Andromache - The Olympus Cycle, #10

She is still here.

This is what Andromache wants you to understand before the account begins: she is still here. After Cilician Thebe, after Hector, after the walls of Troy and Astyanax and the fall and the ships. After being given to Neoptolemus, Achilles's son — the widow of the man Achilles killed, delivered to Achilles's son as a prize of war. After all of it. She is still here and she is going to tell you what that means.

ANDROMACHE: WHAT REMAINED is the story of a woman who lost everything in sequence. Her father Eetion, killed by Achilles before the main action of the Trojan War. Her seven brothers. Her city of Cilician Thebe, burned. Then the years of the war in Troy — watching from the walls every day, finding Hector on the battlefield by the way he moved, knowing what was coming and loving him anyway. Then Hector. Then Astyanax, her son, thrown from the walls when Troy fell. Then the city itself. Then the ships, and Epirus, and the household of the man whose father killed her husband.

This is not a story about defeat. It is a story about what survives the sequence of removals — what remains when everything that made you who you were has been taken. What Andromache's father gave her. What the rooms where the war was not contained. What she built from the available material in the available situation when the situation was not the situation she would have chosen.

The story of Hector's wife has always been told from the outside, as the emblem of what war costs the people inside it. This is the inside view. The woman who watched from the walls, who loved someone she knew she was going to lose, who held her son entirely while she could, who survived not because the surviving was triumphant but because surviving was the next available thing and she took it.

She is still here. What remained is still remaining.