Chapter One: The Bard

Chapter Two: The Mountain

Chapter Three: The Cave

Chapter Four: The Prophesy

Chapter Five: The Nymph

When Homer woke the next morning, he went in search of the young boy who lived nearby and who would often be his eyes and run his errands.

“Tell me, lad, have you heard of a city called Ilium or Troy?” Homer asked him.

The boy was puzzled.  “I know no towns beyond our own.  Where is this city you seek?”

“On the cliffs of the sea under the shadow of green-clad Mount Ida, but never you mind.  It is not a famous city after all, I suspect, and will require a harder search than I can request of you.”

And so Homer’s quest began, with the help of the Muses, who gave him his skilled tongue and harpist hands.  With his bard skills, he made his way from town to town, in search of this lost city—lost in ignorance, he hoped, instead of ruins.

Till one day, he heard the first hint of its whereabouts and found surer and surer threads that, following, led him to a rocky shore, where seabirds called and fishermen cast nets from their boats and sheep bleated from the hills above.  One hand on the shoulder of his most recent guide and the other upon his staff, Homer stepped across the threshold of the city he knew so well but had never entered, surrounded by the splash and thunder of strangers’ voices, the noise of animals and carts, the sound of buying and selling and a city alive with people.

With a storyteller’s ear for knowledge, Homer gleaned the news of the city and the name and lineage of the king, a descendant several times removed from the breaker of horses who played a part in Homer’s old tale of Troy.

Leaving the city the next morning, Homer was almost finished in his quest.  One answer alone remained that he could not find and would most likely never find, no matter how long or far he searched: the fate of Paris.  One way or another, Homer supposed, Paris had died so that others could survive, for his legacy had died, whether he had been slain by Oenone or spared to live out his days, a man not remarked upon by any but his wife and children.  As a spinner of stories, Homer could see many ends to the thread he had begun at Ida.  He imagined them all and wondered, pondered which, if any, were true and had led to the undoing of the tale of Iliad and its people’s rescue.

In this unwoven, untold tale, Homer supposed that Paris was the nameless hero in place of his brother.  A strange twist of the Fates, Homer smiled to think about: “and so died Paris, keeper of sheep.”