They wove a chain of black metal and starlight and baby's cries and flowers and manacled him with them, and then drove those manacles into rock with nails of ice and hate and walked away, left him on the mountain to watch the flames eat the world alive.
It was three days before Prometheus woke from the stupor he'd been put in, and his first reflex was to get up. He managed jerk upwards sharply when the chains clanked and pulled him back against the rock. The red-haired god turned his head, breathing quickly, and looked at the chain; it was an oily dark color, a metal he didn't recognize. The flower petals were wilted away to almost nothing but their potency had stayed.
The place where he was chained way very high, and had a very beautiful view of the valley underneath. One week ago it had been lush and green, and people had been scraping out their lives from the herds of caribou and mammoth that criss-crossed across the lush plain. Now it was black and charred and still, impossibly, leaping with flame that jumped and cracked over the blasted landscape. Prometheus stared at it in slowly dawning horror. It wasn't acting like fire should. It certainly wasn't acting like the fire he'd brought, warm and tame, claws sheathed. It jumped and skirled like a dancer, or a cloud of locusts, and it burned on and on with a horrid aura of sated-ness. It had eaten its fill and now it danced and gamboled in play.
Prometheus, known in another age as Michael and another world as Peach, wondered where all the life had gone.
A hot gale of wind blew up and tore at his hair, made sweat shine on his golden skin. Prometheus gasped deeply and coughed at the dry smoky taste of it. The blasting air brought tears to his eyes; he blinked them away and looked – up.
It seemed a dot of ash at first – a dark dot on the tea-colored sky, circling and circling. Prometheus might have been bound but his senses were still sharper and more expansive than a mortal's, and he knew it was alive.
Alive, but nothing friendly.
When the bird – because that's what it was, a dark bird, a dark raptor with a steely beak and sulfur-yellow eyes – landed it birched on his thigh, sinking in its talons and cheeping softly with pleasure. Hot inhuman blood ran down Prometheus' leg and he gasped softly at the feeling. Where his blood touched the ground a thin smoke ran up, dissipating quickly. He knew the bird. He recognized the eyes.
"Loki," he said – in another world, he could have said Lucifer, or Lone – "what have You done here?"
The bird spoke in a voice like stones grinding together. "Isn't it beautiful?" Loki asked him. "I find the irony lovely, Myself. The fire You brought to warm and teach the people is eating them alive. They'll fear strangers for a long time, and wizardry for longer still."
Prometheus could have said a number of things there, but he held his peace, only wincing a bit as Loki shifted and settled further onto his leg. "Not all of them will die, of course," Loki continued. "I'll keep some alive, for one. And humans are rather resourceful on their own. It should be entertaining to see what they come up with to survive on a world that's constantly on fire. Maybe I'll help them, since it will certainly be easy enough to twist their society around, they're so angry and crazed at this already."
"They won't be Yours forever," the Power in man-shape said. "Even You can't hold them this way forever. Someday a wizard will rise…"
The eagle looked at him with one sea-dark eye. Prometheus could see his own face in it, bent. "Nothing is Mine forever," Loki replied. "Everything dies in the end, after all… still, it should be fun while it lasts. And in the meantime, of course, You sit up here and just watch Me work with these people. I don't think any of them will be too eager to help You, since You're the one who brought this on them in the first place."
Prometheus gritted His teeth and swore, inside. The pain in His leg had settled deeper now, made itself comfortable. It was simple enough to think around but not pleasant. Physical pain was something of a novel sensation.
Mental agony, He thought, would soon become nastily familiar.
"Don't be too sad, Brother," Loki said dryly. The great bird twisted His head to look at Prometheus upside-down. "You'll still have Me, after all."
Later, Loki ate His liver while Prometheus laughed.
END
11/5/05