Forever

I have no kind thoughts for her, much less kind words. Call this vengeful if you like—I am quite past caring—but if I were to hear that she died in pain, I wouldn't waste the eye-water to cry for her. It was bad enough that my grandson married her brat, and that I had to see her at the festivities. We said hello Thetis, hello Helen, but really, it was probably quite obvious that I wished she would just drop dead and have done with it.

…I did contemplate summoning a tidal wave, but I rather like most of the other attendees, and besides, it would have embarrassed Neoptolemos in front of his in-laws.

I have drawn a fair amount of criticism for refusing to ameliorate my attitude towards Helen. Firstly, I am a goddess; I am not, I grant you, on the same level as the Dodekatheon, but all the same, I am divine. Before my marriage, I scarcely had to do with mortals, and now that my human family are dead or estranged, I have been withdrawing slowly from their society. What do the feelings of these silly, contrary, transient creatures, always carrying on as though their intrigues were actually important, matter to me? If anything, my good opinion should matter to them; I am willing enough to help them, if they need it, but there are some things I will not tolerate.

Oh, that my son had not been one of them.

When he was born, I knew already that I would never have other children. I would have made him immortal; when his father objected to this in the most vigorous terms, I settled for making him invulnerable. In this, too, I failed. I suppose, left to his own devices, he would have chosen mortality regardless: Patroclus was mortal. And in the end, having achieved nothing with my endless subterfuge and tricks born of desperation, I had to let him make that choice, as I had already known that I would…as I had already known that he would. Achilles had already chosen his death when he had barely begun to live. Being what he was, he could hardly have done otherwise.

I understand, now, mortal women who say that one never gets past having to bury one's own children. At least they have the consolation of the grave. I can't help but suppress a smirk at the idea that Helen, too, must die. I'm surprised those Trojan slaves of hers haven't turned on her yet—I've seen the way they look at her.

She was rewarded by getting to return to Sparta and be a queen again, right where she had left off, just as though she had never left. If the faint stink of scandal clung to her, it only served to heighten her glamour still. I doubt that she has anything in the way of maternal feeling; any woman who can just abandon her child and go traipsing off to Asia hardly qualifies as a mother. So that she could return safely, my son, my only child whom I loved with a passion that she could never have known, died in terrible pain from a poisoned arrow in the Troad. And he was not the only one.

Yes, it was a mortal war, and as such, it was a temporary and faintly ridiculous affair. Regardless, I am not the only one, even among the gods, to lose a child; Zeus' boy Sarpedon died in the war, and Eos has never spoken to me since Achilles cut Memnon down. Semi-divine though they might be, in the end, they were all too mortal: night descended on all their eyes alike. We must live forever; they are gone forever.

Forever is a mighty long time.