It was not the certain comfort he craved, but it was honest. Tears cut clean tracks through the blood and mud on his cheeks.
"Do it," he whispered.
Melinoë placed her palm against his forehead—cool as Styx water, warm as deep earth.
The madness came like the black wave of death closing over him, gentle yet irresistible.
At first only a loosening, as though iron chains snapped. Then sensation fractured. The pain remained—ferocious, intimate, every nerve screaming—but it receded to arm's length, became thunder rolling over distant hills. In its place rushed visions beyond mortal bearing: colors without name blooming like Tyrian dyes, music of invisible spheres, scents of meadows he had never walked yet remembered from some prenatal dream.
His body convulsed as though possessed by a god's fury, worse than any wound. Back arched until vertebrae creaked like ship's timbers in storm; heels drummed the blood-soaked earth; clawed fingers raked deep furrows that filled instantly with crimson. Pink foam flecked his beard; a howl tore from his throat—inhuman, raw, echoing across the silent plain like the cry of a soul already fleeing to Hades, or the wail of night-wandering phantoms Melinoë herself sends.
To any scavenger—a dog lifting its bloody muzzle, a raven pausing mid-feast—it was a death of ultimate horror: a man devoured alive by agony and raving madness, twisting until his spine should snap, eyes rolling white as a sacrificial victim's.
But inside the ruin of his flesh, Eurylochus soared beyond imagining.
He stood barefoot in a meadow of starlit grass soft as a lover's inner thigh, the blades cool and silvered. Clymene waited there, younger than memory, hair loose and scented with wild thyme and olive blossom, laughing without sorrow as their son chased fireflies that were also the souls of the blessed. When he lifted the boy the weight was perfect, the small heart hammering against his own like a bird returning to nest. They walked beside a river that sang in his mother's voice, clear over smooth stones, carrying the scent of Thessalian hills in spring.
Phantoms came, night wandering shades under Melinoë's keeping—and with them lost comrades from the ships, his father long dead, childhood dogs bounding with eternal youth. They embraced him without grief, sharing wine that tasted of forgotten summers. He rode a horse across endless plains where no spear flew, wrestled laughing with heroes of old, feasted beneath trees heavy with golden fruit while lyres played melodies that dissolved every lingering sorrow.
Time unraveled. He drifted through luminous memories made tangible: the scent of Clymene's neck after love-making beneath the olive tree, the taste of new-pressed olives sharp on the tongue, the sound of waves against black ships at dawn, the warmth of his son's sticky fingers in his beard. Each moment glowed untarnished, expanded into eternity. He understood, with the flawless clarity madness grants, that pain had been the tax exacted for having lived and loved so fiercely. The coin was paid in full; the debt discharged.
Through it all, on the battlefield, Melinoë remained, cradling his head in her lap—cool silk on one side, intangible void on the other—as the madness worked its gentle mercy. The body jerked and spasmed beneath her touch; blood slowed, then ceased; the eyes fixed and glazed like still water under cold stars. Something in her dual face softened with quiet satisfaction. This was the rare kindness she could offer when the bright gods looked away: not escape from death, but release from its torment.
At last the convulsions eased. Somewhere far off—beyond mortal hearing yet unmistakable to chthonic ears—a single thread snapped, clean and final, sheared by the pitiless shears of the Moirai.
Melinoë's mismatched eyes lifted toward the deepening night. "Took them long enough," she murmured, voice layered with dry amusement and ancient weariness.
The air beside them thickened, cooled further, took deliberate form. Thanatos emerged from the folds of darkness—tall, winged, cloaked in soft black that drank the starlight, his face beautiful and implacable, neither cruel nor kind. In one hand he carried the silver blade that severed the last tether between flesh and psyche; the other hung empty, ready to guide.
He inclined his head to Melinoë in silent acknowledgment—old colleagues, both servants of the same house—then bent over the ruined body. The blade flashed once, soundless. The psyche slipped free: a little breath, thin as smoke, swift as a night bird, wailing faintly as it rose.
The shade coalesced, translucent yet whole, and looked down at the broken vessel it had worn, then at the vast charnel plain, then at the two divinities waiting. No fear touched it—only the calm that follows inevitable fate and the first faint dimming of earthly memory.
Thanatos extended his hand. The shade took it without hesitation.
Melinoë rose gracefully, brushing mud from her saffron cloak that was never truly stained. "I will walk a little way," she said to Thanatos, voice low, almost fond. He nodded again, accepting.
Together—Death, the bringer of phantoms, and the newly freed soul—they descended, not through soil but through folds in the night itself. The air grew denser, colder, scented with asphodel and river mist. They passed the ashen flow of Acheron, the river of woe, its sullen waters carrying grief like sediment, whispering with the weight of unlived goodbyes. Charon's silent ferry glided nearby on the Styx, his lamp a single cold star; he poled without sound, eyes ancient and impartial.
They crossed the wide fields of Asphodel, white with flowers that bowed though no wind stirred. Pale shades drifted here, murmuring half-lives, neither joyful nor tormented, only dimly existing like twilight shadows. Some turned mildly to watch the small procession pass.
Before any meadow could claim the soul, the palace claimed the question.
An inner passage opened where the mist thickened—an arch cut into darkness so precise it felt like a law made visible. The air beyond had weight. It pressed against the lungs, not to suffocate, but to slow, to make haste an impossibility. The taste in the mouth shifted as they crossed—first the dull tang of old metal, then something dry and root-deep, like earth sealed beneath stone for centuries and still holding its own cold.
The hall unfolded vast and ordered, built to contain judgment the way a deep bed contains a river: by refusing to yield. The floor underfoot was not cruel, only exact—stone that met the sole with a faint bite of reminder, a quiet insistence that every step was counted. Light did not fill the room; it selected. It laid a thin sheen across edges and left the rest in patient shadow, as if sight itself required permission.
At the far end rose the dais. A throne of black, veined faintly as though gold had once tried to live inside it, waited in stillness that did not feel empty. Near it sat a second seat—older in its silence, carved from a single ancient mass whose softened lines suggested time had worried it into subtle curves. Between them, the air held an unspoken axis: a place where verdicts could fall without anyone needing to raise their voice.
In the side-dark, where built stone gave way to older rock, three presences waited—judges not announced, only felt. Their faces were indistinct, veiled by distance and the room's refusal to offer details freely, but their attention was sharp enough to raise the hair along the shade's arms. Beside the dais stood an attendant draped in dark cloth, a figure reduced to function, hands pale and steady around a staff worn smooth by repetition. At its feet rested a cup—stone or metal, it hardly mattered—set into a shallow cut in the floor, placed there as deliberately as a boundary line.
No questions were asked aloud. No speech was demanded. The shade stood at the marked place and the hall listened so intently that even the thin tremor of its breath seemed loud inside the skull.
Thanatos did not look at the judges; he did not need to. He held the shade's hand lightly, not as comfort, but as custody, and waited with the calm of one who has seen every answer and still respects the moment it arrives.
Melinoë lingered a step back, her bright half catching the scant light, her dark half drinking it. She watched the cup the way one watches a mouth: for what it will swallow and what it will declare.
The attendant lifted the staff and struck once—clean, contained. The sound ran through the floor and up through bone like a remembered bell. The air tightened at the center of the room, as if the hall drew a breath.
From somewhere above—unseen, unquestionable—a stone dropped into the cup.
A single, small click.
The shade flinched at the finality of it, not in fear, but in recognition. The room's attention settled with that sound, as though a weight had found its proper place.
A second stone followed, falling after a heartbeat's pause—enough time for hope to think, enough time for dread to answer.
Click.
Two stones. One cup. A verdict rendered without language.
The judges did not move. The attendant did not speak. The decision simply existed now, as absolute as the floor beneath them.
Melinoë's gaze slid to Thanatos. "There," she murmured, so low it was almost a thought. "That's that."
Thanatos released the shade's hand for the space of a breath—permission, not abandonment. The air on one side of the hall shifted, thinning into a corridor that wasn't there a moment before. It opened like a curtain drawn back from deeper dark, not inviting, not threatening—merely available.
The shade looked once toward the dais, as if searching for a face it would never be allowed to fully see. Then it turned toward the corridor the verdict had opened and stepped forward, the edges of its form blurring where the air ahead erased rather than chilled.
They left the court behind without the court acknowledging their departure.
Beyond lay the verge of Elysium, where light warmed to honey-gold and distant voices carried on the gentle breath of Zephyrus from Oceanus. Meadows red with roses stretched endless, shaded by trees of frankincense and golden fruit. Heroes exercised on green plains, rode tireless horses, played at lyre and board games beneath perpetual ease.
The shade paused at the boundary, looking back once toward the world of bronze and blood and brief, fierce sunlight.
Melinoë touched its shoulder—brief, almost sisterly. "The scales have spoken," she said. "Your courage weighed heavy; your heart was true. Go. They wait."
Thanatos released the shade's hand. It stepped forward into the light. The boundary closed soundlessly behind it, and faint music—perhaps Clymene's laughter, perhaps a child's voice calling "bear"—welcomed it home.
Thanatos inclined his head once more to Melinoë and turned deeper into the realm, toward other souls awaiting his quiet blade.
Melinoë lingered a moment on the threshold, listening to Elysium's distant song. Then she ascended alone, back toward the battlefield where the wind still carried the scent of iron and where other broken bodies cooled beneath indifferent stars.
Far off, another moan rose from the dark—a fresh soul clinging to ruined flesh. There was, after all, work yet to do before morning.
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