No doubt unaware of his musings, Bia led him onward without the least slowing of her pace, the slap of her sandals echoing upon the stone. Further down, they came to an open cavern, and here, some dozen Titans had gathered to watch the spectacle.
There, off to the side, stood Leto and Helios’s twins, Artemis and Apollon, enmeshed in furtive whispers. Across from them, other siblings, Hera and Poseidon, both grim-faced and watching the Titan in the center of the chamber.
Platinum-haired Kronos, bound in orichalcum fetters, struggling to stand while his captors circled around him like sharks. Kratos and Zelus, Bia’s own siblings, snickered as they stalked their prey. Noticing his sister’s entrance with Prometheus, Kratos grinned and slammed his fist into Kronos’s kidney. Kronos’s knees buckled, but Zelus caught him, her hands around his neck.
Prometheus set his jaw, refusing to let Styx’s brood take further pleasure in his discomfort at how they treated his erstwhile friend. Still, he could not entirely suppress the visions he’d seen of what they would do to him, as well. Perhaps that would be his punishment for failing to stop what was happening to Kronos now.
As if Fate cared about giving anyone what they deserved.
Just outside the circle, bound Arke whimpered, the ichorous ruins of her severed wings still flapping. Someone had gagged her, perhaps tired of her pleas. Hand on her shoulder—though his wrists, too, were fettered—Prometheus’s self-proclaimed brother Atlas stared daggers at him. Atlas was not gagged, though he said naught, perhaps knowing neither pleas nor recriminations would avail him here. Or perhaps pride had him denying Zeus even the satisfaction of a word.
“Enough,” Zeus’s voice boomed from the back of the chamber. There, he stood, hair a platinum mane so like his father’s, and eyes ice blue.
At once, Kratos and Zelus stepped aside, the latter dropping Kronos and giving way so that Zeus might confront his father.
Prometheus, though, found his gaze drawn from Kronos to Hekate’s haunted visage lurking in the shadows. He had heard others call her Zeus’s attack dog, and the king perhaps could not have managed to harness the Tartarian Gate without her. Yet still, from the look of her, this sat little better with her than with Prometheus himself. Or had Kronos said something to her? Certainly, the fallen oligarch cast a withering glance her way before looking up at his treasonous son with defiance.
And of the gate itself, it lay at the far side of the chamber, cut into the stone as if naught more than an archway leading into another tunnel. The Supernal sigils carved into the stones of the arch shone with lurid effulgence that churned the gut to look upon, and the air beyond the gate undulated as if one looked at it from beneath the flowing sea. The tunnel where it led was not a place, in the strictest sense, but the very terminus of the World, for Tartarus bounded the cosmos, both holding back the taint within its walls, and encouraging it to fester.
“You strove against me and you lost,” Zeus bellowed at his father, his voice booming through the hall. “For this, you are hereby damned. Have you any last words, Father?”
With a grunt, Kronos rose, and looked about the cavern. His gaze settled on Prometheus. “You betrayed me! You and your spawn, the both of you betrayed me! I am here because of what you told me, Fatespinner!”
Prometheus winced. He owed Kronos this confrontation and could not deny the accusations leveled against him. Words failed him, though, and all he could do was stride forward and offer Kronos the chance to look him in the eye. Almost, he wished he could tell Kronos he would one day join him in this torment. As if that might excuse Prometheus now, for failing to end this.
Kronos leaned in close. “I know what is writ upon the Tablet of Destiny,” he grated, words pitched so as not to carry across the whole of the cavern.
It was so hard not to waver. So hard to stay the course, even knowing Fate afforded him no choice in the matter. “Destiny is not always what it seems, old friend.”
Kronos spat upon Prometheus’s sandals. “If there was ever truth to your friendship, it long ago turned fetid.”
Zeus’s fist snared in Kronos’s hair, and, with a twist of his wrist, he sent Kronos careening along the floor toward the accursed Tartarian Gate. “Bring forth the prisoners!”
At his words, Kratos, Bia, and Zelus lurched into motion, glee writ plain across their features as each of them hauled up one of the condemned. Zelus seemed to take particular delight in Arke’s squirming, pointless resistance.
And it was futile, for the orichalcum fetters rendered the bound Titans utterly impuissant, unable to draw upon their Pneumatikoi and thus no stronger than Men, while their captors retained their superhuman strength.
Zelus dug fingers so deep into Arke’s shoulders Prometheus saw golden ichor trickle down them, commingling with the still weeping wounds upon her back. A twinge of sympathy shot through him, but she had made her choices, and he could not save her from them.
Kratos, meanwhile, had hauled Kronos to the gate by his ankle.
Zeus stood at the forefront, taking it all in with a manic exuberance that threatened to choke Prometheus. “For crimes of treason against your true king, I condemn you all to eternal torment at the edge of the void, where you shall be scoured down to the piths of your souls.” The king chuckled, as if aught amusing lay behind his words. “Justice be done.”
At his command, Kratos strode through the gate. His passage took a breath longer than it should have, and Prometheus imagined the viscous resistance that threshold must pose. The Titan dragged Kronos along behind him. Both forms seemed distorted behind the barrier, as they descended the tunnel’s path, in the moment before Bia followed with Atlas.
Prometheus wanted to look away, for witnessing this cleaved his soul
