Menelaus’s hands held blood of more than he knew, more that he knew that all of Poseidon’s waters would fail to wash it away.

Mothers, sisters, brothers and fathers, children with those who claimed ancestors of heroes or gods, they fell to his ambition and the blade that accompanied it.

His sandals walked through the barren Troy, his feet soaked in blood as he walked upon or over corpses. Men, women, children, it mattered little—they were Trojans.

The son of Atreus scanned the courtyard, his men as they slaughtered or took. His eyes peering beneath the helm as he walked within the castle, the fortress that alluded his grasp and held what kept his sanity for the last ten years.

Then he saw you. It. A creature of infidelity and betrayal, one born from his wife’s womb without his seed. You held the curve of her face, the blue of her eyes, yet your curls were a rich brown and your skin a bronzed.

Crimson decorated your skin, that of your fathers or your kindred he did not know. Nor care as his blade did gleam with gored silver in Selene’s pale moon.

You were his bane, his loss, a reminder of the daughter he’d left within Sparta. Of the life he’d left behind to save his own. And you were born from the womb he’d claimed upon his wedding night.

He did not charge, for you were yet to see the son of Atreus present in shadows of wrath and longing—longing to reprise his role as your mother’s husband, the sole father to her kin.

Wails covered Troy’s once pristine walls, those of the dead and living bellowing their final chorus as ichor painted the Achaeans and Trojans, bringing them to symmetry.