POV: Aphrodite
True power does not pursue.
I've been thinking about that since we saw the shadow on the ridge. About the difference between the kind of power that comes after you and the kind that just waits, certain that you'll come to it eventually. The first kind is afraid of something slipping away. The second kind has nothing to fear from patience.
We find higher ground just before dawn and that's when we see him.
He's below us on a wide flat shelf of rock that juts out from the valley wall, and the first thing I understand is that I've been building an image of this king in my head since the ruins and none of it was right. I was imagining something cruel-looking. Something that wore its power visibly, that made itself as large and threatening as possible to establish what it was before anything else.
He's not that.
