Pandora’s heart was broken, its pieces scattered across the sea of time, the sum of it beyond the chance of ever becoming whole once more. Such were her thoughts as she stumbled back to the manse she shared with Prometheus, outside Tyros. History had played out as it had always did, and she remained trapped within the coils of the ouroboros. She had, given the chance, chosen not to prevent her child self’s worst torments and abuses. She had chosen to stand by and allow Europa, her adoptive mother, to be abducted and raped, all in the name of the preservation of a timeline loathsome beyond endurance.
Thus, dolorous, drained of Pneuma, and filled with choking bouts of self-loathing, did she collapse on the beach before her house, unable to bring herself to even open the door. Instead, she beat the sands as if she might pulverise them and, along with them, tame the currents of history that so abused her and her kin.
History was merciless.
As she stared up the firmament, the stars seemed to swirl, the heavens caught in a maelstrom overhead, as powerless to escape the currents of Fate as she was. If Hekate was right and, given what Prometheus had said of the Elder Gods, Pandora believed it, then, somewhere out there, beyond mortal perception, lurked cosmic predators. In the dark between the stars, in the fathomless depths of the Okeanus, they waited. Hungry.
Tiamat, the Leviathan, was but one such abomination, and it alone fit to consume the whole of Gaia if she failed. And, if Pandora sought to avert the future, she had failed at every step along the way. Not once, so far as she could tell, had she changed the course of history. There had to be some other way, some route past this obscenity, toward a destination she could stomach for herself, for her loved ones, for all of Mankind. Her fingers dug rivets in the sand. For a moment, she relished the grit, the sheer, unadulterated realness of it. Faced with invisible, unknowable horrors, forced to look again and again upon the all-encircling coils of the ouroboros, this grime alone became the thing she could touch and thus ground herself upon.
She could surrender now, could she not? She could say, this much is enough. Let Fate attend to itself, for were it so inviolable, it could well enough endure without further input. She could stay here, in this house, beside her husband, and just live. That, and wait for him to be imprisoned in Tartarus. Wait for her past self to grow to adulthood, start her journey, and begin this cycle all over again.
A sigh tore from her, and into it she poured her doubts and her despair, for there was no solution in hiding, and one could not outrun the pace of time itself. So, at last, she pushed herself up off the beach, rose, and brushed the sand from her peplos as best she could.
There was … such darkness, out there in the World.
But Pandora refused to believe darkness was all there was. Time and again, as oft as it took, she would carry the flame to push back the shadows. Always, always one more attempt to find a way free of these coils.
She found Prometheus upon their portico, legs folded, staring out at the waves. Mostlike, he sat here awaiting her return. Perhaps he’d known she was on the beach and had left her there to sort through the moil of her thoughts, to face the battle of her despair, trusting her to emerge victorious in the end. He did not speak or even look to her as she came to sit beside him, but she felt the warmth of his regard brushing across her, nonetheless. Their passions forever blazed like the Flames within their breasts, and she knew he would not turn from her, in this, or any, life.
“I think …” Pandora swallowed, for though an incipient plan had wormed its way into her mind, it seemed blasphemous to give voice to it. And still, it was her last, most desperate ploy to find a way free of the maze in which she remained lost. Prometheus had his gambit with the Destroyer, and maybe, when time played out, his would prove the path of Man’s last hope. Still, she knew he saw but fragments of the future and thence extrapolated everything else and, thus, might fail. Pandora too had to be willing to bet all she had, her soul, upon the ends she sought. Succeed or fail, she had to be able to say to herself she had taken every chance, even those others would not dare.
So she cleared her throat and began again. “I will see the Moirai themselves.”
Now, slowly, her husband turned to look at her, his expression unreadable save for the hint of dread in his starlit, sapphire eyes. Fear for her, perhaps, and behind it, something else. A realisation they had always been heading here, and he must now deliver her to his mistresses or else refuse Pandora. That, she suspected, he could not do. “An audience with them will not avail you. They shall not be swayed from the course set at the dawn of time, least of all by the will of a mortal already accounted for within their weaving.”
“Nevertheless,” she said, firming both her jaw and her nerve. “I will look them in the eyes and I will hold them answerable for the obscenities they have made of our lives.” She was proud that only the slightest tremor had slipped into her voice, considering what she proposed. She would confront, with ire in her breast, beings beyond gods, beyond time itself, and demand they explain themselves to her. The audacity of it surpassed even what Men would term hubris until it became something else, something without name or precedent.
