No Man Comes Home II — The Son Sent Out
In the second canto of No Man Comes Home, Telemachus leaves Ithaca not as a hero, but as a son forced into motion by a house that will not correct itself.
He had crossed the sea to discover that absence had a body.
That was almost worse.
That night, in the shining house of another king, Telemachus lay awake and understood that news is not restoration. The world beyond Ithaca had honoured his father, enlarged him, confirmed him, preserved him in story, and still none of it placed a hand on the son’s shoulder. He had wanted certainty. He had received scale.
Scale is a cold gift.
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Read the full canto on Substack:
Also in House of Cadmus
No Man Comes Home VI — The Oar That Could Not Belong
A grave Odyssey retelling from No Man Comes Home: Tiresias gives Odysseus a prophecy stranger than return itself. After Ithaca, after the suitors, after the bed and the bow, he must carry an oar inland until the sea’s own instrument is mistaken for something else.
No Man Comes Home V — The Name Inside the Cave
In this fifth canto of No Man Comes Home, Odysseus enters the cave of Polyphemus with no need to be there. What follows is not only a famous Greek myth of cunning and escape, but a severe study of curiosity, leadership, hospitality, and the danger of needing one’s name to be known.
No Man Comes Home IV — The Stranger Washed Ashore
Odysseus has survived the sea, but survival is not yet return. Washed ashore on Scheria, naked and nameless, he must enter the human world again through restraint, supplication, Nausicaa’s courage, and the dangerous mercy of a house that does not yet know whom it has received.
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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.
It is a place for stone and story, reflection and vow, shadow and revelation.
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