I sit up. Across the sheer drop to my right, a man rolls a boulder up a steep hill. He’s muscular and strong, his thighs and arms bulging from his work. He concentrates on his task, never once looking at me, or at anything else around him. His feet dig into the hillside, pushing, pushing harder, pushing up. After an endless stretch of labor, he’s almost there, almost to the top he’s worked so hard to reach. He’s right across from me now, high above the valley floor. He wrestles the boulder onto the narrow summit of the daunting rise and then straightens, wiping his forearm across his brow.
The boulder tips over, flattens him with its first full rotation, and then crashes back down the hill. I gasp, my heart rate picking up for the first time since I got dumped here. Almost immediately, the squashed man re-forms into his previous shape. He stands again, loosening his shoulders and shaking out his huge, strong limbs.
I stare in shock. He looks…fine.
The boulder finishes its long, silent descent, traveling what looks like a well-worn path. My unnerved gaze swings back and forth between the man and the rock.Did I just see what I thought I saw?
He begins to walk back down the hill, his stride neither energetic nor dragging. My pulse thumps wildly. I know what’s going to happen. I know that when he’s behind that boulder again, he’s going to get down low, brace his hands against the rough and ragged side, and then start to push all over again.
I scoot back from the edge of the ledge and track him with my eyes. Dread takes a sharp chisel to the stony numbness still encasing me, hammering out a solid crack.
That’s Sisyphus. The ancient king was punished by Zeus himself for his egotistical behavior, underhanded cleverness, and chronic deceit.
Time feels like it has no relevance, but it must take him hours to perform his task again. I don’t take my eyes off him. All the way down. Starting back up again. Roll. Step. Roll. Push. Slowly up the hill.
I swallow hard.
The harsh shriek of a bird of prey shatters the protracted silence I’ve been existing in. It’s the first sound I’ve heard since the God Bolt hit Sykouri. The strident call pierces my eardrums like the tip of a lance, and I jerk my head around to the left.
A terrifying sight greets me. My eyes widen. Not far from me, but across a space of sheer rock too wide for me to possibly reach him, a huge male is strung up and brutally chained to the side of the cliff. His head hangs in defeat, his long, brown hair trailing into the tangled, curling mass of his beard. He doesn’t fight at all when the giant eagle falls upon him and tears into his side, ripping out his liver and eating it in one bite. The bird’s beady eyes flash over me. Gore and blood drip from its beak. It tucks its wings against its sides and then plummets back down into the valley, the arrow-fast dive taking it quickly out of sight.
The harsh tang of fear bursts across my tongue. My nostrils flare on too-fast breaths. The eagle’s call reaches me once more from far away, mixing with the new sounds I hear all around me. There’s nothing novel or distinct in the noises, just the muted whir and whump of a world that’s not so stagnant after all. And all the while, the defeated colossus of a man just hangs there, his face contorted in pain, waiting for his body to regenerate.
Which it will. Because it always does.
Shaking all over, I get my feet under me and then scramble the few steps back toward the rock wall. The cool stone bumps my back and blocks any hope of further escape. My eyes jump to the right—endless, drudging boulder roll. Jump to the left—man pierced with a hole.
Oh my Gods.
The sickening scent of my neighbor’s fresh blood and bile hits me with each new panicked inhale. My senses reignite, and the breeze that made no sound for so long now seems to carry the desolate sighs of a thousand miserable souls. I lean away from the gaping valley with all its shadows below and try to fuse with the sheer cliff face. The Gods only know what I’ll see if I really look down.
I turn my frightened gaze back to the broken and bloody male sharing my bleak stretch of rock. Some legends say Prometheus escaped imprisonment with the other Titans after the War of Gods only to be punished later by Zeus on the mortal plane for stealing fire from Mount Olympus and giving it to the humans of the worlds. I guess the legends were wrong. His torment isn’t being carried out on any mortal plane. Heisfar below the Underworld, in a place reserved for torture, eternal suffering, and endless pain. A hero to mankind but condemned by Zeus for his daring impertinence, Prometheus is in Tartarus. And so am I.
CHAPTER 24
A man pops into the empty space right next to me, scaring the magic out of me—and I was already on the verge of a pretty epic panic attack. Gaping up at him, I try to tilt my whole body away without really moving. I’m rooted to the spot, yet I want to run. Like a rabbit, my heart thumps out the fast and unsteady rhythm of fear against my ribs.
He’s hard to look at full-on, andmanisn’t at all the right word for him. Male—yes—and of alarming and gigantic proportions. He’s neither handsome nor ugly, neither old nor young. Long hair the color of dark smoke flows around his massive shoulders. His full beard is a shade lighter. He trains on me frightening, bronze-hued eyes with oddly large pupils, and all I can think is that he’s power incarnate, that he’s here for me, and that he’s definitely not a friend.
I dart a glance to the left and see Prometheus looking over at us. I’d thought my neighbor was beyond caring what went on around him and his own pain, but his eyes are wide and filled with questions and life. Our gazes catch for only a heartbeat, and something squeezes in my chest that has nothing to do with my own fright. He’s not defeated at all, which makes his daily plight a whole new twisted sort of beast.
The bronze-eyed male props his staff against the rock wall and crosses his arms over his muscular chest. He doesn’t spare even a glance for the Titan chained to the cliff wall next to us. His fearsome, metallic gaze stays locked on me, and every instinct in me screams that that’s a terrible place for his focus to be.
With nowhere to go, I can only stand there and watch the colossus that must be the King of Gods, my eyes hiccupping over him because he’s just too frightening and stupefying to really look at. I swallow, but there’s no banishing the lump of dread in my throat. I think I’m looking at Zeus. I think my life sentence is about to fall.
No, not life.That concept has no significance in this place. Eternal. Everything is eternal here.
He doesn’t speak. Helooksat me so fixedly it hurts. His smoky hair and beard give him an almost sage appearance, but it’s violence that rolls off him in waves. His eyes bore into me like twin fires, boiling metal in a forge. They scrape me, peel off layers, burn. His blistering stare marks me for the miscreant I am.
Flinching away, I wait for some kind of horrible ax to fall. I can’t help glancing at his staff. It’s tall, the dark wood topped by a swirling opaque ball. A petrified vulture’s claw holds the ball in place, the long, time-blackened talons curving up to cradle the orb. Staffs like that pack an incapacitating magical punch—and I have no idea how they work. I shudder.
“Come.”
The God’s voice thunders through me, resonating in my chest. I don’t move, both frozen in place and confused. There’s nowhere to go.
“It’s time to go,” he announces, looking me up and down with obvious annoyance.
Not taking my eyes off him, I brace myself against the cliff wall and do my best to stop shaking. “Go where?” My voice is the smallest it’s ever been.Oh Gods, please don’t say it’s somewhere worse than here.
