When Kratos grabbed him once more, Prometheus did not resist. The Titan pushed him through the archway. And the archway pushed back, the air turned viscous, the pressure like wading through a quagmire. Then they pulled free and Prometheus’s ears popped. His skin tingled as if a multitude of invisible ants nibbled every inch of his flesh.
Kratos’s sisters followed, and the three of them guided him downward, descending deeper, not through Olympus—for they had left the Mortal Realm behind—but into the atramentous wasteland of Tartarus, the binding wall of the World. The only light in the tunnel came from the torch Zelus bore, and, oh, how Prometheus longed to be able to reach for the flame and immolate these sadistic cretins.
Down and down they plodded, until a faint incandescence lit the passage ahead. Unable to suppress his dread, Prometheus shut his eyes for a few steps. Kratos and Bia were guiding him anyway. Was he truly about to suffer this? Was this real?
He had betrayed the so-called Elder Gods, or so Nemesis had accused him. This was the end that choice had brought him to.
When he opened his eyes, the cavern ahead had come into view. Fell light emanated from tornados of flame and iridescent fulgurations in vast expanses of emptiness that demarcated the edge of the World. The greater cavern was actually a rim of stone encompassing the Realms, broken by flows of sputtering magma and surrounded by the first of two concentric, onyx walls. Covered in spikes and bounded with chains that ran off into jutting stone outcroppings, the walls of Tartarus glinted with infernal light and dripping blood. Those walls bent, in convex arcs, seeming to warp if looked at, twisting into impossible geometries.
The twisting summit vanished into the staggering blackness that engulfed Tartarus. But it was what lurked between the two walls that truly boggled the mind with profound foulness, and Prometheus had no doubt some degree of Zelus’s derangement had come from firsthand experience with the horrors. Demons, as she said, spawned in Khaos, and bound within the World by these walls.
His captors dragged him toward a cyclopean pillar that rose outside the wall. Spiraling stairs rose up the column, and they followed that path, round and round, while Prometheus clenched his jaw lest he release any other sign of despair. That satisfaction, at least, he would deny them. He would not plead nor make vain struggles as he knew they would delight in.
At the terminus, a spiked chain joined the column, the links each bigger around than a person. The chain ran up to the top of the black walls, which was clearly how the siblings intended to get him up there. The idea of leaping off flashed through his mind. A fall from high enough would kill even a Titan. Not him, though. The Fates would not allow his death, no matter how he longed for it.
They marched him up toward his damnation, and he could not resist. The chains seemed to squirm beneath his sandals as if alive with the tainted foulness of this prison. As if they were part of the writhing torment encompassing the whole of the cosmos.
As they ascended, the air grew thick with cloying shadows and smoke billowing up from lava flows, until they gasped for each breath, and Bia broke into wet coughs. Still, they pushed him upward, past curving spikes jutting from the wall, any one of which was the size of a house. Up, past more chains, to crest the wall itself.
Despite the appearance of onyx, it had an almost fleshy give beneath his sandals, leaving no doubt this boundary was alive. Prometheus only dared to hope it was not conscious. The expanse of this inner wall stretched long, but—for what he could only assume was further perversity—his captors guided him to the far side, hundreds of feet across.
There, Kratos held him, allowing him to gaze on in horror at the caliginous tracts between the two walls. Within the infinite shadows, he beheld the squirming masses of formless entities. Ever shifting, their very natures seeming inchoate, as flailing appendages formed and unformed upon bloated, amorphous bulks throbbing with prurient need. Amid them opened a sea of eyes and mouths and sex organs, all as transitory as the rest.
Any given entity continuously vanished into the endless dark of the Khaos bound within the walls, making it impossible to gauge their numbers or size. Impossible, yes, but he knew them as manifold, and each an enormity onto itself.
Behold the abject horror of the Ontos.
“They feast upon our souls,” he rasped.
“Oh, yes,” Zelus purred. But she had no idea what he meant, thinking, no doubt, he feared merely for his soul, for having come here. As if these abominations would not claim all souls in time.
With degenerate sensuality, she stripped Prometheus’s clothes, even as Kratos hammered his fetters into a spike upon the wall. The wall itself rippled at the assault, and Prometheus imagined he felt it shudder in discomfort.
Zelus stroked against his manhood and he fitted her with a glare. Abruptly, her knee snapped up into his groin, sending him toppling to the ground. The force of it doubled him over in all-consuming agony. Such that it took him a moment to even realize Bia had wrapped barbed chain lengths about his wrists, further tethering him here, looking out over the ocean of tenebrous Khaos.
“Zeus says you cannot die, Epimetheus,” Bia taunted. “So he’ll test that by sending a bound harpy to come and eat your liver.” Curled up in a ball against the pain in his groin, Prometheus could not even wince. “I wonder what will happen? Will it grow back?” She snickered. “If so, I suppose the harpy will have a fine supper every night, won’t it?”
Kratos blew on some whistle, perhaps intended to summon the Storm spirit Bia had mentioned.
Prometheus shut his eyes, retreating inward. He had known this was
