The Gifts of Pandora, page 20
Forcing herself to rise, she turned about. She couldn’t say which way she was meant to go since the tube seemed to vanish into darkness in both directions. Maybe it didn’t matter.
Picking a direction, she plodded onward. Her sandals echoed faintly upon the stone beneath her, her steps drawn forward though she could not have said why. Her flesh had grown clammy with chill sweat, and she cast a single furtive glance behind herself. The expanse in both directions seemed a fathomless darkness.
A sick sensation began to grow inside her gut, the feeling she was not alone down here. Some monstrous, alien intellect lurked in the darkness. Was it ahead? Behind? It seemed almost omnipresent in the tenebrous tract she had intruded into, as though she had delved so deep beneath the Earth as to reach somewhere else. Somewhere inhabited by a timeless mind so momentous it spread through the whole of the mountain.
With each step she took, the sensation of wrongness increased, but still her feet refused to turn back. Then came the scraping of something rough over the stone, reverberating through the tunnel, and the sensation that whatever lurked out, she not only felt it, but it felt her.
… COME FORTH …
The voice bombarded her, even as it had come to her in dreams down through her years. It had known. It bombarded against the inside of her skull with all the discordant force of Supernal invocations, as if able to bend reality to its whims.
Was that Python speaking in her mind? She had not dared to believe the drakon could hold such power. Ahead, she once more heard mammoth grating of scales over stone. The slithering was intermittent, as if the massive serpent only sought to reposition itself on occasion. Nevertheless, Pyrrha winced with each grinding echo.
Her fist trembled at her side. Every instinct bellowed at her to flee this place, crawl back into the tiny tunnel from which she had emerged, and never look back.
COME FORTH … BRIGHT ONE … YOUR MIND SCRAPES THE ABYSS … SO VIBRANT …
An Old One, Tethys had called Python. A creature from before time itself, spawned by the fathomless Primordials.
It beckoned, and she approached. She plodded further down the tunnel, until her torchlight glinted off a jagged wall ahead. An abrupt sense of cyclopean immensity settled upon her, as if the Earth itself reared before her, alive and aberrant, utterly beyond the scope of comprehension.
YES …
An incandescent eye opened in the wall before her, its faint radiance adumbrating the shape of a saurian head rimmed with a thicket of broken horns and spines.
All breath ceased for her and Pyrrha’s heart seized up, even as she collapsed to her knees.
The eye was bigger than she was. It looked inside her, scourging her soul to its pith with its alien regard. The force of it ravaged her, left her trembling and paralyzed.
… DRINK AND … BECOME …
With painful slowness, she managed to turn her head. Then, in the recesses of the tunnel, her torchlight glinted off some liquid that seemed not quite water.
The eye shut, plunging the cavern into greater darkness once more, and the mammoth serpent slithered forward, parading a wall of endless coils in its passage.
Released from its hold, Pyrrha found she could move once more. And had dawdled far too long already. In such places, it felt she would never again look upon the light of the sun. Almost weeping, she edged her way forward until she reached the pool of it. The surface reflected her like a mirror, silvery and perfectly still.
Having no idea what would happen when she drank it, Pyrrha decided to scoop a draught up in a waterskin. With that claimed, she quickly fled the tunnel, retreating until she found the small passage she had crawled through.
Casting a last glance over her shoulder—and seeing no sign of the serpent—she forced her way out.
Almost completely bereft of drachmae, Pyrrha didn’t expect to find shelter within the fort. Instead, she headed into the woods beneath the mountain, found a sheltered glade, and built a small fire. With her campsite secured, she unstopped the waterskin and sniffed the substance she claimed from those catacombs.
It had a faint acrid scent to it but otherwise seemed unremarkable. So … Had she done all this just to toss the stuff away? Maybe she should. Themis had made no secret that some who touched the drakon essence died from it.
And Python itself was monstrous beyond words. Something so far removed from human experience as to shame conceptions of knowledge.
But within this liquid was power. Unmitigated, unbridled power she could imbibe and make part of herself. Everything she had ever sought could be hers with a little more strength.
So why in Nyx’s dark bosom should she turn back now?
She threw back the skin and took a long swig. Thick, viscous fluid poured down her throat, its bitter bite souring her mouth. She gagged almost immediately. Gods, she needed pure water. She stood with the intent to head for a nearby brook she’d seen, but her knees gave way and sent her tumbling to the ground. Her stomach convulsed.
Darkness seized her.
Pyrrha cradled the gray-eyed babe, dabbing her finger against the newborn’s hand in hopes of getting her to grab it with her own tiny digits. The girl stared at her, wide-eyed, hand half closing around her finger.
“Aww. That’s it, Mama’s got you. Mama’s always got you.”
Her midwife moved about the plush chamber around her, gathering up rags and towels. “Are you well, my lady?”
Pyrrha was perfect and graced the midwife with a smile. “Well enough, Eileithyia. Well enough, for certain.”
The door was flung open before Eileithyia could say aught in answer, and Zeus billowed in, his platinum hair flowing about him.
“Well,” he demanded.
“A beautiful baby girl,” Pyrrha said, beaming.
Zeus, though, seemed to deflate, and he shook his head. “A girl.” Was it scorn in his voice, or just disappointment?
Either way, Pyrrha frowned at him. “What should we call her?”
Zeus shrugged, apparently beyond all care for the birth now. “Whatever suits you.”
Pyrrha groaned, pulling herself out of the weirdly vibrant dream. People she’d never met had felt as real as though she knew them. Was that a hallucination induced by imbibing drakon filth or a prophetic dream? She tried to rise, only to find vines had grown up around her wrists and ankles.
“What the …?” A surge of panic seized her, and she tugged on the plants holding her without avail.
The glade abruptly began to close in around her. Shadows deepened beneath the moonlight, and her fragile campfire dwindled down to embers. The trees nearby creaked and groaned, the branches clattering together as if bestirred by a wind that did not exist.
A throbbing heartbeat resounded through the wood.
Thump. Thump.
She was still dreaming. Please, Gaia, let her still be dreaming.
Thump. Thump.
Something moaned, in the distance, and the air tasted of putrescence. A pervading sense of wrongness erupted around her, and an instant later, a half dozen tree trunks ruptured with wet sucking sounds. Virescent maws opened within them, each glinting with faint luminescence and shining pus. Figures lurched from within, yanking themselves out of the trunks in perverse mockeries of birth.
Rough, bark-like skin covered both the males and the females. Dryads and satyrs. Wood spirits.
The heartbeat quickened. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Pyrrha jerked against the vines binding her, but they held fast. They tightened until her circulation cut off, drawing a shriek from her. A glistening dryad scraped mucus from her face and cast it aside before crawling over toward Pyrrha, lithe and naked.
Before her eyes, more Wood spirits drifted into the grove. They drove each other up against trees and began rutting in pairs or trios. Vines and leaves and branches commingled in their orgy until the wood seemed to pulse with prurient need.
THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP!
Despite her revulsion, the energy in the air seeped into her, her own nethers joined the throbbing that had become the World. The dryad reached her, then leaned in too close. With a rough, distended tongue, she lathered Pyrrha’s face while groping at her breasts.
Pyrrha’s mind screamed at her to buck and try to throw the spirit off, but all she could do was moan, her body begging for more. And beyond, the World thrummed and the Veil began to fray, as something momentous pushed against it. A sense of a consciousness older than time itself pressed in upon her, even as it pressed upon the World. Something eldritch and unknowable and utterly, completely, consumed with consumptive lust.
21
Pandora
201 Golden Age
* * *
Days went by, and Prometheus spent more and more time alone, tinkering with the Box. One day soon, Pandora knew, he would finish it, and she would be forced to use it. She would return to the future and once more be forced to face the reality Zeus had presented her with.
Which meant saving Prometheus.
The only known means of ingress into Tartarus lay beneath Mount Olympus itself. Pandora would need to either sneak in that way or find some alternative route into that forbidden Realm. Either way, the very thought of the nightmare-scape haunted her, both waking and sleeping. It seeped into her dreams, an absolute darkness she found herself wandering, and the sense that within the expanse of the black lurked monstrous intellects. And they felt her presence among them.
As her fear prickled her flesh and brought on cold sweats, she could only loathe herself for that terror. She was afraid to even see the torments her beloved suffered with each passing moment.
So she walked along the shore and allowed him to work. Sometimes she brought Pyrrha, sometimes, as today when the babe slept, she left her with her father. Pandora waited for destiny to catch up to her and force her to walk the path she so trembled before. She willed herself to become as the unbreakable orichalcum wall around Atlantis’s citadel. Her determination would need to make her inviolate.
For she would strive with the very self-styled god of Men and lord of the World. She would plumb the depths of Tartarus and achieve what no mortal had ever thought possible: a return to the world of the living.
To occupy her mind, she sang to herself, trying to forget that leaving the now meant leaving behind her babe’s childhood. One day soon, the child would laugh. Then she would walk and talk and take in the world. If Pandora returned to keep her promise and save the babe’s father, Pyrrha would have to grow up without her. Pandora would miss those irreplaceable first words and steps, and Pyrrha, perhaps, would forever wonder why her mother had not been there with her.
Could Pandora return here, after saving Prometheus? And then leave the Prometheus of her own time alone, knowing his every moment with his lover would forever lie in the distant past, in memories he could never reclaim? That, too, sent a twinge of sorrow running thought her chest. Ananke had presented Pandora with impossible choices. If the Moirai cared the least for the anguish they inflicted upon mortals, she could not see it.
Musing over such until her song had begun to falter from the pain pinching her heart, she caught sight of the masts first creeping over the horizon. First one, then another and another. Those looked somewhat like Phoenikian biremes, albeit of a primitive design long out of fashion. And they came here, to Ogygia.
Had more Titans come to call upon Prometheus? No. No one sent three ships to seek advice from an Oracle.
Pandora glanced up at the mountain, but she’d never make it before they spotted her. Perhaps they already had. Many Titans had sharper senses than Men. Still, she broke into a trot, soon panting from exertion as she made the climb. Where else was she meant to go? The woodlands dotting the slope would offer her some cover, at least, and perhaps she could take shelter until Prometheus arrived.
Still, it was not like her lover could fight off two hundred foes, either. Had he seen the ships? Did he even now try to reach her?
Someone leapt over the ship’s side and—before she’d gone half so far as she’d hoped up the slope—began a sprint in her direction. Titan feet kicked up a curtain of sand as a pair of them raced forward with such speed their limbs seemed to blur.
In the woods, Pandora crouched down behind a thicket. She could barely control her ragged breaths. Even as they closed in, her mind kept leaping back to Prometheus and Pyrrha. She should have tried to warn them. She should have made a break for it, hoping he would hear her shouted warnings, even if it meant these people claimed her.
But Pandora did naught save hide.
The first to arrive was a boy, no more than fifteen she’d have gauged, and flush with glee. His platinum hair flapped about in the island breeze, but it was his ice-blue eyes that seized her.
No. No, not this …
Zeus. Zeus as a boy.
He was trailed momentarily by a slightly older boy who looked an awful lot like him, save for a jagged scar across his nose and the first hints of a flaxen beard about his chin.
An older man followed, platinum haired himself, with a flowing beard. Another Kroniad. He was tall, bare-chested, and well-muscled. The older Titan surveyed the island, gaze seeming to scour every tree.
The hammering of her heart must surely give her away. It must reveal her and damn her.
“I know you’re here!” The older Titan bellowed. “I know who you are! I know what you are! Give me the Box and you may live.”
Now, her pounding heart actually seized up, missing a beat. The Box? How in the fuck did he know about that? How could he possibly know about that? The World once more shifted, her mind struggling to find purchase upon the compounding revelations. Others knew about her precious puzzle. Not that she had it at the moment—Prometheus had been adjusting it up in the cottage.
And these people were here for her, and for him, as well.
These Kroniads. So, this must be Kronos himself, father of Zeus and apparently this other boy. Kronos had been one of the winners of the Ambrosial War, though not so securely he managed to take Atlantis back from Atlas. Somehow, those two and four others worked out a deal to keep the Ambrosia flowing under their control.
At the moment, though, Atlas must seem his greatest foe. Perhaps he had come to try to wring advantage from Prometheus, as Atlas’s foster brother. Perhaps he had actually already known Pandora would be with Prometheus.
“Last warning, woman!” Kronos snapped. “Hand over the Box, or we take it.”
Even had she had it now, she’d not have dared give such a thing to him. Prometheus had made it for her, and she needed it if she had any chance of saving his future self from the torment Zeus inflicted upon him. Besides, she could not even harbor a guess at what Kronos would do with such a tool.
And her? Was that why they feared her? Because they knew or suspected that even Pandora, a mortal, could wreak unimaginable havoc should she learn to control a device that could send her through time at will.
Pandora kept to utter stillness. Instinct demanded she break into flight, but she could not outrun the Titans. Her only chance of escape lay in remaining concealed and awaiting her moment.
“Very well, then. Zeus, find the woman.” Kronos paused. “And be careful. She is more dangerous than she appears.” Huh. Well, that was news to Pandora. “Hades, with me, and bring the others. Prometheus offers a far greater threat still.”
Hades? Fucking god-of-the-dead Hades was Zeus’s big brother? That was … that was … Wasn’t he a ghost? Oh. Her mind was muddled. Obviously, he wasn’t a ghost as yet, but would become one in the way such things usually happened.
More and more Titans and Men had begun to fill the beach, surely the better part of the crews of all three ships. If not two hundred strong, close enough to make no difference.
“Isn’t all this a bit overkill for one Titan, Father?” Hades asked.
Kronos cast a hard look at his son. “That depends on whether he decides to cooperate or not. You underestimate him at your extreme peril. There are few more dangerous foes in the full ambit of the World.” Then he turned to the other son. “I want the woman alive, boy.”
Zeus shrugged as if he’d never countenance murder. As if it were the most foreign thing imaginable. As if he would not become history’s most sanguinary king.
Careful not to make the least sound, Pandora crept further and further away into the woods. She could not make for the slope or their cottage upon it. Not with all those people converging upon Prometheus. She had to imagine he would make it out of this, as she had seen him again, millennia later. Herself though … her future was aught but certain.
She needed to get away from Zeus. So she skirted around the edge of the mountain, out of the path of Kronos’s war band.
Her heart continued to pound its painful rhythm.
And once again, Zeus threatened to take from her all she loved in life.
22
Kirke
1576 Silver Age
* * *
Six years after leaving Ogygia, Kirke found herself walking off the gangplank of a bireme in Kronion’s harbor. Six years since she had last seen Athene, but their mother had summoned her, and Kirke would never refuse her. She might, had Athene herself sent for her, have made some excuse to avoid this trek. After all, Themiskyra had offered promising seclusion and the chance to study the effects of the moly at greater length, with only the occasional need to venture forth and spread the Nectar.
She couldn’t allow the demand for the substance to fade away completely and thus make it impossible to test future batches, after all.
Satchel over her shoulder, Kirke hopped from the plank and wended by a press of dockhands eager to unload cartons of Phrygian textiles out of Ilium. Such exotic fabrics might fetch a fair few drachmae here, where the aristoi were always trying to outdo one another with the latest fashions.
