Chapter 53: Vision
Silence hit him first.
This silence was not hollow. He knew silence like that; it came on a cold battlefield long after the shots had stopped. But this was dense and physical and pressed against his eardrums.
It tasted of ash and burnt copper. It filled his lungs with the same uncoughable smoke.
He opened his eyes.
He stood on a vast expanse of black glass, no sky overhead, no stars anywhere. Distant, planet-sized mountains rose up from the black, their peaks a tangle of lightning that pulsed with a slow, hungry, golden light.
The lightning never struck the ground below; instead it looped through space to hover and vibrate. It was just there.
Long, serpentine coils lay half buried, their scales glinting in the red light as they stretched across the expanse of the plain between great winged beasts.
Other fossils lay scattered across the glassy surface of the world: a winged ribcage here, a skull there, its emptiness so vast that Ethan could not quite locate the end of its spine from where he stood.
He turned.
There was nothing where the System normally resided in his head. Just a cold, empty space where there should have been his current health, stats, and mission objectives.
Still nothing.
His molars ground together until his jaw ached.
Of course.
As he attempted to speak, his thin and reedy voice was consumed instantly by the nothingness around him.
This was not the Typhon’s maw devouring him. Something else.
He took a step. As he did, the black glass ground under his heel, splintering in a single line of golden light. He watched that line for a long time. It felt like Spark’s power. But it was old. Heavy. The sort of thing that had split planets asunder before it learned to shatter stone.
A low thrumming vibration coursed through his soles.
Ethan froze.
The mountain range stretched off into the horizon and shifted slightly. Two discs of molten gold, the size of two small planets, opened up between two of the highest peaks. The discs were focusing on him with the same weight that a collapsing star would.
A monster had been buried beneath the earth for millennia. Ethan watched it wake up.
It was not spoken. It vibrated inside his chest and shook his ribs.
"I taste him on you."
A pause. The ground vibrated.
"The Thunderer’s rot. Zeus’s blood."
Ethan stilled his hands to his sides.
"Spark gave me that name."
"And you accepted it."
"I did."
"Why?"
Ethan let the silence be, feeling the weight of the creature’s inquiry pressing against his sternum. The creature’s golden eyes were unreadable, unblinking.
"Because he needed someone."
The lightning above the mountains seemed to intensify. The creature’s voice grew colder.
"That is not an answer."
His fingers closed into fists. His nails cut into his palms.
"Everyone around him wanted something. His power. His blood. His Authority. I didn’t."
Memories, some of them so foul they burned in his belly like bile, surfaced next. The extraction array, the priests chanting, the feel of cold, hard silver being pressed into tender skin, the lines it made.
The commander studying readouts, planning just how much of Spark’s divine energy he could extract before the little boy’s heart gave out. The smell of divine-silver burning. Spark’s whimpering.
"I just wanted him alive."
The world held its breath.
Then the black glass shattered beneath him.
He fell, without any warning, without any way to stop, through a screaming void of nothing. The air tore past his ears, cold and hard, and he landed on the ground, feeling his pelvis crack.
Rome.
But not his Rome.
The city before him was older, even heavier, than the Rome he knew. Gold bled from the walls, and every tower boasted a massive stone statue staring lifelessly down at the ground below.
The temples seemed to reach for the sky, stacked upon each other like they were about to fall at any moment. Their roofs were piled high with divine banners, shifting gently in the air, never once moving in the wind.
The soldiers that made up the phalanx lines looked as though they were wearing uncomfortable, gold-worked armor. They held massive pikes with elaborate spearheads and raised their shields, on which were painted the heads of gods, bristling warily.
Ethan recognized the man on the temple steps.
Zeus.
He was a much younger king than the legend later portrayed. His silver hair was cropped short to about an inch off his head and was stained with blood. A fresh wound crisscrossed his left cheek, still seeping and beginning to scab. He carried a spear made of raw lightning, his knuckles tight on it.
Above the city, the sky burned.
Hordes of Typhons swept down upon the scene like living storms, each great serpent twisting between the structures of the city as it plummeted earthward, flashes of light leaping from the tips of its great wings. The soldiers’ shields locked in anticipation of their arrival.
Ethan’s muscles coiled to attack; a reflex, nothing more.
Zeus raised his hand.
"Hold!"
The army locked in place.
An enormous, ancient, scarred Typhon dropped its head to the ground before Zeus. A brilliant, pulsing, ethereal shard of light protruded from the creature’s throat between the scales.
Zeus stepped forward and pressed his palm to the creature’s brow.
"We stand together."
Ethan’s breath caught.
Monsters and gods. Allies.
However, the image kept changing. In the newly formed scenes, the Olympians were fighting alongside the Typhons against an invisible enemy. Every time one of the dark stars fell, sky color drained away and the landscape turned a little grayer.
Then the ancient Typhon fell.
Its massive body cracked the earth as it fell. The brilliant shard of light embedded in its throat began to break free, pulsing weakly. Hera, Ares, Athena, Hermes, and Zeus immediately rushed to encircle the fallen creature.
Zeus’s voice cut through the din.
"Leave it."
Hera did not flinch.
"If the Authority remains, the enemy will return."
"It belongs to him."
"It belongs to whoever survives."
Ares rammed his spear into the ground.
"The age of monsters is ending."
Zeus stepped between them, his face twisted with fury.
"You have no idea what you’re doing."
Hera met his gaze without blinking.
"We understand perfectly."
The scene lurched. Ethan was now inside his memory of the worst event of his life. There was a terrible, wet sound of tearing flesh as a sharp shard was pulled from the throat of the dying Typhon.
Ethan’s stomach sank to lead. He tasted bile. The memory replayed for him the awful, helpless horror that he had felt during the time he had watched over Spark as he lay strapped to an extraction table.
He relived the memory of grabbing the divine-silver beam and feeling his blood sucked from his body in agonizingly slow layers.
Rome had not invented the extraction process; they had merely perfected the art of the gods.
The memory shifted again.
Many Typhons chained beneath divine arches. A few of them still breathed, while the rest were hollowed out and left to drift on clouds of Authority, their ribcages lying open before them like empty chests.
Then a small chamber. Hidden. Sealed.
Inside, a child.
A small Typhon, no more than a human boy. In his chest glowed a golden fragment of divine power. It glowed peacefully.
Zeus stood beside him.
The boy looked up with wide, trusting eyes.
"Father?"
Hera’s dark form filled the doorway. She looked at the small form of the boy with the same cold interest a surgeon would show to a cadaver.
"The final fragment survived."
Zeus’s spine went rigid.
"No."
"You know what he is."
"I know what he could become."
"Then give him to us."
The King of Olympus, father to the child before him, looked down with fear in his eyes.
"Never."
The memory exploded.
Golden light exploded from the room and Ethan was sent tumbling backward, landing hard on the stone floor. He gritted his teeth as he came up to sit, his chest protesting at the sudden movement. There was still no sign of the System. No notifications flashed in his head. No safety net dropped down to catch him.
Something else woke up.
As the darkness opened up before him, Ethan realized that it was not the same Typhon from the plain. No, this was something far more sinister. This was the image of Spark warped to colossal size, his golden eyes blazing down at Ethan with a fierce, malevolent energy.
"Now you know."
Ethan spat blood onto the cracked stone.
"Zeus hid him."
"He hid more than the child."
"Then why show me?"
The Typhon leaned its head forward, the breath from its mouth hot against Ethan’s.
"Because you carry his blood."
"Zeus’s."
"No."
The golden eyes narrowed.
"Spark’s."
A jolt of old vibration, a connection from long ago, went through Ethan’s chest. It was not power, it was not lightning; it was a resonance, a tether that was there long before the System.
Long before Zeus. Ethan remembered now why Spark said
"Father"