Eupeithes

He comes up from the town at the front of a tide of fathers, men who had spent twenty years watching their sons drink another man’s wine and grow soft in the suitors’ sprawl, and now carry spears and rage. He bellows about blood-price, about justice, about fathers and sons. The crowd surges forward. Laertes does not answer. The old man, touched by Athena, throws his spear across the open space like a line drawn in the air, and it takes Eupeithes in the breastplate, punches through, and he falls backward with a scream that cuts off before it ends. The fathers falter. He is the engine of the cycle of revenge, the proof that ends only when everybody is dead, and the engine stops with him.