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She was awakened by screams – distant, agonising, the dying yells of men echoing somewhere within the palace.
For a moment, she laid still upon the bed her husband had built with his own hands, a bed rooted to the earth itself. The veil of sleep clung to her as she turned to the bronze mirror some podes ahead of her.
She stared at the reflection – at what she had become – a shade.
Perhaps you really are dead, my lord, and in your journey to the underworld you have taken my life with you.
Yellow hair a tangled mess, eyes swollen and red from her endless weeping. Her lips bore the angry red of having been bitten raw. Tear tracks clung to her cheeks, salt stiffened on her skin. Like so many nights before, she had wept herself into unconsciousness.
She was alone. More alone than she had ever been.
Odysseus had left her and now their son had vanished too, stolen away on a ship into the unknown, just like his father had all those years ago.
Do not grow up so quickly, Telemachus. Do not grow up so quickly, Telemachus. Do not grow up so quickly, Telemachus. Do not grow up so quickly, Telemachus. Do not grow up so quickly, Telemachus. Do not grow up so–
How many times must she have uttered those words to her precious babe. How many countless days and weeks and months and years – in a desperate attempt to preserve his youth for her sweet husband, for the man who had made her a mother in the first place, and in turn had lost the gift of fatherhood.
Their babe had grown up, and now he had left her behind, just like he had – father and son were ever so alike.
Was she truly so wretched?
The screams below continued.
She trembled, truly afraid. Still, she forced herself upright. Her limbs were heavy, as if grief had weight that shackled her, as if sorrow had sunk into her bones. She reached for her veil with shaking fingers. Long time ago, her kin used to fondly say that she was akin to the flow of a river, that Penelope could not be shackled or bound – they were all wrong.
The gods had proved it so, by shackling her to this cruel fate – a wife without a husband, a mother without a child – they should have just taken her wretched life if they despised her so much.
Had the challenge she set – the test of her husband’s divine bow – come to its brutal conclusion? Had they begun to turn on each other, those beasts who had taken up residence in her halls, feeding on her son’s inheritance, dreaming of her bed?
It would not surprise her.
Perhaps they fought now over who would be king in Odysseus’ place. Perhaps they had tired of pretending. Perhaps one would drag her screaming from her chamber before the sun rose, and she would be raped in the very halls that once rang with her husband’s loving laughter. The halls he built with such care and named in her honour.
Penelope’s Palace.
Sometimes she heard his voice. Just a murmur, barely there – a whisper on the wind. My precious Penelope... Or was it My heart? My loving woman? My beloved queen? The words blurred, like dreams too long clutched after waking, but what else did she have left but her dreams.
On her worst days, she would refuse to eat. Hunger brought him closer.
When she starved, he came to her. He would scold her gently – fiercely – tenderly. He would sit beside her, his eyes full of worry, urging her to eat, to live. She would eat for him, mouthful by painful mouthful, and by the time she finished, he would be gone again, and she left alone once more.
But at least then, she still had Telemachus.
She had had their son – no matter how wrought he was with her silences, her refusal to allow the throne to pass onto him, no matter how quick he was to turn away from her broken eyes.
He had been angry, true, but present. Breathing. A living reminder that her husband had once loved her, that she had once been more than just a statue sculpted from sorrow.
Now even he had left her.
Why would he do this to her? Had she not fed him from her own breast? Reared him all these years? Had she not lived for his sake alone?
He had taken a ship and vanished into her grandfather’s endless river, leaving her behind just as his father had.
He had known that his presence along with their subjects were what was stopping those monsters. Why had he left her behind to this fate? Why had her precious child abandoned her?
Her eyes burned. Tears gathered, though she did not let them fall.
She was so tired of weeping, so tired of being the only one left behind.
She stood.
Walked.
The cold of the floor bit at her bare feet, the silence of the halls wrapping around her like a shroud.
But before she could go far, a voice stopped her, a hand reached out.
“You mustn’t go down,” Actoris pleaded, her voice cracking, her old eyes wide with terror. The woman who had tended to her since childhood, now clung to her like a frightened child.
Penelope shook her head.
“No,” she whispered, pushing aside Actoris’ trembling arms. “I do not… I do not wish for them to desecrate my marriage bed. The bed my king carved with his own hands, for his beloved bride. For me.”
Her voice broke, but she did not stop.
“You know it is true,” she said. “Once the fighting ends, the victor will come for what he believes is his reward. He will come for me.”
She swallowed.
“I will not… I cannot…”
The words would not come. Her throat closed with grief. Her tears, silent, fell down her cheeks like rain down marble.
Actoris collapsed to her knees and clutched the hem of Penelope’s ivory skirts, sobbing. “Please,” she begged, “please my Queen, do not go– please–”
But Penelope’s heart was hollowed out – there was no one left to fill it up, no one left for it to beat still.
“I am tired, Actoris,” she said. “So very tired.”
Tired of waiting.
Tired of hoping.
Tired of surviving.
“If Telemachus should ever return… if he finds that I have been defiled, killed… then even gods will rise with him. They will give him back his father’s throne.”
Her voice was calm now, almost cold.
“I am doing what must be done. For him. For Ithaca. For all of us.”
And she turned.
Behind her, the handmaids wept. They called after her, but she was already halfway through the family wing, her steps growing steadier with each passing moment.
She told them not to follow. Told them to slip into silence, to become shadows among the victors. To save themselves what little peace they might find in submission.
“Become invisible,” she told them. “Pretend to be what they will not bother to break.”
Still, they followed – Actoris wailing softly, another with hands pressed to her mouth to stifle sobs – but Penelope walked ahead of them, as if in a dream.
Lady Selene’s silver light pooled across the polished stone of the colonnade, pale and mournful, as she walked.
Through the wide, hollow belly of the palace – past the chambers where once her husband had met his council, past the stone thresholds where lords of Ithaca and the isles beyond had knelt, praised, argued, and feasted. The voices of the past echoed faintly through the hallways now, carried on the smoke that curled like wraiths through the heights. She moved like a shade, silent, slipping between memories and nightmares – unable to find a difference.
The screams grew louder. Closer. Agonised.
Men were dying – slaughtered.
She passed the great hearth where once fires had blazed in joy during the feasts honouring the gods. She passed murals she no longer saw. She passed tapestries she had woven herself – gifts to the gods, to the seasons, to the line of Cephalus. Forgotten relics of a home that no longer welcomed her.
At last, she reached the outer corridor of the megaron – the great hall where the heart of the palace had once beat with life and laughter, where her husband ruled. Now, the scent of blood mingled with the metallic tang of fire and fear.
Her steps slowed.
Corpses littered the marble.
She stepped over one, her bare foot brushing against clammy flesh. She looked down.
He was from Dulichium.
She knew his face. A young man, smooth-cheeked, full of empty words and greed, once confident enough to speak of marriage to her as if it were his right, as if she were his right. His neck had been cut clean through, eyes staring at nothing.
So it was true then – they had turned on each other. Or someone had turned on them.
A flicker of something stirred within her – not joy, not even vengeance – just... satisfaction. Faint and terrible. A flickering spark in the endless dark.
She continued.
The megaron gates loomed before her, towering and half-ajar. She could hear the chaos within – the clash of metal, the wet thud of flesh being struck, the unrelenting cries of the dying. She should have turned back. She should have listened to the voice in her head that had started to scream, wordless and primal.
But Penelope had long since ceased to listen to reason.
She slipped through the half-open door like a shade and shut the gate behind her.
Darkness swallowed her.
Only the faint light of the braziers remained, casting the room in a flickering, infernal glow – red and orange, like a world drowned in firelight. The air was thick with blood and smoke and death. Her feet – pale and bare – stepped soundlessly into the crimson pooling across the polished floors.
She did not lift her skirts. Let them be stained. Let them wear the blood like mourning robes.
She, too, was stained.
Stained with grief. With sorrow. With years and years of waiting that had hollowed her out like rot.
The screams now roared in her ears. She covered them with her hands, trying to shut them out, but her palms ached – ached with the pains and aches of sitting at the loom, of days spent weaving and nights spent undoing that weaving, of lies spun with broken fingers and an aching heart.
All for nothing.
All for h–
She stopped. Pressed her back to a column.
And looked.
Men were running, falling, dying. Arrows flew through the smoky air, swift and unerring. One man fell just feet from her, a gurgling cry slipping from his mouth. The arrow that pierced his throat glinted in the brazier light.
She stared.
That fletching. That shaft.
Recognition struck her like a blow to the chest.
These were no common weapons.
They were his.
Her husband’s bow. His arrows.
A chill spread through her, slow and cold.
Fear.
Penelope stared at the arrow lodged in the man's throat, her breath catching in her lungs as if invisible fingers had wrapped around her neck. Her trembling hand gripped the column behind her, the marble cold and unyielding, the only solid thing left in her spinning world.
No.
It was not possible.
No one should have been able to string that bow. His bow. Her husband’s sacred weapon. Not even the strongest of the suitors, not even the ones swollen with their youth and arrogance, should have come close to bending it and stringing it.
It had sat untouched in their chambers for years, waiting. Waiting for the one it belonged to. Waiting for the only hands worthy of touching and holding it.
And yet…
There it was. Not just strung, but in use. Arrows flying true, felling men with the silent wrath of justice long denied.
Her knees buckled, but she did not fall. She would not fall. She could not – because if she fell, the dream might shatter. The madness of it might break her open like a cracked amphora, spilling everything out – her hope, her leftover sanity, her soul.
Her lips moved, breathless, forming a name she dared not say aloud.
Odysseus.
No.
No, it was a trick.
A cruel trick of some god still toying with her.
Had one of the monsters managed the impossible?
Had some cunning bastard figured out a way to mock her grief, to mimic her beloved and claim her hand?
Her heart raced. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She leaned harder against the column, her gaze fixed on the next arrow that loosed itself from the smoke and found another throat.
She took a trembling step forward, then another. She moved like a shade, skirts dragging in blood, her bare feet soaked through.
Through the smoke, a shadow moved. Not like the other men – this one did not flee. This one hunted.
He stood tall and sure, his form a blur of shadow and firelight, bow in hand, arrow nocked. And when he turned, just for a moment, the torchlight kissed his face.
Penelope’s breath left her in a soundless exhale. Her heart that she had thought had forgotten how to beat, started its rhythm anew.
That face.
A little older. Lined with pain and war and years away from her arms. But it was him.
It was him.
The world tilted. Her body forgot how to move. Her lips parted, but no sound emerged.
Odysseus.
It could not be.
And yet–
It was.
Her husband. Her king.
Her Odysseus.
She watched as he raised the bow once more and drew the string back with ease. His glowing gaze was death. His face a mask carved from rage.
She pressed her hand to her mouth, suddenly unsure if she wanted to scream or sob or fall to her knees.
Tears welled, spilling hot down her cheeks, mingling with the blood and smoke on her skin. She did not care.
He was here.
He was real.
And he was killing them all.
She moved closer, no longer able to stay hidden, drawn towards him through that divine pull that had dragged her towards him from the very beginning.
All the fear that had consumed her up until then left in an instant at the sight of the god-like man who had haunted her all these years.
His mouth parted.
He had seen her.
Across the ruin and blood, across the broken corpses and choking smoke, their eyes met – two beings caught in the wrong world. “Penelope,” he whispered.
She saw the word form, though the sound did not carry. But she knew it. Gods, she knew it. She had dreamt about it night after night – his voice, his breath, his warm hands, imagined in the dark to keep the world from swallowing her whole.
And now here he stood, not imagined. Not dreamed.
Real.
His face was gaunt, shadowed with pain and grime and war. His beard grown thick and streaked with grey, as had his hair – closer in length to their child’s hair. His skin was streaked with blood – not all of it his, she knew that instinctively. Rags were too good a term for what little adorned him, though even that was drenched in blood.
There was a wildness to him, something feral and terrible. But beneath it all, she saw the man she had loved, the man she had lost, the man she had waited for until her bones ached with it.
He turned toward her.
The bow followed.
The tip of the arrow aligned with her heart.
And she did not flinch.
If he let go now, she knew it would strike true. Straight through her chest. Through the very core of her being. Through all the years of grief and silence and fury and longing. And strangely, she did not care.
Her heart had always been his anyway.
If it pleased him to kill her, so be it. Let it be him.
Let her die in his hands. Let her blood wash over his fingers as it had over her soul for twenty endless years.
Her lips parted.
She did not speak. She could not. But her eyes told him everything – It is me. Your Penelope. I am here. I waited. Gods forgive me, I waited even when I did not believe I could.
The string trembled.
He had not yet loosed it.
But his breath caught.
A small shift passed through him, a tremor, like a man waking from a dream on the edge of sleep. His hand wavered.
She stepped closer.
Each step was a risk. Each step she wondered if this broken man – this weapon carved from the ruin of her husband – would truly see her, or if war and pain and grief had stolen all that was gentle in him.
But she stepped forward all the same, skirts heavy with blood, feet numb with cold and sorrow.
He suddenly took a step back as she neared him, the bow still drawn, the string trembling like ropes holding the sails of a ship together in the smoke-stained air.
“Do not,” he whispered, his voice low, hoarse, scraped raw by battle and sorrow. His gaze roamed her face and her form as if trying to memorize her, as if he feared she would vanish like a mirage.
“I am… stained,” he said, voice cracking. “I do not wish to… to stain you.”
Penelope froze, the pain in her chest deepening.
The war had not won - her gentle attentive husband stood before her still.
“My hands and soul are drenched with the blood of thousands upon thousands – with murder and betrayal and blasphemy. I have done things that the gods themselves will turn away from. Forgive me, but I cannot let you near me. I am not the man who took you for bride.”
She looked at him, this man who was her husband, her king, her love – and yet claimed to not be so, claimed to not be the same man who had once held her gently beneath tree of their marriage bed, who had laughed with her at Lady Eos’ first light on so many days. She looked at the arrow still pointed toward her heart, and at the anguish etched deep in the lines of his face.
And then she spoke, softly, clearly.
“Then you must forgive me in return,”
His eyes widened a fraction.
“For I took the bed you built for us out of our chamber,” she continued, voice calm, unshaking, “and replaced it with another. You see, it was getting on in its time – creaky and weary–”
Before she could finish, the arrow flew.
It loosed in a blur, a silver streak through the firelight – and though it raced past her cheek close enough to stir her hair, she did not flinch. A grunt sounded behind her, and a body fell – hard. The arrow had found another throat.
She did not turn to look. She did not need to.
She had not been afraid.
Her heart thundered, but her eyes remained on him. Steady. Unyielding.
If he had wanted her dead, she would be dead.
But she knew him.
She had always known him.
And he – for the first time in what must have felt like lifetimes – stared at her as if he was seeing something not possible. Not real. Sorrow twisted through his expression like a storm cloud.
“YOU DID NOT EVEN MOVE! YOU DID NOT EVEN FLINCH! YOU COULD HAVE HURT YOURSELF! What if it had been you I had aimed my arrow towards?!” he breathed. Disbelief, rage, and something like despair swirled in his eyes.
What fear do I have from Odysseus, she thought.
Then his brow furrowed, incredulous, caught halfway between rage and confusion.
“What do you mean,” he said slowly, dangerously, “you replaced our marriage bed?”
Penelope lifted her chin.
“I mean what I said,” she replied. “It creaked. I had it moved. Another one was brought in.”
His mouth opened – then closed. The hand holding the bow trembled slightly. The fury in him flared so hot it looked as though it might devour him whole.
“You moved it,” he said, the words thick with disbelief. “You replaced the bed I carved with my own hands – from the olive tree that grew through the heart of our chamber?! IMPOSSIBLE!”
She said nothing.
Let the silence speak.
Let him hear himself.
And then, something shattered.
His eyes widened further – as if struck.
His breath caught.
He stared at her.
“Penelope…” he said again – but now his voice was barely a breath, barely a prayer. “You know that no one could have moved it. Not without divine–” His words broke off.
It really was him…
He really had returned to her.
“Exactly,” she said. “Our marriage bed – our marriage itself, rooted onto the very life-giving earth. How can any deed – no matter how cruel, part you from I?!”
She stood tall, her voice rising now, in clarity – in that bone-deep truth that could not be denied, not by gods or grief or the blood that soaked the stones between them.
“I am your woman,” she said, fierce and shaking, pushing forward every bit of strength that she had left. “Odysseus’ woman. Odysseus’ bride. Your bride. The mother to your heir. I was given to you before the altar of Teleia Hera herself, my hand placed in yours by my father’s trembling fingers. And I went with you willingly, wholly – body, mind, heart and soul. Even when mine own father begged me not to.”
She walked closer, step by step, her gaze never leaving his.
He did not move, as if he could not. He stood as if stricken by the gods themselves, the bow slack in one hand, the other still curled in tight, bloodstained tension at his side.
She reached out and clasped that hand – that ruined, shaking, blood-wet hand – with her own.
Tears slipped down her cheeks, but she did not look away. Her hand trembled only from the weight of everything they had borne, not from fear – how could she fear him?
“Stain me,” she whispered, voice cracking with pain. “I care not. I was stained the moment you were. I am yours, My lord. And you are mine.”
He stared at her, lips parting, shaking his head slightly, as if he could not understand how the world had spun back around and handed her to him again. His fingers tightened around hers with trembling reverence, and then he pulled her close with that trembling, bloodied hand, as he had playfully a thousand times before – slow at first, as though he feared even now she might vanish from his arms like sea foam under moonlight.
But she did not vanish. She let go of his hand, only to throw her arms around his neck and collapse into him, her body folding against his with the sudden, shattering relief of a woman who had held herself together for far too long. Finally, at last – he was here.
Her knees gave out, but he held her upright with but one arm. And she sobbed – not softly or gracefully, but in great, choking heart-wrenching waves. Years of silence uncoiled from her throat in heaving gasps, grief tearing loose from the prison where she had buried it. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, clutching at him as if he might disappear again if she so much as moved from him.
Her fingers curled tightly into the rags of his tunic. She could feel his heart hammering beneath the grime and blood, his living beating heart. Could smell the salt and smoke and blood that clung to him like another skin. His arm wrapped around her back, the other curled around her hips, pulling her tighter into him, clutching her like a drowning man finally breaching the surface.
The blood that covered him undoubtedly smeared her tunic – deep crimson soaking into her ivory cloth. The ruin of battle, the filth of it, marked her now too. But she cared not.
She buried her sobs against his throat. “You are here,” she whispered brokenly between breaths. “You are real, you are here…”
Odysseus said nothing at first. His arms held her tighter, pulled her closer to him – until she did not know where he began and she ended.
And then, hoarse and low and rough as storm winds scraping over jagged rocks, he murmured, “I am here. Gods help me, I made it back.”
Her fingers tightened in his hair, her body shaking with the force of her weeping. “I thought… I thought the seas had swallowed you. I thought I was mad for waiting still. That the gods were cruel.”
“They are cruel,” he rasped into her hair. “But I am more stubborn.”
That ragged ghost of a laugh caught in both their throats – half pain, half joy.
“I saw you,” he whispered, his voice thick with awe, pain, disbelief. “Through the smoke. I thought I had gone mad at last. Thought I was dead already, and the gods had fashioned your face from memory to torment me one last time.”
She pulled back only enough to look at him. His blood covered face was blotched with tears, lashes clumped and cheeks streaked with smoke and salt – and still, in that moment, she thought he was more glorious than any sight she had ever seen.
This was what she had longed for all these years. He was what she had longed for.
“But it was you,” he said. “It is you.”
She nodded, a soft, trembling sound escaping her as she pressed her forehead to his, blood staining her face further. Looking into his brown-blue eyes and feeling her heart burst.
She barely had a breath left in her, not after all she had spoken. But he took what remained of her – the moment his lips met hers, everything in her shattered.
His kiss was desperation and fury, agony and devotion – not gentle, no, there was nothing gentle in it, nothing left unscarred between them. It was the kiss of a man who had come through whatever tribulations he had undergone and still could not believe he had found her at the end of it. A man who had been starved of everything soft, and now clung to it like a drowning man to driftwood.
Her knees buckled completely.
She collapsed into him, the last of her strength siphoning away like tide drawn back into the sea. But he did not let her fall – not even a little. That arm of his, strength forged in war and battle, held her with such veneration it broke her anew. The tension in his shoulders trembled with restraint, but his mouth never left hers. Their lips moved as if no time had passed, as if their hearts remembered the shape of one another even when their mortal forms had forgotten.
Her hands slid up his chest, slick with blood and sweat and soot, and tangled in his hair – his ragged, sweat-matted hair that smelled of salt and blood. She kissed him like she could pour twenty years of love into that one moment. As though if she could kiss him deep enough, she could erase the scars from his skin and his soul.
And he kissed her like she was the only thing that had ever mattered.
Their tongues met – tentative at first, like two shades remembering how to live after being given their lives once more. And then greedier, desperate, need blooming beneath the ache. She moaned into him, soft and shuddering, and he drank that sound like a man denied water in a desert.
He broke the kiss only when neither of them could breathe, and even then, he did not release her. His forehead remained pressed to hers, breaths coming harsh and uneven, eyes squeezed shut as if the act of seeing her again burned too much.
Her hands cupped his face, thumbs trembling along the edges of his jaw.
“You are real,” she whispered, because she still could not believe it. He had returned to her. “You are real. You are mine.”
“I am yours,” he rasped, voice a broken vow. “Always. Even when the gods tried to make me otherwise. I never stopped being yours.”
She kissed him again before she could sob – quick, fevered, and sharp, her lips catching the edge of his. And then another kiss, and another – as if she feared if she stopped he would vanish, as if only her touch could tether him to the mortal world.
He growled softly against her mouth, a low, pained sound, and pressed her tighter into him, lifting her slightly off the ground. She clung to him, arms locked around his shoulders, legs trembling with the weight of a decade and more of longing breaking all at once.
“I ruined your tunics,” she murmured into the crook of his neck, still breathless. “I wept into it. Every night I thought it would be the last I would live through without you by my side.”
“I dreamed of your voice,” he said hoarsely, hands trembling as they slid up her back, cradling her head, holding her so preciously in his arms. “Even when I forgot my name. I remembered yours.”
Tears fell between them again, mingling with blood, with sweat, with everything that they were. She kissed the scars on his jaw, his cheek, his brow – a devotional litany of love, of yearning that had consumed her.
He kissed her again, deeper this time, slower – the fury in him melting into something softer. Something that trembled. And she knew then that this, too, would take time. They had both been broken, reshaped, undone by years they had lived apart.
But they were here. Together. At the end. And that was enough.
“I will never leave you again,” he breathed against her lips.