Recommended listening: "Seven Devils" by Florence + The Machine
"The gods do not hear the prayers of slaves. They hear only the prayers of those who can afford sacrifice."
— Temple inscription, defaced and abandoned, Lower Kyrios
The stench of Kyrios reached Thera before dawn—a miasma of salt, sweat, and desperation that clung to the lower districts like a shroud. From her window in Philon's villa, she could see the city sprawling down toward the harbor in terraced layers, each level marking another descent in fortune and fate. The Obsidian Palace crowned the highest hill, its black spires catching the first rays of Apollo's chariot with defiant arrogance. Below it, the temple district gleamed white marble and gold leaf, where priests grew fat on offerings from those desperate enough to believe gods cared about mortal suffering. Then came the merchant quarters—her prison, with its limestone walls stained yellow by decades of cook-fires and broken dreams. Further down, the freedmen's slums sprawled in chaotic density, and finally, clinging to the harbor like barnacles, the slave markets.
Thera had been sold in those markets once. She would not be sold again.
She pressed her palm against the iron bars that crossed her window—decorative, Philon called them, as if the word could transform a cage into architecture. Her fingers found the familiar groove in the metal, worn smooth by five years of habit, five years of counting sunrises and promises to herself that this would not be her eternity. Twenty-three years old, and she had been property for nearly a quarter of her life. The brand on her left shoulder blade throbbed as it always did in the hour before dawn, a phantom pain that had nothing to do with the healed scar tissue and everything to do with memory.
She turned from the window, her bare feet silent on the cold tile. The chamber was small but luxurious in the way of things meant to comfort slaves into compliance—silk cushions in jewel tones, a bronze mirror polished to cruel clarity, oil lamps that Philon kept perpetually lit because he enjoyed the way firelight moved across skin. The room smelled of myrrh and rosewater, perfumes she was required to wear, and beneath that, the faint copper scent of blood that never quite left places where violence was routine.
Thera moved to the corner where a loose tile concealed her only possessions: twelve silver drachma, stolen one coin at a time over two years. It wasn't enough to buy her freedom—that would cost three hundred drachma at minimum, assuming Philon would even consider manumission—but it was enough to buy passage on a merchant vessel, or to bribe a guard at the harbor gate, or to purchase the specific poison she'd acquired three months ago from an apothecary in the freedmen's quarter who asked no questions if the coin was good.
The poison currently resided in a clay vial no larger than her thumb, tucked into the hollow of a decorative statue of Aphrodite. The irony wasn't lost on Thera—the goddess of love housing the means to murder. But then, the gods specialized in irony. It was perhaps their only consistent virtue.
She replaced the tile and straightened, examining herself in the bronze mirror with the clinical detachment she'd cultivated over years of learning to divorce her mind from her body. The woman who stared back was beautiful in the way that inspired both desire and cruelty—high cheekbones that caught shadow dramatically, full lips that Philon enjoyed seeing bruised, dark eyes that reflected light like polished obsidian. Her skin was deep brown, smooth and unmarked except for the brand, and she kept her hair cut short in deliberate defiance of Philon's preference for long curls. He'd beaten her for it the first time. She'd cut it again the next week.
Some defiances were worth the price.
The sound of footsteps in the corridor outside her chamber made her pulse quicken, but she didn't move. Control was everything. Panic was a luxury slaves couldn't afford.
The door opened without ceremony. Philon didn't knock—why would he? You didn't knock on doors that belonged to you, and everything inside those doors belonged to you as well.
"Get dressed," he said, his voice carrying the particular irritation of a man who'd woken before his body was ready. "The Sophion delegation arrives within the hour, and I'll not have you greeting them looking like a shorn sheep."
Thera turned slowly, letting him see the deliberate blankness of her expression. Philon was a small man in every sense—short of stature, narrow of shoulder, and possessed of a spirit so pinched and mean that it seemed to have shriveled his flesh around his bones. His face was perpetually flushed, whether from wine or rage or the effort of maintaining his position in Kyrios's cutthroat merchant class, and his hands were soft as a child's, unmarked by any labor more strenuous than counting coins.
"Of course, master," Thera said, the words ash in her mouth. "What would you have me wear?"
Something flickered across Philon's expression—satisfaction, perhaps, at her obedience, or anticipation of some future cruelty. "The red silk. And the gold collar. They're Athena-blessed, the Sophions. They appreciate… refinement."
The red silk was nearly transparent, designed to reveal rather than conceal. The gold collar was heavy enough to ache after an hour's wear, engraved with Philon's merchant mark and inlaid with garnets the color of dried blood. Together, the garments declared what Thera was with more clarity than words ever could: decoration, property, a commodity to be displayed like fine pottery or expensive wine.
"As you wish," Thera murmured, already moving toward the cedar chest where her master kept his favorite costumes for her.
Philon watched her for a moment longer, his gaze lingering on the curve of her back, the lean muscle of her shoulders. Then he turned away, apparently satisfied that his orders would be obeyed. "I'll send Lyssa to help with your cosmetics. The Sophions expect quality, and I'll not be embarrassed by a slave who looks like she's been sleeping rough."
He paused at the threshold, hand on the door frame. "Oh, and Thera? Smile more today. Your sullenness is growing tiresome."
The door closed behind him with a decisive click.
Thera stood motionless for three heartbeats, then four, letting the rage build and then subside like a wave against stone. She'd learned this too—how to feel everything and show nothing, how to let emotion pass through her without taking root. Rage was useful, but only when controlled. Uncontrolled, it was just another chain.
She dressed methodically, the red silk sliding against her skin like water. The gold collar settled around her throat with familiar weight, and she fastened it with the practiced ease of long repetition. When Lyssa arrived—a Thracian girl no more than sixteen, purchased last spring to serve as Philon's household maid—Thera submitted to having her face painted with the resigned patience of a statue being polished.
"You're quiet today," Lyssa ventured, her hands gentle as she applied kohl to Thera's eyelids. The girl had kind eyes, still soft with the naive hope that kindness might shield her from the worst of slavery's depredations.
"Thinking," Thera replied.
"About what?"
About how many drops of poison it would take to stop a man's heart. About whether the gods were real or merely stories people told themselves to explain why the world was cruel. About the brand on her shoulder that sometimes burned in her dreams, glowing gold like sun on water.
"About nothing important," Thera said instead.
Lyssa finished the cosmetics in silence, then stepped back to admire her work. "You look beautiful."
"I look expensive," Thera corrected. "There's a difference."
The Sophion delegation arrived precisely at the second hour, announced by the clatter of hooves on limestone and the sharp commands of house guards directing traffic in the villa's courtyard. Thera stood with three other pleasure slaves in Philon's receiving room, arranged like art objects against the painted walls. The room itself was an exercise in calculated ostentation—frescoes depicting the labors of Heracles, furniture inlaid with ivory and lapis lazuli, a mosaic floor showing the fall of Troy in disturbing detail.
Thera had spent enough time in this room to have memorized every tile of Achilles dragging Hector's corpse around the walls of Ilium.
The Sophions entered with the quiet confidence of those who'd never had to announce their own importance. There were three of them: an elderly man whose white beard and scholar's stoop identified him as some kind of advisor or philosopher, a middle-aged woman whose sharp eyes missed nothing and whose fingers were ink-stained from a lifetime of writing, and a young man who couldn't have been more than twenty-five, dressed in the indigo and silver that marked him as Athena-blessed nobility.
Philon practically prostrated himself in greeting, his obsequiousness so naked that Thera felt embarrassment on his behalf—not for his lack of dignity, which he'd never possessed, but for his transparent desperation to be seen as worthy by his betters.
"Lord Sophion, Lady Arithma, Scholar Dexios," Philon gushed. "You honor my humble home with your presence. Please, sit, be comfortable. I've had wine brought from the Dionysara vineyards, the autumn pressing, and refreshments prepared by my cook who trained in the palace kitchens before—"
"We're not here for wine, Philon," the young man—Lord Sophion, apparently—interrupted with the casual rudeness of nobility addressing commerce. His gaze swept the room, pausing briefly on each slave before moving on. "My mother requires parchment. You claimed to have Egyptian papyrus of sufficient quality for archival purposes. I hope you weren't exaggerating."
Philon's smile never wavered, though Thera saw the tightness around his eyes that meant rage barely leashed. "Of course not, my lord. I would never presume to misrepresent my merchandise. If you'll follow me to the storeroom, I can show you—"
"Have your slaves bring samples here," Lady Arithma said, her voice carrying the absolute authority of someone who'd never been denied anything. "I'll examine them in proper light. And have them bring the Egyptian ink as well. Papyrus is worthless without quality ink."
Philon bowed so deeply his forehead nearly touched his knees. "At once, my lady. Thera—" his gaze snapped to her with the force of a whip crack, "—fetch the papyrus samples from the locked chest in my office. The Egyptian lot, marked with the scarab seal. And the ink bottles from Clymene's workshop."
Thera inclined her head in acknowledgment and turned toward the door, grateful for any excuse to leave the oppressive atmosphere of enforced civility. But she'd barely taken two steps when Scholar Dexios spoke, his voice mild but arresting.
"That brand on your shoulder, girl. The scarred one. Let me see it clearly."
The words hit Thera like a fist to the solar plexus. She froze, every muscle locked, her mind racing through a thousand possible responses and finding none adequate. Slowly—slowly, because sudden movement would reveal fear, and fear was blood in the water—she turned back to face the delegation.
Philon's expression had shifted from obsequious to uncertain. "My lord scholar, I assure you, all my slaves are properly marked with my merchant seal. If there's some irregularity—"
"Not your mark," Dexios interrupted, shuffling forward with the careful steps of age. His eyes, rheumy and pale, were nevertheless sharp with intelligence as they fixed on Thera. "The old one. Beneath the scarring. Turn around, girl."
There was no refusing. Slaves didn't refuse scholars, especially not Athena-blessed scholars whose favor could make or break a merchant's reputation. Thera turned, feeling the weight of their gazes like brands themselves, burning into the space between her shoulder blades where her oldest scar resided—a circle of puckered flesh, deliberately mutilated years ago by someone whose name she'd never learned, whose face she'd forgotten.
She heard Dexios's sharp intake of breath, heard the rustle of fabric as he moved closer. Then, impossibly, she felt his fingertips trace the ruined brand, following the faint lines that remained beneath the damage.
"By Athena's wisdom," Dexios breathed. "It's not possible. They're all dead. We watched them burn."
The room had gone silent with the particular quality of silence that precedes violence or revelation. Thera's heart hammered against her ribs, her breath shallow, her mind screaming at her to run even as her body remained frozen in place.
"What are you talking about?" Philon demanded, his voice pitched high with confusion and growing alarm. "That's just scar tissue from a previous owner's mark. I bought her in the markets five years ago from a Corinthian merchant who—"
"This is a sun sigil," Dexios said, his finger still resting against Thera's shoulder blade, cold as death against her skin. "Twelve rays in a perfect circle, the mark of House Heliaris. Apollo's blessed line. They were exterminated twenty years ago by order of King Alexandros II. Every man, woman, and child of that cursed bloodline burned or hanged or thrown from the cliffs at Pyratheon."
The room spun. Thera heard the words but couldn't process them, couldn't reconcile the sounds with meaning. House Heliaris. Apollo. Blessed. Exterminated. The terms floated in her mind like debris on water, refusing to cohere into anything resembling sense.
"You're mistaken," Philon was saying, his voice sharp with the defensive anger of a man whose property value was being called into question. "This slave is nobody. No lineage, no house, no—"
"Look at her face," Lady Arithma said quietly. Unlike the men, she hadn't approached. She remained seated, but her gaze was fixed on Thera with an intensity that made Thera's skin crawl. "The bone structure. The eyes. My mother served House Heliaris as tutor to their youngest children before the purge. She described Lady Casseia's daughters in her journals. High cheekbones. Dark eyes like volcanic glass. Skin the color of polished mahogany."
"Half of Astraeon has dark skin," Philon protested, but his voice had lost its conviction.
"Not with that brand," Dexios countered. "Someone tried to destroy it, but the marks remain. Twelve rays. The sun sigil is unmistakable to those who know how to look."
Lord Sophion had drawn a knife—not threatening, precisely, but present, visible, a reminder of the power differential in the room. "If there's even a possibility that this slave is Heliaris blood, we're required by law to report it to the palace. King Alexandros issued an edict twenty years ago: any surviving member of that traitor house is to be executed on sight. The bounty is five hundred drachma."
Five hundred drachma. More money than Thera had ever imagined possessing. A fortune. And all someone had to do to claim it was deliver her to King Alexandros's executioners.
Philon was shaking his head, hands raised in placating gestures. "My lords, my lady, please. This is clearly a misunderstanding. The girl is nobody, I assure you. I have bills of sale, documentation of purchase, records that prove—"
"Records can be forged," Lady Arithma said. "The brand cannot. At minimum, this requires investigation. Scholar Dexios, send word to the palace that we've found a possible Heliaris remnant. They'll want to examine her themselves."
Thera's vision had narrowed to a tunnel, sound becoming muffled and distant. They were talking about her as if she weren't present, discussing her fate as if she were livestock discovered to have diseased blood. Part of her mind—the part that had learned to survive by thinking three moves ahead—was already calculating. The door was ten feet away. There were three guards in the courtyard. She had no weapons. No allies. No plan.
And she was so, so tired of having no control over her own existence.
"I need to piss," Thera said.
The conversation stopped. Everyone stared at her.
"I need to piss," Thera repeated, her voice flat, empty of inflection. "You can discuss my bloodline and my execution, but my bladder doesn't care about politics. So unless you want me to piss on your expensive mosaic floor, I need to visit the privy."
Philon's face had gone purple. "You don't speak unless—"
"Let her go," Lord Sophion interrupted, waving a hand dismissively. "Post a guard at the door. She's not going anywhere."
Philon looked ready to argue, but Lady Arithma's cool gaze silenced him. He jerked his head at one of the house guards—a thick-necked brute named Castor who'd broken Thera's ribs once for moving too slowly—and gestured toward the door.
"Watch her," Philon snapped. "If she tries anything, you have my permission to break her legs."
Thera walked toward the door with measured steps, her face a mask of docility. Castor followed, his hand resting on the cudgel at his belt. They crossed through the atrium, past the fountain where stone nymphs poured eternal water from stone urns, and into the narrow corridor that led to the slaves' latrine.
The latrine was a small room with a bench containing four holes, positioned over a channel that carried waste to the city sewers. It smelled of lime and shit and the particular despair of places where human dignity went to die. A single high window provided ventilation and a sliver of morning light.
"Make it quick," Castor growled from the doorway.
Thera moved behind the privacy screen—a laughable concession to modesty in a house where slaves had none—and let her breathing steady. Her hands found the thin leather cord she kept tied around her waist, hidden beneath the red silk. Looped at one end. Strong enough to hold weight.
She'd always known this day might come. Some variation of it, at least. The day when staying alive required drastic action. The day when the choice was between dying on her knees or fighting on her feet.
She emerged from behind the screen with the cord concealed in her palm.
"Done?" Castor asked, not really looking at her. Men like him never really looked at slaves. They saw property, not people.
"Not quite," Thera said, and lunged.
She moved like water, like shadow, using momentum and surprise to compensate for her lack of size and strength. The cord looped around Castor's neck before he could shout, and she yanked it tight, throwing her full weight backward to drag him off balance. He was stronger than her—much stronger—but she'd spent five years studying the guards, learning their habits, their weaknesses. Castor was lazy. Castor expected compliance.
Castor was wrong.
He thrashed, trying to reach back to grab her, but she'd positioned herself against the wall, using it for leverage. His fingers scrabbled at the cord, managed to get beneath it, but she'd knotted it with a slipknot that tightened under pressure. His face went from red to purple, spittle flying from his lips as he tried to force air past the constriction.
Twenty seconds. That's how long it took for a man to lose consciousness if you cut off his blood flow correctly. Thera had learned that from another slave, years ago, a Scythian woman who'd killed three men before she was finally caught and crucified in the market square as a warning.
Fifteen seconds. Castor's struggles were weakening, his movements becoming uncoordinated.
Ten seconds. His knees buckled.
Five seconds. He collapsed, deadweight, pulling Thera down with him.
She held the cord tight for another thirty count, making sure. Then she released it, breathing hard, her arms burning from the exertion. Castor lay still, his face slack, his eyes open and glazed. Not dead—she could see the shallow rise and fall of his chest—but unconscious. That would have to be enough.
Thera moved quickly, stripping Castor of his cudgel and the small belt knife he carried. The knife was poorly balanced, designed for cutting food rather than fighting, but it was sharp enough. She tucked it into her belt, tested the weight of the cudgel, and turned toward the door.
She had perhaps three minutes before someone came to investigate why Castor and the slave girl were taking so long. Three minutes to cross the villa, reach her chamber, retrieve the poison and her stolen coins, and escape into the labyrinth of Kyrios's lower districts.
It wasn't enough time. It was impossible.
She was going to do it anyway.
The corridor was empty—a small mercy. Thera moved silently, bare feet making no sound on the tile. She'd memorized the villa's layout years ago, every corridor and courtyard, every room and exit. Knowledge was power, and in a place where you had none, you hoarded any scrap you could find.
She was halfway across the atrium when she heard voices approaching from the receiving room—Philon's nasal whine, Lady Arithma's measured tones. They were coming.
No time for subtlety. Thera ran, the cudgel clutched in her hand, her breath coming in sharp gasps. She burst into her chamber, grabbed the clay vial from Aphrodite's hollow embrace, snatched the silver coins from their hiding place. The window with its decorative bars mocked her—no escape that way. The door she'd entered through was the only exit.
And then she heard the scream.
Someone had found Castor.
Footsteps pounded in the corridor outside. Shouts of alarm. Philon's voice rising above the others: "Find her! She's killed my guard! Five drachma to whoever brings her to me alive!"
Thera looked around the room wildly, searching for any option, any possibility. Her gaze landed on the oil lamps, their flames dancing in the draft from the open door. Then on the silk cushions. The wooden furniture. The painted walls.
Fire. Fire was chaos. Fire was distraction.
She overturned the nearest lamp, letting the oil splash across the cushions. They caught immediately, flames spreading with hungry enthusiasm. She grabbed a second lamp, hurled it against the wall where it shattered, igniting the fresco of Olympian gods feasting on mortal suffering. Smoke began to fill the room, thick and black.
Thera wrapped her face in a strip of silk torn from her dress and plunged back into the corridor. Guards were running toward her, drawn by the smoke and flames. She ducked into a side passage, pressed herself against the wall as they thundered past, too focused on the fire to notice the slave girl hiding in shadows.
The villa was chaos now—slaves running in panic, guards shouting contradictory orders, Philon's voice shrill with rage and terror as he watched his investment burn. Thera used the confusion, moving against the tide of people, heading for the servants' entrance that opened onto the narrow alley behind the villa.
She was ten feet from freedom when Lyssa appeared, the Thracian girl's eyes wide with fear and confusion.
"Thera?" Lyssa gasped. "What's happening? They're saying you killed—"
Thera's hand moved before conscious thought, the clay vial appearing in her palm, her thumb popping the wax seal. The poison inside was dark as ink, viscous. Lethal. She'd purchased it to kill Philon, to murder the man who'd owned her body and thought he owned her soul.
But Lyssa had seen her. Lyssa could identify her. Lyssa would tell the guards which way she'd gone.
Their eyes met. Thera saw the moment Lyssa understood, saw the girl's expression shift from confusion to horror to betrayal.
"Please," Lyssa whispered. "I won't tell anyone. I swear on Hestia's hearth, I won't—"
"I'm sorry," Thera said, and meant it.
Then she threw the poison in Lyssa's face.
The girl screamed—high and piercing—as the liquid splashed across her eyes and mouth. She clawed at her face, stumbling backward, her screams becoming gurgles as the poison did its work. Thera watched for one heartbeat, two, fighting the urge to stay, to help, to somehow undo what she'd just done.
But survival didn't allow for mercy. Survival didn't allow for guilt.
Thera ran.
The alley behind Philon's villa was narrow and filthy, strewn with refuse and reeking of waste. Thera's bare feet splashed through puddles she didn't want to identify as she sprinted toward the maze of lower Kyrios. Behind her, she could hear the villa erupting into full chaos—more screams, the crackle of flames, orders being shouted.
She ran until her lungs burned and her legs trembled, until the sounds of pursuit faded into the general cacophony of the city waking to its daily misery. Only then did she slow, pressing herself into the shadowed doorway of an abandoned warehouse, gasping for breath.
Her hands were shaking. The cudgel clattered to the ground. She stared at her palms—still stained with the residue of poison—and felt her stomach heave. She managed to turn her head before she vomited, bile and horror mixing in the gutter.
Lyssa's face. That last expression of betrayal.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
But sorry didn't matter. Sorry was a luxury. Sorry was for people who had choices.
Thera wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and forced herself to stand. The sun was fully risen now, Apollo's chariot climbing the eastern sky, indifferent to the small tragedies of small lives. The city sprawled around her in all its squalid glory—a thousand lives being lived in a thousand small prisons.
She needed to keep moving. Needed to find Leon and the Branded, the slave resistance network that operated in the shadows of Kyrios. They could hide her, maybe. Or at least help her leave the city.
But first, she needed to understand what the Sophions had seen in her brand. House Heliaris. Apollo's blessed line. Exterminated twenty years ago.
Twenty-three years ago, Thera had been born. Born where? To whom? She had no memories before the age of three, no knowledge of her life before slavery. Just fragments—a woman's voice singing, the smell of honey, the warmth of sunlight on skin.
And sometimes, in dreams, a burning building and screaming.
Thera looked down at her left hand, at the thin silver scar across her palm that she'd always had, that she'd always assumed was some childhood accident. In the morning light, it almost looked like a letter. A symbol.
A sun's ray.
"The sun's blood," a voice croaked behind her.
Thera spun, the belt knife appearing in her hand with the fluid ease of instinct. But the figure emerging from deeper in the alley was no threat—just an old woman, bent and crippled, her face ravaged by disease or time or both. Her eyes were milky with cataracts, but they fixed on Thera with disturbing precision.
"You are the dawn that breaks the storm," the old woman continued, shuffling forward. Her voice was raw, like she'd spent years screaming. "The prophecy's child. The sun's last daughter."
Thera backed away, heart hammering. "I don't know what you're talking about. Leave me alone."
"You don't remember," the woman said, and it wasn't a question. "They made you forget. Scarred the mark. Hid you in plain sight. But I remember. I was there the night they burned Pyratheon. I was there when Lady Casseia gave you to the servant girl and told her to run."
The world tilted. Thera's back hit the wall, and she slid down it, suddenly unable to stand. "That's impossible. I'm nobody. I'm just—"
"You're Thera of House Heliaris," the woman interrupted, her ruined face splitting into a smile that was half grimace. "Daughter of Lord Marcus and Lady Casseia. Born under the full moon of Apollo's month. Blessed by the sun god himself at your naming ceremony."
"Stop," Thera whispered. "Please stop."
But the woman continued relentlessly, her words pouring out like poison, like prophecy, like truth. "They killed your family because they feared the oracle's words. 'When storms have reigned a century, the sun's child shall rise. The throne of thunders shall shatter, and a new dawn—or endless night—shall come.' King Alexandros couldn't risk it. Couldn't risk House Heliaris surviving. So he killed them all."
"Then why am I alive?" Thera demanded, her voice breaking. "If they killed everyone, why did I survive?"
The old woman's smile faded. "Because someone loved you enough to damn herself. The servant girl who carried you away was caught at the city gates. They tortured her for days, trying to learn where you were. She told them nothing. They crucified her in the market square, and she died with your name on her lips."
Thera was crying now, silent tears tracking through the grime on her face. She didn't know why. Didn't know this servant girl, didn't remember her, couldn't mourn someone she'd never known. But grief was rising in her throat like flood water anyway, threatening to drown her.
"Why are you telling me this?" she managed.
The old woman reached out with a gnarled hand, pressed it against Thera's shoulder where the ruined brand lay hidden beneath silk. "Because Apollo speaks through dying mouths, and mine is nearly done. He sent me to find you. To tell you what you are. What you could be."
"I could be dead," Thera said bitterly. "The Sophions know about the brand. They're sending word to the palace. By midday, every guard in Kyrios will be hunting me."
"Good," the old woman said, and laughed—a terrible, wet sound. "Let them hunt. Let them fear. You are the storm's end, child. You are the prophecy made flesh. And when you sit the Obsidian Throne, when you break the Keraunos line and claim your birthright, remember this moment. Remember who you were before you became what you must be."
"I don't want a throne," Thera protested. "I just want to be free."
"Freedom is a myth the powerful tell the powerless to keep them docile," the old woman said. "There is no freedom. There is only power. Will you claim it? Or will you die in this alley, nobody and nothing, another forgotten slave in a city that eats its children?"
The question hung in the air between them, as heavy as prophecy, as sharp as the knife in Thera's hand.
And then the old woman gasped, her milky eyes going wide. Blood bubbled from her lips, dark and thick. She reached for Thera one last time, her fingers scrabbling at Thera's wrist, and Thera caught her as she fell, cradling the dying woman's head in her lap.
"The sun's blood," the oracle whispered, her voice fading to nothing. "You are the dawn that breaks the storm. Find the weapon. Find Pyratheon. Find your… destiny…"
The light went out of her eyes like candles snuffed by wind.
Thera sat in the filthy alley, holding a dead oracle, covered in blood and smoke and the ashes of her old life. Around her, Kyrios woke to another day of casual cruelty and small horrors, indifferent to the fact that something had just shifted, some fundamental balance had just tilted.
In the distance, temple bells began to ring—Apollo's morning hymn, calling the faithful to prayer.
And Thera, who had never prayed to any god, who had never believed in anything but survival, looked up at the sky where the sun climbed higher, relentless and burning.
I am Thera of House Heliaris, she thought. I am Apollo's child. I am the prophecy's fulfillment.
And I am going to burn this kingdom to ash.
Behind her, carried on the morning wind, she heard the sound of guards' horns and hunting dogs baying for blood.
The hunt had begun.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Welcome to Chains of Apollo. Thank you for taking this journey into darkness with me.
A few things to note as we begin:
This is Thera's origin—not as a hero, but as someone who will become monstrous in pursuit of justice. She's sympathetic now. She won't always be. That's the point.
The Greek mythology in this story is intentionally twisted—the gods are not benevolent, prophecy is a curse, and divine favor comes with terrible prices. If you're looking for noble Olympians, this isn't your story.
Content warnings remain in effect. This chapter contained violence, murder (Lyssa's death was brutal and necessary to establish Thera's capacity for ruthlessness), and the beginning of what will be a very dark journey.
Historically, I've researched Greek and Roman slavery extensively to portray it accurately. It was worse than most people imagine. Much worse.
QUESTION FOR READERS:
Thera just killed an innocent girl to save herself. She's also been told she's prophesied to overthrow a tyrannical king. At this moment, do you sympathize with her? Why or why not? How far would YOU go to survive?
Next chapter: The Oracle's Gift — Thera learns the full truth of the prophecy, and the cost of destiny.
Thank you for reading. Leave your thoughts in the comments—I read and respond to all of them.