Time had, by turns, flown and crept, muddling into an endless whorl. Pandora could not have said how many years had passed whilst she languished in dungeons beneath Vulgeth. Perhaps two, perhaps five, perhaps longer still, for in the perpetual gloom of the lamplight hold, she had lost all ability to judge.
She had passed the years thinking, meditating, or working through the training the Amazons had imparted to her, trying to keep her edge. But time dragged on and it grew harder to bear. She played games in her mind, solving mathematical puzzles, writing poetry, or pursuing any other complex activity to stave off the madness.
Sometimes, one member or another of the Cabal would come to speak to her and demand answers about the Box and its workings. Pandora offered them precious little information, but nor did she dare outright refuse them. If she did not speak to them at all, they might stop coming down here. And theirs were the only faces she saw, hateful though they proved.
And then Prometheus had come, alongside Kronos, and looked at her, not quite as though he knew her, but as though he knew of her. Perhaps, though he had not before encountered her, prescient insight had warned him of her coming? She could see no other explanation for how intently he had stared into the depths of her eyes as though peering into her soul. The sensation had left her jittery and unnerved.
Prometheus had departed with Kronos—Vorsanos, here—before Pandora had gotten a chance to speak with her beloved, and she was left with no choice save to return to her contemplations.
She had been wrong about so many things. She ought not to have come to Vulgeth, yet she had been so certain she could find the answers she needed. Hekate had warned her she would lose the Box here—a thought the interminable years had given Pandora ample time to stew over—and still Pandora had dared to believe she could cheat the future.
What was the start of this? Pandora chuckled to keep from screaming.
Maybe it was when a misguided timewalker stumbled into the midst of the Gnostic Cabal and showed them time could be breached.
It did not surprise her when Prometheus returned, alone, what she judged to be, perhaps, two days later. Pandora rose and moved to the bars to her cell, gripping them to stare into her beloved’s sapphire eyes. Her orichalcum fetters clanked against her cage. With her gaze, she implored him to help her. “Prometheus …”
“I do not know that name.”
Pandora was trembling, terrified beyond sense she might lose this one chance at her freedom. A mischosen word could send him away. After so long down here, she had begun to imagine spending the rest of her life rotting in the dark. Then he had come to her, a beacon of light taunting her with a single way home. And she ached for fear of losing sight of it. “Not yet, I suppose.”
“Then it is all true, isn’t it? Who are you?”
He had known her, when first he had encountered her on Helion, during the Ambrosial War. Already, he had known her name. Because she was always meant to tell him now. “I am Pandora.” How much was she to tell him now? Could the future be made better—or worse—by her speaking too freely? Or by her reticence? She had mulled over those questions in the time since she had first seen him here and come up with only a half-formed answer: she would tell him as much as she needed to in order to secure his aid, and no more.
Pandora had come here to gain knowledge of the past, not to impart knowledge of the future. Despite all that had befallen her with the Cabal, perhaps she might yet escape this place with some of that knowledge.
“Well, Pandora, here I am called Amirani and I have seen the device which brought you here.”
The Box! “I need it.” It came out harsher than she’d intended, bursting from her mouth before she could stop herself from speaking.
Amirani shook his head. “The Cabal guards it too closely. Though they cannot use it—and are uncertain why—they have spent years adapting it to build devices which they can operate.”
Indeed, Vorsanos and the others had come to her many times, asking why the device would not work for them. Prometheus, in creating the Box, must have somehow limited it. Pandora could use it, and her granddaughter Kirke had used it. Perhaps only those of her bloodline could manage it. Though she had succeeded in bringing Herakles along, so she was not certain of the details. He called Athene—another of Pandora’s granddaughters—his adoptive mother. But if he was also of the line of Athenian kings, perhaps he too shared Pandora’s blood.
“The others believe your presence here, a woman from outside this time, may serve as proof that Fate is not immutable.”
Oh, how fervently Pandora would have liked to believe that. With such desperation she clung to that hope, rekindling its flame each time the ravages of Fate extinguished it.
And Amirani read the thought writ plain upon her face. “Neither of us remains quite so sanguine.”
She clutched the bars even tighter. “Time is an ouroboros.” Amirani closed his hands over top hers, his grip gentle. “If you do not know me,” she asked, heart hammering at his tantalising closeness, “why then do you look at me that way?”
“I did not know your name. I never said I did not know you. The intangible stuff of you that is but motes of Light contained within a temporary shell, that part, I have known from the first days.”
His words, the sound of his voice, caressed. And yet the potential import of his meaning—that she had either lived before or he had seen her in his visions eons before her birth—slammed into her and left her gasping for breath. It took her shamefully long to remember how to work her tongue, much less make use of it. “You have to set me free. I cannot remain here. No matter how hopeless Fate seems, I have to try to make right all the inequities of time.” She stopped herself short of revealing their daughter and the terrible future she would unleash.
Amirani nodded once, not seeming the least surprised, and from his black coat withdrew a ring of keys. After selecting one, he unlocked the bars to her cell, then motioned her forward to remove her orichalcum fetters as well. As those chains fell away, a rush of Pneuma flooded back into her and Pandora shuddered from the sudden return of her power.
The Phoenix wakened to life and flames burst from her hands, leapt along her arms, and singed her tattered tunic. The spirit inside her had lain quiescent so long its ire now threatened to explode. Before the flames could burn away her clothes, Pandora closed her palms together and willed them back inside.
“You hold the Flame,” Amirani said when she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, mouth hanging open.
