Telemachus

He was an infant in the sand when the ships left for Troy. Twenty years later he is sitting in his own hall watching strangers eat his inheritance, mocked quietly enough that he can pretend not to hear. He is soft. He knows it. The weight of his uselessness sits in his chest like a cold stone. Then a stranger comes through the door and tells him his father is alive, and something cracks open. He calls the first assembly Ithaca has seen in twenty years. He fails. He sails anyway, in secret, at night, to find men who knew his father. He sits at Nestor’s table. He watches Helen pour wine. He weeps at Menelaus’s news. [SPOILER: He returns home a different man, lands at the swineherd’s hut on Athena’s order, and meets the beggar by the fire who turns out to be his father. He locks the doors of the great hall. He drives a spear through a suitor’s chest and pulls it free to strike again. He hangs the disloyal handmaidens with his own hands and does not speak afterward. He stands beside Laertes and Odysseus, three generations at last, when Athena calls the bloodletting done.]