“Zeus! Do you see what your son can do?”
Kratos whirled—and let his heart start beating again. Ares had no idea the Spartan was there. He’d only willed himself to the mountaintop because it held the most sacred Temple of Athena.
Ares boasted at the sky.
“You cast your favor on Athena, but her city lies in ruins before me!”
The echoes of that gargantuan voice brought down more masonry around the temple.
The god raised his fist, threatening the sky. “And now even Pandora’s Box is mine. Would you have me use it against Olympus itself?”
Kratos, from his vantage point atop the temple roof, saw that the god was telling the truth. Though the massive box was dwarfed by the fist from which it dangled, there was no mistaking the eerie golden glow of its jewels. Pandora’s Box twisted at the end of a long, slender chain, as though it were a locket, an amulet for the god to wear for luck.
Ares went on with his ranting, but Kratos no longer heard him. All his attention was now focused on that slender chain linking the box to the god’s fist. He looked from that chain to the white scar on his palm, then back to the chain.
“Do not strike at the god, you say?” He showed his teeth to the night like a rabid wolf. “Fair enough.”
He said softly, “Ares.”
Hearing his name, the god turned to look back over his shoulder. He sniffed the air, as if to catch a pleasing savor.
“Kratos. Returned from the underworld.” Ares did not sound surprised; he seemed pleased. He lifted his face to the skies again and threw wide his arms. “Is this the best you can do, Father? You send a broken mortal to defeat me, the God of War?”
Kratos didn’t feel broken.
He raised his right hand, felt the power of Zeus’s thunderbolt surging within him as he took one step forward, and unleashed war upon a god.
THIRTY
“WHO IS THE GRAVE DIGGER?”
Zeus appeared to be taken aback by Athena’s sudden question. “Why, he … digs graves.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“But it is. Just not the answer you’re hoping for.”
Athena hid the beginning of a smile. The Skyfather’s words led her to an inescapable conclusion: Zeus himself had been the gravedigger, and he supported Kratos. She knew he could not openly favor the Spartan, because of his own edict. The other gods would protest. With so much turmoil in Olympus, thanks to Ares and his disobedience, Zeus walked carefully. He was King of the Gods but could never withstand open rebellion among all the other gods.
She exulted. Zeus aided Kratos in ways she did not know, but aid him he did. That increased Kratos’s chance for success.
Zeus had bestowed the power of the thunderbolt on her Kratos surreptitiously.
Athena needed even more from Zeus. “Father, we must help Kratos more openly. He cannot hope to conquer Ares without our aid.”
“No!” Instantly changeable, Zeus jerked to his feet and now towered over her so that her whole body was in his shadow. “You will not help Kratos, because Ares’s blood will not stain your hands!”
Everything fell into place. The intricacy took her breath away. Zeus had maneuvered her so she would guide Kratos to where he, the Lord of Olympus, could bring about Ares’s death.
“What more is there, Father? You said that Kratos had to prove himself to be worthy. Of what? What more than killing Ares do you plan for him?”
“You thought to use your mortal to accomplish your end, but I foresaw failure. Now there is a chance for Kratos to kill a god and … attain more.”
“A chance,” Athena said, “but not a certainty.”
Zeus did not answer.
THIRTY-ONE
SWIFT AS THE THUNDERBOLT WAS, it seemed to Kratos to be creeping through the thickest sort of treacle. The interval between it leaving his hand and reaching its target stretched longer than Kratos’s whole life.
He didn’t wait to watch it hit. If it missed, he was dead anyway, and so he put himself where success would do him the most good. The instant his hands were free, he dove for the edge of the temple roof, caught an ornamental carving, and kicked off it again for the statue of Athena, heading for ground level. He was still in the air when the thunderbolt struck its target.
Ares, still shouting his defiance at Zeus, never saw it coming. His first hint was a stinging shock in his right hand—and then he felt no more the weight of Pandora’s Box.
The thunderbolt had struck home and done its job, severing the chain that joined the box to the hand of the god.
“What?” Ares stared blankly at his fist as though it had somehow betrayed him. “What have you done?”
From Ares’s upraised fist to the ground below was fully a hundred feet. Kratos judged where the box would land and made for it with all his speed. His guess was good. The box landed on a pile of rubble only steps in front of him, and he dashed to it before Ares understood what had happened.
Reaching up, Kratos gripped the lid and shoved as hard as he could. Unlike his attempt at Pandora’s temple, the lid slid away without effort, almost as though the box wanted him to open it.
Among the ruins of the Temple of Athena, Kratos of Sparta had opened Pandora’s Box for the first time since it was hidden in the temple atop Cronos’s back a millennium ago.
Kratos scrambled up the rubble and stood on the rim of the box, staring into its warm sunny glow. Whatever was within shone too brightly for Kratos’s eyes. He experienced a terrible instant of vertigo, as though he were about to plunge headlong into a hole deeper than the universe. But when that vertigo passed, his entire body warmed in the light—and the box seemed to shrink, dwindling to the size of a matron’s jewel box.
Kratos cried out as power surged through his body, filled his soul … and more. His arms rose above his head, and tiny sparks danced between his spread fingers. Never had he imagined such power. Was this what it felt like to be a god?
Then Kratos looked at the God of War and discovered it was not the box that had shrunk.
He had grown.
Where before he had not stood as tall as Ares’s anklebone, he now looked the god square in the eyes. And in those eyes he saw a flicker of fear.
Ares chased away his dismay with towering fury. His face twisted in a contemptuous sneer. “You are still just a mortal, every bit as weak as the day you begged me to save your life.”
“I am not the man you took that day.” Kratos straightened, and when he spoke, his voice, too, shook the mountain. “Ten years I have waited. Tonight you die.”
Ares’s sneer expanded into dark laughter. “Athena has made you weak.”
Kratos dropped into his fighting crouch. “Strong enough to kill you!”
“Never!” The god spread wide his arms, as though welcoming the arrival of his favorite son. “Give my regards to your family.”
Instead of meeting Kratos hand to hand, the god tapped some dark and eldritch power that washed over Kratos, and into him, and seized his mind entirely. The temple, the mountain, Athens, and the god himself were all wiped from before Kratos’s eyes, replaced by a village in flames.
He fell to his knees. He knew this terrible place. He suffered it nightly in his dreams, in the visions that racked his days and filled every instant of his life.
Mocking laughter rang in his ears. “I taught you many ways to kill, Kratos. Flesh burns, bones break—but to shatter a man’s spirit is to truly destroy him.”
Snarling wordless rage and denial, Kratos shoved himself to his feet. He staggered through the flames in front of the village temple where he had killed his wife and daughter.
“Do you recognize this place, Spartan? Perhaps you can undo your crime. If you beg me for mercy, I might let you stay your murders.”
Kratos burst through the temple door. His wife, his daughter, alive and unhurt, stood before him like the answer to every prayer to every god of his life. He tried to speak, but no words could break through the grip of the emotion that h
eld his throat closed. Every nightmare during this terrible decade of torment whirled around him, smeared into one another, and took physical form before his eyes.
“Kratos?” his wife said uncertainly, shading her eyes against the flames at his back. “What is happening? Where are we?”
“Daddy!” His daughter threw herself toward him, but her mother caught the little girl’s arm and held her back.
The only time in his life Kratos had felt a blow so powerful and soul-killing was when Ares’s javelin column had pinned him to the door of the Temple of Pandora. “By the gods, can this be real?”
“Kratos?” his wife said. “Have you come to take us home?”
The wall of the temple suddenly shimmered, rippling as if it was no longer wholly a material thing, and out through that shimmer stepped …
Kratos.
His younger self, the Kratos of a decade past, came striding into the temple to slay everything that moved.
HE PUT HIMSELF between his family and his younger self.
His younger self came at him with the efficient, straight-ahead style that had been his trademark. Every step was a strike. Every strike was a step. His younger self was faster and stronger than Kratos was now—but strength and speed were never the only elements of victory.
The air sizzled with the song of the Blades of Chaos. As they flashed around him, opening small cuts across his body, Kratos discovered he didn’t like being on this side of the blades.
The next time Young Kratos hurled a blade outward to whip through the air, Old Kratos stepped inside the strike and caught the blade by the chain. Its heat seared his hands, but he didn’t care. He was used to pain. To win back his family, he could endure anything.
He grabbed the blade’s haft and yanked with all his might. His strength threw Young Kratos into the air, but his younger self was fully as agile as he’d ever been. Instead of tumbling helplessly, Young Kratos turned his flight into a pounce, the other blade raised for the kill.
Old Kratos guessed it must have come as a considerable shock to Young Kratos when his weapon arm was severed at the elbow, so that his hand, blade, and chain all fell harmlessly to the floor. Old Kratos mercifully spared him any additional shocks by slicing his skull into two pieces.
“Are you watching, Ares? You took them once. I will never lose them again!”
As if in reply, spots on the temple walls shimmered again. Three of them.
From each one, a young, strong, fresh Kratos stalked forward.
Kratos cursed Ares as he swung his Blades of Chaos at the trio of himself. “One at a time would have been too easy.”
As the three advanced on his family, Kratos felt his uncontrollable bloodlust return, fed by the familiar Blades of Chaos in his grip.
Kratos waded into them without hesitation, engaging two at once. The third took advantage of this opportunity to flank Kratos and kill his family—but he discovered to his dismay that his attack had been anticipated. And countered. Blood showered from his severed neck, while his head bounced across the floor.
These duplicates were younger and stronger, but they fought with the same blood-crazed ferocity that had driven Kratos to the worst of his crimes. Old Kratos, whatever else he might be, fought to control this blood rage and was no longer a mindless killing machine. As his wife had wanted, he discarded the need only for spilled blood and substituted a fight for honor and family. Within ten seconds, both of the remaining duplicates lay dead before him.
Kratos stood over them, panting harshly, bleeding from dozens of cuts.
Waiting.
“Kratos, please, I don’t know where we are!” cried his wife. “Take us home.”
“Soon, I hope,” Kratos said softly. “There is still work for me here.”
This time, there were five.
They met the same fate as the others.
“You’ll never get them, Ares. Send ten of me. Send a thousand. I’ll kill them all. Not one of them will touch my family.”
The flames of the burning temple spoke to him in the voice of Ares. “You gave them up in your quest for ultimate power. There is a price to pay for everything you gain.”
“Not that price. Never.”
“No price is too high for what I offered you, fool! You dared to reject a god!” The fire’s voice softened to silken malice. “Here is the cost of that foolish act.”
“I don’t care.” Kratos hefted the Blades of Chaos. “I’m ready.”
“Are you?”
The Blades of Chaos came to life in his hands, moving with a will not his own. It was as though they had become hands that seized his wrists in unbreakable grips—and they began to drag him toward his family.
“No!” he howled. “Not again!”
He tried to drop the Blades of Chaos, to hurl them away, but they were welded to his hands. The chains in his forearms burned with a fury that blurred his vision with soul-tearing pain. For now the blades controlled him, not the other way around.
“Not again!”
The blades went up.
The blades came down.
And again, now, ten years on, Kratos stood over the bodies of his wife and child. Murdered by the God of War. “You should have joined me.”
Kratos screamed then and fell to his knees. This scream was not one of terror or regret; it was not sorrow that unstrung his legs. It was rage.
The fires in his heart burned hotter than the Blades of Chaos ever could.
“You should have been stronger.”
Kratos could only howl with incoherent fury.
“Now you will have no power. No magic. No weapon.”
Invisible hands seized the blades and yanked them from his grip. They surged away from each other, cranking his arms wide, stretching them out as though he was being broken on a wheel, harder and harder, until his shoulders screamed in pain, as though his arms would rip from their sockets.
At the last, his flesh gave way before his joints did.
The chains ripped free, shredding his arms, leaving the blackened tatters trailing smoke.
“All that is left for you is … death!”
With that final word from the God of War, the burning temple disappeared around Kratos.
Kratos knelt on the night-shrouded rubble of the shattered Temple of Athena, atop her sacred mountain, above her ruined city. A single tear trailed down his cheek and fell to the scree of broken masonry. He brought up a hand, gazing upon the charred ruin of his forearm, and then turned it toward the temple itself, as though inspecting how it dwarfed the great statue of Athena.
When he looked up, his eyes were dry.
Ares faced him across the ruin. He leaned upon his red-hot great sword as one might on a walking stick.
“No magic?” The growl of god-sized Kratos boomed across the city, raising echoes from distant mountains. “I have enough.”
“You are still only a mortal, worthless and weak,” sneered Ares.
“There’s a dead woman on the floor of this temple. She said I’m a monster, and she was never wrong.” Kratos stood. He shook the kinks out of his limbs, sending drops of his lifeblood flying in all directions. “I am your monster, Ares, and I’ve come to kill you.”
Ares unleashed a roar of laughter.
Then the fury of Ares erupted in a blast of flame and a thunderous shout like a million soldiers screaming their war cries in unison. He raised the great sword over his head. “Fight!” he roared. “If you dare!”
Ares came loping across the mountain summit, each step shaking the rock and breaking the temple to pieces. Kratos watched him like a stalking lion. And the real battle, finally, began.
ATHENA WATCHED THE FIGHT shown by the scrying pool before the throne of Olympus, Zeus at her side, her heart pounding until she could barely breathe. This was more than anxiety at having reached the climax of a decade-long plan. Astonishingly, she worried for Kratos!
Though she could hardly believe it, she somehow had come to care for this surly, murderous mortal.
When Kratos met Ares’s charge by casting a handful of masonry chunks like sand into Ares’s eyes, she caught her breath. When Kratos slipped aside from Ares’s blind sword blows and tackled the God of War to the ground, she gasped. Kratos next pried up from the bedrock of the mountain a boulder that must have weighed tons; now he was straining to bash Ares’s Olympian brains into blood pudding, and Athena found herself on her feet with no memory of having stood.
“Now, this is a fight!” Zeus exclaimed. His eyes danced, and color was high on his cheeks. Tiny lightning flashes showed in his beard of clouds. “None of this modern leaping around, swords and shields all the time—this is the way it used to be.”
The King of Olympus shifted to a more comfortable position on the rim of the scrying pool. “Kratos reflects well on your … judgment—and on all mortal kind. Can you imagine what must be going through Ares’s head right now?”
Athena found her fists clenching and her shoulders twitching as though she could somehow will Kratos to win. When Ares kicked him off and made it back to his feet, she again could not breathe. The Spartan, though, without hesitation threw himself back into the fight.
“This Spartan boy means a lot to you, does he?”
She jerked at the question and then flushed with shame for being so transparent. “Of course,” she said, forcing a veil of calm to cover her anxiety. “As you care for your eagles, Father. I hope for his health … and for his happiness.”
“If he takes care of our Ares problem, at least he won’t have to worry anymore about his curse of kin slaughter. If he defeats Ares, his crimes will be forgiven. I have decreed it so.”
“It is all he still hopes for,” Athena said. “With forgiveness, his madness—the visions, the nightmares—will finally end.”
Zeus looked at her sidelong. “Who said anything about his nightmares?”
She stared at her father. A dull shock of dread coursed through her heart and spread outward to her limbs. “Father, the end to his nightmares—that’s all he’s been working for all these years!”
“And to avenge his family’s death,” Zeus pointed out. “Which he looks fair like to achieve, from how things are going.”
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