Kratos sprinted toward the spot where the Oracle would strike the temple floor, trusting to save her. But she didn’t land.
“Help me!” The Oracle hung from a hawser dangling from a crane affixed to the temple’s roof. Ares’s barrage of Greek fire, or perhaps Kratos’s own lightning, had broken something loose; the Oracle clung for her life hundreds of feet above the temple courtyard. Worse, the hawser swung erratically and threatened to send her over the side of the mountain-down past that sheer cliff. Kratos knew, if she fell that way, all his strength would count for nothing.
He scanned the temple courtyard for any way to get close to her. He saw a structure of rickety timbers that might allow him to cross an upper tier.
“Kratos, save me! You must hurry!” she screamed from high above. This rescue needed to be accomplished now.
He reversed the Blades of Chaos to an underhand, dagger-style grip, then leaped as high as his mighty thighs could propel him up the legs of the marble statue. The same qualities of workability that made marble the choice for statues now made it the choice for a ladder.
With strike after strike, the Blades of Chaos chopped into the marble, driving deep enough that Kratos could use them as pitons to haul himself ever higher. When he withdrew the blades to chop again, the chipped-out gaps left by the blades made admirable footholds. In this fashion, he scaled the vast statue, reaching the goddess’s serving tray in only seconds.
“Kratos! I can’t hold on!”
“You won’t have to,” Kratos said, as he took three steps for momentum, then hurled himself through the air from the very edge of the tray.
He stretched out, and out, and at the last instant the hawser swung back toward him. He struck the Oracle with his shoulder as though tackling an opponent in a pankraton free-for-all. This broke her grip on the hawser and let them fall free…
With one arm around the Oracle’s slim waist, he grabbed at another rope with his free hand. His fingers touched the rough rope, closed-and for a moment he thought they were safe. Then the rope began playing out over a pulley above.
Kratos grunted, twisted, and snapped the rope hard, sending a shock upward that dislodged the rope from the pulley. The fall stopped suddenly as the rope fouled on a hook, and Kratos and the Oracle swung back and forth like a pendulum. Loosening his grip, Kratos slid down the static rope to stand on the temple floor once more. He released the Oracle, who looked at him intently.
“Kratos! As Athena herself has foretold. But you are late-perhaps too late to save Athens.” She moved closer until her face was only inches from his. She reached up and took his head in her hands, one palm pressed warmly into each of his temples. Kratos tried to pull away, but her grip was surprisingly strong-and his strength surprisingly lacking.
“Or is it Athens you have come to save…?”
Kratos cried out, “No! I-” He jerked to free himself, screwing shut his eyes and trying to step backward-but it was too late. Her power spread irresistibly through his mind.
Needles danced across his brain, pricking ever faster and causing discomfort that built into abject pain. His head felt as if it would explode at any instant-and when he opened his eyes he was elsewhere.
HE SAT ASTRIDE A HORSE, a sword gripped in his hand and held high over his head, exhorting his troops upon the bloody field of battle against the barbarians.
“Rally to me, men of Sparta! Though we are only fifty, we will fight like a thousand! Kill them! Kill them all! No quarter! No prisoners! No mercy!” His breath gusted like fire from his nostrils and his heart hammered like Hephaestus’s forge. The stench of blood and death filled him to bursting. A thousand deaths this day would belong to him and him alone! He led the charge…
… at the head of a thousand Spartans as they rushed into battle on his command. He was a hero now, a legend. Spartans vied among themselves for the honor of serving the legendary Kratos. As his victories mounted, their numbers swelled. He carried two swords into battle. When the first dulled from hacking through the bone and flesh of his enemies, he discarded it in favor of the second, which served him through another dozen or hundred opponents until it, too, dulled. Then he gathered weapons dropped by the dead or fleeing enemy so that the carnage would never slow, let alone stop. His valiant soldiers looked to him for guidance-the kind of guidance a legendary commander could offer. He gave them the lessons he himself had learned.
He showed them how to kill. “No quarter! No prisoners! No mercy!”
The warring became nothing more than a stage on which Kratos played. He killed for the God of War, he killed for the glory of Sparta, he killed for the sheer joy of watching men die under his sword. All feared him, ally and enemy alike…
… except one.
His calm and patient wife, who seemed the only mortal with the courage to stand against his fury. “How much is enough, Kratos? When will it end?”
“When the glory of Sparta is known throughout the world!”
She made a gesture, as if shooing away an annoying insect. “The glory of Sparta,” she said with scalding mockery. “What does that even mean? Do you know, or are you just mouthing the excuses you tell yourself to justify your bloodlust?” She gathered their daughter against her skirts, and the flash of anger vanished, replaced by a resigned melancholy. “You do not fight for Sparta. These things, you do only for yourself.”
Before Kratos could respond, he saw his wife change, grow older, and… her eyes began to shed bloody tears, tears that caught fire as they ran down her cheeks. Where they fell, a wall of fire sprang up between Kratos and his wife-exactly like the flames kindled by his own men to drive the enemy before them and to hear the lamentations of their women. The flames blinded him and seared his flesh.
But his wife! She was on the other side… the other side of ATHENA’S ORACLE pulled her hands off his temples and looked at him, her face bloodless. “By the gods! Why would Athena send one such as you?”
Kratos took her by the throat with one mighty hand. “Stay out of my head!”
For an instant, a need to snap that pretty neck shook him like an unfurled banner. His head rang with memories of war trumpets and the screams of terror and despair. He cast her aside, and she fell to the temple floor.
She sat and rocked back on her hands, staring up at him. Then she stood and faced the Ghost of Sparta, unafraid. “Choose your enemies wisely, Kratos.”
She turned from him and walked toward a section of temple wall where he made out the faint outline of a door. The wall beside it was marked with an insignia, where the Oracle stopped. “Your brute strength alone will not be enough to destroy Ares.”
She leaned against the insignia, causing the wall to fade away and the door to open. “Only one item in the world will allow you to defeat a god.”
Kratos squinted at the bright light pouring through the portal; it intensified until he had to use one enormous arm to shield his eyes. Heat boiled toward him as if he stood near an open furnace. What lay beyond confused him. This door should lead out onto the rocky night-shrouded cliffs surrounding the temple…
But through the portal, as his eyes began to adjust, he saw noontide and swirling sands.
If the Oracle found this in any way unusual or disturbing, she gave no sign. “Pandora’s Box lies far beyond the walls of Athens, hidden by the gods across the desert to the east,” she said with calm assurance. “Only with its power can you defeat Ares.”