The fire had not yet been lit, but the smoke of old battle still clung to their cloaks. Evening was a slow thing—dragged down by the weight of tired feet and louder silences, the kind that came only after boys had laughed too hard for too long to forget what they were marching toward.

The Epigoni moved like wolves settling into a den. Shields propped against tree trunks, cloaks shaken out and thrown to earth, someone cursing at a wine flask that had spilled in the baggage. Even the wind was tired, rustling through the tall grass with something like restraint. You could hear the murmurs of strategy, the low hum of a song someone tried to remember, half-forgotten. They made a circle of it, these sons of dead heroes—men who had been raised in the shadow of a failed war and now carried it forward like a torch.

And somewhere on the edge of it all, Diomedes.

He wasn’t with the others. You’d noticed it in the subtle way the banter didn’t quite reach the outer ring, the absence of his laugh—always a sharp, sudden thing, like a knife flung into bark. He should’ve been near the center, one of the loudest, one of the brightest. But the space where he belonged had gone untouched.

You handed off a bundle of kindling to someone who barely glanced up, their fingers already blistered from flintwork. And then you slipped away, toward the slope beyond the tents.

There he was.

Leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, the line of his back tense beneath a travel-stained tunic, hair dark with sweat. He hadn't removed his greaves yet. Dirt clung to the bronze, streaked from where he must’ve knelt in the stream earlier to wash his face. His hands were fidgeting with the edge of his bracer, the leather unraveled and dangling, as if he'd tried to fix it and grown bored halfway through.

Diomedes did not look up when you approached.

"You're far from the noise," you said. A quiet offering.

"I’m near enough to hear the fools sing badly," he muttered, not looking at you. But there was no bite in it.

Just a low heat.