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I am born of a noble father, and a goddess the mother who bore me,
yet death and powerful fate is upon me too;
there will be a dawn or an afternoon or noon,
when someone will take the life from even me in battle,
striking with a spear or an arrow from a bowstring.
— Iliad 21.109-113, trans. Caroline Alexander
The Prince’s guard is weak on the left. Achilles sees it every time Zagreus moves, the drop of the blade due to inattention to the position of the shoulder, and though he’s pointed it out before, His Highness has yet to correct it. An easy, fatal weakness, that; a lesson in the making.
Achilles has, after all, been commanded to teach.
During their next spar, Achilles gives the Prince once more chance to learn the easy way. A jab here, a feint there, drawing the gap in his defence wider to see if he notices and corrects, but His Highness is clueless and overconfident as ever. The arrogance of the gods: ever on the offensive, certain that they cannot be harmed. Achilles, once called godlike, had made the selfsame error. Zagreus, uppity prince of the Underworld, secure in his immortality, does not care to mark his mistakes, and Achilles sees the opportunity to strike. He has heard the tale of Diomedes and Aphrodite; the gods cannot be killed, but they do feel pain. This is his chance. To teach an important lesson: no one is free entirely from suffering, not even the gods. Not even the children of gods.
Zagreus’s guard drops again. Achilles, swift-footed, moves. His spear, trusty even after all this time, flashes forward, and his strike is true. Thought it has been many years, the give of flesh and muscle and bone beneath the point of his spear feels just the same; the visceral crunch and the splash of blood against stone and the gasp of pain and horror sound just the same.
Zagreus bleeds red just the same. Goes limp on the end of Achilles’s spear just the same. Slides free to land with a thump, only so many pounds of meat, just the same.
Achilles stops.
In the absence of breath and the clash of blades and the scuff of feet, the drip of blood from his weapon to the courtyard’s hard ground is very loud. Zagreus is still and silent, red running from him to stain the stones. He has fallen on his back, his legs crumpled beneath him, and Achilles can see that that burning immortal—or perhaps not—light has gone from his mismatched eyes. The wound in his chest looks as mortal as any Achilles has inflicted before.
At least he died quickly, Achilles thinks. It’s a bleak thought and a familiar one, one he has had about many young men—boys, really—who came blameless before him on the battlefield and met this very same fate. Blameless: this boy, too, was that. Unlike with all the others, Achilles goes to his side and kneels in the spreading pool of all-too-red blood, touches the ragged edge of the wound in his chest, and bows his head in sudden regret. To strike a blow at the gods… yes. That Achilles still wants, will want until the last of his bitterness is spent, but Zagreus was as uninvolved in Achilles’s sorrows as his own son, newborn and never-met. Only a boy, yet untaught and trusted into Achilles’s care. Dead now at his own hand.
Around Achilles, below him, there is a blaze of power. He flinches back as the pool of blood surrounding the boy’s body surges up and in an instant subsumes the corpse in crimson, pale limbs and dark hair bound in blood and then dissolved to nothing—there and gone in a flash. The red trickles down into the cracks of the courtyard stones, and then there is nothing at all to mark the place where Zagreus fell. Frantic, Achilles presses his palm to the stone, but not even the fading warmth of the newly dead remains.
For a moment Achilles is frozen there, still and silent himself now on his hands and knees. Zagreus is plainly gone, and though he does not understand how, he does understand his culpability—and his duty. Whatever punishment he has earned by his actions, he deserves it and will only worsen it by delaying. He rises and takes up his spear once more, its blade now eerily clean once more and gleaming in the low light, then turns toward the great hall of the House of Hades. Not since Priam has Achilles had to look into the eyes of a man whose son he has killed, and it is all the more terrible a prospect this time, for then Achilles had regretted the blood on his hands not at all. He has never and will never regret Hector, but he already regrets Zagreus, as he has come to regret Lykaon, as he has come to regret all the nameless, countless others caught in the path of his ceaseless rage and grief.
When Achilles enters the hall, however, he is greeted not by Hades’s wrath, but by a commotion at the pool of Styx. A new shade, he imagines at first, but when he comes closer he sees instead a familiar figure lying against the steps, still half-submerged in the wine-dark waters.
Achilles gives an involuntary cry and flies with all the haste he can muster to lay hands upon Zagreus and drag him further up from the pool until his body lies across Achilles’s lap. He touches his shoulder and his chest, unbroken once more. He had been so sure—but the lad is immortal after all.
In his grasp, Zagreus gasps for breath, his face filled with shock and terror and the ghost of pain. Then on a slower breath he groans and his eyes, bright again, fix on Achilles’s face and focus there. “Achilles?” he says.
His name, utterly without censure, on the lips of one he has killed. A blessing and a curse; it pierces Achilles’s heart. “Zagreus,” he says in reply. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s…” Zagreus coughs, red trailing from his lips—the water of the Styx only, the blood banished. “It’s okay. I know it was an accident… it didn’t even hurt that much.”
None of that is true. It had been agonizing, and Achilles sees the shock of that pain, the shock of its delivery by a trusted one, still lingering; and worse, it had been no accident at all. Certainly it is not okay. But Achilles is a selfish man, and he will let the falsehoods stand. “I’m sorry,” he says again, as if his words are worth anything at all. Maybe they are to Zagreus, and that is what matters now. He lays his palm against the invisible wound that he still sees clearly in his mind’s eye and Zagreus, warm and living, shivers beneath his touch.
From the opposite end of the hall comes then the booming voice of Hades. “As expected,” he says. “You will need much more training, boy, before you are ready for real combat. But now at least you understand the price of failure.”
Achilles is unsure which cuts the deeper: the way Zagreus flinches at his father’s callous tone, his complete lack of care for his pain and his fear; or the way the Lord of the Dead seems not at all surprised that Achilles seized the first possible opportunity to murder his son. Hades had knowingly contracted a monster to care for and guide his child; a monster is what he wanted. Achilles, though, does not want to be a monster. He does not want to be the bloodied spectre who is ill-fitted to any narrative but one of slaughter. He is no Chiron, but he would like to believe himself better than an Odysseus, too, who would fling a child from fortress walls solely for the circumstances of his birth.
Achilles had wanted to teach the gods a lesson in pain, but Zagreus is not one of the Fates who wove Achilles’s destiny, nor an Olympian who arbitrated it. Zagreus is a child of the gods just as Achilles himself is, and looking at him now as he tucks away the pain behind frustration, Achilles understands anew what his task here truly is, past Hades’s intentions. He must teach Zagreus to fight, yes. But he also must provide him the tools he himself was denied, the tools needed to fight the decrees of those who would control him and grind him into a shape unlike himself. He must grant him skill and strength to stand on his own as Achilles never could, trapped by his lot as a mortal. And in doing so, in building Zagreus up, he might also rebuild himself into someone truly worth being. Someone more like the hero Achilles and less like a butcher of innocents.
With steady hands and strong legs, Achilles levers himself up and pulls Zagreus along with him. Those blazing feet are steady upon the ground, and the waters of the Styx run off him, leaving his hair and his skin clean and unscarred. His resolve had been shaken when Achilles found him lying in the pool, but it has firmed now, the fire in him rekindled; he meets Achilles’s eyes squarely.
“Ready for another go, lad?” Achilles asks.
Zagreus smiles at the nickname. “Yes,” he replies; and Achilles believes him.