The Gifts of Pandora, page 13
She could feel the puissance of the world, thrumming through the night air. Night had become her time more than ever before, and she stalked it like a lion, so aware, so alive. Vibrant as the twinkling stars.
Only once had Enodia allowed her to summon a spirit, one she used for scrying. Slowly, staring into a pool of water, colors had swirled up, shaping into images in a distant mirror. It had allowed her to spy upon the inhabitants of the palace, to watch Poseidon as he drew yet another hapless slave girl into his bed. Oh, the girl didn’t dare resist, but from the look upon her face in their coupling, she endured the process rather than enjoyed it.
But for a hair of difference in station and the will to stand up to him, that could have been Pyrrha wincing beneath his unwanted thrusts. And seeing that had been enough to resolve her. Once, she had believed Poseidon kinder and more worthy than his sisters. But while they vented their frustrations with petty cruelties visited upon any they could, at least Pyrrha could empathize with their desire to demonstrate some degree of power in their lives. Indeed, Styx and Perse had been named Nymphs themselves, and were thus destined for eternal mediocrity.
Poseidon, though, had no frustrations worthy of the name. This world was his to claim and abuse, the people in it existed but to service him. If he weren’t Tethys’s son—if the Titan queen did not, in fact, encourage this behavior through not speaking against it—Pyrrha might have been inclined to ask her how Tethys, a woman, achieved dominance in such a world.
Tethys and Phoebe alone comprised the females of the Ouranid League, and Pyrrha kept circling back, wondering how they attained it. Ah, but then, the answer was in front of her all along. She had no idea how Phoebe had managed her position, but Tethys had the Telkhines—mer spirits—working for her. Combined with Okeanus having died in Kronos’s assault, Tethys had seized the Aegean through sheer arcane might.
Was that not, then, the perfect model for how Pyrrha could begin to build her own sphere of influence?
Thus, when Enodia had at last given her blessing, Pyrrha had traced spirit glyphs along the beach, forming a wide circle. The glyphs were key, Enodia had taught her. A foolish sorceress could simply call up a spirit by name and it might well answer. Many such sigils represented the soul of one entity, and if you knew the glyph for a spirit, then that one would definitely answer, drawn right up to the edge of the Veil, and effectively invited in by the summoner. The circle served to ward against the evoked entity, to invoke other spirits in order to counter its influence. Like the stones of an arch supported one another, the ring of spirits each served to compel and hold back the others, so a sorceress could focus her energy and will upon just the one she needed.
Oft named sirens, mer were spirits of Water. On the seashore, they could be called up close to the Veil. Sitting upon a rock in the midst of the circle, Pyrrha stroked the back of a chicken she had claimed for this purpose, trying to calm herself as much as it. She glanced up at the moon, trying to judge the lateness of the evening. It had to be closing in on midnight now, and she needed to trust Enodia would arrange things as she had promised.
She needed to begin.
Poseidon was a symptom of all wrong in the World, and someone needed to chasten him. He was the perfect person to test her own limits on.
But … she had never incanted aught without the presence of her mentor. Nor had she counted on just how hard her heart would begin hammering at the idea of casting a spell without Enodia watching over her shoulder. Yes, she had practiced this, as much as one could practice such things without risking the invocation of actual spirits. And true, Enodia had inspected her glyphs before departing for the polis.
Still, one misspoken syllable, one faltering of her will, and Pyrrha would suffer under the thrall of any one of the spirits she now invoked or evoked.
When she spoke, her voice reverberated in her own head, the discordant resonances of Supernal feeling apt to shatter her skull. It was the language of spirits, and the purest language for incantations. It was also supremely alien to the human tongue. Her words sent vibrations thrumming through the air, pulsing like shockwaves through the Penumbra. Perhaps, had any outsiders walked the beach at this hour, they would have felt an unnamable wrongness seeping into the air. Perhaps they would have heard the words she spoke and thought them the ravings of a madwoman.
Perhaps, even, they would have dared brave the malaise that would saturate this shore and watch her, as she drove her knife into the chicken’s breast, letting its hot blood wash over her hand before casting the bird into the circle. Blood and death, after all, acted like a clarion to the Otherworldly.
But no one came from the Mortal Realm. Rather, her onlookers drew in through the Penumbra, drifting towards her circle in ones and twos, shadows upon the fringes, drawing nigh slowly, like circling sharks. The dead came and watched, hunger in their eyes, tongues lolling. They were first. Then, from the woodlands, she watched as a tree split, and a naked female writhed from it, lurching free. The entity pitched onto the ground, then scrambled forward almost more lizard-like than human. Her flesh was discolored, with a texture that appeared bark-like, and her eyes held a faint green luminosity.
She was followed by two lampades, the pale mist spirits wafting in on vaporous currents and moving to circle round the perimeter of Pyrrha’s ritual.
It was the approach of the mer, though, that drew her attention. Covered in scales and barnacles, with flapping gills and fins, the creature appeared almost like a humanoid shark. Its too-wide maw leered at her and its opalescent eyes nictitated in a way that made her squirm, though she dare not cease her incantation.
While the other spirits edged around her circle, tracing fingers over its perimeter, the mer pushed against it with webbed palms. As if a membrane separated them that impeded but did not stop it. Slowly, it pushed through, into the circle.
On the Mortal side of the Veil, she caught sight of Poseidon at last, his signature brighter than most mortals for the amount of Pneuma coursing through his flesh. Wanting to see his face, Pyrrha blinked away the Sight. Behind him, Enodia stood, clearly having guided him as she had promised, and exactly to a spot he could walk through without disturbing the glyphs or even noticing them. Without noticing much of aught, in fact, though his expression revealed a disquiet in him. He sensed the Otherworld bruising the Veil from here, even if he had no idea what the feeling was or what caused the hairs to rise upon his arms.
Of course, he could not resist the lure of a tryst. Of course, he could not bring himself to imagine that, when Enodia told him Pyrrha wanted to see him on the beach at night, she might have had aught in mind for him save the sating of his desires.
While she could not cease incanting, she lowered her voice to a whisper and allowed her peplos to drop free of one shoulder. She needed him to join her in the center of the circle. A sudden thought occurred to her, even as she struggled to concentrate on the incantation and hold his attention. If he saw the chicken blood dribbling off her fingers. Well, damn it. She couldn’t explain that. To keep his attention, she further shrugged free of her peplos, exposing one breast.
When he drew nigh, he reached for her flesh. She placed her hand upon his chest, tracing a quick glyph to which he paid no mind.
“What are you saying?” he asked with his usual haughtiness.
“Nereus,” she answered, then flicked blood off her hand into his face.
Poseidon staggered backward, blinking. “What the fuck?”
“Nereus, Prince of Pontus!” Pyrrha called and allowed her vision to shift back into the Sight.
Across the Veil, the mer launched itself at the victim marked with its glyph. The shark-thing hurtled into Poseidon, who spasmed. Pyrrha could not see his face now, but she could imagine the dawning horror commingling with the pain.
Vaguely, she wondered if that was how slave girls felt the first time he intruded inside them. The spirit wrenched open Poseidon’s mouth and drove a webbed, clawed arm down his throat.
Pyrrha almost gagged herself as Nereus somehow, impossibly, began to climb into Poseidon. The mer wriggled like an eel, and though it should never have fit, slowly—in time with the Titan’s immense convulsions—it dragged itself within his body.
Poseidon pitched over, his convulsions intensifying. His legs snapped together and began to fuse even as scales punched through his flesh. His neck ruptured, gills tearing their way from flaps of skin.
An inarticulate moan drew her gaze outside the circle. Okeanus’s ghost hurled itself against the circle’s edge, drawing a yelp from Pyrrha. Her wards held, but as the shade slammed into them again and again, she had to wonder … could a shade break through with sheer force of will?
Her heel brushed against a stone and she realized she’d begun to back away from the fury on display before her. “Nyx’s bosom,” she cursed.
The ghost’s gaze landed upon her, its eyes glinting red with inhuman rage. It flexed its arms and bent its knees as if promising to rush her the moment she left the circle’s confines. Then Supernal incantations rent the Ether once more, and Okeanus wilted, driven to its knees. It turned toward the source—Enodia approaching, deep in her cants. The sorceress pressed her palm against Okeanus’s forehead.
A heartbeat later, the shade trembled as if the whole of it was liquid and someone had cast a stone into its body. It flailed and writhed, then began to melt into pooling shadows that lashed about it, drawing it into the deeper regions of the Astral Realm, a space Enodia called the Roil. Hard as it was to believe, Pyrrha could have almost sworn actual fear washed over its face in its last moments. Enodia … frightened a ghost? How Pyrrha longed for such power.
When she looked back to the Mortal Realm, the mer that had seized Poseidon had formed up legs once more and regained its feet. It cast aside his garments and, utterly naked, stared at her with opalescent eyes, its expression unreadable.
Only then, looking upon the spirit in its human host, did Pyrrha recognize the shrill scream that had been unfolding for Gaia knew how long. Only then did she look and see Styx, hands on her face, wailing at the horror Pyrrha had unleashed upon her brother.
It was like a dream, when the Telkhines came for her. Two of the mer, walking on legs, clad only in loose clothes wrapped around their waists. They grabbed her and dragged her up the cliff to Thebes, and on, into the acropolis where Tethys surged up from her throne like a cresting wave in a storm-tossed sea.
“How dare you assault my son!” It was, perhaps, Pyrrha’s imagination, but the Titan’s wrath shook the throne room. It dominated the whole of the acropolis, filling up the space of the palace with a turbulent force that drowned out all other sound and thought.
Pulse pounding, Pyrrha found all she could do was stare at her sandals and chance fleeting glimpses at the Lady of Thebes. That someone would have seen what she had done, that it would make it back to Tethys, had not once crossed her mind, fool that she was. Enodia had warned her that her desire to punish Poseidon would come with a cost, but Pyrrha had been so obsessed with vengeance she had assumed the sorceress meant a cost to her soul.
“Every incantation you utter tears at your essence,” Enodia had said in their earliest lessons. “And every spirit you evoke or draw upon feasts upon your life, ever so little. A sorceress is flensed over and over, until naught remains save a walking corpse.”
Tethys flowed about the throne room as if guided on some unseen force, gaze perpetually locked upon Pyrrha. Oh, Pyrrha could feel it, even as the Titan stormed across the space behind her. She could sense it, even while she focused upon her own toes. Naught one said at such times could make things any better.
At last, Tethys came to rest in the space before Pyrrha, close enough her breath fell upon the top of Pyrrha’s head. “That you are my guest, Prometheus’s daughter—and that my son Poseidon does still live—makes me consider his pleas for mercy on your behalf.”
Now, despite her throbbing heart, she dared look up at the Titan.
“Exile,” Tethys said, stretching the word to several syllables. “And should I hear of you nigh to my lands again, I will have you hunted. Like a pig, before I roast you upon a spit.”
“Kill her,” Styx implored, quietly, from amongst the columns.
Her mother ignored that. With a wave of her hand, the Telkhines reappeared, and each snared one of Pyrrha’s arms. They ushered her from the palace with such force only their grip upon her kept her from tumbling down the acropolis stairs.
Most sentences of exile began at dawn, but the Telkhines ordered the gates thrown wide and shoved her outward, sending her sprawling upon her face.
“Be well away before dawn,” Sirsir warned.
With a groan, Pyrrha looked up at the mer. Not bothering to answer, she pushed herself up and plodded away. She could have descended the cliff and returned to the harbor, but she half suspected the Telkhines might have orders to harry or even kill her if she tried, so instead, she headed for the river. If she followed it far enough, she would reach Korinth.
Thus, in the predawn blackness, she trudged along, the riverbank on her right and the plains leading to the cliff on her left. There was naught left for her to fear in the night, especially if she didn’t try to look across the Veil. Well, naught save Men, for bandits might prowl the hills to the south, though she doubted any were about so early.
As she walked, though, a shape rose from the edge of the river not far beyond Thebes. It took a moment to recognize her father’s silhouette, his crystal blue eyes.
“Papa.” He had pled with Tethys for her and must have come here before her audience. Knowing which way she would come. He always knew such things.
Without a word, he approached and drew her into an embrace. The warmth of it broke something inside her, and she shuddered. By Nyx, what a night she’d had. Papa stroked her hair as he had done when she was a child.
At last, he held her at arm’s length, staring into her eyes with his own vibrant blue ones. “Pyrrha.” Lines of tension marred his face. “You must turn back from the path you have set yourself upon. The Art has broken entire civilizations. It has rendered death on a scale you cannot conceive, blanketing the land in night. I beseech you to give over any further pursuit of this.”
His grip was so tight upon her arms she yelped. Immediately, he released her, looking even more distressed that he’d hurt her.
Pyrrha rubbed her arms for a moment. He didn’t understand. Oh, she knew he loved her, but he’d never understood what she needed. He had answers about her Sight and almost certainly knew more about her mother’s death than he’d ever shared. Always, he held things back from her. A sudden realization settled in upon her. On seeing him here, her heart had leapt, seizing upon the idea maybe she was not alone.
But if he came with her—and he would unless she denied him—he would only hold her back. Enodia was the one true friend she had ever had, for the sorceress alone had offered her power and answers.
“I’m going, Papa. I must make my own way.”
“We can go to Ogygia, I have land there—”
Her raised hand cut him off, and the clapping shut of his mouth, the pain writ upon his visage, it tore through her. Gaia steel her resolve. “I must make my own way,” she repeated.
And there was naught left to say.
14
Pandora
1570 Silver Age
* * *
When Prometheus had made his way into the throne room, Hekate guided Pandora in behind him, then around to the side. They took up a position in the shadow of one of a dozen great fluted columns, watching as Pandora’s Titan friend at last came to rest at the foot of the dais.
Numerous other spectators stood around the hall. Zeus’s sycophants, no doubt, come to weather or bask in the mercurial whims of their mad king.
Braziers dangled from great chains running to the ceiling, providing additional illumination, though windows far overhead also let in beams of sunlight that crisscrossed the hall.
Zeus leaned forward, elbow upon his knee, hand stroking his beard. “Your nieces are dead, Prometheus.”
Though she could not see his face, Pandora imagined her friend staring daggers at the king.
“They burned for their crimes and now I grow more tired still of your recalcitrance. Someone betrayed and murdered my son’s loyal lover, and still, you have not told me the identity of the one who will betray me, though I know you have it, Oracle.” The king stood abruptly. “Give me the name! Tell me of my perfidious kith, or the Pleiades’ fate will seem paltry compared to yours!” The king had broken into screaming, but abruptly fell silent and brushed back his hair. “Tell me, my loyal ally. Tell me what the flames have shown you. Where do the traitors hide?”
“I can tell you that,” Prometheus said, “unless your son fights at your side, Olympus itself will one day fall.”
“That is not what I asked!” Zeus roared. The room trembled, the braziers dimming. A gust sent everyone’s hair and clothing flapping, though it ought not have reached down from windows so far overhead. “Shall I call you Epimetheus now? For clearly you lack the foresight to know what will befall you if you deny me.”
Zeus’s icy eyes seemed have grown cloudy. Pandora whimpered, and Hekate’s grip upon her elbow grew painfully tight.
“A name, a name, a fucking name, you ingrate cunt!” Zeus waved his arms in the air, and galvanic arcs actually leapt between his fingers, coruscating through the air.
Now Pandora wanted to weep. Not this. Not this again.
“I have no names for you this day, King,” Prometheus said, the defiance—the disdain—in his voice so palpable Pandora might have choked on it. Might have cheered for it, had she not known what would follow.
“You would try to serve as the very hand of Ananke,” Zeus bellowed, the spittle flying from his lips visible even from so far back. “You think yourself of a level with the Moirai? We shall see, Fatespinner. Your torment shall be the stuff of legend. Bards shall weep as they tell tale of fallen Prometheus, who thought himself wiser than even Zeus. Mothers shall frighten their contumacious offspring with bare hints of what you shall suffer!”
Only once had Enodia allowed her to summon a spirit, one she used for scrying. Slowly, staring into a pool of water, colors had swirled up, shaping into images in a distant mirror. It had allowed her to spy upon the inhabitants of the palace, to watch Poseidon as he drew yet another hapless slave girl into his bed. Oh, the girl didn’t dare resist, but from the look upon her face in their coupling, she endured the process rather than enjoyed it.
But for a hair of difference in station and the will to stand up to him, that could have been Pyrrha wincing beneath his unwanted thrusts. And seeing that had been enough to resolve her. Once, she had believed Poseidon kinder and more worthy than his sisters. But while they vented their frustrations with petty cruelties visited upon any they could, at least Pyrrha could empathize with their desire to demonstrate some degree of power in their lives. Indeed, Styx and Perse had been named Nymphs themselves, and were thus destined for eternal mediocrity.
Poseidon, though, had no frustrations worthy of the name. This world was his to claim and abuse, the people in it existed but to service him. If he weren’t Tethys’s son—if the Titan queen did not, in fact, encourage this behavior through not speaking against it—Pyrrha might have been inclined to ask her how Tethys, a woman, achieved dominance in such a world.
Tethys and Phoebe alone comprised the females of the Ouranid League, and Pyrrha kept circling back, wondering how they attained it. Ah, but then, the answer was in front of her all along. She had no idea how Phoebe had managed her position, but Tethys had the Telkhines—mer spirits—working for her. Combined with Okeanus having died in Kronos’s assault, Tethys had seized the Aegean through sheer arcane might.
Was that not, then, the perfect model for how Pyrrha could begin to build her own sphere of influence?
Thus, when Enodia had at last given her blessing, Pyrrha had traced spirit glyphs along the beach, forming a wide circle. The glyphs were key, Enodia had taught her. A foolish sorceress could simply call up a spirit by name and it might well answer. Many such sigils represented the soul of one entity, and if you knew the glyph for a spirit, then that one would definitely answer, drawn right up to the edge of the Veil, and effectively invited in by the summoner. The circle served to ward against the evoked entity, to invoke other spirits in order to counter its influence. Like the stones of an arch supported one another, the ring of spirits each served to compel and hold back the others, so a sorceress could focus her energy and will upon just the one she needed.
Oft named sirens, mer were spirits of Water. On the seashore, they could be called up close to the Veil. Sitting upon a rock in the midst of the circle, Pyrrha stroked the back of a chicken she had claimed for this purpose, trying to calm herself as much as it. She glanced up at the moon, trying to judge the lateness of the evening. It had to be closing in on midnight now, and she needed to trust Enodia would arrange things as she had promised.
She needed to begin.
Poseidon was a symptom of all wrong in the World, and someone needed to chasten him. He was the perfect person to test her own limits on.
But … she had never incanted aught without the presence of her mentor. Nor had she counted on just how hard her heart would begin hammering at the idea of casting a spell without Enodia watching over her shoulder. Yes, she had practiced this, as much as one could practice such things without risking the invocation of actual spirits. And true, Enodia had inspected her glyphs before departing for the polis.
Still, one misspoken syllable, one faltering of her will, and Pyrrha would suffer under the thrall of any one of the spirits she now invoked or evoked.
When she spoke, her voice reverberated in her own head, the discordant resonances of Supernal feeling apt to shatter her skull. It was the language of spirits, and the purest language for incantations. It was also supremely alien to the human tongue. Her words sent vibrations thrumming through the air, pulsing like shockwaves through the Penumbra. Perhaps, had any outsiders walked the beach at this hour, they would have felt an unnamable wrongness seeping into the air. Perhaps they would have heard the words she spoke and thought them the ravings of a madwoman.
Perhaps, even, they would have dared brave the malaise that would saturate this shore and watch her, as she drove her knife into the chicken’s breast, letting its hot blood wash over her hand before casting the bird into the circle. Blood and death, after all, acted like a clarion to the Otherworldly.
But no one came from the Mortal Realm. Rather, her onlookers drew in through the Penumbra, drifting towards her circle in ones and twos, shadows upon the fringes, drawing nigh slowly, like circling sharks. The dead came and watched, hunger in their eyes, tongues lolling. They were first. Then, from the woodlands, she watched as a tree split, and a naked female writhed from it, lurching free. The entity pitched onto the ground, then scrambled forward almost more lizard-like than human. Her flesh was discolored, with a texture that appeared bark-like, and her eyes held a faint green luminosity.
She was followed by two lampades, the pale mist spirits wafting in on vaporous currents and moving to circle round the perimeter of Pyrrha’s ritual.
It was the approach of the mer, though, that drew her attention. Covered in scales and barnacles, with flapping gills and fins, the creature appeared almost like a humanoid shark. Its too-wide maw leered at her and its opalescent eyes nictitated in a way that made her squirm, though she dare not cease her incantation.
While the other spirits edged around her circle, tracing fingers over its perimeter, the mer pushed against it with webbed palms. As if a membrane separated them that impeded but did not stop it. Slowly, it pushed through, into the circle.
On the Mortal side of the Veil, she caught sight of Poseidon at last, his signature brighter than most mortals for the amount of Pneuma coursing through his flesh. Wanting to see his face, Pyrrha blinked away the Sight. Behind him, Enodia stood, clearly having guided him as she had promised, and exactly to a spot he could walk through without disturbing the glyphs or even noticing them. Without noticing much of aught, in fact, though his expression revealed a disquiet in him. He sensed the Otherworld bruising the Veil from here, even if he had no idea what the feeling was or what caused the hairs to rise upon his arms.
Of course, he could not resist the lure of a tryst. Of course, he could not bring himself to imagine that, when Enodia told him Pyrrha wanted to see him on the beach at night, she might have had aught in mind for him save the sating of his desires.
While she could not cease incanting, she lowered her voice to a whisper and allowed her peplos to drop free of one shoulder. She needed him to join her in the center of the circle. A sudden thought occurred to her, even as she struggled to concentrate on the incantation and hold his attention. If he saw the chicken blood dribbling off her fingers. Well, damn it. She couldn’t explain that. To keep his attention, she further shrugged free of her peplos, exposing one breast.
When he drew nigh, he reached for her flesh. She placed her hand upon his chest, tracing a quick glyph to which he paid no mind.
“What are you saying?” he asked with his usual haughtiness.
“Nereus,” she answered, then flicked blood off her hand into his face.
Poseidon staggered backward, blinking. “What the fuck?”
“Nereus, Prince of Pontus!” Pyrrha called and allowed her vision to shift back into the Sight.
Across the Veil, the mer launched itself at the victim marked with its glyph. The shark-thing hurtled into Poseidon, who spasmed. Pyrrha could not see his face now, but she could imagine the dawning horror commingling with the pain.
Vaguely, she wondered if that was how slave girls felt the first time he intruded inside them. The spirit wrenched open Poseidon’s mouth and drove a webbed, clawed arm down his throat.
Pyrrha almost gagged herself as Nereus somehow, impossibly, began to climb into Poseidon. The mer wriggled like an eel, and though it should never have fit, slowly—in time with the Titan’s immense convulsions—it dragged itself within his body.
Poseidon pitched over, his convulsions intensifying. His legs snapped together and began to fuse even as scales punched through his flesh. His neck ruptured, gills tearing their way from flaps of skin.
An inarticulate moan drew her gaze outside the circle. Okeanus’s ghost hurled itself against the circle’s edge, drawing a yelp from Pyrrha. Her wards held, but as the shade slammed into them again and again, she had to wonder … could a shade break through with sheer force of will?
Her heel brushed against a stone and she realized she’d begun to back away from the fury on display before her. “Nyx’s bosom,” she cursed.
The ghost’s gaze landed upon her, its eyes glinting red with inhuman rage. It flexed its arms and bent its knees as if promising to rush her the moment she left the circle’s confines. Then Supernal incantations rent the Ether once more, and Okeanus wilted, driven to its knees. It turned toward the source—Enodia approaching, deep in her cants. The sorceress pressed her palm against Okeanus’s forehead.
A heartbeat later, the shade trembled as if the whole of it was liquid and someone had cast a stone into its body. It flailed and writhed, then began to melt into pooling shadows that lashed about it, drawing it into the deeper regions of the Astral Realm, a space Enodia called the Roil. Hard as it was to believe, Pyrrha could have almost sworn actual fear washed over its face in its last moments. Enodia … frightened a ghost? How Pyrrha longed for such power.
When she looked back to the Mortal Realm, the mer that had seized Poseidon had formed up legs once more and regained its feet. It cast aside his garments and, utterly naked, stared at her with opalescent eyes, its expression unreadable.
Only then, looking upon the spirit in its human host, did Pyrrha recognize the shrill scream that had been unfolding for Gaia knew how long. Only then did she look and see Styx, hands on her face, wailing at the horror Pyrrha had unleashed upon her brother.
It was like a dream, when the Telkhines came for her. Two of the mer, walking on legs, clad only in loose clothes wrapped around their waists. They grabbed her and dragged her up the cliff to Thebes, and on, into the acropolis where Tethys surged up from her throne like a cresting wave in a storm-tossed sea.
“How dare you assault my son!” It was, perhaps, Pyrrha’s imagination, but the Titan’s wrath shook the throne room. It dominated the whole of the acropolis, filling up the space of the palace with a turbulent force that drowned out all other sound and thought.
Pulse pounding, Pyrrha found all she could do was stare at her sandals and chance fleeting glimpses at the Lady of Thebes. That someone would have seen what she had done, that it would make it back to Tethys, had not once crossed her mind, fool that she was. Enodia had warned her that her desire to punish Poseidon would come with a cost, but Pyrrha had been so obsessed with vengeance she had assumed the sorceress meant a cost to her soul.
“Every incantation you utter tears at your essence,” Enodia had said in their earliest lessons. “And every spirit you evoke or draw upon feasts upon your life, ever so little. A sorceress is flensed over and over, until naught remains save a walking corpse.”
Tethys flowed about the throne room as if guided on some unseen force, gaze perpetually locked upon Pyrrha. Oh, Pyrrha could feel it, even as the Titan stormed across the space behind her. She could sense it, even while she focused upon her own toes. Naught one said at such times could make things any better.
At last, Tethys came to rest in the space before Pyrrha, close enough her breath fell upon the top of Pyrrha’s head. “That you are my guest, Prometheus’s daughter—and that my son Poseidon does still live—makes me consider his pleas for mercy on your behalf.”
Now, despite her throbbing heart, she dared look up at the Titan.
“Exile,” Tethys said, stretching the word to several syllables. “And should I hear of you nigh to my lands again, I will have you hunted. Like a pig, before I roast you upon a spit.”
“Kill her,” Styx implored, quietly, from amongst the columns.
Her mother ignored that. With a wave of her hand, the Telkhines reappeared, and each snared one of Pyrrha’s arms. They ushered her from the palace with such force only their grip upon her kept her from tumbling down the acropolis stairs.
Most sentences of exile began at dawn, but the Telkhines ordered the gates thrown wide and shoved her outward, sending her sprawling upon her face.
“Be well away before dawn,” Sirsir warned.
With a groan, Pyrrha looked up at the mer. Not bothering to answer, she pushed herself up and plodded away. She could have descended the cliff and returned to the harbor, but she half suspected the Telkhines might have orders to harry or even kill her if she tried, so instead, she headed for the river. If she followed it far enough, she would reach Korinth.
Thus, in the predawn blackness, she trudged along, the riverbank on her right and the plains leading to the cliff on her left. There was naught left for her to fear in the night, especially if she didn’t try to look across the Veil. Well, naught save Men, for bandits might prowl the hills to the south, though she doubted any were about so early.
As she walked, though, a shape rose from the edge of the river not far beyond Thebes. It took a moment to recognize her father’s silhouette, his crystal blue eyes.
“Papa.” He had pled with Tethys for her and must have come here before her audience. Knowing which way she would come. He always knew such things.
Without a word, he approached and drew her into an embrace. The warmth of it broke something inside her, and she shuddered. By Nyx, what a night she’d had. Papa stroked her hair as he had done when she was a child.
At last, he held her at arm’s length, staring into her eyes with his own vibrant blue ones. “Pyrrha.” Lines of tension marred his face. “You must turn back from the path you have set yourself upon. The Art has broken entire civilizations. It has rendered death on a scale you cannot conceive, blanketing the land in night. I beseech you to give over any further pursuit of this.”
His grip was so tight upon her arms she yelped. Immediately, he released her, looking even more distressed that he’d hurt her.
Pyrrha rubbed her arms for a moment. He didn’t understand. Oh, she knew he loved her, but he’d never understood what she needed. He had answers about her Sight and almost certainly knew more about her mother’s death than he’d ever shared. Always, he held things back from her. A sudden realization settled in upon her. On seeing him here, her heart had leapt, seizing upon the idea maybe she was not alone.
But if he came with her—and he would unless she denied him—he would only hold her back. Enodia was the one true friend she had ever had, for the sorceress alone had offered her power and answers.
“I’m going, Papa. I must make my own way.”
“We can go to Ogygia, I have land there—”
Her raised hand cut him off, and the clapping shut of his mouth, the pain writ upon his visage, it tore through her. Gaia steel her resolve. “I must make my own way,” she repeated.
And there was naught left to say.
14
Pandora
1570 Silver Age
* * *
When Prometheus had made his way into the throne room, Hekate guided Pandora in behind him, then around to the side. They took up a position in the shadow of one of a dozen great fluted columns, watching as Pandora’s Titan friend at last came to rest at the foot of the dais.
Numerous other spectators stood around the hall. Zeus’s sycophants, no doubt, come to weather or bask in the mercurial whims of their mad king.
Braziers dangled from great chains running to the ceiling, providing additional illumination, though windows far overhead also let in beams of sunlight that crisscrossed the hall.
Zeus leaned forward, elbow upon his knee, hand stroking his beard. “Your nieces are dead, Prometheus.”
Though she could not see his face, Pandora imagined her friend staring daggers at the king.
“They burned for their crimes and now I grow more tired still of your recalcitrance. Someone betrayed and murdered my son’s loyal lover, and still, you have not told me the identity of the one who will betray me, though I know you have it, Oracle.” The king stood abruptly. “Give me the name! Tell me of my perfidious kith, or the Pleiades’ fate will seem paltry compared to yours!” The king had broken into screaming, but abruptly fell silent and brushed back his hair. “Tell me, my loyal ally. Tell me what the flames have shown you. Where do the traitors hide?”
“I can tell you that,” Prometheus said, “unless your son fights at your side, Olympus itself will one day fall.”
“That is not what I asked!” Zeus roared. The room trembled, the braziers dimming. A gust sent everyone’s hair and clothing flapping, though it ought not have reached down from windows so far overhead. “Shall I call you Epimetheus now? For clearly you lack the foresight to know what will befall you if you deny me.”
Zeus’s icy eyes seemed have grown cloudy. Pandora whimpered, and Hekate’s grip upon her elbow grew painfully tight.
“A name, a name, a fucking name, you ingrate cunt!” Zeus waved his arms in the air, and galvanic arcs actually leapt between his fingers, coruscating through the air.
Now Pandora wanted to weep. Not this. Not this again.
“I have no names for you this day, King,” Prometheus said, the defiance—the disdain—in his voice so palpable Pandora might have choked on it. Might have cheered for it, had she not known what would follow.
“You would try to serve as the very hand of Ananke,” Zeus bellowed, the spittle flying from his lips visible even from so far back. “You think yourself of a level with the Moirai? We shall see, Fatespinner. Your torment shall be the stuff of legend. Bards shall weep as they tell tale of fallen Prometheus, who thought himself wiser than even Zeus. Mothers shall frighten their contumacious offspring with bare hints of what you shall suffer!”
