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Anastasia Ilaeira Achourioti, 19 years old, is participating in the 6th International Literary Creation Competition, from Athens, Greece. We are grateful for the participation and wish her success.

   Is there glory in the fields of death

   The air is somber tinged with grief and the tragedies of men. The silence unnatural. A type of stillness which can only exist amongst the breathless dead down in the fields of Hades. Monsters are born here, in the same fields in which men find rest. The wine-dark sea just outside these burning gates calls to him, urges him to turn around. It is a danger, but a familiar one. The price he must pay to return home, the punishment for his pride, the trade for immortality. 
   He gives the dead the sacrifice they crave. It is said that blood tastes like wine to them, they desire it above anything, desperate for any drop of life they can leech from the surface. Odysseus feels the warm blood of the animal coat his fingers, as it has done countless other times. He can feel the dead rejoicing around him, even if he does not see them yet. He waits, and it is as if time has halted for the length of his journey to the land where no living man is meant to wander on. He sees them come in fragments, they are wary and angry. More shades than men, more darkness than light. 
   Tiresias comes, and with him all the answers he’s been waiting for. It is not just the past which haunts him now, but the future too. All men want to know of the days ahead, of prophesies woven by the Fates, of the glory awaiting them in faraway shores. Then they learn of it and wish they hadn’t. The future sits above them like a dark cloud, plaguing their mind in all hours of the day and night. They try to stop its course and always fail. That is the way of the world, like the walls of Troy. Ten years it stole from the Fates, it is ashes now, as it was always meant to be. 
   His mother comes next. He wishes she hadn’t. The tears well up in his eyes faster than he can hold them back, like the melancholic lament of the skies. He did not think- he did not expect to see her there. The love he feels for her mingles with the guilt that springs inside of him, fast and sharp like the tip of a spear. She tells him of his wife and son, and he weeps. He feels only a phantom wind when he goes to touch her, his hand passing through her as if he is the ghost and she the one alive. He tries three times. By the third his knees have buckled under the weight of his grief, like Atlas, holding onto burdens no man alone can withstand. Almost failing but never falling. Perhaps that is the tragedy of life. It is one he will have to endure. 
“Why are you here?” 
   He turns around to look at the source of the voice. The face of the greatest of the Greeks greets him. The face of Achilles. He glows bright, the way the sea glitters like teardrops woven together when hit by the light of the midday sun. His face does not seem as youthful as he remembers. The lines of grief and sorrow never left his face. He died in them and so he will exist with them until the end of time, immortal only in memory. Patroclus stands beside him, tall and regal and noble, made even more glorious upon the hour of his death.  
“I need to return home” Odysseus answers. “This is the only way.” 
“The games of the Fates have reached you as well it seems.” Patroclus mutters, his eyes kind and full of sorrow. “You took down Troy’s walls, only to wander in these waters for years on end.” 
“The spoils of war.” whispers Achilles in fake amusement. The divine comedy of their lives.
   The regret he sees on the demigod’s face is something Odysseus does not understand. 
“You cannot tell me you grieve for your lost life Achilles?” he asks bewildered. “There is none more famous than you, none more skilled in battle. Men worshipped you like a god while alive, now they sing songs of your legend, while you rule over the dead. Your name will never be forgotten. What more could a man want?”
   Odysseus sees Achilles turning to look at his companion. He can almost feel him remembering, almost see those memories burn his insides. All the nights and days he spent weeping by Patroclus’ corpse, begging for the sweat release of death. Those days are etched into his soul, seared into his golden skin like scars. It is what he will be remembered for, his rage, his grief, his love.
“I was luckier than most.” He answers. “I was offered a choice, as you know, but I was not wise then, drunk as I had been on promises of glory. I could not have fathomed what the Fates would weave for me. I never thought I would wish for death, that its darkness would come as a relief.”
   If phantoms could cry, Achilles would weep till the end of time, his eyes mournful like the setting sun. He sees Patroclus touching his arm, a phantom touch, light as a breath. He only saw it because he was so close to them; he would have missed it otherwise. A comfort maybe, to battle the torment of their lives, present even in death. He continues.
“You have a gift Odysseus. Hold on to it with everything you have. I would rather be a slave on the world above, than the king of shades and ghosts. No dark crown compares to the colors of the sea under the setting sun or the touch of another, warm and alive on your skin. Do not rest yet, not for as long as you can.”  
   Odysseus looks at them as if in trance. His years are wearing him down, his actions even more so. All he has done and all the torment he has yet to feel. It feels endless, like a chasm threatening to pull him down into the darkest abyss, the one the whole universe was born from.             He looks at his hands before touching his face. He is surprised to feel his eyes wet once more. The two shades still stand before him. They were never friends in life, and yet he doesn’t want them to go. It feels as if they are the only ones who understand his pain, his grief, his fear. He never mourned them in Troy but wishes to grieve for them now. Their faces feel too young to reside in these scorching fields.   
      His mind wanders to his son and a fear sharp as lighting spears him at the thought of seeing him here. He left for war when Telemachus was an infant. He has never seen his face. Somehow his mind makes one for him from these two young men. Achilles’ lighter hair, and Patroclus’ warm amber colored eyes. A boy both brash and kind, eager to wander the world beyond the horizon. He cannot take his eyes off them. It is as if he is seeing them for the first time, as if they are nothing but a reflection, while their true forms reside in Troy, ruling over the ashes of a once great city. Achilles’ grief echoing across the wretched shores for centuries to come, deaf to Patroclus’ comforts reassuring him that they are together again down in the fields of death, urging him to finally find rest. Their tragedy repeated again and again, until the end of time.
“Death doesn’t happen to us, but to those we leave behind.” Patroclus whispers, somehow aware of Odysseus’ inner turmoil. “It is easy to throw away one’s life when they are young. We get swept up by words of fame and destiny, desperate for our lives to mean something more than the short existence the gods grant us. In the end, it is much more glorious to live.”  
   He cannot look at them now. How could anyone? An entire generation of young men dead, sacrificed in the name of honor and fame. More and more people appear behind the two heroes, Antilochus and Ajax and soldiers, countless of them, both Greek and Trojan. They fill these fields of death, and it smells like rot, it smells like the burning of corpses. But that is absurd. They are all dead, their bodies feast for the dogs and vultures of the earth. Only Odysseus stands alive among them, different and bright like a glittering star amidst their waning darkness. These shades, envious as all wretched things are, craving his blood, wanting to feast on it and be born again. 
   Death is choking him, or maybe it’s the flames. The two young heroes appear even younger now before him, the way they were when he took them to war. It makes him sick. “Leave!” they tell him, but he hears them faintly, as if he is underwater. He starts running towards the sea, where there is life and pain and blood to be spilled and love to be given. Let him live to see his wife and son once more. Please gods let him live.