“I am madness.”
She pushed until the syringe pressed against bone.
“I am rage.”
She pushed until a quietcrackresounded in his skull.
“I am fury.”
She pushed until the bone gave way to soft tissue.
His screams were guttural, the agony penetrating his marrow.
“I’ve had many names throughout my lifetime. When I was hiding from Zeus, I was Lytta in hopes it would make it harder for him to find me.” She smiled a soft, sad smile as she pressed the syringe.
Brooks wavered in and out of consciousness as the metal wire loop scrambled what was left of his fractured psyche.
“It never did,” she continued. “As my madness grew, it became harder to see what was real, to tell who I was and who his essence was making me become. I did terrible, unimaginable things.”
Black tears fell from her ruined eyes and streaked down her cheeks as she depressed the syringe, repositioned, and pressed it back into his skull.
“But I wasn’t born like this.” She shook her head with one hand on his cheek to hold him still. “I was born pure and good. My essence, my soul, was clean. I was born Pandora. I was the only human created untainted, full of goodness and hope. But to be Pandora means to be all-giving, and that’s what I did.”
Sheshooshedhim softly as she retracted the instrument of torture with nothing but his moans and the squelch of bloody tissue to fill the silence.
“I was only Pandora for a span of minutes, but what he took from me felt like a lifetime’s worth. He made me immortal so that he could dump the madness he couldn’t hold in his own soul into mine.”
Lytta wiped the leucotome on a cloth and grimaced as she tossed it aside. She lined the instrument up with the other eye and slowly penetrated beneath the brow bone.
“I was a garbage can for his weakness, the bearer of all of his burdens,” she continued. “And every year, when it was too much for him to hold, he would find me. He would find me and he would rip me open from the inside to satisfy his need for cruelty. And when he was finished with me?” She huffed a laugh, but it held no humor.
Crack.
“He would leave me on the ground to knit myself back together.”
She depressed the syringe, repositioned, and pushed the loop back into his brain tissue.
“No one deserves what I’ve been through. But I lost sight,” her voice broke. “I lost sight of who I was, and all of the rage and madness and fury coursed through my blood like a disease. It rotted me from the inside out.”
Brooks begged silently for mercy, or even death. Anything to be rid of the white-hot agony pounding in his head.
Why hadn’t Hades taken him yet?
A clatter sounded to the side, and a blurry Lytta still sat atop his prone form wiping her red-stained hands on a cloth.
“He made me this!” She yelled and gestured toward her ruined body. The scars on her throat ripped open anew, the skin tattered and raw as inky blood stained the collar of her tattered gown. Blood oozed from every orifice, black staining her teeth and spilling from her mouth like the rot within couldn’t be contained.
“I have given myself to you so that you may rise and conquer. I have sacrificed the Earth to ruin so that you may restore balance. You are the Great Void of Chaos, the Soul Eater. I have released you from your prison and given you death so that you may wake.”
The agony in his head dulled to throbbing, and the throbbing dampened to an ache. The blood rushing through his ears slowed to a whisper and he struggled to keep a grip on the room.
He was dying.
A soft tickle touched the remnants of his awareness, and she whispered, “Forgive me, friend. For it was the only way.”
Hewasrunning.Theworld was dark and cold, rain falling in solid sheets that stung his skin as he raced through it. The panic coursing through his veins was too thick to focus on the path ahead. He looked over his shoulder, his mind urging him forward from a threat that loomed behind.
Run, run, run! Just as his eyes adjusted to the darkness ahead, something caught his foot and threw him to the ground. Unforgiving twine wrapped around his ankle and pulled, intent on dragging him back toward the deepest shadows.
