Ten years spent in war and then another ten in progress.

Twenty years ago you’d been stolen from him, by the son of Priam who’s tongue said he had been blessed by Lady Aphrodite and her son’s arrows of love while given hand to your beauty.

It was a pathetic attempt to salvage what had been done. Defiled, scorned and disrespected upon his own grounds, and made a fool from lands of Egypt to Pylos.

It’d been a terrible and heartless bloodshed, though he held no regrets. You were within his arms, his daughter from your womb growing to be of a bride and Queen and his two sons having left to make names among men.

The years succeeding Ilium had been exhausting yet a lasting comfort. Those whom lost husbands, sons, brothers and cousins scorned your place by his side, while their shoutings fell upon his deaf ears.

His brother, Agamemnon, had been slaughtered by his own wife. And young Orestes sought nothing other than bloodshed and violence for the transgressions, it had been a labor to consul you from the loss of your sister.

Then there had been the son of Laërtes. Odysseus. A brave and talented man of craft, he’d proposed the horse scheme, bringing so many men home yet so much death. He respected the man, even if they had not always agreed.

And yet he never returned home.

He’d heard many tales of what had become of him. A drowned soul, a blinded beggar, a new life within other lands, a defiler of his own marriage bed. It had been nothing short of a confusion, to see such a powerful man vanish within sea fog.

It had been a surprise to see his relative by name, Telemachus, appear within court with that of an owl beyond his doorway. Demanding answers for Odysseus’s disappearance, as if that of you or himself held responsibility for such a loss.

Nonetheless he greeted the boy with hospitality, allowing the twenty year old within his home and he was given that same respect. The tension leaving such a young man’s shoulders as you greeted him, a smile of familial blood.