No Man Comes Home I — The House Without the Man
Troy has ended.
Odysseus has not.
Before the famous return, before the scar, the bow, the bed, and the door, Ithaca has already become a battlefield. Not because an army has breached its walls, but because absence has taught appetite how to sit at another man’s table and call itself custom.
In The House Without the Man, the first canto of No Man Comes Home, the story begins where most retellings hurry past: inside the damage left behind. Penelope rules by delay. Telemachus grows beneath the weight of a father who is both rumour and wound. The suitors do not invade. They remain. They eat. They wait. They corrupt hospitality by stretching it into entitlement.
This is an Odyssey of return, concealment, recognition, and consequence. But return does not begin with sails on the horizon.
It begins with a house learning how much absence can cost.
It begins with the son standing a little differently among the men who have mistaken delay for victory.
Continue reading No Man Comes Home I — The House Without the Man on Substack, where the twelve-canto Odyssey begins in the occupied house, before the returning man appears.
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Also in House of Cadmus
No Man Comes Home II — The Son Sent Out
Telemachus leaves Ithaca not as a hero, but as a son forced into motion by a house that will not correct itself. Seeking news of Odysseus, he discovers that a father’s absence can become larger in other men’s mouths than in the life of the child who has carried it. He wanted certainty. He received scale.
Bellerophon and the Borrowed Height
Bellerophon begins not in triumph, but under sentence: renamed by blood, purified beneath guest-law, and sent east carrying the sealed order for his own death. This House of Cadmus Greek myth retelling follows the man who rises by Pegasus — and mistakes borrowed height for possession.
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On The Lantern Chronicles, I gather writings from Angkor, myth and legend, contemplative essays, and poetry — works shaped by silence, beauty, wonder, memory, and the deeper questions that follow us through the world.
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