Thunder cracks outside the warm, cozy darkness of my quarters, jolting me out of a restless sleep. Breach, my instincts tell me, and immediately the claxons sound. The bad kind. The kind that mean I should rouse to action and aid my fellow prison guards in the fight they’re no doubt embroiled in.
I can’t move, though. Erebus’ darkness acts like a drug, dulling the pain of my injuries. How long ago did I sustain them? It could be hours or days, or even a thousand years since the last battle we fought—the one where I lost three heads and was called to the earthly realm beyond Tartarus to fight a goddess, despite my brothers both agreeing it was pointless.
Time has no meaning in Erebus’ darkness, though it is a healing shade. I open the eyes of my strongest head and see nothing, but feel the itchy, tender throb of regenerating flesh. I raise and crane my neck, then nuzzle the crown of one of my other reptilian heads, its scales still as soft as a hatchling’s, the cerebellum inside barely conscious and its spine just strong enough to hold itself up. The other two are in better shape, almost fully healed. Enough to fight? I don’t know yet. I must wait for orders.
I drift back into a fugue, mentally reaching for my oldest brother—my commander, and the warden of this place we guard.
“Brother Tartarus,” I prod, trying to wake him. “Should I report for duty?”
He doesn’t answer.
I push against the blanket of darkness my other brother wrapped me in. I cannot reach him with my mind, which is worrisome. It means Tartarus himself is unconscious; I can’t mentally communicate with any of the other guards until he wakes.
The alarm claxons bleed through the muffled cloud of blackness that cradles me.
Breach, I remember. A prison break has occurred, and I can’t help. My orders were to heal, and until I’m told differently, this is what I must do. If the breach was bad enough to render my brother unreachable, it must be a bad one. The prison is one and the same with his flesh; they are bound the way a soul is bound to a body. If he’s hurt, I should ignore my orders and do what I can to help.
Agitation presses outward from my belly, turns to nausea when I’m still unable to do more than raise my heads. The newly healed ones wobble, and the still-forming one sags lower, then drops back to hide beneath my wing, its incoherent hiss the only indication of its awareness.
“Tartarus,” I try again. “Are you well? Should I report for duty?”
Still no answer. I try again, using his other name… the name he uses in the human world.
“Vesh. Are you there? Please answer.”
The answer finally comes, preceded by a sense of agony as vast and debilitating as the pain of decapitation. I throw up a barrier against the howl that reverberates through the entire prison, shaking its very foundation.
“Guards, report!” comes his command, the relief I feel at the sound of my eldest brother’s voice enough to abolish my agitation. I wait and listen for the others.
“The gates are shattered,” says Asterius. “The Titans have escaped. Void demons are invading. We’re doing what we can to hold them off, but we can’t repair the breach without you.”
I feel Tartarus taking stock like a silent observer lurking at my back. It happens in an instant, and then his presence is gone, the voice returning.
“Where is Pan?”
“Hasn’t reported yet,” Alcides snaps, his voice clipped the way it is when he’s focused on a task. If the gates are destroyed, the entry must be overrun by the creatures that exist in Keńo, the plane between Tartarus and the rest of existence. All the other guards should be there. I would be there too, if I could move.
Tartarus curses. “I’ll come as soon as I find the treacherous faun.”
Pan is one of us. He has no reason to betray my brother or the other guards of this prison; no reason to fall in with the enemy. He was with us when we caged the Titans the first time. His power was instrumental in taking them down. It must be a mistake. But he is notoriously prone to mischief and regularly irritates the other guards with his antics.
Except this goes beyond the pale where mischief is concerned. A breach bad enough to shatter the very gates is beyond most of the guards’ capabilities, including Pan’s. But Tartarus’ thoughts don’t linger on the problem. He’s focused on something else now—distracted. He’s hunting the faun, I realize, and has caught a thread of power that pulls at his consciousness. I can sense the tug through our link.
Now that he’s conscious, I can sense the others as well, and reach out to determine whether the other guards are aware of this pull the way I am. They are too preoccupied with the breach to notice, or to care. But I am intrigued and let my awareness piggyback on Tartarus’, riding his search. Will it lead us to Pan, or to something that can explain the breach? Perhaps it will lead to wherever the Titans escaped to.
The power itself is like nothing I’ve ever encountered. It’s soft, but potent, as varied as the scents of our kitchen when Pan and Asterius prepare our holiday feasts. It incites a hunger within me, and I eagerly cling as my brother continues his search. I don’t sense Pan, though, which means he is either in another realm entirely, or he is unconscious.
“He’d better hope that’s how I find him,” my brother says, startling me into retreating. Guilt over my eavesdropping makes me burrow back into the darkness, each of my hundred heads tucking back beneath my wings. But the sensation of power Tartarus chases lingers, and I can’t help but reach out for his mind again after a time.
As an excuse to be in contact, I venture, “Should I join the fight? Erebus must lift this darkness if you want me to report for duty.”
“They will call you if you are needed. My orders to them were to let you heal. I don’t want to waste your power on a breach the others can handle themselves. They’ve seen worse. I will return to repair the doors once I locate Pan and he is safely back inside.”
“This magic you’re tracking... do you think it’s related to the breach? Is it the Titans?”
“Uncertain. It’s a novel magic, isn’t it, little brother? It intrigues me. It does not feel like the Titans; I doubt they will prove as easy to track.”
“It tastes like Chaos, but … different,” I say. “Why can’t we portal right to it? It’s in the mortal world, isn’t it?”
“It is. I tried to portal, but something blocks me. I must travel by land to get to it. Be silent and let me focus.”
I leave him to his hunt, drifting along in the back of his mind, peeking out through his eyes as the world blurs by. I have been unconscious during much of my recuperation so have missed these ride-alongs. I almost never have an excuse to visit the mortal world, and am never asked to go unless I’m needed to fight some battle. The last one was the worst in eons and left me bitter for want of a taste of fun. If only I could shift into a human shape the way the more beastly of my fellow guards are able to…
Not that Tartarus allows them out, either. As guardians of this realm, we are only a step above the prisoners. We don’t step foot outside unless summoned by the call of Chaos to carry out some task the ancient primordial wishes of us. Even then, only Erebus and myself can physically leave the prison; the others must get their taste through the eyes of one of my brother’s clones, a result of his mind merging with the faun’s and reproducing bodies like an amoeba’s penchant for self-replication.
Chaos’ summons have come for increasingly petty reasons, I’ve noticed. The last one was to chase down a man who’d dared to cheat at cards in the casino Chaos has chosen as his home in the mortal world.
My brother mistakenly assumed it would be an easy fight and promised us fun would be had after we finished and reported back to the casino. He promised I could fly us there after the battle was over.
But we did not win. We were soundly beaten, left to crawl back to the prison with our tails between our legs and with me three heads lighter.
I don’t blame my brother; we are all tools of a more powerful being, so if I blame anyone, it’s Chaos, who still refuses to let go of his ancient rivalry with Fate. Their ongoing feud will ruin us if it keeps up—death by a thousand cuts.
“What is it?” I ask when Tartarus abruptly halts. He’s hovering above a cold, dark sea, staring at a pine-covered island that’s barely more than a speck in the distance. A chill rises through me, buzzing at the base of all one hundred of my skulls. “No. We mustn’t go there again. You must come back with me. We can find Pan another time!”
“I don’t think we can go there.”
He ventures closer despite his words and my objections. This is the place where we battled last. The pain of the decapitation is still fresh in my mind, and my still-healing head lets out a pitiful whimper.
“This is odd,” he muses. “He is here. Can you sense him now?”
I’m too distracted to hear him at first, but then I reach out with my mind, seeking Pan. I hit a barrier that feels like the goddess who severed my heads. I recoil, but Tartarus keeps going anyway. We’re nearly upon it when I finally see the shimmering barrier that reeks of fate magic and balk.
“See? We mustn’t go farther. Fate has clearly barred us from ever stepping foot on that island again.” And I’m more than fine with that, even though the intriguing magic that drew us here is somewhere on the other side of that barrier.
“But I can sense Pan in there,” Tartarus says. “Extend your senses. Tell me if you can find him. Don’t worry, I’ve hidden us, so he won’t be aware. We don’t want him to run.”
I shouldn’t even be able to push my mind past a barrier of fate magic, but I do as he asks. The magic parts, and I find a small cabin resting on a rise amid redwoods. Pan is inside. I easily slip into his mind and peer out through his eyes.
As my brother promised, Pan doesn’t acknowledge me. He’s enthralled by a creature who is with him: a beautiful woman with pale skin and black hair, darkness painted around her eyes and lips stained the color of venous blood. She is tending him, talking to him. And I realize she is the source of the strange-tasting power.
Her power is like chaos deconstructed, but the potential is there and unmistakable. She shows Pan an object that resembles his own cock, constructed out of my brother’s flesh.
Does Tartarus know she has this object? Of the power she wields if she can transform the cast-off remnants of his body in this way?
I return to my brother, who stands on the rocky beach, staring down at a pile of broken void glass. Pieces of him left behind after our battle? Or pieces of the doors that came through when Pan arrived? Either way, this must be where she found the shard she turned into an offering for Pan.
He crouches and picks one up, frowns, then squeezes it until his knuckles turn white. The shard melts, its matter reabsorbing into his flesh. But there is more… so much more.
“Did you see her?” I ask.
“Yes,” he growls. “I don’t know what she is, but she’s what has drawn us here, likely summoned Pan with that replica of his dick. I didn’t think we’d be able to return, but now that I’m here, I see there’s work to be done. After we retrieve Pan and mend the breach, we’ll come back and clean this up. Leaving these pieces strewn across the island is too big a risk.”
He clenches his jaw, his entire body tense. A war unrelated to the one being fought in the prison rages in his mind. I know what it is, though, because the pull of her tugs at my awareness just as much.
His mind is a jumble of excuses and emotions, the likes of which I have never felt when sharing his consciousness. He is relieved that Pan hasn’t betrayed us, pissed about the Titans’ escape, and perplexed by our very presence on the wrong side of a fate barrier. He stalls because he wants to let Pan have a moment of pleasure before hauling him back home; we get so few opportunities to leave, and almost never get to venture out with our own bodies.
Beneath all his questions is the undeniable pull of the woman inside the cabin, and the disbelief at the realization of how we are here at all, how a barrier that was meant to keep us out has let us through.
Is it a trap set by Fate? How else would we be here, after all? Creatures of Chaos are said to not be bound to answer Fate’s summons, but what if we are and it just hasn’t happened yet? Only fate magic would allow us to pass through.
I’m privy to his entire thought process and reach the same conclusion the moment he does when he whips his head around to stare at the cabin. It may be a trap, but if it is, the bait is inside, ripe for the taking. Why not have a taste while we’re here—test the trap, see if it springs, and deal with the consequences after we’ve had our fill.
“Yes,” I say when I grasp the thread of his thoughts. “Let me taste her with you.”