The flames of the burning temple spoke to him in the voice of Ares. “You gave them up in your quest for ultimate power. There is a price to pay for everything you gain.”
“Not that price. Never.”
“No price is too high for what I offered you, fool! You dared to reject a god!” The fire’s voice softened to silken malice. “Here is the cost of that foolish act.”
“I don’t care.” Kratos hefted the Blades of Chaos. “I’m ready.”
“Are you?”
The Blades of Chaos came to life in his hands, moving with a will not his own. It was as though they had become hands that seized his wrists in unbreakable grips-and they began to drag him toward his family.
“No!” he howled. “Not again!”
He tried to drop the Blades of Chaos, to hurl them away, but they were welded to his hands. The chains in his forearms burned with a fury that blurred his vision with soul-tearing pain. For now the blades controlled him, not the other way around.
“Not again!”
The blades went up.
The blades came down.
And again, now, ten years on, Kratos stood over the bodies of his wife and child. Murdered by the God of War. “You should have joined me.”
Kratos screamed then and fell to his knees. This scream was not one of terror or regret; it was not sorrow that unstrung his legs. It was rage.
The fires in his heart burned hotter than the Blades of Chaos ever could.
“You should have been stronger.”
Kratos could only howl with incoherent fury.
“Now you will have no power. No magic. No weapon.”
Invisible hands seized the blades and yanked them from his grip. They surged away from each other, cranking his arms wide, stretching them out as though he was being broken on a wheel, harder and harder, until his shoulders screamed in pain, as though his arms would rip from their sockets.
At the last, his flesh gave way before his joints did.
The chains ripped free, shredding his arms, leaving the blackened tatters trailing smoke.
“All that is left for you is… death!”
With that final word from the God of War, the burning temple disappeared around Kratos.
Kratos knelt on the night-shrouded rubble of the shattered Temple of Athena, atop her sacred mountain, above her ruined city. A single tear trailed down his cheek and fell to the scree of broken masonry. He brought up a hand, gazing upon the charred ruin of his forearm, and then turned it toward the temple itself, as though inspecting how it dwarfed the great statue of Athena.
When he looked up, his eyes were dry.
Ares faced him across the ruin. He leaned upon his red-hot great sword as one might on a walking stick.
“ No magic?” The growl of god-sized Kratos boomed across the city, raising echoes from distant mountains. “I have enough.”
“ You are still only a mortal, worthless and weak,” sneered Ares.
“There’s a dead woman on the floor of this temple. She said I’m a monster, and she was never wrong.” Kratos stood. He shook the kinks out of his limbs, sending drops of his lifeblood flying in all directions. “I am your monster, Ares, and I’ve come to kill you.”
Ares unleashed a roar of laughter.
Then the fury of Ares erupted in a blast of flame and a thunderous shout like a million soldiers screaming their war cries in unison. He raised the great sword over his head. “Fight!” he roared. “If you dare!”
Ares came loping across the mountain summit, each step shaking the rock and breaking the temple to pieces. Kratos watched him like a stalking lion. And the real battle, finally, began.
Athena watched the fight shown by the scrying pool before the throne of Olympus, Zeus at her side, her heart pounding until she could barely breathe. This was more than anxiety at having reached the climax of a decade-long plan. Astonishingly, she worried for Kratos!
Though she could hardly believe it, she somehow had come to care for this surly, murderous mortal. When Kratos met Ares’s charge by casting a handful of masonry chunks like sand into Ares’s eyes, she caught her breath. When Kratos slipped aside from Ares’s blind sword blows and tackled the God of War to the ground, she gasped. Kratos next pried up from the bedrock of the mountain a boulder that must have weighed tons; now he was straining to bash Ares’s Olympian brains into blood pudding, and Athena found herself on her feet with no memory of having stood.
“Now, this is a fight!” Zeus exclaimed. His eyes danced, and color was high on his cheeks. Tiny lightning flashes showed in his beard of clouds. “None of this modern leaping around, swords and shields all the time-this is the way it used to be.”
The King of Olympus shifted to a more comfortable position on the rim of the scrying pool. “Kratos reflects well on your… judgment-and on all mortal kind. Can you imagine what must be going through Ares’s head right now?”
Athena found her fists clenching and her shoulders twitching as though she could somehow will Kratos to win. When Ares kicked him off and made it back to his feet, she again could not breathe. The Spartan, though, without hesitation threw himself back into the fight.
“This Spartan boy means a lot to you, does he?”
She jerked at the question and then flushed with shame for being so transparent. “Of course,” she said, forcing a veil of calm to cover her anxiety. “As you care for your eagles, Father. I hope for his health… and for his happiness.”
“If he takes care of our Ares problem, at least he won’t have to worry anymore about his curse of kin slaughter. If he defeats Ares, his crimes will be forgiven. I have decreed it so.”
“It is all he still hopes for,” Athena said. “With forgiveness, his madness-the visions, the nightmares-will finally end.”
Zeus looked at her sidelong. “Who said anything about his nightmares?”
She stared at her father. A dull shock of dread coursed through her heart and spread outward to her limbs. “Father, the end to his nightmares-that’s all he’s been working for all these years!”
“And to avenge his family’s death,” Zeus pointed out. “Which he looks fair like to achieve, from how things are going.”
“Revenge is only a part of it!” she insisted. “What good is forgiveness? He doesn’t need his sins washed clean; he needs a decent night’s sleep!”
“Perhaps,” Zeus said. “But what he needs and what he deserves are not the same thing.”
“Father, you can’t dangle this hope in front of him to gain ten years of service and then just snatch it away!”
“I dangled, as you say, nothing at all. Whatever bargains have been struck between the two of you are none of my affair. There is more to this fight than you realize.”
Athena could only sit and gape.
Zeus drew himself up, and all his cheerful mockery and petty gamesmanship fell away. The radiant majesty of kingship shone from his face like the sun itself. “There is no crime worse than to spill the blood of one’s own family. I bear the curse of that crime myself. It is a crime that may be justified, perhaps since I acted to defend myself and to save all of you, and yet I am forever tainted with the curse of my crime. Kratos acted out of simple blood frenzy. That can never be changed.”
“He’s not responsible for this-”
“His guilt will be cleansed. But still, he is responsible. What has been done can never be undone. A deed so vile may be expiated, someday. Even forgiven. It can never be forgotten. He must find peace in his own way.”
“But, Father-”
“Calm yourself, child. Do not fear for your Spartan. I will take care of Kratos for you.” He nodded down at the scrying pool. “Look there: Ares may instead kill Kratos. Then we don’t have a problem, do we?”
“You think Ares will win?”
“He does seem to have the upper hand at the moment…”
Kratos and Ares were locked together, chest to chest, snarling and tearing at each other like maddened bears. Kratos had kept the whole fight inside grappling range, so that Ares never got enough distance to use his weapon effectively. He kept one hand clenched on the god’s sword wrist, and the other he forced up under the god’s chin, driving back his head. The flames of the god’s beard blistered Kratos’s hand, but he had grown accustomed to such pain through all the years of wielding the Blades of Chaos.