Vengeance
They would suffer.
By all the Gods of Olympus, they would suffer.
Why was it, that after years of peace, after years of good, happy life, he was to be dragged from his farm? Since birth, he had ploughed his fields, tended to his cattle, praised the Gods as the rain fell and yet now he mourned.
Once, his life had been good; his home had been filled with laughter as his children wandered the fields that fed them. Now, however, the walls of his house were tainted. The air itself hung heavy with a barely concealed grief, the farmland itself seemed to weep and the hills made know their displeasure at the loss of one of their own.
He dreamed at night of what might have been; of the life that had been robbed for him when the egos of the rich and powerful became too great to bear, when discord reigned supreme and the world burned around those too powerful to be sacrificed as payment.
He knew of the perpetrators, of the fiends guilty of inflicting this sorrow upon him. He knew of the reason for which there was no joy in his home, no laughter in his times of happiness. He knew the reason for which his darling wife cried herself to sleep, and he knew that it was so fundamentally wrong.
After all, no parent should have to watch as the shroud of their child burns.
The war in Ilion had robbed Achaea of much; one could hardly enter the towns and cities without hearing of the financial strife, of the shortages in wood to work, and of Bronze to smelt. One could seldom walk the streets of the market without smelling the pungent odour of rotten produce and of stale bread, the finest of ingredients and grain having been sent to the men in a faraway land as they defended the honour of a man who they had never met, and would likely never come to meet in their short lives.
Here they were, now; Menelaus and Nestor and Agamemnon, all those Kings being lauded as greats, being raised upon the pedestals of Heroes, being compared to the likes of Heracles and Jason, spoken of in the same breath as Theseus and Perseus.
Each of those men had rid the world of evil; saved lives as they purged monsters from their world, creating an environment upon Gaia's being that would see all safe, that drew young men from stations of war to living without the burdens of soldiering. These, however, did the opposite. They had dragged men from their farms and families, and spilled their blood where they had been too cowardly to do so themselves.
Even now, he had heard, Odysseus risked the lives of young Greeks, his hubris too great to do so little as to pay obeisance to the Great God Poseidon, and instead his petty arrogance had drawn the crew of his ship astray. Few had any idea as to what lay in that Sea of Monsters and Fiends, and few who had entered had come out alive; their sanity in shreds as they murmured of sirens and lotus eaters, of Titanesses and monsters.
He was old; this much he knew. He had not the vitality in his aged limbs to exact the vengeance which he so desired, no matter how great his want, how strong his will. HE found solace, however, in that soothing knowledge that Zeus, King of the Gods sat atop the holy mount of Olympus, exacting justice as those in the mortal realm of the mundane and simple worshipped him for.
He knew that even if he himself could not reclaim the lives lost, the guilty would pay, with divinity the witness of their crimes.
Vengeance would be exacted.
A/N
Another one, and I'm not apologising.
One exam left, and I've got a bit more time. At the time of writing, the next Waning Moon chapter has some 2.5k words, so about halfway through, and the Darkest of Times chapter is similar in length. Should be updated some time soon.
Until then, though,
Sol