Pandora traced her fingers along the ridges of the box, wondering at its intricacies. It was hard to even focus …
A hot tear fell from her eye and splashed upon the desk.
Gods!
She rubbed angrily at her eye. Gods, she wasn’t going down that road.
Well, at least she would solve the box, clear her head, and get back to figuring out how to reach him in Tartarus.
She pushed at a panel and found it slid to the side with a simple nudge. Another, and then another. Huh. Though Prometheus had concealed the gears within, segments of the box could twist and turn, creating a design of almost endless permutations.
End upon end, she rotated the panels, time melting away as she mused at the masterpiece. Another panel slid into place, then she could twist the middle ring on the bottom. That seemed to unlock rotation of other rings.
She’d never seen—nor imagined—such a complex puzzle. Was there only one solution or where there a thousand? Or was the entire thing one big diversion meant to entertain without actually having a—
As she twisted the box once more, the top slid open, exposing a circular panel that rose up. And then the World itself shifted. Air currents popped, followed by her ears. A wave of vertigo ensnared her, bringing her to her knees. Light around her bent back on itself, as if she was caught in a collapsing bubble.
Then a flash of darkness.
Pandora opened her eyes. It was no longer night. And she was no longer inside, but rather kneeling by a dirt road. A warm ocean breeze swept in from the north.
North. The ocean should have been south of the Aviary.
And this … Pandora turned, looking around herself. The whole landscape had changed. The box—and what a box!—had transported her to another island?
That seemed utter madness.
From down the road, a stream of people rapidly approached. There were donkeys hauling carts and men and women and even children, arms laden with bundles, all scrambling toward her at a half dash. Some cast furtive looks over their shoulders as if the Furies pursued them.
Where in Hades’s vile world was she? What the fuck was going on?
“Hey!” Pandora shouted at a woman scurrying down the road. “What’s happening?”
The woman looked at her as if she were utterly mad. “You haven’t heard?” Her accent was a bit off, a strangeness to her words. “Khione landed to the south, come to claim the island from Helios. She and her war band are heading this way, and the only refuge will be inside Helion.” The woman actually grabbed Pandora and ushered her along. “Now move your arse lest you want to find out what an army does to a woman out alone.”
Though her feet continued to carry her—the refugees seizing her like a riptide—Pandora’s mind staggered from what she’d just heard.
Khione … Khione … As in Kalliope’s play about the siege of Helion?
A cold having naught to do with the supposed Winter Queen had wrapped around Pandora’s chest. An impossibility.
Khione. As in the Ambrosial War … which had transpired some four thousand years ago.
Interlude
1570 Silver Age
Kratos’s fist smacked into Prometheus’s temple. The impact sent blinding whiteness surging through his vision, drowning out all other sensation. When hints of clarity once more seeped into his vision, Kratos and his sisters were dragging him down stairs he had last descended long ago, when Zeus had damned Kronos and his followers to the same fate Prometheus would now endure.
Despite himself, despite his foreknowledge of this and the ages spent preparing himself, a gasp of despair escaped him. This Fate he would have paid most any price to avert. Most prices, but if there was a way around it that did not betray Pandora or the future, he could not see it.
His end had always led here.
Bia chortled in manic delight. “Remember the last time we came here together? Oh, what times we’ve had together, haven’t we now?” Styx’s daughter jabbed his bruised ribs with one finger. “Ah, you didn’t even see what lies beyond, though. Ooo, hehe. It’s glorious, I tell you.”
Not deigning to answer her, Prometheus held his tongue, focusing his mind inward. He would need the retreat of deep meditation to survive this. He would withdraw into the palace of his memories and find solace in the moments he had stolen from eternity. He would sever any awareness of his corporeal form and thus endure whatever ravages were visited upon it.
He would … fool himself. Pretend the tongues of agony would not lap at his heels.
The siblings carried him down into the cavern deep within Olympus.
There, across the breadth of the cavern, lay the hateful Tartarian Gate, an archway cut into rough stone and leading into another tunnel. A tunnel to a place that was not a place, beyond all Realms.
“There are demons there,” Zelus said, seeming almost to speak to herself. “Formless abominations from before the dawn of time. They shift and writhe and …” The Titan shuddered, in some perverse amalgam of horror and ecstasy. “They wriggle up inside you.”
Kratos and Bia shoved Prometheus forward, sending him staggering toward the Gate. For an instant—only an instant—he debated trying to struggle against them. Though the orichalcum fetters suppressed his Pneumatikoi and the Art of Fire, leaving him essentially mortal, he might have still escaped.
But he had seen the ambit of Fate, and this was his. He had to pass through the torment if the future was to have even the fragile chance he’d hoped to give it. All of it, his interminable life, would amount to naught if he refused to accept this.
Besides, maybe this was justice, long denied, for his own misdeeds. He had manipulated and killed, and even those crimes paled in comparison to those who had died as a result of his actions and inactions. All-consuming oceans of pain and death fell at his feet in the name of his gambit
