by M. R. Holman
it will someday reach you. The gods who banished you are no longer in power. I too was once sentenced to an eternity of suffering, but now I walk free as a titan should. The gods remain but they cannot keep you in peril as they once could. Topple the tower and walk free once more. - Prometheus.'
The name was vaguely familiar to Abyssi, but she could not remember why. That was hardly the most pressing piece of information that she had received though. The letter continued thus:
'P. S. - If you have any questions, ask the eagle. I taught it to speak. We spent a great deal of time together.'
Abyssi looked from the letter in her hand to the eagle that sat beside her.
"You can speak?" she asked it.
"I can," the eagle said in a piercing caw.
"Why have you not belayed this information to us sooner?" she asked incredulously.
"I was unaware of the contents of the letter," the eagle said. "I was instructed by Prometheus to alight upon this tower daily until I was sought out."
Abyssi had a vague inclination that Prometheus was an intelligent titan and that he likely could have found a better solution to delivering news than this, but she tried not to dwell on that.
"The gods are really gone?" she asked the bird.
"Not gone," it said simply, ruffling its feathers. "But they are not in the same capacity of power that they were in when they suffered you all to this fate. They remain, but they remain as you do..."
"So Zeus... Poseidon...?" she asked, still utterly confused.
"Still around, but not powerful," the eagle reiterated. "They each have planets named after them, despite their lack of power on the very planet that they once called home."
"Poseidon has a planet named after him?" Abyssi asked in amusement, recalling vague memories of the god. "Is he god of that planet as well?"
"Listen, I don't know how it works there," the eagle said exasperatedly, staring her down with its piercing amber eyes. "I've never been to that planet so I can't say for certain. I doubt it, though. It was the humans who named the planets after the gods."
Abyssi released a sharp cackle of laughter. The gods had not faired any better than the titans!
But then she became very suspicious. She recalled how the gods were tricksters, even in their youth... Could this be a trick? Could this be a gambit devised by the gods?
Abyssi reread the letter several times before addressing the eagle again.
"If this titan, Prometheus, was also sentenced to an eternity of torture, how did he escape to discover this information?" she asked.
The eagle took a deep breath and sighed, which kind of sounded like a whistle through its little nostrils. It paused, as if trying to think of the best way to spin its tale, and then began to speak.
"Prometheus was condemned to be bound to a stone at the top of a mountain," the eagle began, looking away from Abyssi's face and staring off into the distant rain clouds. "That, however, was not the worst part of his punishment. Every day, I would fly to the top of the mountain which Prometheus was chained, and would peck at his gut until his liver was exposed. I would rip and tear and eat away at his liver until night fell and then I would fly away. Prometheus, being immortal, as you are, would regenerate his liver and skin each night and the whole process would perpetuate itself. This went on for a very, very long time..."
"Alright," Abyssi said slowly emotionlessly, wiping her rain sodden hair from her face. "But how did he escape? And how did he convince you, his tormentor, to deliver a message to us?"
"I was getting to that," the eagle said dejectedly. "A great hero, a young man named Heracles as he was known in our native tongue, killed me and freed him in the process."
Abyssi thought she had found a flaw in the eagle's story...
"How can you deliver a message to us if you were killed by this Heracles?" she asked with both suspicion and grave triumph.
The eagle simply sighed again.
"I, too, am immortal. The gods would not have sent any eagle to peck away at Prometheus’ liver day after day... Just as the titan Prometheus regenerated his organs night after night, I recovered from the wounds born to my avian body by Heracles."
Abyssi furrowed her brow. Something still just did not seem right...
"How did Prometheus persuade you to deliver a message to us?" she asked skeptically. "It sounds to me as if you two would be enemies..."
The eagle now looked as though it pitied Abyssi. At least, that is what she thought. It was difficult to ascertain an eagle's facial expressions.
"It is difficult to spend day after day with someone and not form a bond of some sort," the eagle said. Although the tower below it shifted, it remained calm and still. "Prometheus taught me to speak. He likes to teach skills to lesser beings... He knows that knowledge is best when spread widely... Anyways, he and I found each other shortly after he was freed and I agreed to deliver his message. There were no hard feelings about the whole 'pecking at his liver day after day' thing. He knew that I was sentenced to a fate just the same as he was... And just the same as you and your fellow tower-mates are."
Abyssi rose to her feet. She was convinced.
"Where do we go?" she asked the bird, looking across the muddy landscape.
"Well, that's complicated," the eagle said as it hobbled to the edge of the tower and looked over. "You're not quite in the same, uh, area as you used to inhabit..."
"Well?" Abyssi asked.
"Just walk," the eagle said, stretching its wings and preparing for flight. "Just go. You're titans. When you shake the cobwebs from your minds, I'm sure you'll be able to find your way to an existence that suits you. Prometheus did..."
The eagle took flight. It flapped its giant wings and began to soar through the rain laden air. Abyssi watched until it was a distant speck that disappeared across the horizon.
Abyssi remembered the titans and titanesses below her. She approached the edge of the tower and lowered herself down. She swung into the seventeenth floor.
"Our punishment ends now," she cried with authority to the cowering bodies of the titans and titanesses that had strained to uphold the marble floors of their tower for thousands of years.
She stretched her own arms above her head and aided them in holding up the marble. She looked at each one of the titans. Fear and uncertainty was etched upon every face. It seemed that memories of their pasts were being recalled, along with memories of their relative sojourn as nothing more than columns in a tower of ignominious shame and pain. They listened attentively.
"We walk this floor to the edge and then we pitch it with all of our might," she said heroically.
The titans and titanesses strode with great care across the floor beneath them. The tower swayed violently as the whole of the seventeenth floor moved in unison toward the edge of the structure.
Finally, the floor began to tip after they got near enough to the edge.
"NOW!" Abyssi cried.
The titans and titanesses collectively heaved the tipping slab of marble with thousands of years of accumulated strength. It soared through the air and crumbled into the sodden earth below.
"To the next!" she cried. The level full of titans descended upon the one below it, jubilant in their triumph and relieved of the weight from upon their shoulders and arms.
Level after level, the marble soared and crumbled far beneath them. Each one rejoiced as the burden was lifted, and each rushed to help the next until they reached the final level, the ground floor.
The titans at the bottom of the tower were the biggest and strongest of them all. They wore the most sullen expressions and had mud caked well past their knees. They resembled little other than hollow-eyed work horses until the very moment that their burden was lifted.
Several hundred titans, united for the first time since their fall from power, huddled in the depression left from the tower's weight. They glared at one another, trying to piece together their relation and histories. They tried to fathom what they had been through and what
they must have done to have been sentenced to such a fate in the first place. It had been so very long ago...
The crowd turned to Abyssi, their newly assumed leader.
"What do we do now?" a titan asked.
"Whatever we want," Abyssi said as pools of rainwater collected around her feet.
Through the whoops and hurrahs of the surrounding titans, she recalled a vague sense of nostalgia. She felt as though she had spoken those words before...
She had. It was the same proclamation she had made to the group standing around her many thousands of years ago. It was the proclamation that had led to their decline, their banishment, and their punishment.
The titans and titanesses did not remember this, however. They struck off at once to make up for thousands of years of lost time.
Junior Ranger Rooney and the Wallabies of Learant XII
The air was alive with the sound of exotic bird-like creatures and the scent of a lush, overgrown forest which was as vibrant from above as it was from below. Streams and rivers crisscrossed the land, culminating in vast deltas that fed into distant seas. This was all far removed from a clearing in which a concrete visitor's center sat alone beside a massive spacecraft landing pad. Mounted on top of the visitors center was an enormous satellite dish with gigantic block letters painted on its concave surface reading: Welcome To Learant XII Galaxial Planetary Park - Population: Six.
The planet Learant XII had been set aside as a galaxial planetary park several centuries previous due to the planet's pristine natural beauty and its
