God of War

TWENTY-NINE

IN THE OPEN GRAVE, Kratos’s skin prickled as though he had felt a sudden chill. He turned and looked up, and, yes, he was where he thought he was: the grave that had been dug beside the Temple of Athena.

Kratos vaulted from the grave and looked out over the burning city. In the distance he saw the immense shape of Ares striding through the city, stomping buildings at random.

“Ah, Kratos, right on time. I finished digging only a moment ago.”

The unexpected voice startled Kratos into a whirl. He crouched, ready to fight for his newly regained life, but there was no danger here. Behind him stood only the old gravedigger.

Now, though, the gravedigger did not look so old or nearly so decrepit, and his voice had none of his formerly senile quaver. Intelligence burned brightly in his once-murky eyes.

“Who are you?”

“An interesting question, but one we don’t have time to answer, my boy. You must hurry. Athens needs you.”

“But… but…” Kratos gestured in helpless bafflement at the empty grave. “But how did you know… how could you know I would-”

“Athena isn’t the only god keeping watch on you, Spartan. You have gone far to prove your worth, but your final task lies ahead of you.”

Kratos turned as a thunderous roar erupted from the direction of Athens. Ares towered above, meting out destruction and laughing in triumph. Kratos felt his rage building. Without turning to the gravedigger, he asked, “Who are you?”

Kratos spoke to empty air. The gravedigger had disappeared like smoke in the wind. There came an answering whisper, a zephyr blowing in his ear. “Complete your task, Kratos… and the gods will forgive your sins…”

The Spartan shook his head grimly. “How can I do this without Pandora’s Box?” For all the weapons he still carried, Kratos knew that they would hardly even muss Ares’s flame-laced hair.

He gazed across the burning ruin of Athens to where the God of War stood shouting his triumph to the heavens. Kratos steeled himself as he remembered an old maxim: Spartans fight with the weapons they have, not the weapons they want.

The hour of decision had finally come. Time to kill.

Time to die.

Kratos started walking. A strangled, gasping moan came to Kratos’s ear as he headed for the chasm he had only barely crossed as the lone bridge was destroyed. It came from within the Temple of Athena. It sounded like a woman moaning in agony, gasping for a last few breaths.

Hearing this, Kratos found himself glad that at least his wife and daughter had not suffered. He had given them swift, almost painless deaths. Cleaner than the woman inside. Probably the Oracle, he thought, and then he stopped.

If it was the Oracle, he had one last question for her.

He trotted up the front steps of the temple. The whole floor was splotched with dried blood. He went to the immense statue of Athena and stood before it, gazing up into the blank marble eyes.

“No box. Only the weapons I had before,” he said, spinning the Blades of Chaos around. “Any advice?”

The marble face of the statue remained stubbornly blank. Kratos turned away and went behind the altar, to the corridor that led to the Oracle’s quarters. A dozen long strides took him to the empty room. Nothing in there but a few dead leaves.

Back in the temple, he looked around for the source of the soft moans. He turned slowly, listening hard. Above. Somewhere above.

The temple roof had been blasted to pieces. A quick sprint and he leaped onto the altar, springing again up the side of Athena’s statue to the head, and then a prodigious leap propelled him to the edge of the sundered roof. He barely made it; his left hand latched on to a shard of a rafter and he hung there, dangling.

Again the visions captured his mind. His wife and daughter in his arms, cruelly slaughtered on the village temple’s floor. The curse of the Oracle that remade him into the Ghost of Sparta. The swirl of his family’s ashes clinging to his skin, forever staining both his flesh and his soul.

Kratos grunted and pulled himself up to the roof.

Sprawled a few steps away lay Athena’s oracle, her contorted position warning that her back had been broken. Many times in battle, Kratos had seen warriors in similar positions. It took hours, sometimes days, for them to die.

He knelt beside the Oracle. She had seemed diminutive before. Now she was frail and old beyond her years. Her eyes flickered open when she felt his fingers on her cheek, and she squinted against the glare of the flames devouring distant Athens.

“You have returned,” she said in a whisper. “You won the box-and lost it. My visions… I saw.”

“Then you know what happened to me.”

She closed her eyes. Her skin had gone waxy, transparent as parchment, revealing the tangle of veins just under the surface. Kratos pressed his fingers harder into her cheek. She stirred.

“Tell me what you foresee,” he said. “Tell me how I kill the God of War.”

The Oracle’s lips twitched. Kratos bent closer to hear.

“The box…” The Oracle twitched spastically. She shook her head. “Why are you chosen by Athena? You are a terrible man. A monster…”

“A monster to kill a monster.”

There came no reply; he spoke to a dead woman.

He stood and stared at her body, hardly more than a child’s in size, no matter the powers she had possessed in life. Now her shade was consigned to Lord Hades’s embrace.

He looked down upon the city, and then into the chasm. How would he get down from here?

He noticed that one building on fire near the base of the cliff was moving, as though it somehow walked through the city-but then the fire turned a face toward the sky, and Kratos realized what he had thought was a building was in fact the blaze of Ares’s hair, seen from above. The god seemed to be contemplating the view.

In the blink of an eye, Ares was wiped from existence. Again, Kratos felt a chilly prickle spread over his skin. That had been too much like the phantasmal Ares in the Arena of Remembrance. If the real Ares was as invulnerable as the imitation…

He didn’t let himself think about it.

Then the voice that haunted Kratos’s every nightmare roared from right behind him.

“Zeus! Do you see what your son can do?”

Kratos whirled-and let his heart start beating again. Ares had no idea the Spartan was there. He’d only willed himself to the mountaintop because it held the most sacred Temple of Athena.

Ares boasted at the sky.

“ You cast your favor on Athena, but her city lies in ruins before me!”

The echoes of that gargantuan voice brought down more masonry around the temple.

The god raised his fist, threatening the sky. “ And now even Pandora’s Box is mine. Would you have me use it against Olympus itself? ”

Kratos, from his vantage point atop the temple roof, saw that the god was telling the truth. Though the massive box was dwarfed by the fist from which it dangled, there was no mistaking the eerie golden glow of its jewels. Pandora’s Box twisted at the end of a long, slender chain, as though it were a locket, an amulet for the god to wear for luck.

Ares went on with his ranting, but Kratos no longer heard him. All his attention was now focused on that slender chain linking the box to the god’s fist. He looked from that chain to the white scar on his palm, then back to the chain.

“Do not strike at the god, you say?” He showed his teeth to the night like a rabid wolf. “Fair enough.”

He said softly, “Ares.”

Hearing his name, the god turned to look back over his shoulder. He sniffed the air, as if to catch a pleasing savor.

“Kratos. Returned from the underworld.” Ares did not sound surprised; he seemed pleased. He lifted his face to the skies again and threw wide his arms. “ Is this the best you can do, Father? You send a broken mortal to defeat me, the God of War?”

Kratos didn’t feel broken.

He raised his right hand, felt the power of Zeus’s thunderbolt surging within him as he took one step forward, and unleashed war upon a god.