Theodora’s Reviews > Variations on an Apple > Status Update

“They must want something concrete out of all this.”

“Glory,” Ilion said. “Vengeance, spite, security, the sheer unadulterated expression of aggression. None of these, I will note, is concrete.”

“They must live and love and die, the same as we do,” he said, moved by an unaccustomed swell of sentimentality. “They must have children of circuitry or flesh or cunning brass. And some of them must be as sick of this whole conflict as we are.”

Discord. War of wars.

“Do you never listen to your brother when he goes on about strategy? Only an idiot picks a fight when they could avoid it instead.”

Even if the queen of the gods felled nations for him, conquest was never the hard part.

“I am under no illusions that Ilion will stand forever,” he said. “Still, I had hoped it would last a little longer.”

“If that’s your wish,” Hera said, “choose accordingly.”

“What a prize,” she said softly, bitterly. “No one wants the damn thing, except being uncrowned by its light is even worse. Someone has to claim it.”

“Choose by random number generator?” Paris said, because someone had to.

“As if anything is truly random in the stories we write for ourselves,” Athena said.

It wasn’t so much that Paris was a mathematician. Rather, it was that Ilion was a creation of curvatures and angles and differential seductions, and he was the city’s lover.