He chuckled, answering with a slight, merry shake of his head. “Well, Pyrrha it is, then.”
Nights, sometimes, proved harder. The nightmares had mostly abated, never mind occasional visions in which her mind imagined the torments that must befall the other Prometheus in Tartarus. The reminder that, for all the precious moments she shared with him now, the man she so loved would suffer unimaginable agonies in his future.
She had sworn to him she would find a way to save him.
What, then, did it mean that she made her life here, in the past, happy with him while elsewhere he languished? It meant she had broken that promise, even as she fell ever deeper for him.
She would roll over and stare at his sleeping form and think it was impossible to love someone so much as this. To see the very ambit of the World in the beating of a heart slumbering beside her. Was this tiny family of hers not the very meaning of her life?
A hundred times a night she woke to check on Pyrrha, to make sure her daughter’s breathing sounded proper, that she was warm enough in her blankets. No matter how oft she reassured herself naught would happen, still she needed to see, again and again, that the child remained hale and healthy.
Now, leaning over the tiny form, she knew without doubt: this had been the best year of her life. The only time she had truly felt home since Zeus and Hekate had taken her from Tyros all those years ago.
But was she failing the very man who had helped her claim this life?
Ogygia, it seemed, had once belonged to Atlas before he left to conquer Hesperides Island and ignited the accursed war that yet raged on. It had not come to these shores, though certainly many Titans had tried and failed to claim Atlantis from Atlas. The bodies of those who had attempted it continued to pile up.
Prometheus had told her, some months back, that Atlas was like a brother to him, though not actually, in fact, related to him by blood. Either way, he took no part in the war, save occasionally conferring with other Titans who came and took his counsel. In these cases, he would meet them in private, most oft upon the mountain summit, where he would one day build the Aviary.
On one such day he asked Pandora to take Pyrrha for a walk and she agreed, despite a drizzle of rain falling over the island. It was best, she supposed, to grant him his discretion for his guests. Moreover, he seemed inclined to conceal Pandora from them, as though some of these Titans might pose a threat to her. Thus, from behind a tree in the light woods surrounding their cottage, she watched him escort yet another such Titan up the slope.
It had to be a Titan, for both her height and her luxurious amaranthine himation raised against the weather. Prometheus took females up there oft enough, and Pandora knew another woman might feel the bitter twinge of jealousy at that. How could a Titan male not lust after the grandeur and superlative grace of Nymphs? But Prometheus had never given her the least reason to distrust him. In his eyes, she saw the refraction of his soul. That soul was many things: haunted and brooding and, perhaps, burdened by guilt. But it was true to her, of that she had not the least doubt.
So she watched her lover take the Titan up the slope, noting by the set of her features the war must not go well. It never seemed to.
Once, Pandora had asked Prometheus why so many came to call upon him. “Most seek Oracular insight. Some hope I will actually fight by their side, believing I aided Ouranos in ending the Time of Nyx.”
“Did you?”
“After a fashion.”
He was always like that. Perhaps it was his nature to make himself into another, living puzzle box, or perhaps he did so because he knew she could not resist him thus. Either way, she prodded with her questions, moving a piece of his enigma at a time, ever searching for his hidden center.
Such were the games they played in daylight.
And at night, she writhed in the half-light, envisaging the ruination of his flesh and soul in Tartarus.
“What if we could change it?” she asked one morn, while they sat upon a rock overlooking the bay. She worked her tongue around an olive pit, just the way Uncle Phoenix had taught her. Pyrrha rested in Prometheus’s lap, looking out at the waves along with them, blessedly quiet for a moment.
“You mean alter the future.”
“Just don’t side with Zeus in the first place. You helped him win the Titanomachy. You helped him end this Golden Age by destroying the entire Ouranid League. Do you really think the World better off under his rule than it was under the hegemony?”
Prometheus, too, popped an olive in his mouth. When she’d told him of her uncle’s olive lessons, he’d readily joined her in the morning routine. “Better off … Such an interesting question. As if we might abort the flow of history and allow it to stagnate in one moment for all eternity.”
Pandora scoffed. “Because history must move forward regardless does not mean the unfolding that happened resulted in a beneficial transition for anyone.”
“A society that remains mired in place without progress begins to wither.”
Ah. So he did not so much believe his arguing points as he did enjoy the act of debating her. “A move toward tyranny doesn’t qualify as progress. We surrendered a flawed oligarchy for an insane autocrat.” She paused, softening her face. “He hurts you. He hurts me, and he hurts so many others, playing with lives like pieces on the draughts board. He does not, so far as I can see, move toward any greater aim than his own gratification. And all the while,
