Why do we never talk about how soft Kassandra is?
The way she melts around kids.
The big, bad, Achilles-reborn Misthios who took the time to tell a story to school children, who helped a little girl get pearls and gems to decorate her clay friends, who loved Phoibe with all the strength left in her broken heart.
She listens to a little boy sing on the way to his trainer, proud at this small Spartan, heartbroken at the cruelty of her homeland.
When Ardos tells her of the Minotaur, of how alone he is, she doesn’t scoff. She listens to this child with his big dreams and fantastic stories, and she believes him, and she swears, with all the ferocity of the Styxx itself, that she’ll bring his father home to him.
We talk about Kassandra the hero of Greece, the bearer of the Staff of Hermes Trismegistus, Herakles reborn…
But I’d rather talk about Kassandra the broken. Kassandra the orphan. Kassandra, who spent twenty five hundred years raising children just like her, those with no where else to go; who sent those with fire in their eyes and justice in their hearts off to the Assassins when they were old enough, and kept the soft and the gentle safe from all the horrors of war.
Give me a Kassandra with a sword in her hand and a child trailing behind her, fighting desperately to make the world into a safe place: a place where a sister would never have to fight her brother, where a young girl with dreams of flying wouldn’t have to die in a senseless battle that was never hers to begin with.
Kassandra the warrior, the demigod, the Eagle Bearer, is a legend to be respected.
But Kassandra the protector, the sister, the mother?
She’s the hero I want to know.
