[SPOILER: The retelling will not let the reckoning be a clean win. After the cleansing, after the sulfur, after the floors are scrubbed and the tables reset, Odysseus walks through his restored hall and the line lands: the blood had come out of the stone, but it had soaked into the air, the light, the very shape of the rooms. The suitors were gone. Their deaths inhabited the space. No amount of sulfur could burn that away. This is the cost the Iliad-style hero usually doesn’t get to feel. You can win the room and still lose the room. The place where his father built the hearth, the place where his son was born, is now also the place where he killed a hundred men. It is the same room and it is not the same room. He turns and walks to his chamber. The servants finish their work in silence.]
Stained Space
The blood came out of the stone. It soaked into the air, the light, the shape of the rooms. No amount of sulfur could burn that away.