Chapter Text
In the blood and dust of the battlefield, the duel for kingship, for the future of Kremnos, came to an end. Not with a great clash of metal or anguished cry of life spilling warm into the earth. No glorious end to triumph in, Gorgo crumbled to one knee.
Her heart roared in her ears. As loud as the thunder and flames roused by Nikador’s lance, setting her ablaze from her very core. Her blood burned up her parched throat scratched raw by her ragged breaths. A trembling hand grappled for her chest, smearing grime against her chest plate emblazoned with Strife’s symbol.
Nine months of carrying and one day of labour—that alone would not be enough to reduce her to such a state. Treachery. Trickery.
Poison. One that found a home in her blood turned sluggish in the same manner the magma roiled beneath the Castrum Kremnos’ forges. It would hollow her out until nothing else remained.
Eurypon’s long shadow loomed over her. “Yield, Gorgo, and accept your defeat. Just as those ten bouts that marked our union ended, submit yourself to my authority as the King of Castrum Kremnos and the ruler of your fate. I shall exercise the judgement I should have all those years ago and sentence you to death.”
The sheer audacity made her scowl. She had surrendered herself to defeat all those years ago because her opponent had proven himself her equal. Then more with a final duel that brought her low.
If she had known back then that he was the type of warrior to secure his victory with sordid schemes, she would have let him take her life before her hand in marriage.
Her rage rallied the last of her strength and she clutched her spear stabbed into the ground, lifting a head weighted by her helmet to glare through blurring vision. “A true king would never need to best me with trickery and cowardice. Eurypon! You are unworthy of that crown and this dynasty that shall fall to ruin by your hand.”
Beneath his plumed helmet, Eurypon was unmoved. It was the expression of the king devising plans around a map, in which numbers and names were meaningless when weighed against victory. It was not the face of a husband towards his wife, nor a king to his queen, but a general to a pawn.
“Then rise to your feet and seize them from me. If you can find the will.”
There was poison seeping into every limb, rising to the surface in terrible bruises and bleeding from a myriad of open wounds. Even the rise and fall of her shallow breaths made her cracked ribs ache and her lungs sear with the effort of staying alive. Her body was as worthless as the city-states she had spent a lifetime conquering: its walls crumbled, its storehouse pillages, and everything set aflame on the path towards the next conquest.
If it was a simple matter of will then Eurypon would already be a corpse growing cold at her feet.
Eurypon’s armoured footfalls echoed heavy against the stone and he brandished his spear. It was long smeared with her blood, obscuring her reflection as it ran down the blade. “Then accept your punishment. But as a gesture of grace for all those years you spent faithfully by my side, I will allow you to choose the means of your demise.”
Decapitation at the king’s blade would he traditional. That same blade through Gorgo’s heart would be more appropriate. Whether she loved him or not—whether something akin to love had grown throughout their marriage, flourishing under the pursuit of their shared ideals—was irrelevant. Trust, hope, respect were equally precious things she had entrusted to him, only to have them crushed underfoot.
And one final thing.
“My son…” she croaked, hoarse under the exhaustion of childbirth and a laborious duel with only three restless nights in between. “My beautiful boy… I delivered him into this world and cursed him with a father lower than the lowliest of hyenas. I shall be the one to accompany his departure.”
Eurypon’s expression shifted but there was no hesitation or sympathy that arose from her invocation of the child they had both promised so much to: a future. A better one where they might thrive without so much blood on their hands, staining their head with a crown made gold by the blood it was soaked in.
There was only derision in his eyes for the death Gorgo had chosen. Not at the end of a blade but by her own two feet.
Supposedly, his word still held some meaning because he thumped his spear against the ground. “Very well. Come and take this accursed child. See to it that he reaches the eternal battlefield at the end of the Sea of Souls where he may sow his destruction far from the high walls of Castrum Kremnos.”
The world spun around her and coaxed her to crumble, knees buckling as she clambered to her feet, but she leaned her weight upon her spear jabbed into the loosened stones. None of the Royal Wing Elites nor the Council of Elders who had resigned themselves to Eurypon’s tyranny would deign to offer her a hand. If they did, she would have spat her blood at their feet.
Slowly, she dragged herself to the cliff’s edge where a traitor dared to hold her son.
She discarded her broken weapon over the edge and it tumbled down down down, rattling off jagged stones that chipped its worn edges to nothing. It hit the water with a splash swallowed by the howl of frigid winds and tormented souls.
In place of her spear, she cradled the warmth of her newborn son. He was such a small thing, it had brought tears to her eyes when she held him for the first time and imagined the Strife that would inevitably hound his footsteps.
The hilt of a weapon more familiar than a child’s ball or a scholar’s pen. The blood and dust of the battlefield his home. The gold he would one day come to crown himself in as dictated by Kremnos’ antiquated traditions.
But he had opened eyes that captured the flames of war and cried out for the very first time with the weakest of war cries, and she smiled for her son. For Mydeimos.
Those eyes stared at her now. He didn’t cry, lips parted around babbles only known to himself, and her smile remained steadfast even as his round face blurred through her tears.
He reached with a tiny hand so clean and soft with fat. She let him grasp her dusty, bloodied finger as she brought him to her lips and left a kiss against his high forehead.
“Mydeimos, you were loved. If not by your father nor this dynasty, then by me. My little lion.”
He smiled up at her and cooed, a silly thing of unbridled joy and innocence, and her heart broke all over again. That this smile would never know the light of the sun, the warmth of life, only eternal toil at the end of the Sea of Souls.
Her one regret was that he could never be an ordinary boy, but was shackled to the fate she had given him.
She turned to the battlefield that had sealed her fate in treachery, the man that had betrayed her, and shouted over the call of the dead to join them, “Eurypon, heed my words! I shall await the day Castrum Kremnos crumbles into the Sea of Souls and drags your worthless soul with it into the abyss where great men and cities are forgotten. I shall await the day we prove once and for all who was the worthy victor.”
Whether what laid beyond the living realm was a sea of flowers or an eternal battlefield, she would nourish it with whatever dregs of life lingered in his wretched soul.
“Then,” she snarled with all the ferocity she had used to slay a lion and claim the name of Gorgo for herself, “I shall relish spending every day of eternity taking your head from your shoulders.”
And Gorgo stepped off the cliff’s edge with her son in her arms.
The cutting winds tried to wrest Mydeimos away but she clutched him to her chest that had yet to feed him and curled her body around him. She protected him, as she had endeavoured to spend a lifetime doing. This was all she would be able to do for him.
His cries whipped past her ears with the winds and sliced deeper than Eurypon’s blade could ever hope to reach. What surfaced wasn’t her raging blood nor her defiance but the chilling terror of what was to come.
The River of Souls snapped its maws around her and plunged her into its frigid depths. The poison turned sluggish with the blood in her veins. The very air in her lungs froze in an instant too quick for her to scream. The tumultuous rapids swept her away.
She would have forgotten the feel of warmth—from a tended hearth, from a kylix of quality wine, from the fervour of battle—if it weren’t for Mydeimos, soft and warm and alive, in her arms.
Her muscles stiffened. Her bones ached. Her mind solidified into something too unmoving to be dead; it was as though she never existed at all.
But with the last of her strength, she prayed that Thanatos, in all their cruelty she had witnessed over a lifetime of bloodshed and conquest, would take her as a willing sacrifice and spare her son.
Death disentangled from Strife was, perhaps, less cruel.
When her heavy eyes opened like the slow thaw of frost, it was the darkness had warmed. A roof above her. A hard floor softened by stiff bedding below her. Four walls dancing with the shadows of a crackling fire to her left.
It was too peaceful to be the afterlife the Kremnoans yearned for.
The afterlife… Mydeimos…
Her empty hands flew to her chest. He was gone. Where was he? How could she have let go of him? How would she find him again in a place so vast it contained all of the dead and he was a child so small the only large thing about him was the strength of his lungs to cry out for his mother?
“Please don’t move too much.”
A hand landed against her shoulder and another against her lower back, trying to coax her to lie down, as a woman leaned into Gorgo’s line of sight. They were not so different in age but this woman lacked any proud Kremnoan features or aesthetic. Instead, she bore unusually light hair and eyes, akin to a winter nymph shaped from ice and snow.
Yet her hands and her voice were warm as Gorgo’s body swayed beyond her control. She was too weak to resist as the woman laid her back down.
“You’ll aggravate your wounds and drain the strength you’ve managed to recover,” she said as she drew the blanket bunched around Gorgo’s waist to rest over her shoulders.
When she tried to pull away, Gorgo grabbed her wrist in a trembling hand all too easy to shake off. But the woman let her hold on as she croaked out in a voice frozen over and spindled with cracks, “My… son…”
Realisation widened her eyes and she set a hand over Gorgo’s own, offering a reassuring squeeze. “He’s here.”
Those were the few words Gorgo needed for her fingers to spasm and fall slack, strength sapped by relief. The woman tucked it back beneath the blanket.
“The both of you were terribly cold when you washed ashore,” she said with a troubled pinch to her brow that disappeared as she glanced over her shoulder. “Phainon, can you bring the boy here?”
Gorgo rolled her head to follow the woman’s gaze. Beside the hearth was a young boy, likely only a few years in age, with his mother’s fair hair, skin and eyes that turned at the call of his name.
In his arms was Mydeimos. Bright eyes open and a smile on his face as he played with Phainon’s finger.
“Coming.”
Phainon hurried to his feet, jostling Mydeimos in his arms before he realised his mistake and slowed to cup his head and properly support his weight. Then he shuffled over as quick as he dared, eyes on Mydeimos, and Gorgo would have smiled if she could.
The woman ruffled Phainon’s hair. “Give him to his mother. She wants to see him.”
Phainon nodded and knelt at Gorgo’s bedside. Her arm protested, still frozen down to the bone, but she raised an arm and caressed her crooked finger over the supple curve of Mydeimos cheek where it had flushed in the heat of the fire.
Alive. He was alive. As alive as Gorgo.
A wordless sob broke from her chest and Phainon flinched away, Mydeimos’ wide eyes on her and blinking rapidly. It was ill-befitting her accomplishments, her prowess as a warrior, her status left behind on a cliff top, to cry.
But her son was alive. She hadn’t failed him. The sheer relief of it moved her to tears and she allowed herself to shed them warm rather than icy down her cheeks.
“Do you…” Lost, Phainon looked between his mother, Mydeimos and Gorgo. “Want to hold him?”
She cleared her throat and scrounged up the strength to reply, “No. You… you’re doing a wonderful job. Hold him for me. Keep him warm and safe.”
At that, any uncertainty lifted from Phainon’s face. The set of his lips and eyes were stern but sincere as he nodded.
With one hand, he tugged blankets from a basket beside the bedding. The growing bundle of fabrics was far more than a household such as this would likely own, and all in various stages of use, colours, and weaves.
“I’ll lie here,” he explained as he constructed his own nest them upon the floor whilst carefully cradling Mydeimos, who had taken to reaching for the ends of his hair. His mother crouched to help him. “So you can see him.”
“That’s very…” Just those short words left her breathless and she took a few deep inhales while he laid down with Mydeimos on his chest. “Very thoughtful of you.”
Her eyelids had grown heavier and her blinks slower but her final view was of her son fiddling with the pin of Phainon’s tunic while he giggled. Away from Castrum Kremnos and the Sea of Souls and very much alive for it.
The next time she awoke, the same woman was tending the hearth while Mydeimos rested in a sling of fabric upon her back. She had enough strength to push herself upright, and the rustle of blankets and straw drew the woman’s attention.
She finished stoking the fire and walked over. “How are you feeling? Can you speak?”
Gorgo’s lips were cracked but damp with a bitter decoction lingering in her mouth. The word scratched itself from her throat, “Yes.”
The woman nodded and twisted the slung so Mydeimos hung at her front, allowing her to easily lift his sleeping body. Gorgo had the strength to hold him for herself. Still soft, still warm, still alive; undoubtedly so when she rested her fingertips over his chest to feel his heart beating strong.
“I’ve warmed some wine. Let me fetch it for you,” the woman excused herself but the house was small. One room with a hearth, kitchen and straw bed.
She returned to the hearth and retrieved a small amphora from beside the fire, collecting a kylix and dispensing the wine. The woman lifted the shallow dish to Gorgo’s lips and allowed her to drink without letting go of Mydeimos.
Gorgo licked the remnants from her lips. It was watered down and the quality far lower than what was provided for Kremnos’ warriors, within the city and on campaigns. But it was fresh. A farming village.
“Thank you,” Gorgo said once she’d had her fill, voice still worn thin and close to breaking. “May I know my host’s name?”
“Audata of Aedes Elysiae,” the woman introduced herself. “I live with my husband, Hieronymus, and my son, Phainon.”
Aedes Elysiae. Gorgo had never heard of such a place. It must have been beyond the bounds or ambitions of Kremnos.
She tried for a smile and playful bounce of the bundle in her arms. “I am known as Gorgo. This is my son, Mydeimos.”
She was no longer ‘of Castrum Kremnos’. Certainly not its queen nor an esteemed warrior and not even the lowest of trainees. She was of nowhere. Nothing but a wanderer in exile.
Her clothes, her jewellery and the red markings upon her skin spun a different tale. If Audata had ever heard of a city-state renowned for its warriors and warmongering, there was no hint of fear when she leaned closer to peer at Mydeimos’ sleeping face.
“He is newly born,” Audata remarked.
She thumbed at the drool trickling from the corner of his mouth. “Indeed. I do not know how much time has passed but… when my husband endeavoured to kill both him and I, Mydeimos had only seen three full days and nights.”
Audata’s hand startled to her mouth, eyes wide with horror. “Your husband?”
“I dove into the river with my son to escape him.”
Audata’s face was still stricken but she composed herself enough to place a hand upon Gorgo’s shoulder. “That’s quite the heavy burden placed upon you. One no parent should have to endure. I cannot say how long you were adrift but it has been eight days since you arrived in Aedes Elysiae.”
Eight days, yet Mydeimos looked no worse for her neglect. He was swaddled in unfamiliar clothes and a fresh blanket as he dozed without a hint of discomfort.
“You have housed my son and I for eight days. You have my gratitude,” she said with all the sincerity she could muster, laying a hand atop Audata’s with a gentle squeeze.
Unfortunately, even once Gorgo recovered, there was nothing fitting she could award this family. She was no longer a queen, or even leader of her tribe. She possessed none of the great spoils she had spent a lifetime amassing.
Audata shook her head. “There’s nothing to be grateful for. Stay as long as you need. Besides,” she sighed as her lips curled with a small smile equally fond and exasperated, “my son is quite enamoured with yours. He would be heartbroken to part ways so soon.”
That boy who had cradled Mydeimos like the most delicate thing in the world.
Gorgo breathed a quiet laugh. “I see.”
“He says that your son has eyes like the sun rising over the wheat fields. Then,” Audata laughed to herself, shaking her head, “he asked if you and your son were fairies.”
“The sun…”
She smoothed her thumb over Mydeimos’ forehead and his eyes lazily opened but closed again just as soon.
Not the blazing fury of war. But the dawn.
In place of her thumb, she kissed his forehead and nuzzled him against her cheek. “I had never considered such a thing.”
While Audata cooked over the hearth, she recounted the events of the last eight days. Her husband had been fishing with others from the village when they noticed someone adrift in the waters near the pier and dispatched a fishing boat to collect them. Although they had expected the corpse of a stranger, deserving of a proper burial over a watery grave, the person had been alive and fiercely clutching onto a babe.
Hieronymus and Audata had volunteered to house the stranger and her child. Throughout those eight days, the local physician and a few new mothers with breastmilk to spare had circulated through the home.
By the time Audata had finished cooking and helped Gorgo to their table, there was nothing more to say. Although Audata dished out a serving of stew and a few rolls of wheat bread for Gorgo, she excused herself with urgent business rather than share the meal.
“No wonder you have yet to cry even once,” Gorgo mused as she bounced Mydeimos upon her knee. “My little lion has been spoiled.”
Mydeimos cooed up at her and played with her chlamys that swayed with the motion of her bobbing her leg. Her own clothes had been changed for a plain, loose chiton borrowed from Audata, who insisted all her belongings had been stored in the small chest beside the straw bed.
She didn’t know what had been taken by the River of Souls’ tumult—her necklace, her earring, her ring—but none of that could begin to measure against the things she had been permitted to keep.
There was no need to check for herself that her possessions were in order. Unless they were even more dastardly than her once-husband, she had faith that Audata and her family were too compassionate to steal. Otherwise they would simply have left her for dead.
But it seemed her debts were growing beyond this household. She would need to thank everyone responsible for a scrap of fabric, taste of medicine, and drop of milk.
It was customary within the Kremnoan royal family to rely on wet nurses until the babes could move onto proper food. It ensured the the king and queen remained unburdened, especially since Kremnos so rarely existed in times of peace. However, it was another archaic tradition Gorgo had anticipated changing.
She had been too exhausted by labour, and Eurypon’s schemes as she discovered much too late, to argue against the use of a wet nurse until she fully recovered. But the poison had kept her feeble, Mydeimos had been imprisoned for the sake of blaspheming Nikador, and she had assumed she would never get the opportunity to hold him again.
She had wanted it all: to hold him, to nurse him, to fall asleep with him and awaken in the night to his cries and lull him to sleep again as many times as needed. To hear his first words, watch his first steps, offer his first wooden weapons and see which one he chose.
To encourage him, console him, congratulate him. Through all of his struggles, his failures, his triumphs.
When the front door opened, a head of white hair peeked in and Phainon furtively glanced around the room. His resolute face broke into a smile when he noticed Gorgo at the table and he bounded into the room with the overwhelming energy of a pup.
An elderly man followed, dressed in the long robes of a priest embossed with a symbol of Oronyx.
“You’re awake!” Phainon said but he glanced down at Mydei, still asleep in Gorgo’s arms, and slapped his hands over his mouth. “Sorry…”
“Don’t worry yourself,” Gorgo reassured him. The priest of Oronyx pulled out a chair and seated himself at the table. “Why don’t you take Mydeimos while this man and I have a conversation.”
Phainon’s hands dropped in an instant, exposing his grin as he opened his arms ready to carry Mydeimos away. “I’ll be outside. With Cyrene.”
Gorgo didn’t know who Cyrene was but the priest nodded, solemn yet encouraging, and Phainon did his usual cautious shuffle out the room. Although her mind was still fogged at the edges from the River of Souls, she wasn’t concerned as the door closed.
“Audata tells me you and your son have nowhere to return,” the priest began.
Gorgo’s brows twitched, tempted to rise, but she smoothed the reaction into tired complacency. “Yes. If my husband hears word that either of us survived, he will make it his duty to change that.”
As the man stared at her, the tattoos stark upon her cheek and arms burned. “You bear the markings of Strife’s followers.”
Gorgo opened her mouth, to retort, to placate, whichever came first, but he raised a hand. Reduced from a queen to a supplicant, she fell silent.
“However, time treats all equally. It watches as we are born into its currents where we toil until it carries us onwards towards death. Under Oronyx’s gaze, all are welcome in Aedes Elysiae.”
She had spent a life marching in the shadow and thunder of Nikador’s lance. Yet she had never spared much thought for Oronyx, whose Time would erode the sung memory of venerable heroes, lay waste to their spoils, and cast their legacy to be forgotten.
“Please.”
The word left her too soon. Kremnoans were not ones to ask let alone debase themselves to beg, not even for their lives. But for this Gorgo would cast aside her lineage, her upbringing, and the teachings of Nikador she had lived by.
She had very little left to lose and her tarnished pride was worth the least. She bowed her head. “Please. I have nothing of value to offer. But I beg you to grant mercy upom a mother who wishes to raise her son.”
“Raise your head.”
She did as commanded. The priest smiled at her. A subtle thing but filled with a warmth she couldn’t recall receiving before. It wasn’t the same as the reverence offered to her by the citizens who knew her by title and deeds. Nor was it the smiles she had shared with Eurypon back when their minds were alike.
Instead, she felt small. Young. In a way she hadn’t even as a child being encouraged by her parents to spread her wings from their nest and sink her talons into prey.
“No one wishes needless suffering on a mother and child. But never forget the hospitality shown to you.”
“I will not,” she swore, as solemn as she once issued a challenge for the throne, took a vow for marriage, and commanded armies.
Aedes Elysiae. A small wheat farming village along the coast. A place that existed under the gaze of Time yet had evaded the march of Strife. To stay here, to live here, would be to evade Eurypon’s eye and ear. It was a place where Mydeimos was allowed to grow, free from the constraints of warfare and bloodshed crowning him a patricidal king. Perhaps she had not failed her only son just yet.