"He was not a hero. He was a man who refused to drown."
Not a retelling of the Odyssey — but a new sailor, Nikias of Corinth, whose voyage home after the Trojan War takes him through the same mythological waters in a different sequence. He is not Odysseus: he is less clever, less chosen, and more honest about his fear. He is accompanied by the six surviving crew members of a ship that no longer exists. Each island and monster they encounter is rendered as a genuinely alien encounter — not an adventure, but a crisis of world-understanding.
