Medusa: Fate's Game Ch. 15

"I... I..."

"She can't speak, Darian, when you're torturing her." Otrera put a hand on his shoulder, and he snapped his head around. She winced when he did, as if expecting him to hurt her — he almost did — but kept her hand there anyway. "Ease up."

He snarled, white mist leaking out of the mouth of his mask, but managed a nod. Forces ceased, his grip relented, and he lowered his hands to let the vile creature fall to the cave floor. She landed on her palms and knees, coughing, sputtering, crying.

"You can't be Bellerophontes. You can't! If... Moros tricked you... into wearing the mask, he would—"

Darian squatted down in front of the helpless goddess, and growled, more of the white mist seeping from the mask's mouth and over her.

"I did put on the mask, so I could be with Medusa by Moros's hand. But after learning what you did to her? After learning what Moros would do with my body as his avatar? I couldn't allow it." He reached down, grabbed the woman's hair, and yanked her head up. "I asked you why. Answer me before I start removing limbs."

"You don't understand! We... she's always... always... managed to..."

Otrera squatted down next to Darian, and poked the girl in the forehead with an arrow tip. "Is that jealousy I hear?"

"She does not deserve wisdom!" Athena scowled and pushed the arrow away. "Just a human, just a lowly human. Does not deserve her wisdom, her words. She has done nothing to earn it! Her soul is... it... she should be punished!"

Darian froze, and looked at Otrera. The Amazon was starting to frown much as Darian was, and she turned to face him.

"Punished for what? Why?" he said.

"You don't understand, human. Your souls, creating life, will, emotion, as easy as you breathe, while we must spend centuries to express even the smallest inkling of their influence!" She reached out, took Darian's knee, and squeezed. Not enough strength to come close to hurting him, but she was trying anyway. "And she... always... better than me. Every time, every rebirth, she... so beautiful... loving... wise... with the strength to defend her walls and home. For thousands of years, her soul has taunted me! And Poseidon... he..."

"Would rather have her than you?" Otrera laughed and shook her head. "Seriously?"

"You know nothing about gods," the bleeding creature said. "We... for millennia we... push, pull, and contend with forces beyond your comprehension. You exist because we control it. You exist because the sea, the sun, the seasons, the air, the animals, we weave them into a world you can live in." Athena tried to stand herself up, but collapsed back down onto her knees. Knowing she was dealing with Bellerophontes instead of Moros was giving her some courage apparently. "To have... my temple sullied by him... with her? Unforgivable. She... must... be punished."

"So you damn her soul to a thousand years of punishment in Tartarus? She doesn't even remember what she did in past lives! She didn't even do anything to ever offend you! She simply..." Was the only person to ever reach you, Darian. Medusa was special, in a way only he understood. In a way only Athena understood.

And Athena hated her for it.

He got up, and started to shake. His fingers squeezed into fists until they ached, and his jaw clenched until his bones and teeth threatened to crack. That was the reason? Some petty, juvenile jealousy? Some age-old hatred based on nothing? Nothing at all? This goddess of wisdom was this utterly pathetic?

The cave started to shake. Braziers jingled on their chains, the flames upon them grew, and the wailing dead around them started to scream. Rocks danced along the cavern floor with the vibrations until they nudged against the walls, away from Darian. And the white glow of his eyes began to leak the same mist as his growls did.

"You are just a human," Athena said, but she had to raise her voice to get over the growing roar of the earthquake. "You wouldn't understand. I was a fool to think you worthy of being one of my chosen. You—"

Darian pointed his palm down at the bleeding woman, and started to squeeze. Just like with Hades, the woman fell back down again, this time rolling around on her side with her hands grabbing at her chest and neck.

"Darian," Otrera said.

"I served her, Otrera. I did her bidding. I roamed the world, killing monsters and saving kingdoms in her name. This! This is what I served." He squeezed harder. Athena cried out, clutched her chest, and started to spasm. No tears, but he didn't expect a god to be able to cry tears. Instead, she cried out in pain, and more as he squeezed the air in his palm, and started to rip apart her insides.

Until Otrera punched him in the back of the head.

He stumbled forward and turned around. The Amazon clutched her punching hand, and shook her wrist as she started hopping in place a little.

"Oh my gods that was like punching a rock! That mask has done some serious work on your body."

"Why did you—"

"Because!" After shaking her hand a few more times, she walked up to him, grabbed his armor by the collar, and pulled him close to her. "They are depraved things, I get that. You're not the only one here who dedicated much of their life in the vain pursuit of appeasing them. But you heard her, they're... they're necessary."

Darian snarled at Otrera, but lowered his gaze to look at Athena. He had released her when Otrera hit him, and the goddess was struggling to get back to her hands and knees again. Silver blood dripped from her mouth and nostrils onto the stone.

"You think it's worth it? She's a self-absorbed, delusional, idi—she's practically Stheneboea!"

"...I think if you kill her, the repercussions could be huge, and countless deaths could be on your hands."

The temptation crawled up and down his skin like bugs, itching at his pores, demanding to be scratched. So close, so fucking close. Just a snap of his fingers, a flick of his foot, anything, and he could destroy her. He could crush her godly body into paste, like Patrius. He could leave her a heap of bones or whatever gods had, and she'd never torment anyone again.

And Medusa would hate him if he did that.

"... why did you ask Patrius to kill her, at that last moment?" he asked again.

Athena coughed up more of the silver fluid, and tried to get up once more. She failed.

"Through Patrius's eyes, I heard of your plans to speak to me, with the power of the sisters. I will... not... let her... speak to me. She is to suffer, not find contentment! She is to be nothing more than a tool to spread my name."

Otrera brought her foot back, and landed her sandal square in Athena's face. God or not, Athena was far too damaged to protect herself, and the Amazon's foot crashed into the woman's chin, and sent her flying onto her back against the cave wall.

Darian raised a brow at her, and she shrugged at him.

"I said we shouldn't kill her, not that she didn't deserve some punishment."

Damn that woman. As the itches faded and the fury started to bleed away, he chuckled, and rubbed at the back of his head where she punched him. A cruel way to cut through the blinding fury in his skull, but, he smiled. It was exactly why he was happy she was coming.

"You're right, you're right. Just... let me do something here." He pointed his palm at the goddess once more, and raised it. She floated up against the wall until her feet were dangling. Chains that hung from the stone snapped out for her hands, and cuffed around her wrists. She whimpered and squirmed, but hung her head after a moment as her efforts proved fruitless. Silver dripped from her toes and splashed against the stone next to the groaning and crying dead around her.

"Will those hold a god?" Otrera said.

"For now."

"You... will pay for this... Bellerophontes."

"Will I?" He got up closer to her, and stared up at her with his mask. It was enough to make her wince, ready for more pain. But he brought none. "What will your family think when I explain to them what happened here, and that you took Medusa's soul to Tartarus when it did not deserve to be? What will they think when they realize you brought this upon them?"

"..." Athena looked away, and frowned. Silver dripped down her split lip where Otrera hit her, and Darian smiled inside his mask at the sight of her discomfort.

Every fiber of his being wanted to split the goddess open and see how long it took her to die. He could still remember her when she first appeared to him after Iobates's request to kill the Chimera. Her golden mask, how she removed it with a smile, touched his arm, told him of the majestic creature Pegasus. He could still remember wanting to do everything to please the goddess, how blessed he felt to be offered aid by her, how much it inflated his sense of self-worth.

His hands started to shake again. Otrera put a hand on his shoulder, before reaching down to take his fingers into her palm, and pull him away from the hanging goddess.

"Come on, we have a job to do."

Darian forced down his bile, and walked next to the Amazon deeper into the cave. He could hear Athena coughing, and small sobs too. Good.

Ahead the cave grew darker. Less fires, less dead chained to the walls, until the cavern started to narrow and the walls closed in. The darkness was lit by his glowing eyes, but only just, and Otrera held his hand a little tighter as she started walking on soft feet. The cavern was closing around them, becoming a tunnel, and considering the opening had teeth, it didn't feel far removed from walking down a monster's throat.

But once the pinch of the monster's throat forced them to crouch, it started to open up once more. And as it did, he heard the sound of wind. Firelight started to fill the cavern ahead, and as they entered the larger room, the walls reached up and overhead to dangle a single stalactite down through a large hole. It was from the hole in the rock floor that the light emerged, and the howling of tempests.

They both stood over it, looked down through the hole, and gasped.

At first, it looked like another cave, but as the rising heat tore upward and smacked his face, the smell of sulfur filled his nose. Streams of red and yellow fell down colossal mountains of jagged rock, pouring over ridges and turning into falls of the bright, searing color as they splashed into rivers of the lava. There were other rivers, with different hues of color, and every so often, a new smell rose up to the top of the cavern, something that stung the eyes or nose or tongue.

The cavern below them was deep, deep enough he could not judge its scale as he tilted his head from side to side, peering down upon Tartarus through a hole in a cave floor. Craters and canyons dotted the black rock, and streams of lava flowed along cut, sharp, and twisting paths. Raised pillars of stone were everywhere, hundreds of feet high against the massive ravines that scarred the horrible landscape. There were no roads, everything was a mess of sharp rocks, stalactites and stalagmites that hugged together so no spot on the floor of the cavern was flat, and any that were had bright liquids coursing through them. The green rivers gave off large amounts of smoke of the same color, and the clouds of putridness flowed through the thick air until dispersing into the heat.

One of the spots of rock opened its eye.

Otrera jumped back with a squeak, and got down on her knees before peering back over the edge of the hole. Another eye opened, and from the cavern below, a face stared at them. Stalagmites jutted from its face, gargantuan, and where the entity's nose may have been, there was a mountain. Where its mouth would have been, a dozen of the monstrously huge stalagmites bore up through what must have been cracked teeth and ruined lips.

Darian swallowed again, but not bile. Disbelief. He tried to wrap his mind around what he was seeing, but the scale of it didn't make sense, didn't fit into a shape or size he could realize. There was a face, staring up at them, and unless he was mistaken, the face was the size of a city. Its eyes were white except for the center, where a maelstrom of dark colors twisted and turned over each other. Storms for eyes.

"... a Titan," Otrera said. "H-how? How can..."

As they looked around, the curvature of a shoulder, the bending a knee, the arch of a bent back, all of it started to appear in the landscape. Darian got down on his knees as well, stuck his head into the hole, and winced as he stared out to the sides. There were no walls. Tartarus wasn't a cavern at all, but an entire realm like the Asphodel Meadows, with no end in sight. Big enough to hold the Titans. And as the different colors oozed from the mountains, he realized why they were different colors. It was their blood, and different Titans bled different things.

"How you going to get Medusa out of there? Or even find her, for that matter?"

"... stay here."

"What? You—"

"The heat, the gases, it would all kill you. Just touching any of those rivers would kill you ten times over. Stay here." He could see it in the glow, in the sizzling waves the mask captured that his human eyes could not. It was a realm of torture purely by stepping into it.

"Ok! Fine, but... how are you going to get out? Or not splatter when you land?"

He stood up, tilted his head to the side until it cracked, cracked his knuckles, and shook out his arms. "Fly."

"... um, what?"

"I'll be back soon. I can feel her, I can get to her."

"No no, I mean about flying. What are you—"

He stepped into the hole.

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~~Medusa~~

She could only stare up as Athena kicked her in the face.

"Enjoy pain. Enjoy agony. This will be your home for a thousand years. How dare you presume to speak to me. How dare you presume to be better than me!" Athena reached down, grabbed her hair, and yanked her head back. "I am a goddess! You are nothing but a soul."

Medusa could feel her hair in Athena's fingers. Normal, human hair. It was long, down to her waist, and it was soft bronze. And more than capable of shooting pain through her scalp as Athena yanked on it harder, but the pain was buried. The air sizzled and burned her skin, her eyes, her sinuses, her lungs. She could feel the flesh pop and bleed, gush blood, pus, and heal it all back in a matter of seconds, only to do it again.

"What... what have I done to you?" she said. Talking made her tongue blister, and she closed her mouth tight the moment the words were out. Her eyes watered, and closing them did little to hold off the wrenching pain of her eyeballs boiling in their sockets. They healed, and she managed a glimpse at the goddess once again before the pain returned.

"You existed." Again Athena kicked her, this time in the side, hard enough for ribs to break. "Perhaps a thousand years will teach your soul its place."

The goddess kicked her one last time, before she began to hover away. As casually as walking, Athena flowed up into the searing air, white chiton flowing in the wind, her beautiful skin undamaged by it all.

Medusa thought she could deal with the pain, the solitude. A thousand years? She'd done a hundred before, she could handle this she thought.

But she couldn't handle this. She curled up on the rock platform, and tried to look out at the valley of Tartarus. The air alone was boiling her alive, and every time she tried to get a handle on the pain, it overwhelmed her, and she cried out. There were other screams too, far and away, and they managed to reach her between bouts of her ears melting and healing.

Try to think about Darian. Stop thinking about the pain, block it out with him. Think about how he found you. Think about how he held you, bandaged your wound. Think about his lips on yours, how great his silly smile was. Think about holding him in your coils, and how he loved being there.

Coils. She took a peek down at her legs, and sighed. Long, curvy, beautiful legs, cracking and oozing thickened blood over her skin. Her body was slightly see-through, which was a classic sign of being a ghost, she figured. But the wounds felt more than real, looked more than real; guess ghosts can bleed. Her white chiton had magically been there, when she awoke from death in the river Styx. A moment later, Athena had grabbed her, yanked her out of the blood river, and walked her through the underworld, through the pillar of light, through the Asphodel Meadows, through a canyon of torture, and brought her here.

A strange way to get reacquainted with legs.

She vomited blood. Attempts to push out the pain failed, and she wailed into the air around her. Again she looked around, over the edge of the pillar of rock she sat upon. No way down, no stairway or climbable rock, just a sheer drop down hundreds of feet to the rivers of red and green and orange. Far into the distance, mountains dotted the horizon. No sun, no moon, just firestorms and maelstroms of lightning cracking against green mist. This was her new home, jagged mountains, rock, the explosive thunder, and an unending horizon in all directions, with nothing but fire and brimstone. And pain.

When the landscape opened an eye as wide as a village, she gasped and fell back onto the rock behind her. Gasp turned into wheezing cough and gargling blood as the air ruined her insides. No one around to help her, no one around to alleviate the pain, no one to soothe her.

Truly alone once again, except instead of a hundred years of pain and solitude, it'd be a thousand years of sheer agony, isolated on a tiny island of rock, in Tartarus itself. Athena's punishment yet again, only a million times worse.

She laughed, and rolled over as a mix of blood and fluids she did not know coated her lips.

Darian. Was he alive? What happened? Athena said her warrior Patrius had killed her at her order. Why did the goddess hate her so much? What could she have possibly done to deserve this? And what about Darian? Would Athena try to kill him too?

She managed another small smile, and curled up into a ball. He'd be fine, he could survive anything. Even if the Fates tried to kill him, even the gods. Even if everything in the world and afterlife tried to kill him, he'd be fine. Take comfort in that.

So she clutched her chest, cried out as sizzling pops filled her ears, and held onto her smile as the burning scorched into her bones.

"Never thought I'd see you smile in this place."

She sat up with a scream. Blood again coated her lips, and she looked down as she coughed it up. But as she spat her crimson liquid over the rocks, the pain faded away, and it did not return. The wounds healed, the blurry air faded away from around her, and the sizzling heat ceased. She could breathe again without torment, and as her ghostly body repaired the damage in a matter of seconds, she gazed up at the man over her.

A masked man, like Athena, except his mask was black.

But she recognized his armor, his body, his shape. She recognized the wrinkles of his knuckles, the hair the mask didn't cover, the sound of his voice despite how it sounded different. Her heart stopped, and she forced herself to look away. He wasn't real, just a hallucination to taunt her before her torment resumed.

But the masked Darian got down onto a knee beside her, and put a hand on her shoulder.

She forced herself to raise her eyes, and blinked at the sensation of his gentle warmth on her skin, cool compared to the heat of moments before.

"You're... real?" she said.

"Of course I'm real."

"You can't! You can't be real..."

"... I'm sure we've had this conversation before." The man sighed, and put his other hand on her other shoulder. "You were... gods it looked horrible. How long have you been in here?"

He wasn't an illusion. He was real!

"I... I... only a few moments, but... it was..." Later! She could talk about it later. "Darian! Oh gods, how did... did you..." No, he didn't look see-through like her, if that was enough proof he was alive. "The mask! What's going on?"