“I said,” Zeus snapped, “don’t worry about it.”
“With every passing second, more of my city burns!”
Zeus gestured down at the images in the reflecting pool. “Watch.”
As Kratos pushed Pandora’s Box out from the temple into the morning sun of the Desert of Lost Souls for the first time in a thousand years…
Zeus gestured, and the scene in the pool changed.
Athens lay in flames. Ares strode through the streets, stamping fleeing Athenians, laughing as his sword slashed whole neighborhoods to rubble and hammer blows squashed houses flat. His evil laughter echoed from the mountains to the harbor.
As the God of War lifted a fist to smash another building, he paused, fist upraised, and turned to the east as though an invisible hand had tapped him on the shoulder.
“So, little Spartan, you’ve recovered Zeus’s precious box.” The flames of Ares’s hair blazed like the sun. His eyes burned with a fury not to be contained, and his entire body shook as anger fed his muscles. “You will not live to see it opened!”
Ares reached down to snap off one of the great marble columns of the Parthenon. The god hefted it as though the column were no more than a child’s toy spear but one with a deadly, jagged point. He ran four ground-shaking steps and hurled his prodigious javelin, which streaked upward into the sky so fast it vanished with a thunderclap.
Ares turned back to his task of destruction, a sneer on his face. He did not even bother to watch his weapon strike.
“Good-bye, Spartan. You will rot in the depths of Hades for all eternity.”
His laughter pealed over the ruins of Athens like the doom horn of Hades himself.
“Father, stop him-”
“Athena,” Zeus interrupted sharply, “your plans are at an end. There is only one more thing for you to do until this is all over.”
Athena lowered her head, worrying about Kratos’s fate and that of her city. “And what is that, Father?”
“Watch.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
KRATOS’S FEET KEPT SLIPPING. He moved closer to Pandora’s Box, got his legs under him, and pushed harder. The monstrous box moved slowly. Weighing an imponderable amount, the box proved difficult to slide even across the polished floor of the antechamber. The earthquakes caused him to lose what little traction he found under his sandals. Even as he finally shoved the box through the titanic doors, more masonry tumbled and shattered around him.
With the box in the doorway, Kratos stopped to gather his strength for one last hard shove and found himself gazing up at the beauty of the desert sky: vivid cerulean, shading toward indigo in the west, studded with clouds that took on curious shapes that chilled his soul.
But there was more up there than clouds. Four specks drifted high in the sky, slipping in and out of feathery clouds only to reappear as dark, almost invisible dots warning of approaching danger. Harpies!
His attention returned to Pandora’s Box. He had no idea how he’d lower it from Cronos’s back, let alone drag it across the Desert of Lost Souls. He reached up and gripped the lid. No matter how hard he shoved, the lid refused to budge. Taking the entire box back to Athens would be easier if he possessed whatever power lay locked within. While it might not grant him the ability to move this massive box from Pandora’s temple all the way to Athens, he guessed it would make the task easier.
He tried to slide the lid, lift it, swing it to the side, but whatever force locked this box was more than he could overcome. Perhaps it could only be opened after he took it to Athens, or the box might have to be placed in Athena’s temple, where her oracle could use it to bestow the power upon him. Kratos wished he knew more, but he didn’t have the time to waste in speculation.
He started pushing again. Getting out of Pandora’s temple had to be his first goal. When finally he had shoved the box fully outside, the massive doors of the temple boomed shut behind him. He stopped to catch his breath and to choose a path. He squinted at the sky and the harpies on their way down.
And one of those low clouds suddenly developed a large hole in the middle, as if Zeus had shoved his finger through it. A ripple spread outward from the hole, like the ripples from a stone tossed in a still pool. Kratos’s scowl deepened.
With only an instant’s flash of white, his chest was struck by an invisible hammer, wielded by an invisible Titan. Nothing in all his decades of battle had ever hit him so hard. The impact blasted him backward off his feet and drove him flying into the vast stone door of the Temple of Pandora.
Pinned to the stone door, blinking his incomprehension at the immense white marble column sticking out of his chest, Kratos fought to breathe. The spear of marble had struck so fast, he never saw it until he was already hit. He looked down and knew he had only seconds of life remaining in his rapidly failing body. He could not speak, for his lungs had been punched from his chest along with his heart and liver, stomach and spleen. Weakly, he scrabbled at the column. He knew that only the last drops of blood in his brain gave him awareness in these final seconds…
And even in death, the nightmares would not leave him.
He again saw his career, his life as a man and as a weapon in the hands of the war god. He saw his victories beyond number, murders beyond all imagination, but two murders he didn’t have to imagine. He remembered them.
He saw them every night in his dreams.
He saw the ancient, wizened village oracle and again heard her words: “Beware of blaspheming ’gainst the goddess, Kratos! Do not enter this place!”
If only he’d had the wisdom to heed her words…
And the massacre in the village temple replayed in his mind once more as it had every night for ten long years: the murder of the priests, the slaughter of Athena’s worshippers huddled there, and then the final two, a woman and a girl, only silhouettes against the fires he had set to burn the temple and every building in the village… those last two silhouettes, who didn’t fall to their knees, didn’t try to run away, didn’t beg or plead for their lives…
Kratos again felt his blades sear through their flesh, and he knew when their souls fled, sent to Hades as he had done to so many others. He had killed too many for too long not to be an efficient soldier. Too efficient.
His final two victims had not fallen to their knees, had not tried to flee, did not beg or plead for their lives because Kratos’s wife and his daughter could not believe that their husband and father would ever hurt them.
Kratos again felt himself fall to his knees, and then it was he who begged, who pleaded, who wished he could flee what he found there. Once more he was haunted by the sight of his beloved wife, his precious daughter, lying in pools of their own blood, slaughtered like lambs by his own hand.
“My wife… my child… how?” The words had choked him-a final, fatal question that he asked of no one, because he was the only living creature within that burning temple. “They were left safe in Sparta… .”
The flames of the temple had answered him-in the voice of his master.
“You are becoming all I’d hoped you’d be, Kratos. Now, with your wife and child dead, nothing will hold you back. You will become even stronger. You will become DEATH ITSELF!”
On that night, Kratos realized his true enemy was the god he had served all too faithfully. Upon the cold bodies of the only two people on earth he had ever loved, Kratos swore a terrible oath. He would not rest until the God of War was destroyed.
The ancient village witch, Athena’s oracle in that tiny village, had come upon him as he stood by the pyre on which he burned the bodies of his beloved wife and his precious daughter. For only a moment, her senile cackle had transformed into words clear and strong, in a voice from the gods themselves.
“From this night forward, the mark of your terrible deed will be visible to all. The ashes of your wife and child will remain fastened to your skin, never to be removed.”