When they finished the wine, he led her onward, along the same path to yet more stairs, these climbing past the agora and into the true acropolis. Another hundred or so steps and they came to the final landing, just below the summit.
Here, the air had grown so thin she felt no amount of gasping truly filled her lungs. She teetered, hands upon her knees, struggling to catch enough breath, shivering in cold winds. Prometheus’s warm hand fell upon her back, then eased her upward.
“Do not allow them to see weakness in you.”
Pandora gasped, but nodded. Olympians sounded much like wolves.
Alongside the acropolis ran canals of crystal-clear waters without apparent source. They pitched over the slopes, no doubt feeding the falls they had passed earlier. Arching bridges spanned the canals, each leading to a mansion more ostentatious and grandiose than aught she had ever imagined, even in Atlantis itself. From the architectural flourishes, she could guess which of the Olympians each belonged to.
Certainly, the one at the end of the acropolis, the famed Throne of Zeus. The sprawling complex left her gaping. A many tiered palace supported by great buttresses that spanned gaps to rock islands floating in the sky, supported by absolutely naught at all.
“What? How?”
“Skystone,” Prometheus said, continuing forward to their ominous destination. “Mined from the World of Sky long ago.”
Another world? What did that even mean?
Birds soared about the air amid those floating stones. Or not birds, she realized as they drew nigh, but pegasi. Steeds to the Olympians. Which explained why they didn’t mind living up here. Only others had to make this climb, a symbolic obeisance to call upon their gods.
In the distance, on the sky islands, she also caught sight of winged, bird-legged women. Harpies? She’d read of such creatures but thought them fancy rather than fact.
Prometheus noted her gaze but said naught. He guided her up the final stairs to the Throne of Zeus, and her raging pulse was not merely from the throes of physical exhaustion.
The gates here—great doors ten times her height—were thrown wide. Inside bustled numerous Titans, mortal slaves, and more than a few she could not say with utter certainty whether Man or Titan. They passed through a great vestibule into an inner chamber. Beyond this, she spotted a green courtyard that seemed somehow warm despite the height upon the mountain. Within this pranced innumerable peacocks, and Pandora took a step toward the birds, entranced.
Prometheus, though, took her hand to guide her to another set of great double doors, no chance to revel in such a place. It was not for her. Through this secondary gate, she could make out steps leading up to a dais, mounted with a golden throne that must have stretched twelve feet tall. Upon this sat the King of Olympus himself, a mountain of muscles forever in his prime, platinum hair falling about his shoulders, ice-blue eyes fixed upon some petitioner standing before him.
About this inner chamber milled copious other Titans, far more than Pandora had ever seen in one place. Too many, in fact. Despite the chill from the mountainside, sweat drenched her back.
So overwrought was she, she did not at first notice the approach of the Heliad Titan. Not until Hekate stood at their side. Pandora felt every muscle in her body clench, from her fists to her arse. This witch had dragged Pandora screaming from her home.
Now, the Titan didn’t even look at her, but only at Prometheus.
With a gentle hand on her shoulder, Prometheus guided Pandora toward Hekate. “Go with her.”
W-what? Pandora gaped at him, mind refusing to grasp at what her ears had just heard. Madness. He would not betray her to this abomination.
“She will not harm you,” Prometheus promised, easing Pandora forward.
Hekate’s grip snared her elbow and pulled Pandora to her side, still looking only at Prometheus. Pandora could feel the iron strength in the Titan’s fingers, though she wasn’t rough.
For a moment more, Prometheus held her gaze, sadness in his sapphire eyes. Sadness and fear.
Was this betrayal? Or was it the only way he could keep her safe?
Pandora’s stomach seemed to drop out from under her. What had Prometheus beheld of his own future? What dread did he tread into?
The moment broke, and he entered the throne room.
13
Pyrrha
218 Golden Age
For two years, Pyrrha had striven under the tutelage of the sorceress Enodia, always seeking to conceal her studies from her father and the rest of Tethys’s court. Sorcery, as it turned out, was but a single discipline of a greater field of arcana that Enodia termed ‘the Art.’ According to the sorceress, studies of the arcane dated back to the Time of Nyx, but whatever knowledge the ancients had held was mostly lost. A handful of lodges around the world, including her own former order, the Circle of Goetic Mysteries, sought to recreate that lost knowledge and power.
Other disciplines included alchemy, and Enodia had shown her the brewing of potions and crafting of reagents to imbue the body with greater strength or aid against illness, as well as poisons to enervate even the strongest of Titans. But in sorcery lay both the greatest risk and the greatest potential reward, and thus Pyrrha had always sought after that knowledge above all else.
Enodia, though, always held Pyrrha back, demanding she wait. “The evoking—or even invoking—of ghosts or spirits is not be taken lightly, child.”
Of course, the sorceress only called her child when she used condescension as a whip to rebuke her failures. Every time, it had Pyrrha grinding her teeth in frustration. She knew she could do more.
She could feel the puissance of the world, thrumming through the night air. Night had become her time more than ever before, and she stalked it like
