Night could only think, "Well done."
He had given Hector a single idea.
The latter took it, turned it over, and applied it far beyond what he had intended, using it to convince an entirely separate power to enter the war on Troy's side.
Chryseis added that Troy reached out to many potential allies at the start. Most hesitated. The war was still new. The outcome was still unclear. No one wanted to commit to a side before the outcome began to show itself.
Penthesilea was the only one who heard about shared fate and moved.
And now that she was here, and Troy gained ground, every voice that objected to Hector's plan went quiet.
The same people who called it desperate, weak, and beneath Troy's dignity now stood in the halls and said loudly that calling for help sooner was obviously the right decision all along.
The prince showed remarkable wisdom. Everyone agreed.
Night looked out the window.
Although Troy was winning, he understood something they did not.
And that was—the gods would not allow either side to dominate.
That was not how this war worked. That was not how it ever worked.
He thought about the geography first, the way he always did when he needed to strip mythology down to something he could reason through.
The earliest civilization of ancient Greece could be traced back to the two great powers now locked in this war. Mycenae and Troy.
Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek coalition, was the king of Mycenae.
If one set aside the mythology and looked at the geography, the reason for the Trojan War became something more straightforward.
Mycenae held the western and southern Aegean. Its core sat in the Peloponnese, and its reach extended across the great city-states. Athens, Sparta, and Crete all operated within Mycenae's sphere; all of them answered, in their own ways, to Agamemnon as the king above kings.
They all sat on one great landmass. And far across the sea was another.
Past the long coastal line of the Trojan city-states lay the beginning of the Persian Empire's territory.
Across the sea, at the entrance to the Dardanelles, sat Troy.
Both civilizations worshipped the same gods.
Both shared the same roots.
But they grew separately, developed separately, and Mycenae did not particularly care about Troy for most of its history.
Why would it?
Why would the paramount power of the known world bother with a distant coastal city?
Sending an army across the sea was expensive and difficult. Even if you won, the territory was hard to hold, and Troy sat right next to a formidable Persian Empire that would be watching for any opportunity.
That kind of location was a hard bone with very little meat on it.
Without a reason that outweighed all of that, Mycenae would never have marched that far for nothing.
The story about Helen, about a war fought to reclaim one woman, was the kind of reason people repeated because it was simple and it sounded right, and no one was quite meant to examine it too closely.
Even if she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world, so what?
The real reason was simpler and considerably less romantic.
Mycenae had watched Troy develop its position at the entrance to the Dardanelles, sitting at the threshold between the Aegean and the Black Sea, collecting the profits of every trade route that passed through.
Troy belonged culturally to the Aegean world, but it was quietly growing rich from commerce that Mycenae had no share in.
That was what finally made Mycenae take notice.
And Mycenae, which considered itself the rightful overlord of the entire Aegean world, decided it wanted a share.
The demand was straightforward. Submit as Athens and Sparta submitted. Acknowledge Mycenae's supremacy and open its ports to let Greek merchant ships pass freely through the straits.
Troy refused.
It was far enough away, strong enough behind its walls, and managed well enough on its own for long enough that it saw no reason to acquire an overlord it never needed before.
That refusal was the true beginning of the war.
At its core, the Trojan War was fought over the control of maritime trade. Everything else was the story built around it.
But this was a world where the gods were real and present and involved.
Which meant the gods had to be factored in as well.
Both Troy and Greece worshipped the Olympians.
If the gods did not permit the war, Agamemnon could have coveted Troy's position all he liked and never moved a single ship.
The war existed because the gods allowed it.
One reason given was that Troy gave offense to certain gods.
Perhaps. But Greece had no shortage of heroes who offended the gods and lived long lives regardless. Offense alone did not explain the scale of what followed.
Night thought of Rome.
The Rome that would come after all of this.
The parallels were difficult to ignore.
A people driven from their home, guided by divine hands to a distant and unfamiliar land, told to build something new from nothing.
Troy fell, and Aeneas did not rebuild. The gods did not help him rebuild. They sent him across the Mediterranean, far from everything familiar, to find a new city in a new land. To establish a new mythology. The Roman one.
A new system of faith, planted in new soil, expanding the gods' reach westward across a continent they did not yet claim.
That was not coincidence.
The gods looked at a piece of land and decided they wanted a new base of faith there.
They expanded their sphere of influence westward, systematically, using the fall of Troy as the mechanism to move the pieces where they needed to go.
If that was true, then the gods wanted Troy to fall from the beginning.
They arranged its end early, guided Aeneas through the enemy pursuit with something suspiciously close to divine protection, and then used his homelessness as the pressure that forced him to do what his ancestors had done, build a kingdom alone in unfamiliar territory.
The royal house of Troy had always been a tool.
An old and well-used one.
The war between Greece and Troy was a performance staged for mortals, pushed forward by unseen hands.
A pretext to send someone west and plant a new mythology in Roman soil.
Apollo and Aphrodite might appear to be on Troy's side, but if the goal had always been Troy's destruction, no god in this story was truly trustworthy.
Night stared at nothing in particular, his expression still.
'Then why draw it out?'
If the end was written from the start, why support both sides?
Why let the war last as long as it did, grinding both armies down season after season, feeding generation after generation of heroes into the fighting until the names became legend precisely because so many of them died?
It felt deliberate. A slow and careful bleeding of the mortal world.
'What is at the source of it.'it?'
Night's mind moved quickly, his expression grave.
Nothing in the world happened without reason.
Not hatred, not love, not even cruelty on this scale.
There was something underneath it, some factor driving the gods to play with mortal lives so thoroughly.
Could it really be nothing more than entertainment?
He did not know the details.
But what he could reason out was this: the gods wanted Troy to fall, but not quickly.
They wanted both armies worn down, the losses deep and irreversible on both sides, before the curtain came down. And to make sure the conflict scaled up to the size they needed, in the later stages of this war, gods came down onto the battlefield in person.
Now that Troy pulled ahead with Penthesilea's early arrival, the gods backing Greece would compensate.
They would find a way to strengthen the Greek side.
That was simply how the balance was always maintained.
And if that escalation moved too fast, if a miscalculation pulled a god directly onto the field before the moment was right, the battlefield would stop being something any mortal force could navigate.
Even Night at his current strength. Even with Helena, wherever she went.
He pressed two fingers to his temple.
'Wait.'
Something was wrong.
A thought surfaced, sharp and cold.
Night straightened.
"Where is Achilles?"
"In everything you have told me,
I haven't heard his name once.
Did Achilles not come out to stop Hector?"
.
.
.