Three #5

written by Kieron Gillen
art by Ryan Kelly
colors by Jordie Bellaire

There was only ever one way this could end: a bloodbath.  Even without the momentum of Three's narrative symmetry with 300 and its inevitable Spartan slaughter at the hands of the Persian army, the single-minded pursuit of three slaves by a full Spartan military force led by a king would have guaranteed their eventual execution.  Messene was only ever a pipedream.

Pinned in the narrow goat path, Klaros, newly dressed in Arimnestos' armor, defends the entrance.  And by a combination of his fine fighting skills and his strategic position, the Spartans can't make much headway.  Funneled nearly into a single line, obstructed by the fresh bodies of those fallen before them, and unable to find their footing uphill on the gore-slicked rocks, Kleomenes' troops suffer swift casualties.  In a last knowingly futile attempt to save their lives, Klaros challenges Kleomenes to single combat.  And, though he accepts, the Spartan king chooses Tyrtaios as his champion.  When Klaros kills his second-in-command, his friend, and his lover, their fates are sealed.

With Klaros wounded, Terpander, with his intestines lately wrapped in place, takes his turn in the armor.  A storyteller.  The defiant instigator of the entire affair.  And he serves the Spartans a further defiant truth and another challenge on behalf of the helot ancestors.  His bravado is winning, and effective.

If Three disappoints in anything, it's that Klaros' history, how he came to feign infirmity, is much as we thought and Terpander guessed, and Gillen leaves no room for mystery.  But Klaros was better as an unknown, even had he remained so as the series ended.  His tale is shameful—collaboration with the Spartans against the newly liberated Messenians and a impious desecration of a sacred grove—but ultimately quite pedestrian, though I suppose that could be the point.

Sparta may still stand, if weakly, but Spartan idealism has eroded away.  Warrior honor has given way to Kleomenes' shrewd pragmatism, one that denies Klaros a fight.  But it's her own clever deception that preserves Damar's life, substituting the facially mutilated corpse of Arimnestos as the third helot, allowing her to slip away to Messene, the fox who escaped the Spartan net.  Her future, a quiet idyllic freedom, a culmination of Terpander and Klaros' dream, is satisfying, but it is the series' final scene—aged and alone, Agesilaos lounging on an Egyptian riverbank, the excitement of the pharoah for an old man—that more soundly strikes Three's themes.  This is the end, the last days.  For Sparta, for its imagination.