"So was this the future?"
Ajax asked Night directly, urgent and unsteady.
The latter's answer was deliberately vague. "Predict the future?
A mortal like me couldn't do anything so dramatic.
I only made a rough guess about your fate based on your personality.
It's just a little story I came up with. Don't take it too seriously, Great Ajax."
....
Although that's what he said, those deep, star-like eyes gave Ajax a sense of unfathomable depth, along with an overly real and déjà vu feeling and an intuition that had struck him like a thunderbolt since he first heard the story, leaving him with a vague sense of unease.
All of this made it impossible for Ajax the Great to remain calm.
A guess?
How could such astonishing predictions about the future be made based solely on speculation about his personality?
And how did Patroclus die in the story? How did even the invincible Achilles die?
Impossible. This is absolutely impossible.
A future that absurd had to be nothing more than imagination.
But somewhere underneath all that, a terrifying feeling Ajax couldn't name told him those things could genuinely happen.
Was this really not a prophecy?
This was a man who didn't flinch against Hector's divine spear, who held the line behind his shield without changing expression.
And now he stood pale-faced, his insides shaken apart by a dark and terrible vision of what was to come.
If it was true, it was horrifying beyond words.
If it wasn't true, then where did this visceral, pounding unease in his chest come from?
He could not calm down.
Ajax put his fear into words and started asking.
"How did Patroclus die?"
Since Griffith said it was a guess, then let it be a guess.
How did he guess that Patroclus was going to die?
He originally didn't expect the latter to answer.
In the divine age of Greece, something as miraculous as foresight wasn't unheard of.
Figures like Prometheus could glimpse the general direction of things ahead, and even the Fates saw in broad strokes but never clearly.
The prophecy about Zeus's lineage being ended by a son was the same: known in outline, never in specifics.
Even the gods couldn't produce precise prophecy.
Ajax went in with low expectations for whatever he would say next.
Then the latter said, "He died in place of Achilles."
"What?! What...what does this mean?" Ajax the Great was bewildered.
"Let me ask you something else. If you were Achilles, after everything that happened today, and the other heroes pressured you to hand over your armor and weapons, would you be willing to do it?"
Ajax frowned. "Of course not."
He finally realized the problem and then felt relieved—while they were arguing back and forth at the meeting, Achilles, the original owner, hadn't even spoken yet.
Given how bad things were between Achilles and Agamemnon right now, if someone came to him asking for the armor to help out, Achilles would be more likely to put his weapon through that person than hand anything over. Ajax went cold just thinking about it.
Good thing he stepped away from that argument when he did.
If he went through with it, even getting the armor would have earned him the hatred of Achilles himself.
"But that armor will eventually get lent out. Achilles gets to choose who it goes to. If he had to pick one person from everyone in this alliance, who do you think he would choose?"
"Gulp."
Ajax swallowed hard.
The answer came to him before he even finished the thought.
The midday sun came through the window and filled the room with warmth that should have felt gentle.
But standing in that light, Ajax felt something cold crawl up his spine.
He said the name quietly: "Patroclus?"
Night's expression shifted into something sorrowful, like a man carrying grief for the whole world.
He played a mournful tune while he said, "Exactly.
Out of love for his friend, the demigod would lend his prized armor to the person closest to him.
But that bond was too heavy a weight for Patroclus to carry safely.
And what would his ending be? Death.
The Styx, the river that once gave Achilles his near-invincible body, divides the living from the dead across an impossible distance.
When the demigod, having pushed his closest friend into fire with his own hands, was consumed by grief and rage, what choice would he make?"
...
Ajax hadn't asked a second question yet, but Night seemed to have already given him the answer.
Achilles would step back onto the battlefield.
Blinded by hatred and grief, reckless and burning, would he lose to Hector through sheer carelessness in the end?
The guess wasn't exact, but Ajax already half believed Achilles would fall and that death might be where it all led.
He felt awe toward that terrible future, and something close to awe toward Night as well.
The more the latter insisted it was just reasoning, the more plausible it sounded.
But the way he accounted for every step of human nature, anticipating the choices and endings of heroes one after another, made Ajax certain the future really would go something like this.
Even if the specific cause of Achilles's death was wrong, that much of a margin didn't change anything.
A kind of reverence stirred in Ajax's chest.
When someone's grasp of human nature reached this level, whether or not they actually saw the future, it amounted to the same thing as prophecy.
Terrifying.
And more than that, what sent Ajax's thoughts spiraling wasn't just the awe.
He could not simply watch everything play out toward that ending now that he knew.
Ajax stood up sharply: "I have to stop Achilles." He can't lend that armor to Patroclus!!"
Night: "Wait."
Ajax the Great stopped in his tracks, as if afraid he might have missed some crucial information.
....
Then came another question that cut right to the core. "Stop Achilles?
Naive. What would you even use to stop him?
A vague guess?
If Patroclus hears about this, he will only think you are trying to drive a wedge between him and Achilles."
.....
There was something Night didn't say out loud.
The odds of Achilles being in a romantic relationship with Patroclus were not particularly high, but the closeness between them was genuinely excessive.
It was also for Patroclus's sake that Achilles eventually broke out of his standoff with Agamemnon and returned to the battlefield, which is what opened the path to his eventual death.
With the pride of heroes being what it was, even warned of the danger, most of them would still want to try on that legendary armor.
Night looked at the man and said.
"I have a way to prevent that future from happening."
Ajax said nothing, just stared with tense, focused eyes, and the latter knew the hook was set.
He didn't know where Achilles was right now, but Ajax certainly did.
And even if Ajax didn't, Patroclus would.
As long as Ajax brought him along to find Patroclus, finding Achilles was virtually guaranteed from there.
After that, the question wasn't going to be about convincing Achilles to lend the armor or not.
It was about taking the whole package, man and armor together.
Everything was riding on this next move.
Agamemnon, Agamemnon.
You better step up your game and keep drawing Achilles's hatred.
For the moment, Night settled Ajax down and asked him to wait quietly alongside him.
Meanwhile, on the other side, things he hoped for were already unfolding in full force.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)