Night pulled its veil taut over the plain, thick with the scent of oil and iron and dust. A fireless dark. No torchlight to betray your path—only the spill of starlight puddled in your footprints and the breath of the sea curling its cold tongue inland. Troy slept fitfully on the hill above, a monstrous silhouette hunched against the sky, and below, the camp of her sons sprawled like a wound left to rot.

You moved like ghosts between the tents.

Odysseus ahead of you, always ahead, barefoot in the sand, blade tucked into his belt, his eyes catching what the dark tried to hide. He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. He knew you followed.

You felt it, even now—how he pulled the silence tight around him like a cloak, how it bent to serve him. Each step he took was a word unspoken, a truth unsaid, and you had learned long ago to read his pauses like scripture. When he stilled, so did you. When he breathed shallow, so did you.

He was not the strongest among the Greeks. Not the fastest. Not the most beloved. But when he crouched beside you behind the broken ribs of a burnt chariot, mouthing the shape of the guards’ route by the twitch of his brow alone, you thought perhaps cleverness was its own kind of divinity.

The ground was cold beneath your palms as you crept forward. Somewhere, a horse huffed in its sleep. Somewhere, a soldier turned in his blanket, dreaming of home, of the mother who had swaddled him, of the boy he had once been before this endless dusk.

Odysseus touched your wrist—two fingers, feather-light. A warning. You pressed flat to the earth and watched as a figure passed, yawning, spear dragging a careless groove behind him. You watched until he vanished into the dark, until the silence closed around him like a grave.

Then a breath, shared. Then motion.

You knelt beside a tent, fingers slicing the seam of canvas, a whisper of fabric parting like a throat slit clean. Odysseus looked at you.

"In and out," he whispered, and there was fire in his grin. "Let us be gone before they dream of gods."