Thanks to verwohnt and Orochi warrior x, who reminded me I wasn't alone in the universe. This chapter is for you guys...and the next will be the last of Resurrection...
Chapter Thirty Five: The Seal of Tartarus
Iwanami squeezed her eyes shut, expecting a meteoric splash as Harusame hit the water that ran alongside the crater, or perhaps an ugly bone shattering crepitus as the unfortunate faller went splat on the bars of Tartarus itself, but there was no sound, not even after a prolonged moment. When she finally dared to look she saw the girl had not plummeted.
Harusame was dangling precariously from the ledge with only one hand.
Kronus snorted a gurgling laugh, coughing up yet more blood, and lurched a few steps in her direction. Iwanami noticed that the wet crimson patch where the dagger had plunged into his back was spreading. 'How many more times must a goddess with green eyes try to ruin all my best laid plans?' he yelled, and lifting his hand he fired a spark of energy in her direction.
Harusame reacted swiftly, swinging herself to one side so that the shot blasted into the wall, missing her by inches.
'Aya-san!' she screamed, her voice made louder as the circular walls acted as an amplifier. 'Please! Please!'
Kronus glared at the girl, barely hanging on. 'I do not have the strength or the time to keep up this target practice game with you Persephone,' he said, 'so Aya, as you call her, will oblige in my place.'
Iwanami arched an eyebrow as he came back towards her, and folded her arms. He voiced what she was thinking.
'I know whose side you are truly on, my little pawn, but you won't even know yourself when I am through with you.'
He pressed a hand to her forehead and a Siberian coldness suddenly swept through her. She fell to her knees. Her mind turning painfully numb, Iwanami wondered if this was what he'd done to Cassie. It was total sensory shutdown, brain-freeze of the worst kind.
'Go ahead,' he snapped, his voice setting off manic urges within her, as though every nerve end was trained only to follow his commands. 'Keep her out of my way until the spell is finished. Slit her pretty throat open if you must. She is a goddess now after all, she can take it.'
With Harusame's begging screams now sounding as though they were coming from a different dimension, Iwanami felt her legs move to the circumference of the top of the cage where poles protruded from the ground. A mystical bluish haze of flames burned brightly from them, and she yanked one from the ground and blew out the fire in a singular huffing whoosh, holding it high and wielding it like a spear.
'Finish the brat! It's what you've always wanted!'
'Erm, no. Not any more…'
While Kronus was busy unfolding and reading his incantation parchment, Iwanami levelled the weapon within her hands and aimed high. She could see, even from far away, the Harusame could not hang on for much longer.
'Aim right for her heart! Even if she doesn't die she will suffer!'
'If I aim a little to the right…'
'FOLLOW HIS ORDERS!'
'No, I don't think I will thanks.'
Arching her arm back over her head and thrusting forward, she let the pole fly like a javelin. It struck the rock beside the girl, exactly where she'd wanted it, and a trembling Harusame's eyes met hers as she gratefully used it as a lifeline to cling to.
'Thank the gods she inherited sportiness from her mother. Connor had all the muscles of a refrigerated cheesecake.' Iwanami smirked, then with a remote expression turned back to Kronus. She really was a special Ker and his mind control had little effect; though of course he didn't have to know that.
'There,' she said dully, careful to keep her eyes blank and her tone monotonous. 'The girl will not bother you again.'
'Good,' Kronus muttered, and winced as a spasm of pain wrenched through his chest. He could feel his internal organs beginning to give out. 'Let us begin.' He grabbed Iwanami's wrist and pulled her back with him to the very edge of the pit. He then cleared his throat and raised his hands, the parchment grasped tightly.
'APERIO VORAGO!' he bellowed.
A greenish blue liquid poured from an unseen beaker into an unseen template, and Iwanami watched in awe as it began to ripple its way over her head and over the cage, elongating and forming the shape of a twelve pointed star. There was a rumbling, as though the earth itself might split open, and a resounding creaking sound, like an antique door not opened in years, echoed through the caves. The din bounced off every surface in a grinding, groaning clarion.
Kronus let loose a giggling, shrieking howl of victorious laughter as light shone from under him as though the furnace of hell had exploded, and the bars of Tartarus slid to each side with a final massive groan, revealing what lay beneath.
'My titan brothers!' he rasped, falling to his knees on the edge of the cage. His voice quavered with emotion. 'My army of comrades. I have returned for you.'
Iwanami gulped, and very cautiously peered down. She almost pulled back again as a pair of blood red eyes met hers, their golden flecks glowing with hateful intensity.
They regarded her for a second, and then swept over to Kronus. They belonged to an older titan, his tawny hair streaked with grey and his complexion sallow. He was wearing the ancient, leather-clad apparel of a warrior.
'Kronus,' said Hyperion, in a voice that roared like the firing of a million cannons, 'you dare to show your ignoble face after you deserted us?'
'You contemptible snake!' added another in harsh tones. 'You will not face your punishment at our side after we gave up everything to fight for you?'
This reproach belonged to Phoebe, a brawny red-headed titaness who looked middle aged in human years. She along with most of them, noted Iwanami, would have claimed great beauty were it not for the shadows beneath her eyes and lines drawn into her face, as though she'd been in extreme and prolonged pain for many years.
Kronus was perplexed, hurt at her exclamation. 'Why…no, my dear Phoebe,' he said, his eyes wide. 'You…you have it all wrong!'
The other titans began to gather, muttering and growling, in the centre of the pit, and turned their glowering faces upon their king. A Cyclops and other fearsome creatures grunted eerily in the shadows. Iwanami's attention was drawn to one in particular. He did not walk confidently and angrily like the others, nor did he join in their noisy protests. He was a beautiful man with a lean muscular figure, a handsomely strong jaw line and soft waves of platinum hair falling into his milky complexion, and he was standing and staring up at Kronus with anguished disbelief on his face.
'You!' he cried with fury. 'You stole my body! Give it back!'
'You would stoop so low as to steal the guise of a human?' said Crius, another titan with a bushy black beard. 'We suspected this, but to see you here in that scrawny, broken mortal body looking like death…you are a joke!'
'No!' cried Kronus shrilly, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the edge of the cage. This wasn't the way things were supposed to happen. 'No no no! All I did…I did so that we could rejoin the world anew…just us!'
'Have you learned nothing?' thundered Hyperion, 'from a millennia of incarceration? There is a time to win and a time to lose, a time for war and a time for peace. Our time is over, you fool. We are through!'
'I am not through! My time has not come yet!'
Phoebe's hopeless, despairing gaze silenced his hysteria.
'Do you suppose,' she said, 'that even if we escaped here that the Olympians would allow us freedom for long? We are old and tired, Kronus, not fit for a war the likes of which we fought in our youth. Can you not see what our power-hungry foolishness cost us? We have no desire to continue any more pointless bloodshed. We wish only to pay for our crimes, learn from our mistakes, and hope that someday the Olympians may see fit to rethinking our sentence.'
Utterly gobsmacked, Kronus just stared at his old comrades. Tears began to sting the corner of his eyes, but compared to the pain of his dying body it was nothing.
'Has it all been in vain?' he whimpered. 'Has everything been in vain? Am I the only one who believes…that it isn't over until it is over?'
'Kronus…it was over long ago,' said Phoebe a little more gently than before, and he put his face into his hands.
'How can you be content,' he sobbed, 'resigned to that endless monotony of misery? Where there is no fresh air and no trees, just a dungeon of darkness; where we cannot even look forward to the sweet release of death. I cannot go back there. I cannot and will not…'
A cool hand was placed on his arm, and as he looked up through his tears he felt a rush of emotion.
The blurred vision of a woman, her russet hair reaching her shoulders and her golden tiara sparkling in the blue flames, parted her full black lips in a smile just for him. Was he losing his mind? It couldn't be…but he didn't care. He was never so overjoyed to see her.
'My dear Nemesis,' he breathed shakily, embracing her on his knees, pressing his head to her stomach. He held her tightly, desperately, crying into her dress, and she began to stroke his hair.
'Lord Kronus.'
'Oh heavens how I missed you,' he said, his words muffled as his lips pressed against her. 'I swear to the sun in the sky that we shall never again be parted. You still need me, do you not? We can still turn this pitiless, unjust world into something worth salvaging. Do you understand that I had only good intentions, Nemesis? Do you forgive me? Can you forgive the appalling way I treated you?'
She pulled him to his feet, and tears streaked unashamed down his face as he drank in her miraculous appearance. Something was strange though; were her eyes always that colour? Not violet blue, but glittering cherry red.
'I do not forgive,' she said slyly. 'Were those not your own words, you goddamned sonofabitch?'
Kronus could only stare at her in wounded, childlike confusion as she placed her hands squarely on his chest.
'This is for Polly, every woman you manipulated into doing your dirty work, and every time you took my body against my will,' she said. 'Goodbye, Mr Titan.'
And she shoved him hard.
