Being beautiful was a good thing. It meant survival, less of a chance of being sent to die and more of a chance to be sent off to be married to a man who would probably die fast. It was also a bad thing. It meant rape and kidnapping and being sold to strange men with no mercy. It was a promise of long life, long but full of pain.

I got neither death nor strange men in the end. At the age of 15 I chose my weapon and marched off with my mentally disabled dad. I was never allowed near the training field and I sure as hell never fought. Aphrodite rarely let her daughters be murdered so brutally, I was money to be collected so as to make and build her army. In a way, I was a weapon.

I only trained. Day after day of brutal training. Etiquette was hard. There were a hundred different salad forks and million different ways to tell someone they were a dumbass.

I was trained to be submissive, beautiful, a wasted talent. Trained to be a wife. I was nothing but talent wasted by a mother who wanted nothing more than the profit I would make her in a few years. Aaron Trin was the only man who took me seriously, who saw something. The only one who handed me a dagger instead of a butter knife.

Too bad he was an alcoholic.

He was a man brutalized by the only thing gods feared. The child of the child of the sea. A man said to be even more beautiful than my pathetic brothers. Someone so unaffected by the beauty of my mother and my mother's children. (Her child's kids had zero effect too.)

The idea was nerve wracking; I'd seen what the beauty had done. Build an army of men so willing to die and women so willing to give up children. My siblings were notoriously good at assassination. Infiltration was a second sense (sex was also there) and murder was just part of the job.

I was an extra; a secondary action.

(I was cattle ready to be sold off to the first man or business who offered enough)

Two weeks ago was Aaron's funeral. The same day as the single bloodiest battle in all the few hundred years of the hell.  At least my soon-to-be husband was dead. Killed by the same man whom I had hoped was dead.

Unfortunately, not. Which brings me here, hiding with far too intelligent cows as my fear has an almost intelligent conversation. The woman's stuttering and his shifting was what ruined that.

The screaming of a nearby cow blocked out their conversation, but the nymph was flustered and seemed to be flirting with the indifferent (new) god.

When the war ended, I got a letter of promotion, one with no refusal. Widows were swept away to heaven to serve the so called jobs lost in the war.

Slaves.

There were no jobs here. There was work to be done but no workers, so they swept women like me up from the peace and silence and shoved paintbrushes and shovels and trays and pans into our hands with the promise of death if disobeyed.

Our ancestors' said that agriculture was the worst thing to happen to humanity.

I say it was the gods.