Member-only story
Achilles, Lay Down Your Sword
Don’t heed the call of the darkness.
“Do you think she’s still waiting for you?” The nymph had giggled against her hand as she ran a hand down Achilles’s chest mottled with scars from wars fought in yesteryears — in an age where it was easier to forget he was all too soft, malleable, and impressionable. “You were just a plaything of the gods — just like we all were. Or did you think the music would save you?”
The words haunted him at intervals. Sometimes he wanted to scream up at the sky for a world where he was once a warrior on the battlefield. He could have fought for Helen of Troy, he could have warred Hades for the hand of Persephone, or he could have flown to the skies with Icarus as they tried not to let their wax wings melt against the tide of Helios above.
But instead now he wrote ballads for a muse he couldn’t have. She was taking the world by storm, one note at a time, while he sat in the shadows of someone else’s spotlight. Kindness was not his to own. His name was not his to grasp.
But that muse — oh, she was lovely with her ringlets of gold and her lips of maroon. Once, she had laughed with him as songs spilled from their fingertips. Once, she had danced in his kitchen with the light playing along her lovely form till they were dizzy from intoxication.
