The tent was silent but for the faint rustle of canvas shifting in the night wind. The muted din of the camp lay just beyond, soldiers murmuring, footsteps crunching, fires crackling faintly like whispers. Inside, however, it was a small and hollow world.

Diomedes sat on his mat, his broad shoulders hunched, his forearms braced on his knees. His head hung low, the dark curls falling like shadows across his face, obscuring his perpetual blank expression. The man before you was a fortress of flesh and iron, built for war, raised by it, yet there was a vacancy in his gaze that wasn't for the fight.

"I cannot remember," he said finally, his voice low and rough, as if dragged from some deep and reluctant place within him.

You didn’t answer immediately, watching instead how his hands, strong and calloused, hung limply between his knees. Hands that had wielded a sword as though it were an extension of his body. Hands that had crushed a man’s skull beneath a rock at Thebes, the earthy gray of the stone turning to a sickening, glistening red. You had seen it, had borne witness to the animal desperation that overtook him when his blade was struck away.

"They called me brilliant, claimed I fought like one touched by the gods. That my sword, my strength, was beyond compare. And I don't know if it is true. But they said I fought on until—" A pause. "Until I struck the killing blow."

Diomedes raised his head then, his eyes meeting yours. “I recall no gore,” he said, his lips pressing into a thin line. “When they praise me, I nod and pretend to understand. How stupid."

You wanted to tell him something, anything. But what was there to say? He was raised to see the blade as an extension of his body, violence as the language he spoke best. But the price of speaking it so fluently had left him fractured, staring at the broken pieces of himself.

In the dim light of the tent, Diomedes looked like a man drowning in a sea of his own making, and for all his strength, he did not know how to swim.