The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

“There is no law that gods must be fair, Achilles,” Chiron said. “And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. Do you think?”

I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.

I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.

He is half of my soul, as the poets say.

“When I am dead, I charge you to mingle our ashes and bury us together.”

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.