PROLOGUE
He stood on the ivory sands of an endless coast, iron gray eyes searching an empty ocean that stretched away interminably until it melted into the colorless haze at the distant margins of a pale and infinite sky. His lean, square-jawed face wore the hollow, haggard look of a hunted animal that had outrun death at the cost of complete physical exhaustion.
He stumbled into the warm, jeweled waters of the bay. Long, black hair curled over his wide forehead and hung, damp, thick, and tangled down his neck.
“The gods,” he murmured.
His words hung in the air, suspended between a prayer and a curse.
Beneath a tattered, forest green tunic soaked with seawater, his chest heaved as he drew in a deep, painful breath and exhaled. The sharp tang of brine rose from the cloth that clung to his hard-muscled body; the light of the early morning played across his tanned, olive skin – a skin etched with scars from a decade of war. His enemies bore fewer scars; but they had died under his sword, while he had fought on.
That knowledge brought him little solace now. Nor did the golden ring he fingered on his left hand that bore the crest of a proud stallion’s head, surrounded by olive leaves and encrusted with emeralds. It glinted even in the gray dawn. Exquisite in its workmanship, it was a royal signet – the symbol of a barren sovereignty, bequeathed by a slaughtered king who lay dead among the ashes of a city a thousand miles away.
Behind him, seven ships, great biremes with broken masts and shattered oars, listed in the shallows or stood beached on the shore, canting awkwardly. On the pale sands beyond them, hundreds of men, women, and children lay sprawled like corpses, spent from the hurricane that had battered their vessels and hurled them up onto this unknown coast.
He bowed his head and took another painful breath.
“Ilion,” he whispered.
The name of his lost city unlocked a floodgate of memories and he sank to his knees in the warm shallows of the bay. Eyes closed, his mind raced back across the oceans of time with the speed of Zephyros, God of the West Wind-
-Back to the day when the world ended.
