Ovo_do_bonde

The war is over - Troy has fallen. After ten long years, you, the sovereign of the crown of Ithaca, cast your sails home. But Poseidon, god of the sea, cursed your journey, and now, many trials stand between you and the loving embrace of your wife and child: Polyphemus the Cyclops, Scylla and Charybdis, the mermaids, the Land of the Lotus Eaters.. .you and your companions will even travel to the land of the dead.

And the memories that haunt you: the ghosts of those you killed on the battlefields? Do you even want to get back to your spouse and the burdens of government? What if you find love or peace somewhere along the way? Not all houses look the same. And what songs will the poets sing about you - will they hail you as a hero? ...or an assassin?

Origin Of My Family

Who would have thought that, among all the crimes that human beings are driven to commit at times of war, this would be the one that would unleash the Erinyes on you? Not the hundreds slaughtered, not the children plucked from breasts, not the burned temples or the hearths wrecked, but the insolence of the young toward the aged.


They come to you now. They are the chthonic daughters of Nyx, the starry night. Inhabitants of Erebus and more ancient than all of the Olympian gods. They wrap you in their arms. They dig their clawed hands into your chest and whisper curses to your heart. They show you visions of things that never came to pass, alternate fates, another Mazacuintli.


When Achilles died, the Achaean leaders thought it just to award his spear to the worthiest hero among them.


The contest is between Ajax–the same Ajax who is with you now on the ship–and yourself. Unable to decide, Athena herself appears in her armor and her golden helmet and her shield, and argues with her golden voice, and, in the end, bestows the spear upon you.


In the Erinyes' vision, Ajax accepts his defeat as the Atreides mock him and his pride. He hangs his head to his chest, his face sunken with the sorrow over his cousin's death and red with the shame on top of that. He kneels, plants the handle of his sword in the ground. Ajax, son of Telamon, the gigantic, unconquered by any human being, has finally been conquered by his own grief.


You know what you are seeing is false, and yet it feels so, so real.


The Erinyes come up behind you. They caress your shoulders with their long, long fingers. As if having heard your thoughts, they say: "How about now, Mazacuintli? Will you feel something now?"


And so, right there, in front of everyone, Ajax turns his own sword against his chest. "I call on the ever-living maidens," he says, "the Erinyes, watchers of every human misery, to mark how I have been destroyed by the Achaeans." He glances at you, and, for a moment, you think you see him smile. "Goodbye, my friend," he says. He casts his eyes around, at the battlefield, at the sacked city in the distance. "Goodbye, Trojan plains and springs and streams. This is the last you hear from Ajax. All else in Hades to the dead I'll speak."


Then, before you or anyone else can do anything to stop him–and who would even dare?–he falls on his sword.


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