You Bring Death to Our Shores
For fans of Hadestown and She Who Became the Sun, an epic told in two timelines, the Trojan War and the Greek afterlife, where Helen of Troy wakes in Elysium to find the heroes who died in her war are doomed—whether by fate or old grudges—to repeat the same familiar story, until they can at last let go of the past.
“Did you know the poets say you are the most beautiful woman in the world?”
A thorn had cut into his skin. On instinct, I reached to wipe the blood away. “Poets are so often prone to exaggeration.”
“Not this time,” he said, and the way he looked at me, I believed it. I still had his blood on my hand, and I raised my finger to my mouth. The taste of it was rich, coppery. As I watched, he broke off the green stem of the flower so that there were no thorns, no leaves—just the soft unfolding of petals. He tucked the flower into the crown of my hair, his hands trembling just slightly as he brushed the shell of my ear. “I will give you everything, Helen,” he promised, and the shine in his eyes looked like devotion. “Everything the light touches shall be ours.”