Nobody's War

Everyone knows the story of Odysseus.Nobody knows the story of everyone else. Troy has fallen. The war is over. The greatest hero of the age is sailing home and in his wake he leaves a coastline of people whose lives he has entered, upended, and departed from without a second thought. Nobody's War is the Odyssey retold from the margins. Not the hero's journey. No, the human cost of it. Ancient world, modern prose. No archaic language. No reverence for men who don't deserve it. Just blood, consequence, and the quiet devastation of people who never got to choose whether they were part of this story. It is told by a nameless god who has been watching (quite obsessively and  for reasons that will become clear) since before the war began. And it is told through the eyes of: PERIMEDES An Ithacan soldier, age 27, who has spent ten years at Troy and is now rowing home on Odysseus's ship. He didn't choose this voyage. He won't be remembered for it. He is the eyes on the deck for everything that follows: the Cyclops, the witch, the sirens, the wreck. TELEMACHUS Sixteen years old. His father a ghost, his palace overrun by men eating through his inheritance, his mother weaving herself thin to buy time. He has to become a man with no one to teach him how. ANTINOUS The lead suitor. Capable, calculating, genuinely convinced he would make a better king than the man who abandoned the island for a decade. He's probably right. That's what makes him dangerous. That, and the fact that he has never once considered that Odysseus might actually come home. PENELOPE The most strategically brilliant person in this entire story. She has been fighting a war with a loom and a set of careful lies for ten years, and she is almost out of moves. Almost. POLYPHEMUS The Cyclops. Who had a life before a Greek ship arrived. Who asked his father for one thing and received it. Whose prayer is the engine of everything that follows. AND OTHERS. Circe, who is done being gentle about men washing up on her shore. Calypso, who kept a man for seven years who never wanted to stay. Elpenor, who fell off a roof drunk and was left behind... dead, burnt and buried. A crewman who will be the last man in the water before the wreck. The suitors, the servants, the forgotten soldiers, the bystanders. The Odyssey is twenty-four books long. Every one of them is about Odysseus. Nobody's War is about everybody else. Updated every Monday and Friday. Each chapter is self-contained but builds toward a single, devastating end. AUTHOR'S NOTES This is a retelling of Homer's Odyssey told entirely through secondary characters and bystanders. Every event is faithful to the original. What changes is the perspective and the prose. No archaic language. No verse. Just the ancient world written the way it might have felt to live in it, for the people history didn't bother to name. New chapters release every Monday and Friday. I'm building this in real time. Feedback shapes it. If something lands or something doesn't, please let me know. Cheers!