The Gifts of Pandora, page 1
Contents
The Gifts of Pandora
Extra Resources
Skalds’ Tribe
Prologue
Part I
1. Pandora
2. Pyrrha
3. Pandora
4. Athene
5. Pandora
6. Kirke
7. Pyrrha
8. Pandora
Part II
9. Pyrrha
10. Pandora
11. Kirke
12. Pandora
13. Pyrrha
14. Pandora
Interlude
Part III
15. Artemis
16. Athene
17. Pandora
18. Athene
19. Pandora
20. Pyrrha
21. Pandora
22. Kirke
23. Pandora
Part IV
24. Artemis
25. Pandora
26. Artemis
27. Kirke
28. Pyrrha
29. Athene
30. Pandora
The Cycle Continues …
Epilogue
Skalds’ Tribe
About the Author
The Gifts of Pandora: Eschaton Cycle
Tapestry of Fate Book 1
MATT LARKIN
Editors: Sarah Chorn, Regina Dowling
Cover: Juhi Larkin
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Copyright © 2021 Matt Larkin.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
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Incandescent Phoenix Books
mattlarkinbooks.com
Extra Resources
For full color, higher-res maps, character lists, location overviews, and glossaries, check out the bonus resources here:
https://tinyurl.com/hw52dzss
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Prologue
2400 Golden Age
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Fulminating clouds encircled the peak of Mount Olympus, every flash a testament to the power and self-aggrandizement of its new lord. Rough-hewn steps sliced the mountainside, weatherworn and slick, a remnant of the Time of Nyx. Oh, but Prometheus had seen them restored. In pyromantic visions, he had beheld the grandeur Zeus would erect upon his new home. Time and again, Prometheus had walked here in his prescient trances, half-aware of the marmoreal temples and grandiose Olympian halls that would limn this peak.
When the time came at long last, he would walk, half in a daze, as oft happened when an Oracle fulfilled his visions and lived in actuality a moment he had lived in prescience too many times. Thus, accordingly, he’d seen his own bemused steps.
Now, though, Titans passed him by, both ascending and descending, and so many pausing to gape at Zeus’s coruscating display upon the summit. Perhaps the self-styled god vented thus to announce his victory to the World, though the storm remained, even in Prometheus’s visions of distant days to come. If Zeus created this now in celebration, it would endure in perpetuity as a symbol.
Prometheus paused, halfway up the winding staircase, just before a raging cataract. A cool brume rose from where the fall hit the rocks, and he tried to revel in the way it tingled the bare flesh of his arms and shins. He wished he could luxuriate in the beauty of this place, but he could not suppress the shudder that wracked him at the foreknowledge of what fate would one day befall him here. So very like what awaited Kronos high above.
Zeus would not enact his father’s vile sentence until Prometheus and the others had gathered to witness it. The new king sought an exhibition to titillate and horrify, and he would have one, though he surely did not begin to grasp the import of all he had done.
An approaching woman yanked his attention from the cataract as she descended the peak. Zeus might want his spectacle, true, but many would not wish to watch what he intended for Kronos, Nike among them.
She paused before him, dark hair flapping in the wind.
“Did he say aught?” Prometheus asked, raising his voice to carry over the fall.
“He said a great deal,” Nike answered. “Not all of it made sense. Some of it made too much sense.” A hesitation. “Will you speak with him?”
Prometheus found his fists clenching. He wanted to refuse, but he owed Kronos at least the dignity of a final word. “I must.”
Nike frowned, looking like she wanted to say more. Like she was none too pleased at having helped Zeus begin his reign. Nor was Prometheus. Maybe none of the Titans who had sided with him were much pleased. But then, Fate had forced their hand.
With a nod of understanding, Prometheus left her and continued his unpalatable ascent. Flickers in his mind hinted at locations where an agora would one day rise, and beyond, upon the summit, where Zeus would erect his ostentatious palace. About that spot Skystones orbited, an archipelago of hovering rock islands, held aloft by their Otherworldly nature.
The fulgurations from the storm burst amid those floating isles, leaving them in turn radiant or tenebrous. Not so unlike the Titans claiming this place as their home, when even Kronos had not possessed the hubris to think he could dwell among such energies and remain himself.
Finally, Prometheus reached the summit. Here, snows lingered upon the rocks and flurried in the wind.
Others emerged from a cave that bored into the mountainside, hollowed out long ago, in the Time of Nyx, when Men touched something they ought to have left alone. And Zeus would build his throne upon a bed of cancer eating away at the foundation of the World, drunk on its poisons.
Upon the cave threshold, Bia waited for him. Auburn-haired and incarnadine-eyed, the Titan was, perhaps, the most violent of all Styx’s brood, and her visage held a sickening glee at what she knew impended. “The king sends for you, Firebringer.” The Titan licked her lips, her eyes gleaming. Was she actually aroused by these proceedings? Or perhaps she wished to discomfit him for her amusement.
Either way, Prometheus ignored her salacious airs. “Take me to him.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Bia’s expression turn into a glower that persisted even as she guided him downward. Like the stairs rising from the base of the mountain, these were rugged, though in better shape for not having endured millennia of wind and rain. The path led them deep inside the mountain, past the chamber that housed the Oracle Mirrors that had, in their own way, helped ensure the damnation of Kronos. The quicksilver mirrors had shown more Truth than even one such as Kronos was prepared to handle.
Oh, Prometheus knew all too well the agony of foreknowledge and the anguish of unvarnished Truth—the Ontos of the World held no whit of pity. While Men toiled, suffered, and died, they did so in ignorance, and for that, were at least able to sleep at night.
No doubt unaware of his musings, Bia led him onward without the least slowing of her pace, the slap of her sandals echoing upon the stone. Further down, they came to an open cavern, and here, some dozen Titans had gathered to watch the spectacle.
There, off to the side, stood Leto and Helios’s twins, Artemis and Apollon, enmeshed in furtive whispers. Across from them, other siblings, Hera and Poseidon, both grim-faced and watching the Titan in the center of the chamber.
Platinum-haired Kronos, bound in orichalcum fetters, struggling to stand while his captors circled around him like sharks. Kratos and Zelus, Bia’s own siblings, snickered as they stalked their prey. Noticing his sister’s entrance with Prometheus, Kratos grinned and slammed his fist into Kronos’s kidney. Kronos’s knees buckled, but Zelus caught him, her hands around his neck.
Prometheus set his jaw, refusing to let Styx’s brood take further pleasure in his discomfort at how they treated his erstwhile friend. Still, he could not entirely suppress the visions he’d seen of what they would do to him, as well. Perhaps that would be his punishment for failing to stop what was happening to Kronos now.
As if Fate cared about giving anyone what they deserved.
Just outside the circle, bound Arke whimpered, the ichorous ruins of her severed wings still flapping. Someone had gagged her, perhaps tired of her pleas. Hand on her shoulder—though his wrists, too, were fettered—Prometheus’s self-proclaimed brother Atlas stared daggers at him. Atlas was not gagged, though he said naught, perhaps knowing neither pleas nor recriminations would avail him here. Or perhaps pride had him denying Zeus even the satisfaction of a word.
“Enough,” Zeus’s voice boomed from the back of the chamber. There, he stood, hair a platinum mane so like his father’s, and eyes ice blue.
At once, Kratos and Zelus stepped aside, the latter dropping Kronos and giving way so that Zeus might confront his father.
Prometheus, though, found his gaze drawn from Kronos to Hekate’s haunted visage lurking in the shadows. He had heard others call her Zeus’s attack dog, and the king perhaps could not have managed to harness the Tartarian Gate without her. Yet still, from the look of her, this sat little better with her than with Prometheus himself. Or had Kronos said something to her? Certainly, the fallen oligarch cast a withering glance her way before looking up at his treasonous son with defiance.
And of the gate itself, it lay at the far si
“You strove against me and you lost,” Zeus bellowed at his father, his voice booming through the hall. “For this, you are hereby damned. Have you any last words, Father?”
With a grunt, Kronos rose, and looked about the cavern. His gaze settled on Prometheus. “You betrayed me! You and your spawn, the both of you betrayed me! I am here because of what you told me, Fatespinner!”
Prometheus winced. He owed Kronos this confrontation and could not deny the accusations leveled against him. Words failed him, though, and all he could do was stride forward and offer Kronos the chance to look him in the eye. Almost, he wished he could tell Kronos he would one day join him in this torment. As if that might excuse Prometheus now, for failing to end this.
Kronos leaned in close. “I know what is writ upon the Tablet of Destiny,” he grated, words pitched so as not to carry across the whole of the cavern.
It was so hard not to waver. So hard to stay the course, even knowing Fate afforded him no choice in the matter. “Destiny is not always what it seems, old friend.”
Kronos spat upon Prometheus’s sandals. “If there was ever truth to your friendship, it long ago turned fetid.”
Zeus’s fist snared in Kronos’s hair, and, with a twist of his wrist, he sent Kronos careening along the floor toward the accursed Tartarian Gate. “Bring forth the prisoners!”
At his words, Kratos, Bia, and Zelus lurched into motion, glee writ plain across their features as each of them hauled up one of the condemned. Zelus seemed to take particular delight in Arke’s squirming, pointless resistance.
And it was futile, for the orichalcum fetters rendered the bound Titans utterly impuissant, unable to draw upon their Pneumatikoi and thus no stronger than Men, while their captors retained their superhuman strength.
Zelus dug fingers so deep into Arke’s shoulders Prometheus saw golden ichor trickle down them, commingling with the still weeping wounds upon her back. A twinge of sympathy shot through him, but she had made her choices, and he could not save her from them.
Kratos, meanwhile, had hauled Kronos to the gate by his ankle.
Zeus stood at the forefront, taking it all in with a manic exuberance that threatened to choke Prometheus. “For crimes of treason against your true king, I condemn you all to eternal torment at the edge of the void, where you shall be scoured down to the piths of your souls.” The king chuckled, as if aught amusing lay behind his words. “Justice be done.”
At his command, Kratos strode through the gate. His passage took a breath longer than it should have, and Prometheus imagined the viscous resistance that threshold must pose. The Titan dragged Kronos along behind him. Both forms seemed distorted behind the barrier, as they descended the tunnel’s path, in the moment before Bia followed with Atlas.
Prometheus wanted to look away, for witnessing this cleaved his soul in half, and not only because he knew he would follow in their wake many centuries from now. He wanted to turn, to leave, even, rather than bear the torment of those who had trusted him.
Betrayer, indeed.
But then, that was all the more reason he owed it to them to look on and bear witness. Fate had forced himself to this moment, even as it had damned these people.
It forced him. And it would carry him onward, toward yet worse agonies.
Part I
With all due respect, I find myself compelled to raise the question as to the origins of the term, ‘Nymph.’ Why, exactly, do we have a word for female Titans of lesser status and not for our male counterparts? But then the answer is obvious, is it not?
— Thalia, Dialogues of the Muses
1
Pandora
1570 Silver Age
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The scents of wine and olives mingled with a tinge of vomit emanating from some corner of the palace courtyard. Laughter, heated discussions, and passionate moans punctuated the silences between the chords of Pandora’s harp, and she took it all in, though wine warmed her face and dulled her senses. Being half-drunk helped, too, with whatever meager hint of modesty she might have still had at sitting here, playing with her breasts exposed.
Such things kept the symposium guests jovial, though perhaps more of them leered at the entirely nude flute girls across the courtyard than at Pandora. Either way, the Pleiades expected as much from hetairai like Pandora, and they paid her far more custom than she’d make seducing any of these men on her own.
So she paraded herself, she strummed her harp, and she sang. This night, she chanted Adonis’s almost forgotten epic of the Ambrosial War, her voice soaring as she reached the bit about the death of Okeanus and how his mournful lover named the very ocean itself for him.
And yes, indeed, by the end of the song, nigh every eye in the courtyard was upon her, even those of some few of the Pleiades themselves, the very Queens of Atlantis. When the song at last finished, Pandora rose and offered a bow to her scattered applause, surreptitiously shrugging her khiton back over her shoulders as she stood.
She’d barely had time to grab a bowl of wine—the drinking rules of the symposiarch only applied to the guests, not the entertainment—when the men came sauntering over. They always did. Drunk and brazen, as if she ought to revel and swoon in their favor and attention. Queen Kelaino saved her from idle chatter with a pair of them, though, deftly stepping around them. Graceful, despite the fact that, like any Titan, she stood half a head taller than the Men.
The queen grasped Pandora’s elbow lightly and led her away from the garden courtyard, into a paved colonnade that ran through the central palace. “You have a gift for music, Pandora,” the Titan said, not looking at her. “You have, in fact, a great many gifts, I am given to understand.”
For a glorified whore, she meant. Ah, but much as Pandora oft found it hard to hold her tongue, there were some things one simply did not say to a queen, and certainly not to a Titan queen. With a word, Kelaino could shift Pandora’s fortunes from free hetaira to actual whore owned by some brothel. That the Titan took any interest in her, that she occasionally hired her for these functions, was a boon. A chance to make something of her life on Atlantis, even though Pandora held no citizenship here.
“I am honored you think so.”
Kelaino snorted lightly. “Your false modesty is quaint.”
Oh, Pandora could feign modesty or most aught else, given the need, but here, she saw little reason to do so. The sharpest mind in the World was not always a blessing, not for a woman whose intellect might threaten the fragile egos of the men around her. Kelaino, though, clearly felt no threat. Titan pride scraped the very firmament, brushing the stars and claiming them as their due. In a Man, a fraction of such would be called hubris, but amid Kelaino’s kind, it was simply a fact of life.
