“Hold the blade steady, if Agamemnon can, then a woman and yourself could.”

Atreus watched on, his shoulders tensed, like a lion circling its pride, hunting the weakest blood yet making no movement as to pounce upon the others. His eyes, sharpened by meticulous workings that bordered upon obsession, eyes that saw blood stain his good grounds with nothing short of spite.

He found you within a farmstead, your frame small, bundled in cloth sloppily while shepherds coaxed wordless babbles and coos from your pinkened lips. He saw your eyes, like that of his kin–Thyestes. The bastard, the lamb he ought to have wrought a poisoned dagger upon exiting his mother’s womb, watch life spill itself from his brother’s lips and onto his hands, see the hearth flicker with disgust at what his hands bore.

Death.

He took you from those shepherds, from the ones who claimed you of Gaea’s brood. He clothed you in silks and linen, your brothers newly Menelaus and Agamemnon who shortly came from the womb of his wife.

“I said, hold it steady, or can you not hear above your own tremblings?”

Atreus never found himself with his kin, then you. You did not know your true origins, not like he, he held plans for your smallish fingers, your soft words would form into battle cries, your fingertips would bleed from the bruises of a sword’s handle.

He’d make sure of it.

“Quiet.” He said, his fingers, like tendrils, wrapping themselves about the blade’s handle you held onto and ripping itself from you.

“You are apart of this house. Focus, you will rot upon the sheets you sleep upon if you cannot keep yourself from slicing another!”

Atreus held no qualms as your wrist bled, as the tip of his dagger pierced your unhardened flesh, feeling as your crimson painted itself onto him, as it made rivers against the skin and your cheeks bloomed with tears of pain as the trees whispered their condolences for what would be a future.

a future of blood.

A future Atreus would rule with every step.

“It will not hurt if you listen.”