“It’s your box.”
“Are you so certain of that? You are, after all, the one who used it. I would rather call it Pandora’s Box.”
Pandora hugged herself, hardly knowing what to say. She felt so overwrought she could make no sense of any of this. She felt like a spectator watching a drama unfold upon a stage … save the stage kept expanding, until they all lay within its ambit.
On Ogygia, he took her not atop the mountain, but to a small cottage upon its lower slope. Everything was different, from the rocks to the trees, but Pandora was fair certain this place would one day become Marsa. The lay of the land, that didn’t change. In the intervening millennia, the tiny cluster of fishing houses they had passed would become the harbor.
Compared to his Aviary, the cottage seemed quaint, with a single bedroll upon the floor, lying in front of a fire pit. Outside, Prometheus set about cooking a casserole, laced with cod and bits of other fish he’d bought from the fishermen. Once he’d folded it all together, he stuck it in a clay oven, then settled down beside her on the ground.
“I cannot fathom where best to even start,” she said.
He turned his sapphire gaze upon her. She expected him to take her hand, as he so oft had done to offer comfort, but now he seemed more reserved. Ah. Because all the moments they’d shared had not yet happened for him.
“Start with whatever seems most pressing and build upon the questions that arise from that.”
Pandora folded her hands in her lap. “You don’t know all the things that have happened to me, though I shared them with you in my past. You were …” The words stuck in her throat. After a lifetime of sheltering her heart, an exposure seemed to open it to fresh wounds. “I cared about you. I cared, and something happened.”
He pursed his lips. “Your mind reels from reconciling the anachronic implications of our meeting then and now.”
“Yes.”
“You ask yourself, did the me you knew recall this very conversation?”
Such a question had crept in upon her while they sailed from Helion. She had introduced herself to Prometheus on Atlantis and he’d said he’d heard of her already. Heard of her from now? But he already knew her name, even when he found her in Helion, no doubt from his visions. Innominate dread stilled her tongue, even as her flesh prickled.
“I am asking.”
“And am I to speculate about what my future self knows?”
Finally, she managed to give voice to her fear. “If you did—will have known—the implication is that my presence here may not have actually changed the past as yet.”
“What do you think?”
Perhaps, that if she had managed to take some steps that might have actually altered her relationship with Prometheus, then the one from her time might not have saved her from Atlantis. Would that unmake the version of her who now sat beside him on Ogygia, four thousand years before those events?
Such weavings of her mind made their own history at least as great a puzzle box as the device he’d built. Her Box.
They ate the casserole and he invited her to rest upon the bedroll in his cottage, while he himself slept on the floor across from the fire.
The expression upon his face, the roil of pain and sympathy as Kratos beat him, it woke her. Sweat had plastered Pandora’s hair to her face. The better part of her nightmares had ceased since using the Box, so perhaps Morpheus had truly haunted her dreams, seeking her in her own time, while here she was beyond his reach.
But Prometheus’s visage in that moment … it tore through her heart. It carved it asunder like a knife. He’d known he was going to his own damnation. He’d known he would suffer, and he thought of her, how it would pain her.
Blinking away tears, she forced herself to sit.
Across the fire pit, eyes sparkling like crystals in the tenebrous cottage, he had pushed himself up on one arm and now stared at her. More sympathy, concern even.
Pandora edged her way closer to him. “I saw you … tortured.” The pain of it wracked her, left her voice quivering. “They dragged you down, said they’d cast you into Tartarus.”
A slight shudder seized him, though his gaze remained fixed upon her.
“I swore I’d find a way to help you.”
“Then I believe you will.”
She placed her palms upon his cheeks. “Maybe you don’t know what you meant to me. Will mean.” Surely, she herself had not fathomed it then. Maybe not even until now. She pulled herself forward until she was straddling him, then kissed him. At first, unsure how he’d react, she merely brushed her lips over his.
Then his hands fell upon her hips and she had her answer. It was not the rhythm of her clients she fell into, but one far more intimate for its uniqueness and uncertainty. His lips massaging her own, her tongue exploring his mouth. The flush of his initial intrusion inside her, as he leaned backward, as she guided him.
There was something deeper here than she had ever experienced. Something glorious in the reign of true choice and the need, not of custom, but of connection. A soothing, heaving whirl of flesh and emotion.
She felt him convulse beneath her. His release surged into her in a coruscating wave as though some rush of energy passed through her. His crystal eyes glinted with a whorl of stars in motion. And more, in her mind’s eye, she saw a maelstrom of visions, like fragments of his life. A flaming cavern drenched in smoke and lambent from lava flows. Standing upon the balcony of some twisted tower, gazing out into iridescent vapors as lightning and flame played upon one another in a dance. And a spreading of a living night across the sky, as if the gloaming claiming the World were a thing of
