The wind carries the sharp scent of cypress and sea, and the earth beneath his sandals is foreign, though not unfriendly. Southern Italia lies spread beneath the sky like a half-healed wound—ridges softened by years of peace, its villages half-built from stone dragged out of old wars. Here, Diomedes is no longer a warlord. No longer the lion of the Achaeans, breaker of chariots, favored once by grey-eyed Athena.

Here, he is a relic washed up on a foreign shore.

Diomedes had meant to carve out quiet. To till the fields of Apulia with his hands, hands once slick with Trojan blood. He had built a shrine, modest and olive-shadowed, and set no spear beside it. No bronze. Only silence. Only olive trees and long days and the kind of forgetting that comes from sheer, stubborn will.

And still, the gods do not leave him be.

The road bends just beyond the well at the edge of the village, where the shepherds drive their herds and the women carry pitchers atop their heads. He does not come to town often. Only when salt or wine runs low, when his stores grow thin. He is older now. Worn, but not bowed. The scar on his thigh pulls in the cold. The bones in his shoulder grind when he lifts anything heavier than a pail. But his eyes are as they ever were—sharp as flint and twice as hard.

He does not expect you.

You are standing by the market stall, your head turned slightly to catch the sun. You are older, too. Of course you are. But time has not unmade you. It has only burnished. Only pressed you into something quieter, sharper-edged, more enduring.

He knows you at once.

The rest of the world falls away—clatter, cry, color—and there is only you, and the thundering silence of memory.

You do not speak. Perhaps you see him. Perhaps you do not. But he sees everything.

After the war, Diomedes had returned home, blood-earned and salt-washed, to betrayal.

A wife unfaithful. A house corrupted. A son—not his—raised beneath his roof. The son of Sthenelus, his closest friend, whose memory he had carried like a sword in his ribs. Whose presence was heavy in his heart.

And so he had left. Not with curses. Not with fire. Silence.

The same silence you offer him now.

Diomedes steps forward. Just once. No one notices. The market continues. A child pulls at a chicken’s tether. Somewhere, someone laughs.

He draws closer, slowly. As one might approach a dream he does not trust to stay. He stops just beyond your shadow. His hand twitches at his side—not for a weapon, not anymore—but for something else. The urge to reach. To confirm.

He speaks, at last, his voice rough with disuse and long roads.

“…So the gods send ghosts now, do they?”

He looks you over—quick, but thorough. A soldier’s glance. A man checking for wounds long after the battle is over. Or weapons.

“I thought you dead,” he says simply. “Or married.”

Still you do not speak. He does not expect you to. Diomedes exhales through his nose. Runs a calloused thumb along his jaw.

He lifts his eyes to yours.

There is nothing polished in him now. No bronze gleam. No spear-song. Only a man carved out by war and time and loss, standing in the soft dirt of a village too small for gods.

“You remember me,” he says. It is not a question.

His fingers twitch again. He does not touch you. But something in him shifts. And for the first time in many years, Diomedes—the great Tydides, breaker of ranks, once nearly godlike—lowers his head.

Not in shame. Not quite. And he mutters, softly, as if to himself, “…Not all the gods forsook me, then.”