Titan_Kingdom of the Dead_An Epic Novel of Urban Fantasy and Greek Mythology
Page 1
Daniel Mignault & Jackson Dean Chase
— as seen in BUZZFEED and THE HUFFINGTON POST —
Praise for TITAN: The Gods War, Book I:
“[Co-authors Daniel Mignault & Jackson Dean Chase have] stepped up to the plate with gusto…[a] diligently crafted debut novel…”
— The Huffington Post
“[Titan] succeeds in taking fiction to a whole new level.”
— TheBaynet.com
“Irresistible… a heart-pounding story full of suspense, romance, and action!” — Buzzfeed
“Excellent… Titan is a beautifully crafted story that braves all odds.”
— Medium.com
“…[loaded with] suspense, romance, and action thrills.”
— The Odyssey Online
“A delectably great experience… [gives urban fantasy] a new twist.”
—ThriveGlobal.com
“…will keep readers guessing until the very end.”
— WN.com
KINGDOM of the DEAD
The Gods War — Book II
Daniel Mignault
Jackson Dean Chase
Get a FREE BOOK at www.JacksonDeanChase.com
For the man who released the Kraken,
RAY HARRYHAUSEN (1920-2013)
The magic remains… the monsters too.
A Note from the Authors
IF YOU HAVE NOT READ BOOK 1 IN THIS SERIES
Welcome, citizen! This is Book 2 in our epic urban fantasy series, The Gods War. It assumes you have read and are familiar with the characters, events, and world described in Book 1: Titan. If you have not read the first book, we strongly recommend you STOP NOW, go back, and read Titan before reading this one. Not only will it give you a better understanding of this book, it will substantially increase your enjoyment of it, as well as prevent you from stumbling across MAJOR SPOILERS for the first book.
But if you want to read the series out of order, or if it’s been a while since you read Titan, we’ve included a glossary in the back (be aware it contains SPOILERS for Book 1).
With that out of the way, let us tell you a story: the story of a cruel and magical future, a world ruled by monsters of Greek Myth. It is a dystopian world, a near-future nightmare that is part ancient Greece, part modern day America. And it is the world our heroes want to save.
Come then, if you dare! Come and face the darkness within us, and within you…
— Daniel Mignault &
Jackson Dean Chase
P.S.: Want to read more exciting novels like this?
Get a free book at www.JacksonDeanChase.com
Contents
A History of Gods and Titans
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part II
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Afterword
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Glossary
About Daniel Mignault
About Jackson Dean Chase
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
George Santayana
A History of Gods and Titans
as taught by the priests of the New Greek Theocracy
In the beginning, all was Chaos. From that primal Chaos sprang Gaia, the Earth Mother, and Ouranos, the Sky Father. From the holy union of Heaven and Earth came their children, the immortal Titans. But Ouranos grew jealous of his children and cast them into Tartarus, the vast and terrible underworld. There, the Titans languished until Cronus, the youngest and most daring of them, escaped. Cronus defeated Ouranos, and there was much rejoicing as the Titans were reunited with Gaia.
There was a Golden Age of peace under the rule of Cronus, King of the Titans, and his queen, Rhea. But when Rhea became pregnant, Cronus knew he could not let his spawn usurp him as he had usurped his own father.
Cronus devoured his children. One after the other: Hades, Hera, Hestia, Demeter, and Poseidon. But not Zeus. Rhea had had enough of her children being devoured when she became pregnant with Zeus, so she hid him away and substituted a rock disguised to look like a child in his place. Cronus ate the rock, and it joined the children in his stomach who were still alive, being digested for all eternity.
These children were a new race, a lesser race called Gods, but they could not die. So mighty Cronus swallowed them, not only to ensure they would never escape, but also to absorb their power and add it to his own…
Zeus decided to overthrow Cronus. Zeus was a cowardly, deceitful creature who lacked the power to challenge his father directly. He knew he could never do it alone, so he poisoned Cronus, which caused him to vomit up his imprisoned brothers and sisters.
The Gods then went to war against the Titans and after ten long years, managed to imprison them in Tartarus. And Zeus, the youngest of the Gods, became their ruler, much as Cronus had when he overthrew Ouranos…
But Zeus was a pretender! He and his fellow Gods thought they could rule better than the Titans, but they could not. Because they had been held so long in Cronus's stomach, all the Gods except Zeus needed the psychic power of others. So the Gods created mankind to worship them, and they made us in their own image, but they knew better than to make us immortal. They thought we would worship them forever, and for a time we did, in many countries under many names, but the Gods grew complacent and our faith waned.
That waning faith is what caused the locks imprisoning the Titans in Tartarus to weaken. And then the locks broke and the Titans were released, igniting the Gods War. A war the Gods could not win, and when they refused to surrender, they were responsible for why so much of our world was destroyed.
The Titans won, and rather than make the mistake of keeping the Gods in Cronus's stomach again, the Titans had them killed, all of them except Hades… The Titans kept the God of Death alive, but imprisoned in Tartarus, so we mortals could never die. That was the Titans’ gift, the Titans’ promise!
But life without purpose is life not worth living. So in their mercy, the Titans created the New Greece Theocracy from the ashes of the American west coast. And in our great country, our proud and undying NGT, they allowed mankind to serve their infinite glory forever.
All hail the Titans! All hail the NGT!
Part I
TO FIGHT A TITAN
1
INTO THE UNDERWORLD
This is what it’s like to be dead. It’s funny, but it’s true. I’m in the boat of Charon—just like a dead man, like a gho
st, a ferried soul on its final journey. I hope this won’t be mine. There are people I love, people I care for back on Earth. I can’t let them down, just like I can’t let my friends down: Mark Fentile and Hannah Stillwater. They’re in the boat with me, my fellow fugitives from life, from death, from horror.
How we got here, to this place between worlds, is a long story. I go over it in my mind, searching for answers, searching for truth among the lies, the magic, the mystery. Maybe, if I can wrap my head around it, it will all make sense. Maybe I won’t feel so lost or alone, though I don’t know why.
I’ve always felt this way.
The River Styx flows, and we flow with it. Down, into the deep. Down, into the underworld, to Tartarus, the Kingdom of the Dead. But Tartarus is not just home to ghosts, it is home to monsters and to Hades, Greek God of Death. He has been imprisoned by Cronus, King of the Titans. Cronus the Immortal. Cronus the Cannibal, All-Devouring Father of the Gods: Zeus, Poseidon, and all the rest. Cronus, who is my father too.
My name is Andrus Eaves. I only discovered the truth of my birth yesterday… That I was born from a rock. The magic rock Cronus ate, tricked into thinking it was his son, Zeus. The rock that absorbed a fraction of my father’s power. Power that flowed into me and became me.
In my former life, I was the adopted son of George and Carol Eaves. The Eaves are rich from oil—oil I found as a child in our backyard. That’s another of my gifts, sensing the bounty of the earth. But my old life, my old esteemed position in society is gone. I wanted to join the Warrior caste and serve the New Greece Theocracy, the NGT that rules what’s left of Earth. I wanted to put in my military service helping my fellow citizens before joining the family oil business. That’s hard to do when you’re on the run.
The NGT wants me dead.
That’s because Cronus doesn’t want any more children. Especially me. He likes to eat his spawn because, well, you know the story: Cronus worries they will grow up to challenge him. And he’s right—I know I will. And I know Zeus did, and won, for a time. Only Zeus is dead. The Gods are dead: dead or fled, fled and gone. Only Hades remains, imprisoned in the depths of Tartarus. That’s where Hannah, Mark, and I are going. To free her father.
To free Hades.
I look to Charon, the robed and hooded figure in black who guides our boat down the Styx. He’s a living mummy, with parchment-thin flesh stretched tight over ancient bones. But he’s not without a sense of style: his pointed beard is groomed into shape with cobwebs. And Charon’s boat is just as ghoulish: long and narrow, like a gondola, decorated with the bones and skulls of the dead. Not exactly cheery, but at least it’s consistent and exactly what you’d expect from the Ferryman of Souls.
I look to my friend, Mark Fentile, former priest-in-training. Mark, one step up from slavery, so poor he had to live in Loserville. Poor Mark! All he ever wanted was to serve the Titans and the Theocracy. That was before he realized how evil they are.
Mark has lost everything: his alcoholic mother, hung by the neck in their Loserville shack. Lucy, his beautiful blonde sister—the girl who dared to love me—lost to the clutches of our enemy, Inquisitor Anton.
Mark’s mother is a zombie now, and Lucy, we don’t know what happened to her. We only know she sacrificed herself wounding Anton, to buy Mark and I time to get to Hannah, and to buy herself revenge on Anton for raping her. I hope Lucy is OK, because if she isn’t, she might be a zombie now too.
That’s because the dead don’t die. Not as long as Hades is imprisoned. Once King of Tartarus, now he is its prisoner, and a prisoner cannot force the dead to die. So the dead live on, in mindless agony, as zombies.
Immortality is the Titans’ “gift” to humanity, the gift the Gods never gave, and now we know the reason why. It’s a curse. You grow up, aging normally, then when you hit adulthood, you don’t stop, but slow down—so slow, each year is like a decade, and that’s great until you get too old to function. Then you slowly wither, yet horribly go on. That’s because unlike the Gods or Titans, the human body isn’t meant to live forever. But the bodies of immortals? Bodies like mine? We go on. We must go on until we are destroyed or destroy ourselves.
Like I intend to destroy Cronus—with Hades’ help, and the help of my friends. Once Hades is free from his prison, then even Gods and Titans can die…
I look to Hannah Stillwater, the beautiful witch, the Demigoddess. She's thin, black-haired, and pale, wearing a purple cloak and toga. Almost eighteen, like Mark and me. Her dark eyes are tombstone gray and sharp with intelligence. Her raven familiar, Shadow, sits perched on her shoulder.
I look behind us, to the shores of the secret cave below Bronson Canyon. In the past, before the Gods War, the canyon was a place of magic and monsters. Hollywood filmed everything from Batman to It Conquered the World there. Under the NGT, it’s a place of magic and monsters again, only this time, it’s all real and nowhere is safe.
Moments ago, we barely got away from Captain Nessus and his Night Patrol: centaurs and harpies. We’d still be fighting them if I hadn’t used my magic to collapse the tunnel behind us.
So that’s where my life’s at. It’s easy to look back, to other people, other places. It’s not so easy to look to yourself, to gaze deep inside, but that’s what I do now, and it all comes down to this:
I am Andrus Eaves.
I am a Titan, and I am Earth’s last hope.
2
THE PLAN
Our boat glides on, through the murky darkness, through black, sluggish water. All around us is rock. Rock walls, rock ceiling. The Underworld. The Afterworld. Silent and eternal.
Tartarus is where your spirit goes when you die. It’s not a place of punishment, it’s just where the dead live. But just because you’re dead doesn’t mean you stop living—the flesh fails, but the spirit goes on. You’re still you, only a ghost, and you go on doing the things you did in life. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. The difference is your mistakes can’t kill you. You have eternity to learn and grow, to know joy or to suffer…
Hades ruled Tartarus once, and despite the Theocracy’s propaganda, Hannah says he did a pretty good job. Now the Titans rule in his place. I’m not sure how things have changed, except there are probably more monsters. Monsters like harpies and centaurs need magic to breed, and there isn’t enough of it on Earth. Oh, there’s enough for short-term spells and the like, but long-term, sustained magic is hard unless you’re a God or Titan. That’s why monsters died out in the past. They’re sterile on Earth.
Tartarus on the other hand, well, this place is pretty much all magic. It’s below the Earth, but not really part of it: another dimension. You can only get in through gates, like the one we passed through back in Bronson Canyon.
The air down here isn’t air at all. It’s a deadly combination of sulphur, brimstone, methane, and other toxic things. As immortals, Hannah and I are immune. To me, the air has a strange, smokey flavor, but nothing too bad. But Mark is mortal, and shouldn’t be able to breathe. He should be choking right now, strangling, becoming a zombie.
Only he isn’t. He’s wearing the ghost-mask Hannah gave him, a mask that makes Mark look like one of the dead, and allows him to breathe the gruesome gasses that fill Tartarus. “I can’t believe it,” Mark says. “We’re really here, in the Underworld!”
Hannah shrugs. “It’s not that special, priest. I grew up here. Personally, I couldn’t wait to get out, but I guess every one feels the same about their home town. What about you, Rock Boy? You excited to be here?”
I bristle at the nickname. “I’m excited we’re all in one piece. As for being here, well, it’s better than being back there. I hope Ares is all right. Last I saw, Captain Nessus had his magic sword.”
“Correction,” Hannah says, “Nessus had one of his swords. You can bet Ares still has the other.”
We’d left the God of War behind. Ares had bought us time to get inside the cave. I still can’t get over the fact he was Mr. Cross, my gym teacher in disguise. No wonder
he’d been so hard on me. He was secretly training me for this…
“You think we’ll see him again?” I ask.
Hannah flashes a grim smile. “We’re going to war, aren’t we? War is kind of his thing. You can bet Ares will turn up sooner or later, don’t worry.”
I flash her a smile of my own. “Who’s worried?”
“Don’t try to play it off. You’re worried as hell. We all are… Well, except this guy.” She jerks her thumb back at the living mummy piloting the boat. “Charon’s pretty chill, aren’t ya?”
Charon bows his bony neck in a grisly nod. We sail on. Into the night. Into endless darkness.