Work Text:
The bards that morning were not as chipper in their songs and jovial demeanour, less rhythmical lines and more jagged prose aimlessly thrown together as if in a rush to get the words out.
There was a frenzied look in their eyes, and faintly, Shoko had felt something deeply sinister in their manic ramblings.
The last verse, however, they did not stutter like always: Gods save us all.
Shoko hadn’t thought anything of it then, proceeding to lather salves made of lavender and rose oil into the row of soldiers who still had much healing to do. She notes their far-off gazes as her hands graze over their wounds, not even flinching when she probes on exposed skin or still bleeding scars.
Ten years of war, she thought, is as good an armour as steel.
When she has made sure most soldiers were accounted for—Gojo, for all his doctored arrogance befitting his general position; truly did care for his men—Shoko makes her way over to the citadel after.
Her visits were growing frequent in nature, her unsated desire to once again marvel at the grandiose display of wooden architecture not yet quenched by time.
The fifth battalion had brought it over some few fortnights ago and dumped it on the center of the town’s apex, the gigantic horse statue had been found sitting seemingly abandoned in a barren strip of land as if in quiet waiting.
Getou had been the one to see it first, and ceremoniously gathered them all one night when stars hung low and they could observe the stilling deity in uninterrupted quiet.
Look at me, the fine woodwork glinted in the light, aren’t I a wonder?
Gojo was second in command only to the King himself, in this decade long war that had yet to cease; Getou as his brother-in-arms was one of the foundations for most of his battle prestige. The bards seldom sang of them without the other, always in tandem.
Young men they were, once, when the first of the thousand ships had sailed. All because their young prince Naoya had felt himself entitled to whisk a married woman away; and his father, the King, had been too forgiving of his son’s philandering.
It had also been sung to death and wrote into enough marble stones, that, of their short tenure in impressionable youth then: the crown maiden Utahime had a face worthy of such grand gestures.
Even Getou had disclosed as much, one day, when they were in the early stages of preparation and Shoko could still badger them in jest if the rumours were really true of the world’s most beautiful woman now being the most hunted one.
Gojo was a prince in his own right, having been the son of a king and a lineage that spanned out just as far as the Spartan seas would sail. Getou, the same, although of a significantly less dominion; but a conquered nation where his family still governed nonetheless. Shoko, daughter of Apollo’s High Priest, had first met the pair when their respective fathers had dropped them off for proper church teachings in the cathedral.
Decades have passed since then, and grown into fine adults they did.
Gojo and Getou moved up the ranks of the army through no efforts of the blood coursing through their veins lended them, but more so the undeniable swiftness that carried them through victory at every battle. The spear was their primary medium.
Shoko had been careful not to skip any of the ancient rites; her faith, her chosen armour. The temple priestess whispered extra prayer to the gods to guide her battle-ridden heroes safe passage back home; and as such, the city of Troy had flourished, even under the ruins of war.
Especially because they were still at war.
Something was wrong, Shoko had felt more than actually saw, with the massive contortion of refashioned wood perched on the town center.
It was like looking for the needle in a haystack, impossibly hard to find the source of discomfort, but still knowing it was there.
“Do you think it’s the color?” she had asked Gojo, who decided to accompany her on a Sunday pilgrimage she usually ended in the lower slums of the city, handing out relief packs to the underserved.
She wishes she could do more, had even gone to her father for as much; but the war had dragged on far longer than anyone had expected, and even the church was starting to ration its supplies.
Gojo carefully considers the statue, shifting the thread basket on his arm as Shoko looped hers around his elbow. “It still looks the same muddy brown to me. Why?”
“I just have this feeling,” she admits, eyes glazing all over the prized novelty, noting for the first time the chips in the wood and uneven structure; as if having been built more in a rush than true dedication to sculpting.
Her grip on Gojo’s arm tightened, as with the unceasing coil in her stomach. "That something bad is about to happen, and somehow, that horse is bad omen.”
“Darling,” Getou had consoled her a little after, when they had finished handing out the last reserves even Shoko could no longer keep in generous dozes, and met up with Getou by the local tavern. “We’re at war, something bad is always happening.”
Shoko locked herself in the temple and spent the next three days praying, offering up as much sacrificial herds as she possibly could; because no sooner, the King came hollering as he usually did, and had once again commanded the two best men of the Trojan army to seize another rebellion from the outskirts of the wall.
Ah, she thought bitterly as she clasped her hands together in earnest to no god in particular now, You have sent my friends to die again, haven’t you?
The itch was stronger now, a force Shoko could no less avoid even if she had wanted to, because: the first crack splintered through the birchbark by dawn, and the Greeks came bursting forth like bees from a cage with spontaneity as their main advantage.
Gojo and Getou were in the center of the commotion, having barrelled down to the mainland as soon as the first horns rang through the land.
They thumbled past the raging townspeople and broken buildings, their steeled armour banging together with every abrupt movement, helmets long been discarded.
The high-rise pillars their walled city was known for came crashing down, piles of granite and boulders wreaking havoc on what was left of the city. The whole acropolis was burning red, a hot blaze siphoned by archers from a distance who rained down terror on unsuspecting citizens and desecrating walls.
“Where’s Shoko?!” yelled Getou in distraction, trying to string along as many people he could into the discreet tunnels that ran underneath the city, where Nanami was instructed to wait.
“I don’t see her anywhere!”
Gojo hefted off another soldier who made the mistake of thinking he could sneak up on him. Prying his sword off from where it was lodged in the man’s throat, he hissed over the soldier’s cries, “The temple! Try the temple!”
But when Getou turned in search for the general direction of where Apollo’s temple should have been sitting high and mighty atop the mounted hills, his eyes froze in horror.
His sword fell on the rubble, a definitive clang ringing through the cries of the city.
The temple was the first thing the Greeks had burned down to the ground.