For @messageforyou

[refusetofight]

The palace at Skyros is only a loose sketch; Achilles dreaming memory can only paint it in sparing detail after so many years. The shapes and colors describe the place as much as Achilles’ emotions: The palace itself is washed out and bland, but the sunny rocks, the glittering sea, and the endless horizon just beyond are vibrant, tantalizing with the lure of fateful heroism.

It felt like a prison after the freedom of his bright, sunny youth on Phthia and his adventures on Mount Pelion. He was bored, impatient, but respected his mother’s wishes even as he resented them.

The dream palace is hollow and quiet. Lycomedes’ table is empty. His daughters’ looms are left abandoned. Achilles imagines the real Skyros must be in the same sorry state; he left Deidamia unwed and Lycomedes had no sons to defend his meager kingdom.

Achilles walks the halls and thumbs the shells encircling his wrist. He has no dream guide this time, but he came here on his own instincts: visit a memory both he and Pyrrhus share. Eventually, he finds an abandoned lyre and settles to play in a central courtyard where plucked notes echo hauntingly between colonnades—the only sound in the palace other than the sigh of the sea.

Comments

[messageforyou]

Pyrrhus lets the vision wash over him. He doesn't know where it came from, but he knows his father is sure of its reality. Orestes was supposed to kill him. How strange. And then generation after generation of fatherless warriors until finally someone kills the last of them when he's too young to defend himself.

But his reaction isn't horror. He just... sighs softly, as if releasing a held breath. He's never seen violence as a great evil as many do. To Pyrrhus, violence is a tool. It's a tool he knows how to use, so it's the one he utilizes the most, the same as weavers use looms and carpenters use saws. There's a resigned sadness to his sigh. He doesn't grieve the violence, the continuation of their profession, but he grieves all the boys just like him who will grow fatherless, and that final child who won't grow at all.

"If I fight the Fates, all I'll do is usher in my own demise faster, and ignominiously." 'Humble' isn't a word that anyone would have thought to apply to Pyrrhus, not even himself, yet he didn't inherit his father's stubborn defiance of the gods. Maybe it's because throughout his life, he's been forced to face how truly powerless he is in the face of the Fates in a way his Father wasn't. In the face of a far away war, disease, snake venom, ill birth... he's always been powerless to stop death from coming for his loved ones, and he accepts that he's just as powerless to stop it from coming for him.

But his heart hurts for his son, who will not have his father or his mother. His heart hurts for his father, trying to fight Fate to save his son from beyond the grave.

"If the gods have decided I'm to die, then I will." Pyrrhus squeezes his father's hand and gently bumps their foreheads together. "But the gods haven't decreed the circumstances I leave Molossus in. So I can make sure he's taken care of."

He's already thinking about it. Ophelia is good with Molossus. If he marries her, he trusts she'll be a kind stepmother even if he dies soon. She'll probably be a better mother than Andromache would have been. His son will grow into a fatherless warrior, but he doesn't have to grow alone and unloved.