God of War

by Matthew Woodring Stover

  “Revenge is only a part of it!” she insisted. “What good is forgiveness? He doesn’t need his sins washed clean; he needs a decent night’s sleep!”

  “Perhaps,” Zeus said. “But what he needs and what he deserves are not the same thing.”

  “Father, you can’t dangle this hope in front of him to gain ten years of service and then just snatch it away!”

  “I dangled, as you say, nothing at all. Whatever bargains have been struck between the two of you are none of my affair. There is more to this fight than you realize.”

  Athena could only sit and gape.

  Zeus drew himself up, and all his cheerful mockery and petty gamesmanship fell away. The radiant majesty of kingship shone from his face like the sun itself. “There is no crime worse than to spill the blood of one’s own family. I bear the curse of that crime myself. It is a crime that may be justified, perhaps since I acted to defend myself and to save all of you, and yet I am forever tainted with the curse of my crime. Kratos acted out of simple blood frenzy. That can never be changed.”

  “He’s not responsible for this—”

  “His guilt will be cleansed. But still, he is responsible. What has been done can never be undone. A deed so vile may be expiated, someday. Even forgiven. It can never be forgotten. He must find peace in his own way.”

  “But, Father—”

  “Calm yourself, child. Do not fear for your Spartan. I will take care of Kratos for you.” He nodded down at the scrying pool. “Look there: Ares may instead kill Kratos. Then we don’t have a problem, do we?”

  “You think Ares will win?”

  “He does seem to have the upper hand at the moment….”

  KRATOS AND ARES WERE LOCKED TOGETHER, chest to chest, snarling and tearing at each other like maddened bears. Kratos had kept the whole fight inside grappling range, so that Ares never got enough distance to use his weapon effectively. He kept one hand clenched on the god’s sword wrist, and the other he forced up under the god’s chin, driving back his head. The flames of the god’s beard blistered Kratos’s hand, but he had grown accustomed to such pain through all the years of wielding the Blades of Chaos.

  Ares snarled obscenities through his locked teeth as he punched with his free hand again and again into Kratos’s kidney. A spreading numbness there buckled the Spartan’s knee. Feeling his joint give way, Kratos—as any Spartan would—used what he was given. If he couldn’t stand on that leg, he could still slam it into Ares’s groin. For every punch the god delivered, Ares took a knee shot to the testicles in return, until even through the firelight of his hair and beard, his face began to show the pain.

  Kratos gave over the chin pressure in favor of slamming his elbow into the side of Ares’s head, staggering the already weakened god. As Ares fell off balance, Kratos dived to his left, using his grip on the god’s wrist to make Ares’s sword hand take the full impact of both their weights as they fell sideways to the ground.

  Ares’s fist shattered the bedrock where it struck—and the rock did the same to Ares’s knuckles.

  Kratos got his knee between them then and kicked the god away from him, while twisting the sword from Ares’s grasp. Ares scrambled drunkenly to his feet, cradling his broken hand. Kratos rolled up smoothly and slashed the air with a blurring flourish of Ares’s sword.

  Lips peeled back from the Spartan’s teeth. “How do you like your monster now?”

  Ares straightened and let his injured hand fall to his side. His feral predator’s grin was a near-exact mirror of Kratos’s face. “You have no idea what a true monster is, little Spartan. You get one lesson.”

  Ares hunched over, and his face blackened with strain. Bursting through the impenetrable armor on his back came jointed appendages, writhing like the legs of some nightmarish scorpion, armored in black shell, and ending in blades longer than the columns of the Parthenon. “You won’t live to need another.”

  With a clatter of his bladed limbs, Ares sprang like a wolf spider, every blade angled to drink deep the Spartan’s blood.

  Kratos backpedaled. This was a foe he’d never imagined. Ares pressed the assault, stabbing his scorpion blades in concert, in a complex sequence impossible for Kratos to counter. The Spartan kept giving ground, parrying furiously, cutting at the limbs when he could, but their black shells were no less impenetrable than the god’s mystic armor. But that mystic armor, Kratos noted, did not cover the war god’s whole body….

  The next time Ares came for him, Kratos lunged and ran ten yards of red-hot great sword through the god’s inner thigh.

  On a mortal, that would have been a deathblow; cutting the large artery in the thigh would cause a man to bleed out in seconds. Gooey black ichor came oozing from the wound, but the only real effect it seemed to have was that Ares now used his blade limbs to lift his body from the ground. Just as they had served him for a sword arm, they now served him for legs.

  He lunged at Kratos again and again. Kratos gave ground, trying to circle, seeking any opening in the limbs’ baffling weave of death through which he might strike at the god’s more-vulnerable flesh. He was tiring rapidly now. Without the Blades of Chaos to feed life energy into him, his wounds stayed open and poured his strength out on the courtyard’s flagstones.

  For one brief moment, he actually thought that he would lose … but in that instant, the faces of his wife and his daughter rose up within his mind and ignited a fury unlike any he had ever known. All his strength roared into him, and more. The next time Ares came for him, Kratos smashed aside one limb’s stab with such force that its blade struck a neighboring limb—and cracked its armor.

  Kratos blinked at the obsidian ichor that leaked from the crack. A weakness?

  Ares drew back, his confidence shaken for a moment, but then he gathered himself for another assault.

  Let’s make it final, Kratos thought. He let his knees buckle, so that he swayed dizzily, and let the sword droop out of line. When the tip scraped on courtyard stone, his fingers opened nervelessly and the sword clanked to the ground. Seeing such weakness, Ares sprang into the air, leaping high so as to fall upon Kratos and impale him on two blades at once.

  But as the war god leaped, Kratos’s weakness vanished and he sprang up to meet Ares in the air. His hands closed around the joint of one blade limb, and he twisted and bent it with irresistible strength, jamming its needle point through Ares’s cuirass into the god’s chest. Ares spasmed, and they Sell—and Kratos wrenched his weight to fall on top of the god, letting his weight drive the blade limb fully through Ares’s chest and out the back.

  With a roar that was more outrage than pain, Ares flung Kratos from him and spidered to his feet, staring down at the immense blade jammed through his chest with a kind of bafflement Kratos recalled all too well—it was exactly how he’d stared at the column with which Ares had speared him at the Temple of Pandora.

  Ares fell to his knees.

  Kratos rose and recovered the war god’s sword.

  Ares stared up at him, in his eyes only fear and pleading.

  “Kratos … Kratos, remember … it was I who saved you at your hour of greatest need!”

  Kratos raised the sword.

  “That night … Kratos, please … that night I was trying only to make you a great warrior!”

  Kratos thrust Ares’s own sword through the god’s chest.

  As he limped away from the god’s corpse, it began to twinkle with myriad lights. The lights turned into dancing motes that pulled away from the body and then swirled upward to the heavens, until with a blinding flash and a clap of thunder like the end of the world, nothing of Ares remained.

  Kratos was battered, and bleeding, and, once again, only a man. He stared in awe up at the vast blade that only moments before he had wielded so lightly. Now he wasn’t half as tall as the blade’s narrowest point was wide.

  He limped back over the broken walls of the ruined temple to stand before the statue of the goddess.

  “Athena,” he said, “yo
ur city is saved. Ares is dead.” He gazed up into the blank marble eyes. “I’ve done my part. Now do yours. Wipe away these nightmares forever.”

  The shimmering glow of immanent godhead played over the marble. The eyes came alight, and the lips moved as Athena spoke.

  “You have done well, Kratos,” the statue said. “Though we mourn the death of our brother, the gods are indebted to you.”

  Kratos stood a little straighter. A dark chill trickled into his veins.

  “We promised your sins would be forgiven, and so they are. But we never promised to take away your nightmares. No man, no god, could ever forget the terrible deeds you have done.”

  “You can’t—Athena, I’ve done everything you asked! You can’t!”

  “Farewell, Kratos. Your service to the gods is at an end. Go forth into your new life, and know that you have earned the gratitude of Olympus!”

  The shimmer of the goddess faded. Kratos stood alone in the ruined temple above the shattered remnant of the city. He stood there for a long, long time.

  Then he started walking.

  EPILOGUE

  AT THE BRINK of nameless cliffs he stands: a statue in travertine, pale as the clouds above. He can see no colors of life, not the scarlet slashes of his own tattoos, not the putrefying tatters of his wrists where chains were ripped from his flesh. His eyes are as black as the storm-churned Aegean below, set in a face white as the foam that boils among the jagged rocks.

  Ashes, only ashes, despair, and the lash of winter rain: These are his wages for ten years’ service to the gods. Ashes and rot and decay, a cold and lonely death.

  His only dream now is of oblivion.

  He has been called the Ghost of Sparta. He has been called the Fist of Ares and the Champion of Athena. He has been called a warrior. A murderer. A monster.

  He is all of these things. And none of them.

  His name is Kratos, and he knows who the real monsters are.

  His arms hang, their vast cords of knotted muscle limp and useless now. His hands bear the hardened callus not only of sword and Spartan javelin but of the Blades of Chaos, the Trident of Poseidon, and even the legendary Thunderbolt of Zeus. These hands have taken more lives than Kratos has taken breaths, but they have no weapon now to hold. These hands will not even flex and curl into fists. All they can feel is the slow trickle of blood and pus that drips from his torn wrists.

  His wrists and forearms are the true symbol of his service to the gods. The ragged strips of flesh flutter in the cruel wind, blackening with rot; even the bone itself bears the scars of the chains that once were fused there: the chains of the Blades of Chaos. Those chains are gone now, ripped from him by the very god who inflicted them upon him. Those chains not only joined him to the blades and the blades to him; those chains were the bonds shackling him to the service of the gods.

  But that service is done. The chains are gone and the blades with them.

  Now he has nothing. Is nothing. Whatever has not abandoned him, he has thrown away.

  No friends—he is feared and hated throughout the known world, and no living creature looks upon him with love or even affection. No enemies—he has none left to kill. No family—

  And that, even now, is a place in his heart where he dare not look.

  And, finally, the last refuge of the lost and alone, the gods …

  The gods have made a mockery of his life. They took him, molded him, transformed him into a man he can no longer bear to be. Now, at the end, he can no longer even rage.

  “The gods of Olympus have abandoned me.”

  He steps to the final inches of the cliff, his sandals scraping gravel over the crumbling brink. A thousand feet below, dirty rags of cloud twist and braid a net of mist between him and the jagged rocks where the Aegean crashes upon them. A net? He shakes his head.

  A net? Rather, a shroud.

  He has done more than any mortal could. He has accomplished feats the gods themselves could not match. But nothing has erased his pain. The past he cannot flee brings him the agony and madness that are his only companions.

  “Now there is no hope.”

  No hope in this world—but in the next, within the bounds of the mighty Styx that marks the borders of Hades, runs the river Lethe. A draft of that dark water, it is said, erases the memory of the existence a shade has left behind, leaving the spirit to wander forever, without name, without home …

  Without past.

  This dream drives him forward in one final, fatal step, which topples him into clouds that shred around him as he falls. The sea-chewed rocks below materialize, gaining solidity along with size, racing upward to crush his life.

  The impact swallows all he is, all he was, all he has done, and all that’s been done to him, in one shattering burst of night.

  But even in this, he is doomed to disappointment.

  HE DOES NOT SEE the figure at his side in the Aegean’s dark waves; he does not feel the hands that lift him from the sea. He does not know that he is being carried far beyond anywhere mortals can ever go.

  When next his eyes open, he stands before a mighty gate of gold and pearl set in a rampart built of cloud. And with him stands a woman of supernal loveliness, clad in glittering armor and bearing a shield on which is set the head of Medusa.

  He has never seen her before. But he has known her for years, and she cannot be mistaken for any other.

  “Athena.”

  Her flawless face turns toward him, and the serene majesty of her gaze takes his breath away. “You will not die this day, my Spartan,” she says, and her voice is martial music of pipe and drums. “The gods cannot—I cannot—allow one who has performed such service to perish by his own hand.”

  He can only stare, struck dumb both by bitter injustice and incomprehensible grace.

  “There is more at work here than you may ever know.” She lifts a hand and the immense gate swings open before him, revealing stairs ascending into cloud. “But you have saved more than your own life today and worked a greater deed than taking your own revenge. Zeus has declared you worthy, and you will not deny him. There is now an empty throne in Olympus, my Kratos, and I have one last service to require of you. Take these stairs. They lead to that empty throne. To your throne.”

  “I don’t understand …” Words fall thickly from his numb lips.

  “It’s possible you never will. I will tell you only this: You should not die by your own hand and stain Olympus with your blood. And so you are here. With us. Forever. It is Zeus’s wish.”

  Kratos mounts the long, long stair. Now he can see at the top a throne of glistening jet: deadly gleaming black, befitting the god he is to become.

  With each step, the sights and sounds of battle rush in upon him, from all across the world and throughout all eternity, for time and place are different for the gods. He fears for an instant—or for a millennium—that his nightmares return to rape his mind, but he does not recognize the soldiers he sees. They wear metal armor and march in phalanx; cavalry and chariots support their swordsmen, pike men, and archers. “Cross the Rubicon,” a general bellows in a strange and foreign tongue, but Kratos understands.

  At the next step, again he gasps. Curious armor here replaces the more-familiar design. Rushing past him are men with Asiatic eyes, shouting in a language he does not recognize, though again he understands—Sekigahara. “For the shogun!” The names spring up unbidden and mean nothing to him, but as foreign as their aspects and armor are, the carnage they wreak is all too familiar. Thousands lie dead on all sides, although he is still on the stairs to his throne.

  At the next step he finds himself almost flinching, as a huge bird with stiff metal wings and a spinning wheel in front dives down on him. Sudetenland. Huge explosions rock him as the machine—not a bird but a flying machine, a Stuka, another unfamiliar word that he somehow understands—pulls out of a dive and roars away into the dirty gray sky. And just above, a brilliant glare has him squinting and shading his eyes, but he knows somehow t
hat this light cannot harm him. Nothing can harm him. The light comes from a vast cloud curling upward from a burning city, burgeoning as it lifts into an astonishing shape, like a blazing white mushroom larger than Athens itself.

  He looks in another direction, and there before him unfold wooded hills where the rivers run red with blood. Antietam? What language might this be?

  These people, these places, come to him with every step. Waterloo. Agincourt. Khyber Pass. Gallipoli. Xilang-fu. Roncesvalles. Stalingrad and the Bulge and Normandy. The chaos of war rages around him, an endless looping chain of stunning victories and horrific defeats.

  When he reaches the throne, he pauses for a moment and looks back down from whence he came. Spread before him is all of Greece, all the Mediterranean, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the strange lands on the far side of the world. Anywhere that battles rage—anywhere war will ever be fought—this is his kingdom. But among it all, his kingdom, the quarter that means most to him, will be the scene of battles that will tear the world asunder.

  For Olympus, too, is of his kingdom, whenever he might choose to make it so.

  Kratos, once of Sparta, lowers himself upon his throne, and dark designs unfurl behind his brows. They want a God of War? He will show them war the likes of which they’ve never conjured in their worst nightmares.

  Kratos of Olympus, God of War, gazes down upon his realm, and his fury burns.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  MATTHEW STOVER is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars novels Revenge of the Sith, Shatterpoint, and The New Jedi Order: Traitor, as well as Caine Black Knife, The Blade of Tyshalle, and Heroes Die. He is an expert in several martial arts. Stover lives outside Chicago.

  ROBERT E. VARDEMAN is the author of more than one hundred novels, in the fields of fantasy, science fiction, mystery, high-tech thrillers, and westerns (under the pen name Karl Lassiter). Among these titles are tie-in novels for four other RPGs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s degree in materials science, and he worked in solid-state research before becoming a writer. In addition to being a past vice president of SFWA, he is a member of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers. For more information see his website, www.CenotaphRoad.com.