God of War

THIRTY-ONE

SWIFT AS THE THUNDERBOLT WAS, it seemed to Kratos to be creeping through the thickest sort of treacle. The interval between it leaving his hand and reaching its target stretched longer than Kratos’s whole life.

He didn’t wait to watch it hit. If it missed, he was dead anyway, and so he put himself where success would do him the most good. The instant his hands were free, he dove for the edge of the temple roof, caught an ornamental carving, and kicked off it again for the statue of Athena, heading for ground level. He was still in the air when the thunderbolt struck its target.

Ares, still shouting his defiance at Zeus, never saw it coming. His first hint was a stinging shock in his right hand-and then he felt no more the weight of Pandora’s Box.

The thunderbolt had struck home and done its job, severing the chain that joined the box to the hand of the god.

“What?” Ares stared blankly at his fist as though it had somehow betrayed him. “What have you done?”

From Ares’s upraised fist to the ground below was fully a hundred feet. Kratos judged where the box would land and made for it with all his speed. His guess was good. The box landed on a pile of rubble only steps in front of him, and he dashed to it before Ares understood what had happened.

Reaching up, Kratos gripped the lid and shoved as hard as he could. Unlike his attempt at Pandora’s temple, the lid slid away without effort, almost as though the box wanted him to open it.

Among the ruins of the Temple of Athena, Kratos of Sparta had opened Pandora’s Box for the first time since it was hidden in the temple atop Cronos’s back a millennium ago.

Kratos scrambled up the rubble and stood on the rim of the box, staring into its warm sunny glow. Whatever was within shone too brightly for Kratos’s eyes. He experienced a terrible instant of vertigo, as though he were about to plunge headlong into a hole deeper than the universe. But when that vertigo passed, his entire body warmed in the light-and the box seemed to shrink, dwindling to the size of a matron’s jewel box.

Kratos cried out as power surged through his body, filled his soul

… and more. His arms rose above his head, and tiny sparks danced between his spread fingers. Never had he imagined such power. Was this what it felt like to be a god?

Then Kratos looked at the God of War and discovered it was not the box that had shrunk.

He had grown.

Where before he had not stood as tall as Ares’s anklebone, he now looked the god square in the eyes. And in those eyes he saw a flicker of fear.

Ares chased away his dismay with towering fury. His face twisted in a contemptuous sneer. “ You are still just a mortal, every bit as weak as the day you begged me to save your life.”

“I am not the man you took that day.” Kratos straightened, and when he spoke, his voice, too, shook the mountain. “ Ten years I have waited. Tonight you die.”

Ares’s sneer expanded into dark laughter. “Athena has made you weak.”

Kratos dropped into his fighting crouch. “Strong enough to kill you!”

“Never!” The god spread wide his arms, as though welcoming the arrival of his favorite son. “Give my regards to your family.”

Instead of meeting Kratos hand to hand, the god tapped some dark and eldritch power that washed over Kratos, and into him, and seized his mind entirely. The temple, the mountain, Athens, and the god himself were all wiped from before Kratos’s eyes, replaced by a village in flames.

He fell to his knees. He knew this terrible place. He suffered it nightly in his dreams, in the visions that racked his days and filled every instant of his life.

Mocking laughter rang in his ears. “I taught you many ways to kill, Kratos. Flesh burns, bones break-but to shatter a man’s spirit is to truly destroy him.”

Snarling wordless rage and denial, Kratos shoved himself to his feet. He staggered through the flames in front of the village temple where he had killed his wife and daughter.

“Do you recognize this place, Spartan? Perhaps you can undo your crime. If you beg me for mercy, I might let you stay your murders.”

Kratos burst through the temple door. His wife, his daughter, alive and unhurt, stood before him like the answer to every prayer to every god of his life. He tried to speak, but no words could break through the grip of the emotion that held his throat closed. Every nightmare during this terrible decade of torment whirled around him, smeared into one another, and took physical form before his eyes.

“Kratos?” his wife said uncertainly, shading her eyes against the flames at his back. “What is happening? Where are we?”

“Daddy!” His daughter threw herself toward him, but her mother caught the little girl’s arm and held her back.

The only time in his life Kratos had felt a blow so powerful and soul-killing was when Ares’s javelin column had pinned him to the door of the Temple of Pandora. “By the gods, can this be real?”

“Kratos?” his wife said. “Have you come to take us home?”

The wall of the temple suddenly shimmered, rippling as if it was no longer wholly a material thing, and out through that shimmer stepped…

Kratos.

His younger self, the Kratos of a decade past, came striding into the temple to slay everything that moved.

HE PUT HIMSELF between his family and his younger self.

His younger self came at him with the efficient, straight-ahead style that had been his trademark. Every step was a strike. Every strike was a step. His younger self was faster and stronger than Kratos was now-but strength and speed were never the only elements of victory.

The air sizzled with the song of the Blades of Chaos. As they flashed around him, opening small cuts across his body, Kratos discovered he didn’t like being on this side of the blades.

The next time Young Kratos hurled a blade outward to whip through the air, Old Kratos stepped inside the strike and caught the blade by the chain. Its heat seared his hands, but he didn’t care. He was used to pain. To win back his family, he could endure anything.

He grabbed the blade’s haft and yanked with all his might. His strength threw Young Kratos into the air, but his younger self was fully as agile as he’d ever been. Instead of tumbling helplessly, Young Kratos turned his flight into a pounce, the other blade raised for the kill.

Old Kratos guessed it must have come as a considerable shock to Young Kratos when his weapon arm was severed at the elbow, so that his hand, blade, and chain all fell harmlessly to the floor. Old Kratos mercifully spared him any additional shocks by slicing his skull into two pieces.

“Are you watching, Ares? You took them once. I will never lose them again!”

As if in reply, spots on the temple walls shimmered again. Three of them.

From each one, a young, strong, fresh Kratos stalked forward.

Kratos cursed Ares as he swung his Blades of Chaos at the trio of himself. “One at a time would have been too easy.”

As the three advanced on his family, Kratos felt his uncontrollable bloodlust return, fed by the familiar Blades of Chaos in his grip.

Kratos waded into them without hesitation, engaging two at once. The third took advantage of this opportunity to flank Kratos and kill his family-but he discovered to his dismay that his attack had been anticipated. And countered. Blood showered from his severed neck, while his head bounced across the floor.

These duplicates were younger and stronger, but they fought with the same blood-crazed ferocity that had driven Kratos to the worst of his crimes. Old Kratos, whatever else he might be, fought to control this blood rage and was no longer a mindless killing machine. As his wife had wanted, he discarded the need only for spilled blood and substituted a fight for honor and family. Within ten seconds, both of the remaining duplicates lay dead before him.

Kratos stood over them, panting harshly, bleeding from dozens of cuts.

Waiting.

“Kratos, please, I don’t know where we are!” cried his wife. “Take us home.”

“Soon, I hope,” Kratos said softly. “There is still work for me here.”

This time, there were five.

They met the same fate as the others.

“You’ll never get them, Ares. Send ten of me. Send a thousand. I’ll kill them all. Not one of them will touch my family.”

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.

Ares snarled obscenities through his locked teeth as he punched with his free hand again and again into Kratos’s kidney. A spreading numbness there buckled the Spartan’s knee. Feeling his joint give way, Kratos-as any Spartan would-used what he was given. If he couldn’t stand on that leg, he could still slam it into Ares’s groin. For every punch the god delivered, Ares took a knee shot to the testicles in return, until even through the firelight of his hair and beard, his face began to show the pain.

Kratos gave over the chin pressure in favor of slamming his elbow into the side of Ares’s head, staggering the already weakened god. As Ares fell off balance, Kratos dived to his left, using his grip on the god’s wrist to make Ares’s sword hand take the full impact of both their weights as they fell sideways to the ground.

Ares’s fist shattered the bedrock where it struck-and the rock did the same to Ares’s knuckles.

Kratos got his knee between them then and kicked the god away from him, while twisting the sword from Ares’s grasp. Ares scrambled drunkenly to his feet, cradling his broken hand. Kratos rolled up smoothly and slashed the air with a blurring flourish of Ares’s sword.

Lips peeled back from the Spartan’s teeth. “ How do you like your monster now?”

Ares straightened and let his injured hand fall to his side. His feral predator’s grin was a near-exact mirror of Kratos’s face. “You have no idea what a true monster is, little Spartan. You get one lesson.”

Ares hunched over, and his face blackened with strain. Bursting through the impenetrable armor on his back came jointed appendages, writhing like the legs of some nightmarish scorpion, armored in black shell, and ending in blades longer than the columns of the Parthenon. “You won’t live to need another.”

With a clatter of his bladed limbs, Ares sprang like a wolf spider, every blade angled to drink deep the Spartan’s blood.

Kratos backpedaled. This was a foe he’d never imagined. Ares pressed the assault, stabbing his scorpion blades in concert, in a complex sequence impossible for Kratos to counter. The Spartan kept giving ground, parrying furiously, cutting at the limbs when he could, but their black shells were no less impenetrable than the god’s mystic armor. But that mystic armor, Kratos noted, did not cover the war god’s whole body…

The next time Ares came for him, Kratos lunged and ran ten yards of red-hot great sword through the god’s inner thigh.

On a mortal, that would have been a deathblow; cutting the large artery in the thigh would cause a man to bleed out in seconds. Gooey black ichor came oozing from the wound, but the only real effect it seemed to have was that Ares now used his blade limbs to lift his body from the ground. Just as they had served him for a sword arm, they now served him for legs.

He lunged at Kratos again and again. Kratos gave ground, trying to circle, seeking any opening in the limbs’ baffling weave of death through which he might strike at the god’s more-vulnerable flesh. He was tiring rapidly now. Without the Blades of Chaos to feed life energy into him, his wounds stayed open and poured his strength out on the courtyard’s flagstones.

For one brief moment, he actually thought that he would lose… but in that instant, the faces of his wife and his daughter rose up within his mind and ignited a fury unlike any he had ever known. All his strength roared into him, and more. The next time Ares came for him, Kratos smashed aside one limb’s stab with such force that its blade struck a neighboring limb-and cracked its armor.

Kratos blinked at the obsidian ichor that leaked from the crack. A weakness?

Ares drew back, his confidence shaken for a moment, but then he gathered himself for another assault.

Let’s make it final, Kratos thought. He let his knees buckle, so that he swayed dizzily, and let the sword droop out of line. When the tip scraped on courtyard stone, his fingers opened nervelessly and the sword clanked to the ground. Seeing such weakness, Ares sprang into the air, leaping high so as to fall upon Kratos and impale him on two blades at once.

But as the war god leaped, Kratos’s weakness vanished and he sprang up to meet Ares in the air. His hands closed around the joint of one blade limb, and he twisted and bent it with irresistible strength, jamming its needle point through Ares’s cuirass into the god’s chest. Ares spasmed, and they Sell-and Kratos wrenched his weight to fall on top of the god, letting his weight drive the blade limb fully through Ares’s chest and out the back.

With a roar that was more outrage than pain, Ares flung Kratos from him and spidered to his feet, staring down at the immense blade jammed through his chest with a kind of bafflement Kratos recalled all too well-it was exactly how he’d stared at the column with which Ares had speared him at the Temple of Pandora.

Ares fell to his knees.

Kratos rose and recovered the war god’s sword.

Ares stared up at him, in his eyes only fear and pleading.

“Kratos… Kratos, remember… it was I who saved you at your hour of greatest need!”

Kratos raised the sword.

“That night… Kratos, please… that night I was trying only to make you a great warrior!”

Kratos thrust Ares’s own sword through the god’s chest.

As he limped away from the god’s corpse, it began to twinkle with myriad lights. The lights turned into dancing motes that pulled away from the body and then swirled upward to the heavens, until with a blinding flash and a clap of thunder like the end of the world, nothing of Ares remained.

Kratos was battered, and bleeding, and, once again, only a man. He stared in awe up at the vast blade that only moments before he had wielded so lightly. Now he wasn’t half as tall as the blade’s narrowest point was wide.

He limped back over the broken walls of the ruined temple to stand before the statue of the goddess.

“Athena,” he said, “your city is saved. Ares is dead.” He gazed up into the blank marble eyes. “I’ve done my part. Now do yours. Wipe away these nightmares forever.”

The shimmering glow of immanent godhead played over the marble. The eyes came alight, and the lips moved as Athena spoke.

“You have done well, Kratos,” the statue said. “Though we mourn the death of our brother, the gods are indebted to you.”

Kratos stood a little straighter. A dark chill trickled into his veins.

“We promised your sins would be forgiven, and so they are. But we never promised to take away your nightmares. No man, no god, could ever forget the terrible deeds you have done.”

“You can’t-Athena, I’ve done everything you asked! You can’t! ”

“ Farewell, Kratos. Your service to the gods is at an end. Go forth into your new life, and know that you have earned the gratitude of Olympus!”

The shimmer of the goddess faded. Kratos stood alone in the ruined temple above the shattered remnant of the city. He stood there for a long, long time.

Then he started walking.