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My father was a king and the son of kings.
At her temple a starburst of white gleams like bone, the scar from the time her father hit her with the hilt of a sword.
It is the only memory I have of my mother and so golden that I am almost sure I have made it up.
i can already tell i'm going to be obsessed with this writing style
I had brought a toy from home, a horse whose legs could move. I lifted one hoof, then the other, imagined that I had ridden him instead of the donkey. A soldier took pity on me and lent me his dice. I clattered them against the floor until they showed all sixes in one throw.
omg stop how is this already so depressing !
There was violence in that room,
He was the last in line, sitting at ease on the bench, his curling hair gleaming in the light of the fire. He had a jagged scar on one leg, a seam that stitched his dark brown flesh from heel to knee, wrapping around the muscles of the calf and burying itself in the shadow beneath his tunic. It looked like it had been a knife, I thought, or something like it, ripping upwards and leaving behind feathered edges, whose softness belied the violence that must have caused it.
the descriptions !! *snaps*
He didn’t bother to threaten me, yet. I hated him for it. I should be worth threatening.
That is what a son should be.
He did not hear me enter, or he did not choose to look. This is how I first began to understand my place here. Until this moment I had been a prince, expected and announced. Now I was negligible.
That is what a prince should be.
his beauty shone like a flame, vital and bright, drawing my eye against my will.
The keen edge of my envy was like flint, a spark away from fire.
On one of these days he sat closer to me than usual; only a table distant. His dusty feet scuffed against the flagstones as he ate. They were not cracked and callused as mine were, but pink and sweetly brown beneath the dirt. Prince, I sneered inside my head. He turned, as if he had heard me. For a second our eyes held, and I felt a shock run through me. I jerked my gaze away, and busied myself with my bread. My cheeks were hot, and my skin prickled as if before a storm. When, at last, I ventured to look up again, he had turned back to his table and was speaking to the other boys. After that,
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this writing !!!
His presence was like a stone in my shoe, impossible to ignore.
His skin was the color of just-pressed olive oil, and smooth as polished wood, without the scabs and blemishes that covered the rest of us.
Juggling was a trick of low mummers and beggars, but he made it something else, a living pattern painted on the air, so beautiful even I could not pretend disinterest.
One by one, Achilles caught the remaining fruits, returned them to the table with a performer’s flourish. Except for the last, which he ate, the dark flesh parting to pink seeds under his teeth. The fruit was perfectly ripe, the juice brimming. Without thinking, I brought the one he had thrown me to my lips. Its burst of grainy sweetness filled my mouth; the skin was downy on my tongue. I had loved figs, once.
My narrow world narrowed further: to the cracks in the floor, the carved whorls in the stone walls. They rasped softly as I traced them with my fingertip.
He was utterly still, the type of quiet that I had thought could not belong to humans, a stilling of everything but breath and pulse—like a deer, listening for the hunter’s bow. I found myself holding my breath.
My mother had always pulled her chair close to the bards when they came, so close my father would scowl and the servants would whisper. I remembered, suddenly, the dark gleam of her eyes in the firelight as she watched the bard’s hands. The look on her face was like thirst.
But at that moment the teacher entered, a man of indeterminate middle age. He had the callused hands of a musician and carried his own lyre, carved of dark walnut. “Who is this?” he asked. His voice was harsh and loud. A musician, but not a singer. “This is Patroclus,” Achilles said. “He does not play, but he will learn.” “Not on that instrument.” The man’s hand swooped down to pluck the lyre from my hands. Instinctively, my fingers tightened on it. It was not as beautiful as my mother’s lyre, but it was still a princely instrument. I did not want to give it up. I did not have to. Achilles had
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uh oh i may already love him
His fingers touched the strings, and all my thoughts were displaced. The sound was pure and sweet as water, bright as lemons. It was like no music I had ever heard before. It had warmth as a fire does, a texture and weight like polished ivory. It buoyed and soothed at once. A few hairs slipped forward to hang over his eyes as he played. They were fine as lyre strings themselves, and shone.
“Now you.” I shook my head, full to spilling. I could not play now. Not ever, if I could listen to him instead. “You play,” I said.
He looked different in sleep, beautiful but cold as moonlight. I found myself wishing he would wake so that I might watch the life return.
In the dim light I saw his easy breathing, the drowsy tangle of his limbs. In spite of myself, my pulse slowed. There was a vividness to him, even at rest, that made death and spirits seem foolish.
When he smiled, the skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled like a leaf held to flame.
“There is no one like you,”
im obsessed
We would lie on the warm sand and say, “Guess what I’m thinking about.”
And as we swam, or played, or talked, a feeling would come. It was almost like fear, in the way it filled me, rising in my chest. It was almost like tears, in how swiftly it came. But it was neither of those, buoyant where they were heavy, bright where they were dull. I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread: my father was not near, nor boys. I was not hungry, or tired, or sick. This feeling was different. I found myself
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Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular.
“Achilles.” He turned to me, his eyes still filled with frustration, with a sort of angry bewilderment. He was barely twelve. “Do you want to be a god?” It was easier this time. “Not yet,” he said. A tightness I had not known was there eased a little. I would not lose him yet.
It was hard to know if it was the firelight that made his face look so changed.
The heat rose up my neck, wrapped fingers over my face. His hair fell around me, and I could smell nothing but him. The grain of his lips seemed to rest a hairsbreadth from mine.
not doing well over here
His features are drawn with a firm hand; nothing awry or sloppy, nothing too large—all precise, cut with the sharpest of knives.
He has looked at me a thousand thousand times, but there is something different in this gaze, an intensity I do not know.
As I ran, I promised myself that if I ever saw him again, I would keep my thoughts behind my eyes. I had learned, now, what it would cost me if I did not.
no!! stop!! :'(
And then there was something else. The barest sound, just at the limit of hearing. But I caught it, and my skin, even in the heat, went cold.
I stretched, startling a little when my limbs bumped against Achilles, still asleep beside me. I watched him a moment, rosy cheeks and steady breaths. Something tugged at me, just beneath my skin, but then Chiron lifted a hand in greeting from across the cave, and I lifted one shyly in return, and it was forgotten.
“A wound in any of them will eventually be fatal. But death is quickest here.” His finger tapped the slight concavity of Achilles’ temple. A chill went through me to see it touched, that place where Achilles’ life was so slenderly protected. I was glad when we spoke of other things.
“And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone.
Achilles’ eyes were bright in the firelight, his face drawn sharply by the flickering shadows. I would know it in dark or disguise, I told myself. I would know it even in madness.
this prose is actually crazy !!!
Later Achilles would play the lyre, as Chiron and I listened. My mother’s lyre. He had brought it with him. “I wish I had known,” I said the first day, when he had showed it to me. “I almost did not come, because I did not want to leave it.” He smiled. “Now I know how to make you follow me everywhere.”
my heart !!!!
There was a quality to the silence like a held breath. Like the rabbit beneath the hawk’s shadow.
Other than the unsteady surface of the river, there were no mirrors on Mount Pelion, so I could only measure myself by the changes in Achilles.
“You would not be displeased, I think. With how you look now.” My face grew warm, again. But we spoke no more of it.
Our bodies cupped each other like hands.
He was outlined against the painted stars; Polaris sat on his shoulder.
I said his name, I think. It blew through me; I was hollow as a reed hung up for the wind to sound. There was no time that passed but our breaths.
His eyelids were the color of the dawn sky; he smelled like earth after rain.
I will never leave him. It will be this, always, for as long as he will let me.
