“Have you no more memories?” I am made of memories.

In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out the sun.

“You have never deserved him. I do not know why he ever loved you. You care only for yourself!”

Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. “No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.”

When he speaks at last, his voice is weary, and defeated. He doesn’t know how to be angry with me, either. We are like damp wood that won’t light.

I saw the moment he woke and knew me. Our limbs slid against one another, on paths that we had traced so many times before, yet still were not old.

“There are too many of them,” he said. “It’s simpler if they just remember me.”

Even years later this camaraderie would remain, a fellow-feeling so uncharacteristic of our fiercely warring kingdoms. For a generation, there would be no wars among those of us who had fought at Troy.

But even I could not fill each minute with fear. I have heard that men who live by a waterfall cease to hear it—in such a way did I learn to live beside the rushing torrent of his doom.