In the wake of the Titanomachy, Zeus declared himself and the Olympians the gods of Man. Upon the peak of the highest mountain in that storm-shrouded range, he ordered the construction of temples to each of the twelve Olympians, counting Athene among them.
A temple to Pandora’s own granddaughter, though yet a child. It was strange to think Zeus sentimental enough to bestow his daughter with the honour, though she had not fought against the Ouranid League. Or perhaps his ostensible magnanimity had more to do with carrying forward his claim of divine blood. For if his pure-blooded Titan daughter were not a god, how could the rest of them be?
Hekate alone spurned the title, and Pandora was given little chance to speak to her daughter before the sorceress vanished in some pursuit or other. The rejection that represented remained a splinter she could not dislodge from her heart, even as she and Prometheus returned to Ogygia and the Aviary for a respite she so desperately needed.
It was a homecoming, of a sort, though she had lived here with him in other Ages and could not quite shake the disquiet cast by shadows of the past and the echoes of his future. To be here, now, between such happy times, was like hearing a well-loved tale across a crowded tavern room—pleasant and yet somehow disappointing all at once.
Atop the windswept tower, as dawn smeared the sky in a rainbow of colour, Pandora sat across from her beloved Prometheus, watching his silent meditations. He sat with legs crossed beneath him, wrists upon knees, a picture of stillness concealing the rumbling storm that she now knew raged within the both of them.
“What is the Unseen Order?” she asked, knowing he would mostlike deflect rather than answer. Pandora had sworn to bring down the Moirai for the mockery they had made of Mankind’s free will. She loved Prometheus so fiercely it burned, hot as the fire of the Phoenix that even now smouldered in her soul, kindling urges to immolate all who stood against her. Her love seared, leaving it painful to the touch. Staring at it was like staring into the sun, a process that blinded even as it awestruck.
For her love, she could defy the World and strive against Fate from now until the end of time.
And still, still, a part of her wanted to scream at him for his stubborn refusal to lay bare all the secrets to which he was privy. He knew the Ontos, perhaps even the whole of it, and he thought to shelter her from it. Perhaps in protection of her mind, perhaps in guardianship of the timeline that had allowed their love and its product to arise in the first place. Either way, she had begun to suspect that, like Nemesis, Prometheus was a servant of the Moirai, albeit perhaps an unwilling one.
His sapphire eyes opened, casting her a look that mingled love and pity and other thoughts she could not read. His gaze drank her in, swallowed her whole, until just looking into those depths became the same as finding shelter in his arms.
How desperately she craved that embrace. How easy to dive in, duck her head upon his shoulder, and weather the currents of merciless history rather than strive against them.
Burn it all.
“What is the Gnostic Cabal, really? What is Vulgeth? Where did Kronos go after escaping Tartarus?” She wrang her hands in her rising desperation. “Give me something, Prometheus!”
A weighty sigh tore out of him. As if he might blow out the centuries of burdens weighting him down. As if he fervently wished he could bare the whole of his soul to her. “This is not the first race of Man.”
Even if it did not seem an answer to the questions she posed, all answers had value. All pieces of the puzzle would, when assembled, prove necessary for the course she hoped to chart. “What?”
“Gaia, the Earth, has gone through numerous cycles of destruction, life wiped out, or close enough, only to rise once more. In the past, the distant past which Man now terms the Time of Nyx—for it lies engulfed in the darkness of time before memory—there were other Eras. Other iterations of the World.”
“Vulgeth is from one of those,” she said. Kronos had told her as much, and it seemed the only connection between his answers and her questions. “Are you saying … he went back? That he travelled into this prior Era?”
Prometheus grimaced, a slight shake of his head betraying the war within. For an instant, it looked like answers would burble forth from him like the waters of a fountain, like at long last, she would hold all pieces she needed to truly apprehend the shape of things. But his imperishable composure returned as swiftly as it had cracked. “I looked into the flames, my love, when you told me he had escaped from Tartarus.”
An event that would not happen until she and Herakles freed Prometheus himself, sixteen centuries hence. But she had travelled further into the future than that, and neither Perseus nor Herakles nor anyone else in those times seemed to realise Kronos had escaped. Which had to mean he never returned to challenge his son. This Titan lord, this fallen Ouranid who had taunted her with his withdrawn promise of Gnosis, he might help her put together pieces Prometheus was unwilling or unable to hand her himself.
“So deeply did I search for answers, delving through nigh incomprehensible visions of things that have not come to pass, that could not come to pass within this Era.” He swallowed. “A future that keeps spiralling onward, toward a dark end I dare not name.”
“Are you saying that Kronos … went to a future Era?”
The implication of that stole her breath and squashed her hope like a slug beneath her sandal. That the World had ended many times before could be swallowed, even if choking it down proved painful. But that this iteration, her World, would inevitably end and give rise to others—that her time was not, in fact, unique or special, exempt from the rules governing the rest—it laid bare, once again, her impotence in the face of Ananke.
She had seen the breaking of Atlantis already. What if that was but a single cataclysm within a greater tragedy?
History would not be denied.
From the sympathy creasing Prometheus’s eyes, he read her thoughts well enough. Her beloved reached over, laid a warm hand upon her knee.
She wanted this.
She wanted all the answers.
She wanted the whole of the Ontos.
Even as it, with each revelation, flensed away bits of her complacency. As it wore down the unspoken, inherent sense that something exceptional lay within each individual, each time. But there were no exceptions.
