The sun had not yet risen over the harsh mountains of Lakonia, but the training yard echoed with the sound of fists striking flesh, of bone grinding into dirt. The chill of morning clung to the bare skin of boys too young to be called men, yet already too hardened to be called boys.

  Damon stood in the circle, shirtless, arms loose at his sides, eyes locked on the older boy before him. Twelve years old, lean, all angles and tendon, but his eyes held something the others feared: clarity.

  The older boy lunged first. A wild hook aimed for Damon’s temple, but he wasn’t there when it landed. Damon had already stepped left, pivoted, and struck a precise blow to the throat. The boy fell coughing, gasping for breath.

  Damon didn’t follow it with another punch. He simply turned to face the others, bloodless, calm, as if the fight hadn’t mattered at all.

  “Who taught you that move?” barked Instructor Thyrios, his voice like sand scraped over bronze.

  “No one,” Damon replied.

  “Then how did you know it would work?”

  Damon glanced toward the mountains in the distance. “I didn’t. I only knew what wouldn’t.”

  There was silence, then a murmur through the ranks. Instructor Thyrios didn’t speak again. He didn’t need to. The boy had spoken like a commander, not a child.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The agoge was not a school. It was a forge. Damon was one of fifty boys in his cohort, all stripped from their homes at age seven. They ate little, slept less, and were taught that pain was not to be endured, it was to be weaponized.

  At night, Damon would trace formations in the dirt with a stick, memorizing phalanx rotations and mock ambushes he had only read about in stolen scrolls. Where others wrestled, he studied. Where others bled, he calculated.

  He became known as “The Silent Wolf.” Not for a lack of voice, but because he only spoke when it mattered. And when he did, others listened.

  One day, the instructors threw the boys into a mock war: a forest skirmish between two teams. Damon was given ten boys. The other side had twenty.

  The odds were clear. The lesson was cruel. They expected him to lose and learn.

  He didn’t.

  He vanished into the woods with his team, cutting strips of cloth to blind the enemy’s torches at dusk. He set traps using branches bent backward and sharpened to deadly points. He didn’t engage directly, he fragmented their lines, sowed panic, then struck.

  The battle was over in less than half an hour.

  Instructor Thyrios stared at the fallen team in disbelief.

  “You disobeyed the rules of engagement,” he accused.

  Damon didn’t flinch. “There are no rules when the enemy enters your land. Only results.”

  The instructors were silent. Then Thyrios muttered:

  “Perhaps you were not born of woman... but of the Wolf herself.”

  The name stuck.

  That night, as the boys slept on cold stone, Damon sat alone under the stars. His knuckles were raw, and the cut on his side from the mock battle still oozed. But his eyes never left the horizon.

  He knew this wasn’t the end. It was only the proving ground.

  One day, he thought, I will lead Spartans not in mock war, but in fire and death. And when the world comes to break us, we will hold the line, not because we are told to... but because we were born for it.