The glade abruptly began to close in around her. Shadows deepened beneath the moonlight, and her fragile campfire dwindled down to embers. The trees nearby creaked and groaned, the branches clattering together as if bestirred by a wind that did not exist.
A throbbing heartbeat resounded through the wood.
Thump. Thump.
She was still dreaming. Please, Gaia, let her still be dreaming.
Thump. Thump.
Something moaned, in the distance, and the air tasted of putrescence. A pervading sense of wrongness erupted around her, and an instant later, a half dozen tree trunks ruptured with wet sucking sounds. Virescent maws opened within them, each glinting with faint luminescence and shining pus. Figures lurched from within, yanking themselves out of the trunks in perverse mockeries of birth.
Rough, bark-like skin covered both the males and the females. Dryads and satyrs. Wood spirits.
The heartbeat quickened. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Pyrrha jerked against the vines binding her, but they held fast. They tightened until her circulation cut off, drawing a shriek from her. A glistening dryad scraped mucus from her face and cast it aside before crawling over toward Pyrrha, lithe and naked.
Before her eyes, more Wood spirits drifted into the grove. They drove each other up against trees and began rutting in pairs or trios. Vines and leaves and branches commingled in their orgy until the wood seemed to pulse with prurient need.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!
Despite her revulsion, the energy in the air seeped into her, her own nethers joined the throbbing that had become the World. The dryad reached her, then leaned in too close. With a rough, distended tongue, she lathered Pyrrha’s face while groping at her breasts.
Pyrrha’s mind screamed at her to buck and try to throw the spirit off, but all she could do was moan, her body begging for more. And beyond, the World thrummed and the Veil began to fray, as something momentous pushed against it. A sense of a consciousness older than time itself pressed in upon her, even as it pressed upon the World. Something eldritch and unknowable and utterly, completely, consumed with consumptive lust.
21
Pandora
201 Golden Age
Days went by, and Prometheus spent more and more time alone, tinkering with the Box. One day soon, Pandora knew, he would finish it, and she would be forced to use it. She would return to the future and once more be forced to face the reality Zeus had presented her with.
Which meant saving Prometheus.
The only known means of ingress into Tartarus lay beneath Mount Olympus itself. Pandora would need to either sneak in that way or find some alternative route into that forbidden Realm. Either way, the very thought of the nightmare-scape haunted her, both waking and sleeping. It seeped into her dreams, an absolute darkness she found herself wandering, and the sense that within the expanse of the black lurked monstrous intellects. And they felt her presence among them.
As her fear prickled her flesh and brought on cold sweats, she could only loathe herself for that terror. She was afraid to even see the torments her beloved suffered with each passing moment.
So she walked along the shore and allowed him to work. Sometimes she brought Pyrrha, sometimes, as today when the babe slept, she left her with her father. Pandora waited for destiny to catch up to her and force her to walk the path she so trembled before. She willed herself to become as the unbreakable orichalcum wall around Atlantis’s citadel. Her determination would need to make her inviolate.
For she would strive with the very self-styled god of Men and lord of the World. She would plumb the depths of Tartarus and achieve what no mortal had ever thought possible: a return to the world of the living.
To occupy her mind, she sang to herself, trying to forget that leaving the now meant leaving behind her babe’s childhood. One day soon, the child would laugh. Then she would walk and talk and take in the world. If Pandora returned to keep her promise and save the babe’s father, Pyrrha would have to grow up without her. Pandora would miss those irreplaceable first words and steps, and Pyrrha, perhaps, would forever wonder why her mother had not been there with her.
Could Pandora return here, after saving Prometheus? And then leave the Prometheus of her own time alone, knowing his every moment with his lover would forever lie in the distant past, in memories he could never reclaim? That, too, sent a twinge of sorrow running thought her chest. Ananke had presented Pandora with impossible choices. If the Moirai cared the least for the anguish they inflicted upon mortals, she could not see it.
Musing over such until her song had begun to falter from the pain pinching her heart, she caught sight of the masts first creeping over the horizon. First one, then another and another. Those looked somewhat like Phoenikian biremes, albeit of a primitive design long out of fashion. And they came here, to Ogygia.
Had more Titans come to call upon Prometheus? No. No one sent three ships to seek advice from an Oracle.
Pandora glanced up at the mountain, but she’d never make it before they spotted her. Perhaps they already had. Many Titans had sharper senses than Men. Still, she broke into a trot, soon panting from exertion as she made the climb. Where else was she meant to go? The woodlands dotting the slope would offer her some cover, at least, and perhaps she could take shelter until Prometheus arrived.
Still, it was not like her lover could fight off two hundred foes, either. Had he seen the ships? Did he even now try to reach her?
Someone leapt over the ship’s side and—before she’d gone half so far as she’d hoped up the slope—began a sprint in her direction. Titan feet kicked up a curtain of sand as a pair of them raced forward with such speed their limbs seemed to blur.
In the woods, Pandora crouched down behind a thicket. She could barely control her ragged breaths. Even as they closed
