Fighting to hold the memories at bay, he stumbled blindly down the corridor as if he could outrun them, heading on and not caring where he blundered as long as the nightmares did not seize control of his mind. Blocking his way was the sprawled body of a warrior clad in Athenian-style armor, a sword still clutched in his lifeless hand. The only marks of the battle he had fought were the black reeking smears of undead blood that painted him from head to toe. Kratos stepped over the body and found scattered bones farther along the tunnel, which sloped gradually upward to an arched portal.
He looked through the doorway onto a hellish scene: a vast chamber lit by the fires of bodies of dead men. The stink of this black smoke was worse than the undead blood. At the center of the red-lit chamber, lent a gruesome illusion of life by the dancing flames, rose a huge pyramid of skulls.
A thousand skulls.
He knew the number because he had raised such pyramids himself in the past, when he served the god who was now his enemy. Pyramids like this one had been raised with the heads of the barbarian horde after Ares had answered Kratos’s prayer.
Try as he might, he found it impossible now to hold back the visions. Memories roared into him as the ocean floods through a shattered dike. The room, the temple, the quest for Pandora’s Box-all were ripped away from his mind, and the visions that seized him were of years ago, the good years, when he had been the youngest captain of Sparta, leading his ever-burgeoning corps to victory after victory…
THE BATTLEFIELD WAS SILENT, and it was the silence of death. He could hear only the crows and the vultures in the distance, cawing out to announce their bellies were full with the flesh of fallen soldiers. No other sound. Not even a moan of a wounded but still living man.
He heard no survivors because he had ordered it so. He had ordered complete death.
No quarter. No prisoners. No mercy.
His men had driven hard through the weaker army, and when their commander had tried to surrender, Kratos had slaughtered the envoys where they stood. Any soldier too wounded to leave the field had his throat slit by camp followers for the bounty, an ear taken as a trophy. Kratos paid his camp followers according to how many they slew .
Blood saturated the ground; walking among the piles of corpses was very much like slogging through mud after a heavy rain. Except this was blood. Gallons of blood. Blood from ten thousand slashes, stabs and slit throats.
HE FELT A MOMENT’S DIZZINESS- and the next he knew, he was mounted on horseback, waving his blood-soaked sword.
“CHARGE!” The command ripped from his throat and set his army in motion. Kratos bent low and swept his sword along as he rode. Warrior after warrior died as he rushed past. The bodies piled up. He laughed aloud as the Spartans rushed to…
… defeat.
Kratos lay on his back, staring up into a sky the color of an ugly bruise. Heavy clouds boiled above the battlefield, and the barbarians killed without quarter. All around, Kratos heard his finest soldiers dying as the barbarians slaughtered them. He tried to sit up but could not-one of his arms was pinned to the earth by a barbarian spear. He reached over and yanked the weapon from his arm.
Towering over him was the barbarian king, a vast spiked war mallet dripping with Spartan gore clutched in a brawny hand. His grin was scarlet with the blood he had chewed from Spartan necks. He strode forward, lifting the unstoppable mallet to crush the life from Sparta’s greatest general…
AND IN HIS NIGHTMARE, Kratos could not stop himself from yelling the same words he had screamed on that black day more than ten years ago.
“Ares! God of War!” The words echoed in his ears and his memory at once. “Destroy my enemies, and my life is yours!”
– -
THE BARBARIAN KING LIFTED his war hammer but hesitated when a flash of lightning illuminated the carnage. The king looked over his shoulder… and then above… and then he screamed in terror.
The clouds were pulled apart by Olympian hands, and down from the rent in the sky climbed a man larger than a mountain, with hair and beard of living flame. At the first touch of the god’s hand, the eyes of the barbarian king’s nearby soldiers burst open like drawn boils, black blood spurting from mouths and ears as lifeless bodies crumpled to the ground. Then the eyes of the men farther from him did the same, and then those beyond, until-as Kratos had demanded-all the enemies of Sparta lay dead, all save one.
Kratos screamed as the Blades of Chaos wrapped around his forearms and the chains burned through flesh to fuse with bone. He lifted the blades forged in the lowest level of Hades and stared at the scintillant swords. Without hesitation, he rushed forward, swinging the Blades of Chaos in front of him. When the barbarian king’s neck settled into the V formed by the blades, Kratos drew back hard. A scream of victory ripped from his lips as the barbarian king’s head leaped from his shoulders to go rolling across the battlefield.
Ares’s shadow fell across his newest protege…
KRATOS STAGGERED to find himself in the Temple of Pandora once more, his hands filled with the Blade of Artemis.
He mopped sweat from his forehead with a trembling hand.
He was grateful the visions had stopped when they did; who knew what other memory might take hold of him? That was a question he could not bear to answer.
“Athena, you promised to erase the memories and end these visions,” he muttered under his breath. “You cannot fail me.”
Fires burned, and the stench of flesh roasting gave him another moment’s pause. This, too, was familiar from his years in the service of the God of War, though it mercifully triggered no new flashback. Kratos slipped to the side in a crouch, keeping the great blue-gleaming blade low but ready.
Snuffling and gobbling sounds came from nearby-grunts and lip smacks, like a glutton at a feast. He cat-footed around the mound of severed heads, leaning to catch a glimpse of the feaster.
A Cyclops hunkered down, chomping at what could only be the haunch of a human. The broken yellowed teeth crushed the femur, allowing the Cyclops to noisily suck out the marrow. When it finished, it casually tossed aside the broken bone and hunted for another meaty haunch. As it ripped the second leg from the corpse, some feral instinct warned the creature of Kratos’s approach. It lifted its head, blinking its one great eye; its mouth hung slack, shreds of human flesh dangling from its carious teeth.
Kratos brought up the Blade of Artemis and kept coming. This Cyclops was merely a beast-it was not like its brothers of old, who had been great artisans and stoneworkers. This one looked too stupid to know what a pyramid was, let alone to build one. The monster could not be alone. “Where are your partners in this grisly feast?”
By way of answer, the Cyclops sprang to its feet and snatched up an iron rod longer than Kratos was tall. The bar hissed through the air and struck Kratos’s sword just above the hand guard.
Kratos turned the blade to meet the Cyclops’s weapon with its edge-and a hand span of iron sheared away from the bar and skittered off along the floor.
The monster’s eye bugged out, and it turned to flee. To Kratos, a retreating enemy was only one he hadn’t killed yet. He leaped after it, swinging the Blade of Artemis overhand to catch the beast on the back of its right shoulder and slice clean through without resistance. The creature’s huge meaty arm and gnarly knuckled hand fell to the ground.
Before the Cyclops understood how badly it had been hurt, Kratos spared it the shock. His next swing sent the blue-shining sword directly to where neck met shoulder. Muscle and bone gave way to the magical blade. When the razor edge severed the beast’s spine, its legs could no longer carry it away, and the creature pitched face-first to the floor, with a resounding thump.
As Kratos reached the doorway leading into another room twice the size of the one where the Cyclops had feasted, a wave of heat threatened to singe his beard; it seemed most of the next room was given over to a huge fire pit, not unlike the one outside the temple’s gate. Suspended over it by a long chain was a cage, and within the cage lay a body. Slowly, the chain lengthened, lowering the cage into the fiery pit.