The sea salt still clings to your lashes.

You blink it away, standing with your sandals half-sunk in Scyrian soil, the cliffs at your back, the sun sharp and pitiless over the Aegean. Below, the surf sings its old song—brine and longing, foam and pull. Beside you, Odysseus squints toward the palace gates with the air of a man rehearsing a game of knucklebones he already knows the outcome of.

“King Lycomedes keeps his court like a hive,” he murmurs, brushing sand from the hem of his cloak. “All sweetness and sting. Be still a moment, and they’ll dress you in honey and silk.”

You glance down at yourself, already half-draped in both—your tunic dyed with soft Tyrian threads, your belt too fine for travel. They had offered it the moment you set foot on the island. A guest-gift, they called it. A courtesy. It had felt, in your hands, like a net.

But you wore it. You always wore it. It was the kind of cloth you had learned to use as armor.

Still, you shift beside Odysseus, spine straightening. “Are you certain he’s here?”

He does not answer at first. Only lifts his head to the palace walls. His eyes gleam—dark and unshaken.

“He is,” he says.

And when he knocks at the gate, it is with the certainty of a man not seeking entry but declaring arrival.

You see her in the garden. Or you think you do.

She is seated beneath an olive tree, braid coiled over one shoulder, gold cuffs bright against her wrists. She does not look up when the stewards announce you. Her gaze is fixed on the flute in her lap, delicate and pale and carved in the shape of a swan’s neck. Around her, girls laugh like dryads, threading flower crowns and dropping pomegranate seeds into their mouths.

And yet, there is something in her stillness that rings wrong.

Something in the way her shoulders hold tension like a bowstring, in the quiet stretch of her calves beneath the hem of her chiton. The flute trembles once between her fingers, just barely.

You know what it is to tremble like that.

Odysseus is already striding forward, spinning honey from his tongue—“Your graces, forgive the dust on our sandals, we come with salt in our mouths and iron in our hands”—but you stay back. Your eyes do not leave her.

Then, she looks up. Your breath hitches.

Not because of her beauty, though she has that, and ruinously, not because of the still, half-wild sharpness of her gaze—but because you see it. The thing she doesn’t say. The thing she has buried beneath silk and silence and the cadence of girlhood.

You know it. You know it.

And for the first time since setting sail, your voice leaves you.

You are only vaguely aware of Odysseus speaking, spinning tales of Troy, of honor, of fate wound tight as a skein of wool. But you are watching her—him?—Achilles?—with your heartbeat caught between ribs.

And when there’s a pause, you step forward, slow and deliberate.

“You needn’t look so frightened,” you whisper. Your voice is low. Careful. Knowing. “I know what it is. To feel unmade of yourself.”

The silence is swift, immediate.

One of the other girls shifts. Achilles blinks at you, lashes thick and unmoving.

“I beg your pardon?” he says. His voice is lighter than you expect, but it has weight to it. Something beneath the surface.

You soften. He stares, looks around.

And then, slowly, with the weariness of someone peeling back a second skin, he speaks, “I’m—hiding. Not transforming, as you say."

And just like that, the illusion cracks. Not unkindly.

Achilles shifts on the bench, and suddenly you see it—the prince beneath the silks, the soldier in retreat. The fire not dimmed, only banked. He has not become anything new. Has not shifted the soul in himself.

Unlike you, he has only paused the becoming.