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It happened quietly.
In passing.
Not during some grand moment carved into the bones of history.
Not on a battlefield, with swords ringing like bells.
Not in a marble temple, steeped in incense, where prayers clung to every echo.
No.
It happened in the corridor behind the western courtyard, where the sun had already begun its descent and the stones beneath Hermes’s feet still held its warmth. A ribbon of golden light spilled through the high window, catching on motes of dust suspended in the air, soft as breath.
Hermes hadn’t meant to linger.
He had arrived in Ithaca like wind through an olive branch — sudden, invisible, and with purpose. He had come only to plant a thought in a mortal mind. A subtle influence, a whisper passed like a folded note from one soul to another. Quick work. Barely worth remembering.
Mortals were easy like that.
But then he saw him.
Telemachus.
There in the hall, barefoot on the mosaic floor, Telemachus stood barefoot, speaking in a low voice to an old nursemaid who pressed a cool cloth to his brow and fussed over him with the easy scolding affection born of many years and countless scraped knees.
“You’ll skinny down like your father did if you keep skipping meals,” she huffed, her voice roughened by age but not unkind.
Her hands, calloused from years of tending, moved with a gentleness that broke something in Hermes he didn’t realize could be broken.
Telemachus only smiled. That soft, slanting thing he did when he wanted someone to worry less. It wasn’t arrogant. It wasn’t calculated. It was a habit of someone who had grown up easing the grief of others.
He allowed the fussing. He always did.
Hermes, still as breath, watched from the shadowed archway.
It was the prince’s skin that caught him first. Not the shape of his shoulders or the length of his limbs, those would come later. No, it was the skin.
Sun-kissed and soft, faintly fragrant with rosewater and saffron oil, untouched by war or time. It was the kind of skin that belonged to someone who had been cherished all his life, and Hermes — who had known centuries of blood, grief, and hard-earned wisdom felt a peculiar ache at the sight of it.
A dove , Hermes thought. An unbloodied thing too bright for this kingdom of stone.
His eyes traced Telemachus’s hands; elegant, unscarred. One of his hands rested lightly on the nursemaid’s wrist, the other held a scroll he clearly had no intention of reading.
They treat him like an injured bird, Hermes thought, and the words surprised him by how much they hurt. No wonder he doesn’t fly.
And yet.
Beneath that softness, something pulsed.
The slope of Telemachus’s shoulders. The way his jaw tensed when he thought no one saw. Athena’s presence coiled beneath the skin. Not as comfort, but as challenge. He was changing. Hardening. A chrysalis held in place by duty and silence, inching toward the shape the world expected him to take.
Becoming.
Hermes, god of roads and thresholds, felt something within him still. For the first time in an age, he stayed.
He watched the boy gently take the cloth and press it to his own brow, alone now. The nursemaid had wandered off. Telemachus remained, quiet and thoughtful, unaware that anyone had been watching at all.
Hermes vanished before the boy could turn, but something had changed. A pebble cast into still water. A single breath held too long. A god’s attention, caught.
And so he returned.
That was how it began.
His visits.
The lies he told himself.
Just passing through.
Just one last time.
Always one last time.
Sometimes, he wove excuses from thin air — a message, a mission, some errant godly duty that just so happened to lead him past a certain hallway. Past a certain window. Past a certain boy .
Business, he called it. Matters of fate. Divine errands. But really, he just wanted to be near the boy with the quiet hands and summer skin.
To linger in the spaces where Telemachus had just been.
To breathe the air he left behind.
Just passing through. Just checking the wind. Just once more.
He wanted to. And he wanted to so badly. To touch, to hold, to keep.
He hadn’t meant to leave anything. Tricksters weren’t sentimental. They took. They didn’t offer. Hermes wasn’t a god of altars or devotions. He ran. That was his nature.
But the boy’s quiet smile made his fingers itch.
So he left something.
A sprig of wild thyme.
Freshly picked from the sunlit cliffs of Mount Hymettus, where only gods walked. Its leaves were still humming with divine heat when Hermes tucked it into the pages of Telemachus’s sword manual, a book left half-open beside his bed, abandoned after some weary lesson.
No note. No flourish. Just the herb.
When Telemachus discovered it late evening, he blinked. Frowned. Turned it over in his hands. He sniffed it once, confused, then again more thoughtfully. The scent was not from Ithaca. Not from any garden he knew.
He looked out the balcony.
"Strange," Telemachus murmured aloud, turning the sprig of thyme between his fingers. He had read once, or perhaps heard it from an old soldier in the courtyard that warriors carried thyme into battle, believing its scent could help them find their way home. A charm against confusion. A reminder of direction.
He held it up to the light, studying the delicate leaves as if expecting them to reveal something more. A hidden message, an omen, a reason. The green shimmered faintly in the sun, still vibrant, as if it had only just been plucked.
Athena came to mind, of course. She had always been the quiet sentinel in his life, pushing him toward strength, toward resolve. But this didn’t feel like her. Her presence carried weight, like the press of armor or the edge of a blade.
This… was. Soft.
A kindness offered for its own sake. No lesson, no warning, no destiny wound tight inside it. Just something beautiful, alive, and inexplicably his.
He set the thyme in a small jar by the window, nudging it carefully beside his comb, as if afraid it might fall apart under the weight of being noticed.
That night, high among the beams of the palace rafters, Hermes watched the boy’s hand linger over the jar before he blew out the candle.
And he grinned.
The prince had kept it.
So Hermes came again.
And then again after that.
By now, Hermes had stopped pretending. There was no excuse left but the truth: he wanted to see him.
Telemachus was brushing his hair before bed. Quiet ritual of detangling after the day’s chaos. He sat at the small table by the balcony where his bronze mirror rested, back turned, half-lidded eyes watching his reflection.
The room was dim, lit only by one oil lamp and the stars beyond the balcony. The curtains stirred gently in the salt-laced breeze. The air smelled of lavender and linen, peace woven into fabric, untouched by war.
The comb moved with ritual precision: left, right, pull, breathe. Every movement practiced. Soothing.
Hermes slipped in with the wind.
No footsteps. No sound. Just a shift in the air, like the whisper of a story half-remembered.
The prince hummed softly to himself, unaware of the eyes resting on him.
And Hermes, thief of a thousand sacred things, found his hands aching with the desire to take nothing — only to stay.
He never spoke. He didn’t dare.
So he watched. Night after night. A silent, divine shadow in love with a mortal boy’s bedtime routine.
===
In the morning, Telemachus sits at his marble mirror in a pool of golden light, freshly washed and sleep-flushed. His hair is still damp from a basin rinse, and he combs it out in slow, steady motions.
Left, right, pull, breathe.
There’s rhythm in it. A quiet ritual. Hermes has begun to memorize it like music.
The god stays.
Every morning.
Just long enough to see the yawn. The sleepy frown. The absentminded way Telemachus hums as he works through a knot. Sometimes the boy speaks aloud, muttering about his day, or scolding the weather, or making half-hearted complaints to no one in particular.
Hermes answers in whispers only the birds can hear.
This morning, a sparrow sits on the sill with a twig in its beak, chirping nonsense into the dawn. A breeze moves through the open shutters, tugging gently at the damp ends of Telemachus’s hair. The boy pauses mid-comb and blinks at the sudden scent—ripe, honeyed, rich.
Figs.
He rises, slowly, still drowsy and bare-footed, and steps to the window.
The tree just beyond the courtyard wall, gnarled and half-forgotten, with leaves that had browned too early last season, is in bloom. Not with blossoms, but with fruit. Swollen, purple-dark, heavy figs dangle like ornaments from its branches, though the season is wrong and no gardener has touched it in months. The bough nearest the window bows slightly under its burden, the fruit almost within reach.
Telemachus stares, brows lifting in wonder. “Fig season isn't until a few months,” he murmurs, frowning at the impossible abundance. “You’re not supposed to—”
A fig drops from its stem and lands with a soft thump on the sill.
He picks it up. Warm from the sun. Sweet on the air. A perfect tear of nectar beads along the split skin. He touches it to his lips and lets it rest there a moment, tasting.
Behind him, the comb lies forgotten.
He smiles, slow and private, and leans his elbows on the sill, gazing out at the tree as if it might speak.
Somewhere in the branches, a breeze lifts, and the leaves shimmer like a secret.
He only breathes the word thank you like a morning prayer, and bites into the fruit.
In the shadow of the fig tree, hidden from sight, the god stands with one hand against the bark, feeling the thrum of life he coaxed into it. Watching the boy he loves taste joy from a gift given without expectation. There are no laurels in it. No glory. Only sweetness. And still, it feels more divine than any offering laid at his altar.
He stays a little longer.
Long enough to see the smile.
Long enough to memorize the moment like a psalm.
And then, with a flutter of wind and the scent of ripened fruit left behind, he is gone.
But the tree will remain.
===
One night, Telemachus paused.
It was small at first. A twitch of his fingers as he set his comb down. His posture stiffened, head tilting slightly, like a deer catching the scent of something unfamiliar on the wind.
His eyes narrowed.
The candlelight flickered as if aware of the shift, throwing soft shadows across the pale stone walls. He turned slightly, his gaze brushing over the room. Not searching, exactly, but sensing. The change in the air was subtle, but unmistakable. Not colder. Not warmer. Just... different. Still.
The kind of stillness that followed lightning.
He had felt it.
The press of attention — not heavy or malevolent, but another. The way a mortal feels when divinity draws near. It rang in his bones. It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even surprise.
It was recognition.
A sensitivity born of Athena’s touch. That divine, metallic thread woven through his soul since he'd began training with the goddess. The training had honed it. Time had sharpened it. Now it stirred without warning.
“Who’s there?” he asked, softly.
The words barely stirred the air, but they landed like a weight.
Hermes froze where he stood halfway between shadow and starlight. The wings at his temples fluttered once, betraying his unease. He hadn’t expected the boy to feel him. Not yet.
Telemachus’s eyes drifted toward the open balcony. Slowly, he rose from his stool, bare feet silent against the stone floor. His linen robe fell in gentle folds around him as he walked forward, shoulders tense, jaw set.
He stepped into the night breeze, searching the courtyard below.
Only cicadas answered him.
The silence stretched, long and delicate, like a thread drawn taut between them. Telemachus’s hand rested lightly against the window frame, and for a moment, he simply looked. Not down, but up toward the stars, as if he suspected something might be watching.
Then, after a pause, he turned away.
Hermes exhaled — sharp, quiet. More startled than relieved. He nearly dropped his caduceus in the process. Embarrassed. Intrigued. Shaken.
He vanished before the boy could notice anything more.
But his heart, for the first time in ages, did not leave with him.
The following morning, as Telemachus sat before his mirror, he noticed a comb resting on the low chest near his perfumes and oils.
It wasn’t his.
Yet it didn't stop the thing from laying there.
Carved from laurel wood and inlaid with threads of gold, the comb was shaped like a slender branch, each leaf shimmering faintly, too finely rendered for any mortal artisan. When he picked it up, it felt impossibly light, perfectly balanced, as if it had always belonged in his hand.
His maids swore they hadn’t left it there.
“It’s a gift,” Telemachus murmured, turning it over thoughtfully, his gaze lingering on its reflection in the polished bronze mirror. It caught the light like fire through new leaves, warm, flickering, alive. “But from who?”
It was beautiful, yes. But the thought of someone slipping into his room at night, while he slept, to leave it chilled him more than he let on.
Still, that night, he used it.
Carefully. Reverently.
He drew it through his hair with slow strokes, quiet as prayer.
What he didn’t see, what he couldn’t see, was the god perched on the edge of the balcony, half-bathed in starlight, cloaked in silence. He was glowing faintly in the dark, every muscle tensed as if even a breath might give him away.
Hermes nearly fainted when the boy used it again the next morning.
===
A week passed.
Telemachus trained with Athena, dutiful as ever, and sat at his father’s side during audiences, learning the rhythms of diplomacy and rulership. The King of Ithaca, indulgent as always, made sure his son wanted for nothing. The palace bustled with life, with song and steel, with poets at the hearth and scrolls stacked high beside the wine.
And slowly, very slowly the memory of the mysterious gift began to fade.
Almost.
The second gift was impossible to ignore.
Another morning. Another surprise.
This time: a hairpin, delicate and golden, twisted into the unmistakable shape of a pair of wings.
When Telemachus lifted it, it thrummed softly beneath his fingers. Warm, like it had been forged under sunlight rather than fire. The craftsmanship was extraordinary, unlike anything he’d seen in Ithaca. Too intricate. Too divine.
The maids swooned.
“It must be from a foreign prince,” one giggled.
“Or a god,” another sighed, only half joking.
Telemachus rolled his eyes but his cheeks flushed a quiet pink.
He said nothing.
But he wore it.
With gentle, almost shy hands, he slid the pin into place and stared into the mirror. The golden wings caught the light just so, casting a soft shimmer over his features. For a breathless moment, he looked ethereal. Like something sacred, like a myth whispered into being.
Delicate, he thought and flushed even deeper.
And then the realization came. Slow. Startling.
Was someone... courting him?
“Little owl?”
He nearly jumped.
But he knew that voice. Only one person called him that.
He turned, already bracing himself.
Athena stood in the doorway, quiet and severe, her gaze sharper than the blades she drilled into his hands.
She took him in at a glance; his posture, his cheeks, the glint of gold in his hair — and then stepped closer.
Her eyes narrowed as they landed on the pin.
“What’s this, my warrior?” she asked, voice low, even.
Telemachus didn’t move.
Athena reached out, her fingers brushing the pin with precise, practiced grace. She turned it slightly. Examined the craftsmanship in silence.
He held his breath.
At last, she frowned.
“Who gave this to you, Telemachus?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted quietly.
Something flickered in her gaze, quick and unreadable. A thought she didn’t speak.
Then she stepped back and straightened.
“I see,” she said.
A pause.
“Come. Back to training, little owl.”
They left the chamber in silence.
Telemachus walked a step behind her, as he always did when she was in this mood composed, unreadable, thoughts sealed behind eyes that missed nothing.
They moved through the palace halls, sunlight slicing through colonnades and pooling on the marble floors. Their footsteps echoed.
He knew better than to speak.
When they reached the training courtyard, Athena paused.
She didn’t look at him.
Her gaze lifted upward, toward the roofline. The stillness of the morning air. A feather drifting down from nowhere, caught in a shaft of light.
She frowned.
Subtly. Sharply.
Her fingers curled behind her back.
“Strange winds today,” she murmured.
Telemachus looked up. “What do you mean?”
But her expression had already shifted — softened, mask back in place.
“Nothing,” she said, almost absently. “Just the breeze.”
She turned and tossed him a wooden sword. “Focus. Feet shoulder-width apart.”
He caught it automatically, settling into position.
But as they began their drills, Athena’s eyes kept drifting just slightly toward the rooftops, the balconies, the flicker of shadow that shouldn’t have moved.
She had seen gifts like this before.
Too beautiful. Too precise. Too timed.
And she knew only one god with enough vanity and charm to meddle in a prince’s mirror with gifts .
Her jaw tightened.
Hermes.
She would say nothing yet. Not until she was sure.
But if the trickster was involved.
He would owe her for this.
===
A storm rolls in.
Not a whisper of rain, not a gentle hush, but a roar. A fury that tears at the heavens like a beast unchained. For three days, the sea becomes a living thing, raging and wild, clawing at the cliffs with foam-flecked teeth. Lightning splits the sky in jagged wounds, each strike a divine howl. Thunder shakes the bones of the palace.
Telemachus does not stay sheltered.
He is out among the soldiers, sleeves rolled and skin drenched, helping lash down cargo before the waves can swallow it whole. His voice hoarse from shouting over the wind, his limbs aching from bracing against the gale. He works without complaint — prince or not, Ithaca is his to guard. His to endure.
By the third night, the rain has found its way into every seam of his clothes. His hair is plastered to his cheeks, and salt stings the rawness in his palms where the ropes bit deep. His fingers burn. His shoulders tremble. When he finally straightens from the last tied-down crate and lifts his eyes to the horizon, it feels like lifting his soul from the deep.
The sea still thrashes, heaving and angry. The clouds boil above it, black and bruised with lightning.
And Telemachus wonders, not for the first time, if his father had offended something ancient. Something vast and godly and unforgiving.
Odysseus was clever. And clever men make enemies in the heavens.
The stories still whisper it. His father’s feats and defeats. The old ones. The dangerous ones. Poseidon’s wrath.
The sea remembers everything.
By the time he stumbles through the great bronze gates of the palace, the wind greets him like a slap — sharp, personal. It rips at his soaked tunic and chapped skin, and he ducks his head against it, muttering a breathless apology into the roar of the storm. A superstition, maybe. Or maybe not. He doesn’t know anymore.
“Sorry,” he says, low, into the open air. “If it was something we did.”
The halls inside glow with candlelight. The scent of oil and wet stone clings to everything. Servants rush forward when they see him, all hushed urgency and concern, but he waves them off with a trembling hand. He’s too tired to speak. Too tired to explain the weight behind his eyes.
He walks slowly toward his chambers, each footstep a quiet ache. The marble floors echo under his boots, soaked fabric trailing a faint path of water behind him. He shivers, arms wrapped around himself despite the heat returning in flickers through the palace walls.
He wants a bath. Gods, he wants a bath. Rosewater. Lavender. Anything warm, anything kind.
But something waits for him.
The door creaks open to stillness. No fire crackles. No servant greets him. And yet something is different.
There, across the foot of his bed, rests a cloak.
Not stitched. Forged, perhaps. Maybe even dreamed into being.
It is dark as deep, deeper than night, deeper than the cave-dark of the storm, and it shimmers faintly, like the sky on the clearest of nights. Like the fabric itself has swallowed the stars and now lets them live within its folds. Gold pinpricks flicker across its surface, moved by a breeze that isn’t there.
Telemachus steps forward. His breath catches. He brushes his fingers against it, and it’s like touching the sky. Immense. Infinite.
The cloak feels like it hums with quiet life.
He lifts it to his shoulders and outside, the wind stills.
It doesn’t stop, not entirely, but it softens. The howl becoming a sigh. As if the storm, just for a moment, remembers gentleness.
A hush falls over the room and a hug of warmth gathers behind his ribs.
“What… is this?” he murmurs.
No answer. No note. No voice. No figure stepping from the shadows to claim this gift.
Only the flicker of candlelight, only the flutter of the curtains, only the faint scent of myrrh drifting from the walls.
But he feels watched. Not in fear. In something stranger. Something warmer. As though someone knew. As though someone had seen him soaked and shivering and had said let him rest.
He keeps the cloak.
His cheeks burn. Not from fever, not from chill — but from the thought that someone, somewhere, cared. That someone had thought of him in his exhaustion and left behind the sky.
Telemachus gathers his sodden hair, fingers unsteady, tying it back with the clumsiness of one who can barely keep his eyes open. A few strands rebel, curling stubbornly around his cheeks. He gives up the battle and trudges toward the baths.
The scent hits him before the steam does: crushed petals, soaked deep into the stone, and lavender warmed by time. The chamber glows. The tub is full.
He stops at the threshold. Blinks.
Steam curls like fingers through the air. Rosebuds float gently across the surface of the water, and beside the tub, draped over the hearth, is a towel already warmed to the touch.
He hadn't sent for this.
But someone had prepared it.
A lump catches in his throat.
He sinks into the bath slowly, letting the heat kiss every aching muscle, every rope-burned palm and salt-split knuckle. He slides down until only his eyes remain above the surface, staring at the ceiling — at nothing.
He breathes.
For the first time in days, he breathes.
When he rises again, skin flushed and clean, the towel is waiting. Soft. Fragrant. Pressing to him like an embrace.
He glances around the room once more. No servants. No sound. No sign.
“…Thank you,” he whispers.
Far above, nestled in the carved beams of the vaulted ceiling, Hermes sits. Cross-legged. Smiling.
“Of course, dove,” he says, voice carried by no wind, heard only by the candle flames.
He waits. Lingers. Watching the beautiful prince.
When Telemachus returns to bed, hair towel-dried, the cloak now resting on his shoulders like a second skin, Hermes lets himself drift downward. Silent as mist.
He perches at the foot of the bed, hands in his lap, gaze soft. His eyes trace the boy’s movements. How he fumbles with the edge of the blanket, how he yawns without covering his mouth, how he curls into himself like something small and human and impossibly beloved.
Sleep takes Telemachus gently. The cloak shifts around him like shadow, settling to match the shape of his body. Stars wink along the fabric. His breathing slows.
Hermes leans forward.
He adjusts the blanket with slow fingers. Straightens the book fallen from Telemachus’s hand, the same sword manual from weeks ago. For a long, aching moment, he just looks. Watching the boy sleep, lashes casting shadows across his cheeks, mouth slightly parted in dreams.
Then. Only then he reaches out.
His fingers hover above a curl of damp hair, trembling. Close. Too close.
But he doesn’t touch.
He breathes out, lips parted.
And leaves a kiss in the air, light as dust, warm as memory.
A blessing in the breeze.
And as the wind threads through the curtains once more. Soft, almost shy — the boy sighs in his sleep.
He felt it.
===
The next morning, the storm is gone.
Ithaca is washed clean, glittering beneath a pale sun. The sky stretches wide and untroubled, as if the past three days had never happened. But the land remembers. And so does Athena.
She appears not with thunder but with silence.
When Telemachus enters the training yard, expecting drills and sparring, he finds her already there — waiting. Her spear rests across her shoulders. She does not smile.
“You’re late,” she says.
Telemachus bows his head, sheepish. “I overslept.”
Athena studies him. He’s still damp around the edges. Softer somehow, wrapped in that impossible cloak. Her gaze lingers on the fabric, flickering over the shifting constellations sewn into its folds.
“Where did you get that?” she asks.
He hesitates. “It was… left for me. I don’t know who—”
“You don’t know?” she repeats, voice like flint striking stone.
Telemachus flinches. “I… I thought perhaps it was you.”
Athena tilts her head, as if amused, but her eyes are too sharp, too old.
“No, little owl. Not I.”
She circles him once, slow and deliberate. The tip of her spear drags lightly in the dust.
“Strange,” she murmurs. “The cloak bears the scent of starlight. And mischief.”
Telemachus frowns. “What does that mean?”
She stops in front of him. Looks him dead in the eye.
“It means,” she says slowly, “that a god is watching you. One who takes and never knocks at the door.”
Telemachus swallows, uncertain. “Should I be afraid?”
Athena considers this. Her expression softens, just a fraction.
“No,” she says, “but you should be careful.”
And then, almost to herself:
“He never gives gifts without reason.”
She turns away before he can ask more, already barking orders. “Sword. Stance. Again.”
But as he lifts the practice blade, she watches him from the corner of her eye.
If Hermes had truly taken an interest — if the messenger god had slipped his heart into a mortal’s hands — then the game had changed.
And Telemachus, dear as he was to her, had just become the center of something far older and far more dangerous than courtly affection.
Divine affection was a blade dressed as a kiss.
And Hermes, for all his charm, was still a god.
===
That evening, Telemachus sits alone at his vanity, bathed in the warm hush of lamplight. The last rays of the sun pour in low through the balcony doors, gilding the walls in a soft amber wash. Outside, the storm has passed, leaving the world silver-wet and still. Inside, the air smells faintly of sea salt, of rosewater, of something ancient and sweet.
He’s freshly bathed, skin pink from heat and scrubbing, hair still damp and curling at the ends. He wears a loose linen robe, its fabric barely clinging to his narrow shoulders. Sleep pulls at the edges of his limbs, but he resists, lingering at the mirror with quiet, careful hands.
Comb, breathe. Comb, breathe.
He drags the laurel-carved comb slowly through his tangled hair. Left, right, pull, breathe. As if performing a ritual, each movement weighted with thought. His reflection is soft in the silvered glass. Flushed cheeks, glazed eyes, lips parted like he’s caught in a dream. A warmth lingers there. Not from the bath, but from something else. Something felt rather than seen.
And then.
A ripple across the mirror’s surface. A shimmer of light bending around a presence not quite there.
Athena emerges in silence, coalescing in the reflection like the drawing back of a veil. Her form doesn’t move so much as it settles a solemn figure wrapped in dusk-blue robes, helm and owl-shadow. She watches him with ageless patience, her expression unreadable. In the glass, her eyes gleam silver.
Telemachus pauses mid-motion. His gaze lifts, slow and uncertain.
“Athena,” he breathes, his voice barely more than a hush. There’s a tremor in it, something caught between awe and vulnerability. “You’re here.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Just tilts her head, her expression unreadable. Watching. Listening.
Telemachus lowers his eyes. He sets the comb down beside the basin with delicate care, as if the weight of his thoughts might break it. For a moment, he just sits there, fingers still curled in the air where the comb had been.
Then, quietly, like sharing something forbidden, he murmurs, “Someone’s been in my room.”
His eyes flick up to the mirror, to the place her reflection used to be.
“Not a servant. Not a spy.”
A pause. His voice softens further, like the thought itself might vanish if spoken too loud.
“Someone else. The god you've mentioned. I feel it. Him .”
At that, Athena’s eyes narrow.
The air in the room stills. Not with silence, but with a pause so profound it feels like the whole palace is holding its breath. The candlelight gutters. The breeze from the balcony fades.
“That insolent.. Now, little owl,” she says, and her voice is not angry but firm. Protective. It presses against his ribs like armor being fastened around a trembling heart.
She steps forward. Her reflection disappears from the mirror, replaced now by her true form — tall and solid behind him, close enough that the hem of her robe brushes the floor beside his bare feet.
She raises a hand and places it gently over his eyes.
Warm. Steady. Calloused like the hands of a warrior, but impossibly kind.
Telemachus inhales sharply, spine going taut beneath her touch.
“I’m granting you sight,” she murmurs. “Not only of what it is — but of what it wants.”
Her words vibrate down his bones like a bell rung too deeply.
A slow, shivering exhale slips from his lips. The world tilts, not violently, but with quiet consequence. The edges of everything seem to sharpen, not with menace, but clarity. As if a veil has been lifted. As if the light now bends toward him instead of away. The shadows feel different. Not empty. Not threatening.
Just full. Waiting.
Athena removes her hand.
Telemachus blinks once. Twice. The mirror is only glass again. But the room is no longer simple. The weight of presence lingers — layered over everything like dew.
“I see it now,” he whispers. He’s not sure what he means. He doesn’t need to be.
Athena lays a hand on his shoulder, just for a moment. Her touch is grounding. A final thread of steadiness before she fades.
She doesn’t say goodbye. She doesn’t need to. She'll be back.
When Athena vanishes, she leaves only the scent of olive leaves and rain-soaked stone behind her.
Telemachus sits there for a long time, eyes fixed on the mirror. The comb lies untouched beside the basin, gold in the lamplight. Outside, the sea murmurs softly, as if echoing his thoughts.
Finally, with slow, deliberate movements, he rises.
He decides without fanfare, without fear — that tonight he will go to bed early.
He continues to brush his hair slowly, methodically. Left, right, pull, breathe. The motion is steady, ritualistic not for vanity, but for focus. For calm.
Then he moves around the room with quiet purpose.
Straightens the bedsheets. Smooths the folds of the star-stitched cloak draped over the edge, fingers lingering on the fabric. He pulls it close around his shoulders like armor — or invitation.
Then he sits again.
Still. Waiting.
At first, the waiting feels expectant, even a little foolish. Half an hour passes. The candles burn lower. The breeze through the balcony grows cooler, quieter.
Telemachus stares at the reflection of the balcony doors in the mirror. His expression stays calm, but his fingers curl faintly against the brush. He begins to feel silly. Self-conscious. Like a child who’s set out sweets for a guest who may never come.
Suddenly.
The air shifts.
Something moves.
Someone enters.
And the prince can only watch in shock.
Hermes slips through the balcony curtain the way he always has. Silent, unhurried, wrapped in the sort of breeze that makes the fabric stir without a sound. A presence more felt than seen, like a thought on the edge of waking.
But tonight, something is different.
The air is too still. Suspended, held back. Like the room itself is watching. Listening.
Hermes halts just past the curtain’s edge, golden eyes catching the flicker of candlelight. His gaze drifts to the mirror, an old habit, a favorite trick to admire the boy he always finds here. The dove. The prince. The warrior-in-the-making.
Telemachus is already there. Sitting at the vanity. His back straight, shoulders quiet. He brushes his hair in slow, even strokes, his skin faintly flushed from training. Candlelight gilds the curve of his jaw, the high sweep of his cheekbones.
He is beautiful.
And then.
Their eyes meet.
In the glass. A breath. A blink.
A moment so brief it might be denied but not forgotten.
Hermes stills mid-step.
His body remains fluid, his expression unchanged, but his attention narrows. Sharpens.
Telemachus doesn’t react. Doesn’t turn. Doesn’t speak.
Just continues brushing, smooth and silent, as if he’s alone. As if he doesn’t feel the god behind him, close enough to touch, to burn.
But Hermes knows.
And Telemachus knows he knows.
The air tightens, charged now, not with fear, but recognition. A string pulled taut between two points that cannot name what binds them.
Hermes steps forward. Slower this time. Testing. Not the way a god moves through mortal space, but the way something reverent enters a sanctuary. Careful. Watching.
Waiting for a flinch, a glance, a single breath of acknowledgment.
There is none.
Telemachus keeps brushing. His strokes slow slightly, just enough to be noticed. His hand trembles once — barely. But his face remains steady. Eyes forward.
Hermes glides across the floor like smoke, weightless and without sound, and settles into the chair beside the vanity. The one he’s claimed again and again, like an old ghost with favorite haunts. He doesn’t speak. Just folds his hands in his lap and watches.
They sit like that. Two figures caught in flickering candlelight, pretending nothing has changed when everything has.
Hermes watches the boy. The way the brush moves through soft curls. The way light clings to the damp edges of his hair. The soft curve of his mouth. The way strength is blooming in his frame, slow and quiet and inevitable.
His dove is growing sharper wings.
He wants to speak. To say something clever or careful or kind, but the moment has no room for words.
Instead, he watches.
And waits.
And wonders for the first time what Telemachus will say when the pretending ends.
And whether he, Hermes, will be brave enough to hear it.
He can barely stand it.
He sits — motionless in the chair he’s claimed so many nights before. But tonight, every second coils tighter in his chest. Each breath is drawn too shallow. Too carefully.
Telemachus continues brushing his hair with slow, deliberate strokes. Too deliberate.
Each pass of the brush is practiced grace not vanity, but performance. A quiet provocation. When he finally sets it down, the click of wood against marble is almost surgical.
He picks up a ribbon. Pale blue. Smooths it between his fingers and ties back a small section of his hair with the same ease as always, fingers nimble and calm.
His eyes stay fixed on the mirror.
And then he blinks.
Once. Slow.
Lashes sweep downward like velvet fans, then lift again a flutter just to the side of showy.
Hermes’s breath stutters.
He shifts, just slightly. Jaw clenched. The candlelight flickers, betrayed by the twitch of his restraint.
That blink wasn’t thoughtless.
That softness wasn’t innocence.
Telemachus knows exactly what he’s doing.
The boy — no, the prince — the dove gilded in steel — has learned how to draw blades with his eyes alone.
Hermes leans forward.
Elbows on his knees, hands clasped like he’s praying, like he’s trying to hold himself together by force of will alone. His gaze pierces through the mirror, through skin and shadow and silence.
Still, Telemachus doesn’t look at him.
Instead, he reaches for a small glass vial. Uncorks it without a glance. Dips a fingertip inside, rubs the oil between his palms, then gently glides them down the sides of his neck. Slow, habitual, devastating.
His skin glows.
A gesture so mundane. So familiar.
And yet, tonight, it feels divine.
The candlelight seems to pulse. Hermes feels it in his throat — that sudden swell of heat. The god inside him aches.
He had come here only to sit. To watch. A presence, nothing more. A ritual observed from the corner of a room he does not belong to.
But Telemachus.
That blink. Softer than any, edged like a whispered promise.
Hermes stands.
Soundless. Slow.
The air folds around the movement. Not sudden but seismic. Across the mirror, Telemachus’s shoulders still, ever so slightly. Not in surprise but in awareness. In confirmation.
He knows.
Hermes steps closer.
He reaches out, cautious. Reverent. One hand rests lightly on the vanity, just beside the gold laced comb. The other hovers — only inches from Telemachus’s bare shoulder.
So close. So unbearably close.
His voice comes low. Unsteady.
“I know you see me,” he whispers.
Telemachus doesn’t jump.
But he sets the vial down with a precise, quiet click — and finally turns his head.
Not all the way.
Just enough for their eyes to meet.
Not in the mirror.
Face to face.
“I wondered how long you’d sit there,” Telemachus says, voice soft, a ghost of amusement curling at the edges. “If I batted my lashes long enough.. would the god break first?”
Hermes laughs. breathless, stunned, and undone.
And then he does something he’s never done in all the nights he’s stolen to watch from shadows.
He kneels.
Not in worship.
Not exactly.
But something dangerously close to surrender.
He’s on his knees before he even understands why.
All the centuries he’s spent roaming temples, stealing prayers, teasing kings — never once has he bowed like this. The marble is cold beneath the thin soles of his sandals. His wings, half-furled, brush the rug behind him as if even the feathers know reverence.
Telemachus turns the rest of the way on the stool, ankles still crossed, the ribbon trailing like spilled silk from his hair. Moonlight from the balcony paints him in silver; candlelight gilds the sharp lines of his cheekbones. Between the twin lights, he looks less like a prince and more like a constellation that’s wandered down from the sky, draped in oil and dusk.
Hermes can’t breathe.
He had come to watch. To guard. To adore in secret.
But kneeling here, eyes level with the linen at Telemachus’s waist, he feels it:
The shape of devotion, slotting into his bones.
A hollow carved long ago, waiting only for this.
Worship, he thinks.
I am worshipping him.
Telemachus’s lashes lower — not coy this time, but measured. Thoughtful. He studies the god with the quiet intensity of someone weighing a blade. And then, slowly, with care sculpted into every movement, he slides from the stool and kneels too.
Face to face.
Amid lavender and candle smoke, two figures on the floor like twin prayers.
Hermes’s breath stutters.
A hesitation — no thicker than a wingbeat and then the prince lifts one hand. His fingers hover, trembling faintly, above the god’s golden curls. Hermes’s eyes flutter half-shut. Every muscle draws taut.
Then, at last, Telemachus’s palm sinks into the tousled gold, feather-light.
Hermes melts.
The wings at his temples dip. His shoulders fold inward. A sound escapes him. Quiet, aching, raw in a way no messenger of Olympus should ever sound.
Silence hums between them. Alive.
Telemachus strokes one curl behind Hermes’s ear, reverent.
The texture of divinity is cool and impossibly soft between mortal fingers.
He swallows. His voice barely scrapes the air.
“You’re real.”
Hermes’s laugh stumbles from his throat half-wonder, half-confession.
“I am,” he says, the words cracked with awe. “More real in this moment than I have ever been.
Telemachus searches his face and in those golden irises, he sees centuries unfurling. Skies dusted with stars no longer named, roads winding through forgotten empires, altars choked in ivy and silence. He sees solitude dressed in divinity, and yet now, all that history bends toward him — a boy still learning how to keep his grip steady on a blade. His pulse falters.
“I thought the gods cared for heroes and kings,” he whispers, thumb still tangled in Hermes’s soft curls. “Not… boys who are still learning how to hold a sword.”
Hermes’s gaze gentles, the reverence in it turning almost unbearably tender. “I have carried crowns and quests,” he murmurs, voice tremulous with something both ancient and newly born, “but none were ever half so heavy, or so precious as your quiet courage.”
Slowly, deliberately, he lifts a hand. It hovers; uncertain, reverent and then cups Telemachus’s cheek, mirroring the touch that undid him. Thumb to skin, god to boy, divine to human. “You asked who courted you, dove of Ithaca. It was I. In every feather left at your sill, in every fig on your plate, in every wind that cooled your brow when no one else thought to do so.”
Telemachus’s lips part, breath catching on a realization that blooms like dawn: that every impossible kindness had been an offering not from some distant heaven, but from him . The god who watched, who waited, who loved . The flush rising on his cheeks is no longer shyness, but awe.
“Then stay,” he says. The words come out shaped like a command, but shaded with a plea. “Stand — or kneel beside me in the light. Not only in the shadows.”
Hermes closes his eyes as if the very request is sacred scripture. When he opens them again, his smile is small, luminous startling in its humility, in how mortal it feels. “I will stay,” he breathes, leaning forward until their foreheads touch. “If Athena strikes me for daring, still I will stay, little dove.”
Their breaths mingle. warm, shared for the first time in full awareness. Around them, the curtains stir with a wind that smells faintly of salt and citrus, like the shores of Ithaca itself. It sighs through the chamber, with something that sounds like yes .
For the first time in a hundred stolen nights, Hermes does not hide in the wind.
He belongs here.
They remain like that — brushing, one hand in curls, the other against a cheek, the god’s wings drawn around them like a shroud of constellations. Above their heads, candlelight flickers low, and moonlight begins its slow climb up carved stone. No prayer is spoken aloud. None is needed.
The moment is enough.
And in that hush, Hermes thinks:
Let the heavens keep their doves.
I have found mine—here, in the thrum of a mortal heart that belongs to me alone.