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The silt of the Underworld was not like the sand that lined the rocky shores of Same. It did not warm up and sparkle in the midday sun, cool with the moonlight; it was a gray, grasping sludge that tasted of copper and forgotten things. A permanent damp clung to it, staining any phantom flesh that came in contact with it, corrupting and eroding the very soul of one’s self.
Eurylochus’s skin had long since been stained a charred black by the biting grime, at least, he assumed he had been. It was difficult for him to distinguish where his body ended and where the shore and the river began. It was all the same smudged shades of gray to him, a desolate and bleak world he couldn’t fully process. He could see shapes—the towering, jagged shadows of the cliffs of Erebus, the shimmering, oily coil of the Styx—but the faces of the men he had led to their deaths were nothing but pale, flickering smudges in the gloom.
And would be that way for the next eighty five or so years.
Zeus’s lightning had ensured that.
Because striking him down with divine lightning after such an act of disobedience had not been enough, no, the gods were cruel. They always had been and always would be. The final twelve years of his life in the mortal world had been a testament to that. The lightning and damnation to wander the banks of the Styx for a hundred years was not a suited punishment for the crimes he had committed.
He deserved worse.
Eurylochus had been branded, touched by a fire so pure it had seared his unclean flesh within seconds—there were times when he could still smell it, still taste the cooking flesh in his mouth—and then left to drown. That was the cruelest part.
The lightning itself had not killed him.
The water had.
Eurylochus had been struck down by the king of gods himself and survived, only to drown in the turbulent sea below. He carried his wounds into the afterlife, the singed and blistered flesh, the milky eyes and lungs heavy with a water he could never cough out.
The large man dragged his left foot through the mire. The silt was not merely mud; it was the physical manifestation of memory, heavy and stagnant. Every step Eurylochus took felt like pulling his heels from the grip of a thousand tiny, desperate hands begging their second in command for a solution—for mercy from the gods’ cruel judgment.
He had failed them all.
They came to him for guidance and all he had given them in return was barbaric deaths and a hundred years wandering before they were ever allowed to rest—to return home.
Eurylochus stopped his aimless trudging through the grime, his breath rattling in a chest that no longer needed air but still remembered the agony of its absence. He raised a trembling hand to his face, his fingers tracing the topography of his ruin. The skin of his cheek was a landscape of fused ridges and valleys where the lightning had kissed him. His cheekbones were sharp with malnutrition and a desperate hunger that had led him to his fate.
He shook his head—no—there was no use in lying to the dead. It was not hunger that drove his final reckless decision. Eurylochus had known what would happen if he killed the cattle, he knew that whoever spilt its divine blood would be punished. He had rushed though, so desperate for an escape from his living hell—the demands of a mutinous crew who looked at him expectantly, the hatred of his own brother, the relentless agony of his own body—that he had never considered if only he would be punished. He had been so caught up in the relief of his own demise he had forgotten a crucial detail.
Truly he had thought he would take the blame. That was how the law of man worked.
The gods followed a different standard.
His crew had been punished for his sins.
Eurylochus could feel a low whine in his throat, the noise a meek imitation for the thoughts that lashed upon his mind like a studded whip. The sound that finally tore from him wasn't a cry of grief, but a wet, bubbling rasp—the echo of the Sea still trapped in his chest.
The listless shades around him didn’t seem bothered by the sound.
He looked toward a cluster of shapes nearby. He knew they were his men. He recognized the proud gait of Perimedes, the slouch of Antiphus. They didn't look at him. They didn’t call. Or perhaps they did, and he simply couldn't see the judgment in their eyes through the milky film that clouded his vision and the ceaseless ringing of his inner ear.
The lightning had left him with a muffled world of nothing but a high-pitched, eternal ringing—a thin, silver wire of sound that never broke. Sometimes he thought it was the dying bellow of the sun god’s cattle; other times, he thought it was the sound of Ctimene crying.
Sometimes he wondered if it was a mercy.
Other times it felt like another form of punishment, another layer to isolation for his purgatory.
But he didn't blame his crew for their silence. In life, he had been their shield against Odysseus’s ambition, the one who voiced the fears they only dared to whisper. In death, he was the man who had led them to the slaughter. He had opened the bag, handed out the torches, drawn the blade; he had carved the meat; he had invited the bolt.
And now he was cursed to wander by their side until his sentence had been served.
Eurylochus sank to his knees, the filth of the riverbank soaking into his tattered chiton. He looked down at his hands.
Six hundred men. They were a ragged tide of shadows, a broken army that had once conquered Troy and survived the lotus and the giants, only to be felled by the pride of a single man and their cowardly, weak willed second.
They had all spent ten years away from their homes fighting for Greece’s honor, and Eurylochus had granted them another hundred years before they would ever see their loved ones again.
"I'm sorry," he whispered. His voice sounded like grinding stones in his own hollow head, a change in nasal pressure. Water bubbled from his throat and he reflexively tried to cough it out—a pointless attempt to relieve himself from the wedge in his chest. "I'm so sorry."
The shade didn’t know if the others could hear him, if they cared, or if they were stuck in the same senseless purgatory as him. He didn’t even know if he was apologizing to them, or to Odysseus, the gods, or Ctimene.
Ctimene.
The thought of her was a physical blow. He did not have a heart anymore—not one that beat anyway—but the space where it had been tightened until he gasped, choking on his breath. He had promised her a return. He had promised her children and a new necklace, he had promised that he would hold her again.
He had failed.
Eurylochus leaned forward, pressing his forehead into the cold, wet silt. The math of the dead was simple and agonizing. He had been here a few years—five? Ten? Time was a void in the dark. But a hundred years remained of this wandering. A hundred years of watching the shades of his friends wither into husks of resentment.
And then, only then, would he cross.
If Ctimene lived to be old—if she lived to be eighty, gray-haired and weary—she would still be in the Meadows of Asphodel for decades before he ever arrived. She would wait at the gates, looking for a man with broad shoulders and a steady laugh, and she would find instead this—this broken thing. A deaf, half-blind wraith covered in the soot of his own execution and the black grime of despair.
She would have waited one hundred and twelve years only to be met with a creature of agony and cowardice.
At least she would have Odysseus. At least he would return and keep her safe.
Eurylochus prayed to whatever god would humor a dead man’s desires that his king had returned to Ithaca. That the pain and suffering had been worth it, and perhaps Odysseus would finally find his peace.
The only solace he could find was in that thought.
Because he had not seen Odysseus here, which meant he was alive. Odysseus was breathing the sweet, pine-scented air of the upper world, or perhaps he was already home, pressing his face into the neck of a wife who still smelled of loom-wool and sunlight.
He felt a surge of something hot and sharp. It was the closest he could get to rage, to hate; yet it never hit its mark.
Eurylochus wanted to hate Odysseus. He wanted to scream his curse into the Styx so that the water would carry it up to the surface and poison the shores of Ithaca. He wanted the King to feel the lightning. He wanted him to feel the starvation, the way the stomach turned into a screaming animal before it finally went quiet and died. He wanted him to feel the rot, the guilt of 600 men and a captain that would not listen. He wanted him to just apologize for once.
He couldn't do it.
He still remembered the boy who had shared his bread. Who would pull Eurylochus from the comfort of his forge to go on countless adventures, who had eventually returned enamored with some princess of a far away kingdom. He remembered the man who had been too afraid to enter into his own room alone after the birth of his son—fearing his own inadequacy. Who had given Eurylochus his blessing to marry Ctimene. He remembered the way Odysseus’s hand had felt on his shoulder before another attempt to siege Troy’s wall. His genius wit and brilliance that fooled even the gods.
How could anyone bring themselves to hate a man such as him?
But he also remembered the captain.
He remembered the feel of the ship's deck beneath his feet, the way Odysseus had looked at him in those final months—not as a brother, but as a piece of equipment that was starting to malfunction. A frustration because he dared to open his mouth and speak of his fears. Like a betrayer. Odysseus had played a game with the gods, using six hundred lives as his betting pool, and when the debt came due, he’d simply walked away from the table.
Odysseus had given the cyclops his name.
Odysseus had refused to apologize to Poseidon.
Odysseus had sacrificed six men—he had sent Eurylochus himself as one—to the maws of Scylla.
Oh, but Eurylchus was the one to ask for food that led them to the cave, to open the bag so Posiden could find them, to kill that damned cow.
You coward, he thought, and he wasn't sure if he was talking to himself or the King of Ithaca. You selfish coward.
"Go home, then," Eurylochus murmured into the dark, his fingers digging into the mud. "Go home and be a King. Be a father. Be a husband."
He lowered his head. He had eighty-some years left to sit in the dirt. Eighty-some years to be deaf and blind and hungry for a life that had been traded away for a single man’s survival.
He would wait. He would wander. He would carry the guilt of the six hundred on his scarred back until the mud claimed his memory. And maybe, in a century, when he finally stepped onto the grass of the meadows, he would find Ctimene.
He only hoped she wouldn't recognize him. He hoped he was ghost enough by then that she would simply see another passing shadow, and not the man who had loved her brother enough to follow him into the mouth of hell, only to be spat out into the silt. He prayed that she wouldn’t wait for him for 112 years.
Eurylochus closed his sightless eyes and waited for the next vibration of a grieving soul to tell him he was still there.