The gilded palace of Helion himself lay atop the acropolis, which itself sat upon a mountain at the city’s heart. As the blizzard abated, the palace reflected sunlight in an aureate gleam that seemed nigh blinding from below. Perhaps the Titan lord could help her, though she couldn’t imagine why he would. Her own golden eyes meant she probably carried his blood, yes, but so did innumerable others, and any Titan blood in her veins was too diluted to name her even a Nymph. Or maybe, at this point, none of the genē would even be established.
Pandora rubbed at her temples. How was she to function in a land that operated under such different paradigms?
And then, descending from the mountain, perhaps having come from the palace itself, she spied the auburn-haired Titan. Twice she blinked in an effort to reassure herself it was really him beyond the gleaming sunlight.
Maybe he was the one person who might offer some answer as to how she’d come here, or why.
Of their own accord, her legs broke into a run, a frantic dash that threw herself in Prometheus’s path, panting, chest heaving.
The Titan fell back a step at her approach, his crystal eyes widening. His expression fell away almost as quickly, and he caught her elbows. “Pandora.”
And if the run had stolen most of her breath, that simple name knocked what remained from her lungs like a blow from his muscled arms. He knew her. He knew her, some four thousand years before she’d even be born. How in Hades’s infernal necropolis could he know her? How was any of this possible?
The question stilled upon her tongue, as if her heart was too weak to dare to ask it. Instead, she stood there in aphonic stupor, gazing at him, silently imploring him to force the World to make some kind of sense.
With a gentle hand upon her shoulder, he guided her back down the mountain. “This place is not safe. War has come here, and it won’t end with Khione’s death.” Was that a tremor in his voice as well? He too struggled to make sense of events unfolding around him. So it was not that he had come from the future like herself … No. Something else. “I have a home on Ogygia. We can sail there and find safety.”
“The Aviary, right?” Her voice sounded like it belonged to some other person. The words seemed to come from some place outside of herself.
He glanced at her abruptly, his shock returned for so brief a moment she might have imagined it. “I have considered building such a place. I have not found the time, as yet.”
Pandora found it hard to swallow. To hear such things only compounded the daze she’d found herself walking in since awakening on Helion. Despite the whirring of her thoughts, she couldn’t formulate a coherent question while they walked.
In silence, she allowed him to guide her to the harbor, and onto a sailboat not so different from the one they’d taken out of Marsa a few days … A few thousand years from now.
From outside the city, Pandora caught sight of lingering frost upon the cyclopean wall and the fields surrounding the polis. Already, the sun had begun to melt the aftereffects of the blizzard, but it might take days before all the snows had vanished.
Prometheus made for Atlantis—what would soon be Atlantis, she supposed. She had heard Knosós existed even in ancient times, maybe even into the Time of Nyx. Perhaps they would stop there to gather supplies before skirting the greater island to reach Ogygia. There was a strange familiarity to all this, as if she sat across from exactly the same Prometheus she had just watched get sent down to Tartarus.
As if this was already her friend, though he hadn’t met her yet. But he knew her name … Was it from his pyromantic visions? Was something else going on?
“You have so many questions writ upon your face,” he said, when Helion lay many hours behind them.
So many they threatened to crush her beneath their weight. Questions of such import they made all that had passed in her life until now seem petty. Perhaps everything else was petty in the face of the monumental shift in reality she had experienced. While others went about their lives, thrust into their narrow perspectives, she had passed through time.
In Helion, amid the refugees, she’d managed to acquire a satchel. Producing it, she fished out the box he’d made and offered it to him with both hands, as if in supplication. Let him make sense of all of this. Oh, please let him.
After setting the tiller, he scooted over beside her and took the box, turning it one way and then the next.
“Send me back,” she rasped. Part of her longed to touch his hand again, to reassure herself he was real and not in Tartarus. In this time, she might again talk to her friend, might share long conversations and games of draughts. Might have more time. But this wasn’t her time.
Prometheus adjusted a panel on the box, frowning. And Pandora winced. What if he triggered it again without meaning to? “This sent you back in time,” he said, with the air of one talking as much to himself as to her. “Is it based upon the Time Chamber of Vulgeth?”
He was asking her? She swallowed. “I don’t know how you made it.” Much less what he was even talking about or where Vulgeth was or any such thing.
He took that in without visible reaction. “I’ll work on your box
