“No, gods can be temporarily fatigued by epic tasks. Otherwise we couldn’t brag to each other about who’s stronger. Yet your listeners may rest assured that from the mortal perspective, we remain all-powerful.”
“Oh, quite. We’ve far more stamina than a mortal can match. Would you like me to show you, Rebecca?”
—Apollo and Dionysus (Rebecca, Live! interview, August 22, 2009)
THE OLYMPIANS’ PROTRACTED STRUGGLE was becoming desperate. For all their efforts, Poseidon’s Olympians simply could not force even one of the Titans back through the vortex. Though weakened and wounded with battle, every hour the Titans spent outside their prison saw them grow closer to their former strength. Every moment risked greater collateral damage to the Olympians’ worshippers, and more than once an Olympian escaped grievous and crippling injury by no more than the skin of his or her teeth.
What military assistance the mortals could provide proved near futile. Even when mortal weapons were within range, the Titans were too fast for all but the most state-of-the-art targeting systems, and those shots that did reach their targets made barely a dent. Even so, the mortals refused to shirk the duty of defending their people from the Titan threat. Air strikes, cruise missiles, armored divisions, even small arms—they brought all weapons to bear.
All weapons, that is, save for nuclear strikes. Ares suggested it, of course, even outright demanded it; he would have emptied every launch tube around the world were it not for Athena. While the two Olympians long ago had devised a way to initiate a global combined launch—for the sheer heck of it—Athena refused to turn her key.
It was in the late hours of the European morning that Poseidon’s patience reached its limit. Seizing the battered Dionysus and Aphrodite by the hair, he demanded the use of the UnMaking Nexus. The weapon would serve its original purpose.
The spilled Titan blood pooled on numerous battlegrounds proved ideal for priming the weapon. Poseidon’s first strategy was simple: throw the Nexus at the Titans. As the Titans rarely held position unless fighting, it required perfect timing—an Olympian strike against the intended Titan target would have to withdraw right before the weapon was deployed, in order to ensure the target remained in place.
The plan proved disastrous. Hecate, withdrawing last from the melee while shrouding the others’ escape, fell to friendly fire as the Nexus struck out at the first immortal it could find. She collapsed in her own darkness, first horrified, then mortal, then dead.
Chagrinned, Poseidon reversed his strategy: throw the Titans at the Nexus. While this worked far better—Poseidon and Hera annihilated the Titan Menoetius by flinging him into a pit containing the recharged Nexus in a fragile wooden crate—surviving Titan witnesses spread word of the threat immediately. Upon its next use, they were ready. They trapped the weapon before it could strike, sealing it inside a lump of molten metal and swiftly cooling it with a blast of frigid breath. Then the Titans hurled it into space before the Olympians could recapture it.
The Olympians were not having a good day.
Aetoc spied every moment from his vantage point in the stratosphere before returning to Zeus beyond the battle’s outskirts.
“They have lost the Nexus,” Aetoc reported. “Olympian morale plummets as Titan confidence soars. I offer that it is time.”
“Indeed,” Zeus agreed. “They grow weak. Apollo, send word to the Muses. They are commanded to deliver the message.”
“Do you really think this’ll work?” Leif asked no one in particular.
“It worked on Dionysus,” Tracy said.
Apollo nodded. “The Muses know their business.”
At Apollo’s signal, the Muses leaped from their perches near the last sighted location of the Titan leader, Cronus. Nine gloriously groomed birds of varying types and colors sped on the wind, each grasping a golden string tied to the same small box. They winged their way through the chaos of battle and dodged bursts of violent energies to reach a mountaintop where Cronus surveyed the fight, planned his next move, and looked in vain for any evidence of Zeus. Calliope pulled up short and shifted to womanly form high in the sky as the other Muses continued on course with the box.
“Cronus! We are servants of Zeus, come in peace to deliver a message!”
At that, the remaining Muses released their strings to send the box straight on target to Cronus’s chest. The string-wrapped box plunked off his collarbone and tumbled down the front of his makeshift armor before coming to a stop somewhere along his navel. The nine Muses scattered, disappearing into the sky as quickly as a fleeting thought.
Suspecting another device like the Nexus, Cronus seized the box through his shirt and yanked, tearing both shirt and box from his body. Instinct told him to hurl it away. Anyone not an idiot would surely stab a spork in his eye before trusting a box delivered mid-battle by his mortal enemy (figuratively speaking), and Cronus was not an idiot.
Well, not usually.
Foolish curiosity assailed him in that moment. He’d seen no sign of Zeus at all since their escape. Poseidon seemed to lead the Olympians. Was there not a chance Zeus might serve to be an ally against the others, however temporarily? Might the message contain some proposal of an alliance or vital intelligence? And so it was that Cronus, king of the Titans, father of Zeus, and generally despicable jerk-ass devourer of his own children, opened the box and dumped the contents into his palm.
Within the box was a little golden ball, and taped to the little golden ball was a message on that remarkable substance known as paper: If you have the courage to face me, if you wish your revenge, you will bring your Titan fellows to the slopes of Mount Parnitha. There, treacherous Father, we shall do unceasing battle until one of us is vanquished.
The message was signed by Zeus with a small postscript that read only: Bring the ball.
Enlisting the Muses was the first step the group had taken upon leaving Switzerland. For them, relocating the Idiot Ball from the drawer in Poseidon’s throne was a simple matter, and their experience made them the best equipped to handle it safely. Having delivered the ball to its target, they returned to Zeus.
“He took the bait,” announced Calliope.
“Well, you know, we figure he did,” insisted Thalia.
“Hope and pray he took the bait,” warned Terpsichore.
“We shall soon see, in any case,” said Clio.
“If he did not, we are all doomed! Doomed! Doomed!” cried Melpomene, trailing off. “Just sayin’.”
Calliope cleared her throat with a glare at her sisters and repeated more firmly, “He took. The bait.”
Zeus shot an expectant glance to Aetoc, who peered into the distance.
“The Titans gather,” he confirmed. “They return to Greece.”
A smug smile spread across Zeus’s lips. “To the vortex.”
“To battle!” Baskin screamed.
“Is too much talkings goings on at once!” Jerry threw his branches over where his ears ought to have been.
“You have done well!” Zeus told the Muses. “Now make yourselves safe, but stray not too far. There may still be opportunities for you to help.”
Calliope bowed, pleased. “Of course. Clio and I will be recording it for posterity in any case.”
Off to one side, Thalia caught both Leif’s and Tracy’s eyes and winked. “Looking good, you two. Immortality suits you. Aren’t you glad I lightened you up and bossed you around all those times? Wasn’t it all worth it? Isn’t flying fun?” She patted Tracy’s arm with another wink.
“This is temporary,” Tracy insisted.
“For you, maybe,” Leif grinned. “I’m really starting to get the hang of this.”
“Of course you are; I told you it suits you and I’m hardly one to lie! Unless it’s funny, I mean, or unless I feel like it, or unless I’m talking to a ‘creative’ executive or the Erinyes, or I suppose it could happen in any number of situations, really, so no guarantees, but I’m not lying about this, you can trust me on that. Oh, my sisters are leaving! Time for us to go find a shady spot to watch and catch up on paperwork! Have fun being gods,” she called as she floated up after the others with a wave, “but I’m not going to say anything about storming the castle! Oh—don’t forget to spout lots of one-liners! And smile, Tracy, you’re getting that look again!”
As the Muses sailed off, one turned to call back, “Good luck, Zeus! Be sure to add some sort of twist! Every story needs a good twist!”
“This isn’t a story, Terpsichore!”
“Nonsense!” she shot back, looking quite anxious about the matter. “Everything’s a story! There must be a twist!”
“Sorry,” Apollo apologized as the Muses vanished into the distance. “Terpsichore muses thrillers, you know. I fear her demand for twists lately has begun to border on cliché. It’s the stress of the Return, I think. Overworked.”
“But she’s right,” Leif pitched. “By definition, this is an epic struggle. There will be a twist. There has to be. Just you watch for it.”
Cronus gathered the Titans swiftly. Each withdrew from individual entanglements and followed him to Greece, to the base of Mount Parnitha, to the vortex. The battle-weary Olympians, grateful for respite, let them go, only to notice their destination with mystified curiosity. Surely it must be a trap, they thought, yet they could not afford to dismiss the opportunity. They followed, cautiously at first. Then, seeing the Titans amassed near the Tartarus vortex—now grown into a raging swirl of suction—and unable to discard their luck, Poseidon dived down with his fellows, desperate to wrestle the enemy back into their nearby prison.
When the Titans turned to defend themselves, Zeus struck. He gave no glorious speech, no witty, pre-battle banter. Springing from concealment, Zeus drove his new allies like a lance into the Titan flanks. The battle was well and truly joined.
Iapetus, uncle to Zeus, fell in the first moments to the combined might of his nephews, first stunned by Zeus’s lightning and then kicked end over end and screaming into the vortex by both Hades and Poseidon. Yet even only seven strong, the Titans fought back like death itself. Titans, Olympians, and neo-Olympians smashed into the landscape around the vortex in a storm of cosmic violence. Were Athens not already destroyed, it would not have survived the ordeal.
Spared from the previous day’s fighting, Zeus’s group held a dangerous advantage. Wielding the lightning and arrows that had served them for millennia, neither Zeus nor Apollo were strangers to battle. As elevated forces of nature, Aetoc, Jerry, and Baskin fought in the ways that came natural to eagles, trees, and frozen dairy treats. Tracy swiftly opted to manifest her power in the form of the “producer’s whip” that Jason so often had joked about. Then she decided to use two for good measure. Leif was more distracted, switching at random between various types of weapons (or none at all) in a wild effort to eschew predictability.
Yet even with the old Olympians lending their strength in an unofficial truce, the Titans were no pushovers. Coeus and his consort- sister Phoebe caught Aetoc in midair as he tried to distract them. They ripped him apart by the wings and hurled the still-screaming pieces into the vortex. His sacrifice allowed Leif and Tracy to get hold of the distracted Coeus and wrestle him closer to the vortex with whips and muscle. Even so, the Titan fought back and might have escaped entirely were it not for a sudden onslaught of sugary, multicolored death. With a bellow of, “Suck sprinkles, treacherous hooligan!” Baskin lunged from the sky to blast Coeus full in the face. Leif and Tracy renewed their attack and soon hurled the blinded Titan back through the vortex to Tartarus.
At the same time, Apollo and Artemis struck at Aetoc’s other killer. Bowstrings singing, they peppered arrows into Phoebe to drive her back alongside her brother. Stumbling backward in a mad effort to shield herself, she might still have escaped were it not for Jerry. The god-tree’s preference for ground fighting served him well as he thrust his gnarled roots up under Phoebe’s heels and tripped the Titan backward toward the vortex. In one final combined slam from the archery-twins, Phoebe's fate matched that of Coeus.
“You know, technically she was our grandmother on mom’s side,” Apollo said.
Artemis shrugged. “Given our family, that’s not exactly a character reference.”
“Is not matterings!” Jerry screamed. “Titan-grandmother was being bad! Aetoc was friend!”
“Mourn later!” Baskin yelled. “Fight now!” With a yodeling battle cry, he flung himself toward the mountainside where Zeus battled Cronus.
Yet even with their dual victory, the battle did not go as well for every Olympian. Not for nothing was Cronus king of the Titans. He beat back both Zeus and Baskin with two uprooted trees and then turned on Dionysus and Hermes to knock them toward the vortex with one massive swing. While Hermes managed to zip sideways enough to avoid oblivion, Dionysus fared less well. Screaming for a beer, he toppled through the vortex and out of the narrative entirely.
All around, the struggle continued. Weapons clashed and fists pounded. All combatants tried their best to throw their enemies into Tartarus or at the very least beat, slash, or shoot them senseless. Amid the chaos Hermes, weakened and still dizzy from Cronus’s walloping, found Tracy hunkering down against an onslaught from Hyperion. Though her defenses held, the blazing balls of energized quarks the Titan hurled at her kept her on the defensive. Hermes, posing as a rabbit, scampered up her leg to perch on her shoulder.
“Hello, Tracy! Still fighting for Zeus after all the manipulation and lies, then?”
To her credit, Tracy gave Hermes no more than a second glance after recognizing his voice. Also, Hyperion shattered the rock in front of her so she had other things to worry about. Slinging her whip out to cover her escape, she leaped to another section of cover and hunkered down again, strengthening the rock itself against the next volley.
Even in his weakened state, Hermes kept up with her.
“Hardly the time!” she shot.
“Nonsense! I realize you’re new to this whole ball of kippers, but when we god-sorts get close, we can do sort of a—”
The whole mountainside shuddered as Hyperion launched himself in an arc over Tracy’s cover, blasting destruction down on her that she barely managed to divert with Hermes’s help.
“Stop-time thing, I know!” she finished for him. “Except I don’t want to talk to you!”
She darted for a new spot before Hyperion could make another attempt.
“Hardly being friendly, are you?” Hermes asked as Tracy slipped into a game of cat and mouse with the Titan. “Why not hear what I have to say?”
Tracy raised a finger to her lips to shut Hermes up, popped from hiding around one side of a boulder, and slung her whips at the Titan’s ankles. He jumped and blasted more destruction her way, forcing her back to cover.
“Because I don’t trust you, maybe?” she hissed. “Now either help me or get lost!”
Hermes clung tightly, creating the first ever moment in any battle involving a combatant with a rabbit in her hair (with the obvious exception of the Franco-Prussian War). “I beg your pardon?”
Tracy fled from Hyperion’s next assault, taking to the sky in a shield of her own leptons. “You said the ritual failed! Well, hey, did you notice Zeus is back? You lied!”
“A misunderstanding, I assure you. Zeus is a tricky one—we were still trying to get a bead on him at the time. I thought it had failed!”
“So why did you tell me that right before using me as bait to trap Zeus?”
“Rather worth a shot, at least, wouldn’t you say? Incidentally, incoming.”
Intent on her flight path, Tracy entirely missed spotting two green storms of energy headed straight for her. They blasted into her shields, jolted her from body to essence, and knocked her straight down into a narrow chasm. She barely stopped her fall before hitting bottom. Her entire body stung from the blow, energy temporarily sapped, or muted, or—whatever the heck a god should call getting wounded, she didn’t know. Hyperion hadn’t followed. Yet. Recovering her strength, she waited, preparing to whip the ever-loving crap out of whoever stuck a face into the chasm and hoping it was someone who deserved it.
Hermes scampered down from her hair to cling to her chest and stare up at her, whiskers twitching. “Very well, I’ll help you. After all, we’re both against the Titans, all big, bad, and destructive as they are. I have to hand it to Zeus; it was the perfect diversion, unleashing them. I doubt that’ll be of much comfort to everyone who’s died, but—”
“He didn’t release them,” she whispered, doing her best to shield herself from Hyperion’s senses. “He’s got no idea how they got out.”
“Ah, yes, no idea. Just like when he told Hera he had ‘no idea’ how those seventeen models got into their bathtub. He’ll say whatever it takes, Tracy. That’s thousands of years of experience talking. That’s why we had to put him off. We didn’t want to. It was quite simply our last resort.”
A victorious laugh from above heralded Hyperion’s rediscovery of her. Two whiplashes later he bellowed in pain and darted back out of sight, clutching the eye Tracy had just put out. Tracy widened a crack in the chasm and dashed through it, forcing Hermes to shift to his normal form just to keep up.
“You’re trying to get me to switch sides,” she whispered.
“Rather obviously, yes.”
“Yesterday you tried to kill me. Or was that whole locking me in an airtight box over the ocean just, what, a friendly hazing?”
“Surely someone as smart as you can recognize a bluff when she sees one. Why kill you? We simply needed Zeus to show himself. He arrives, distracts us with releasing the Titans, and then plays the gallant rescuer and claims coincidence! You all but admitted he manipulated you with that amulet. Did you ever ask him about that, or did he feign innocence in that too?”
She stopped short of insisting that the amulet had only amplified her own natural tendencies, which really just parroted what Zeus told her earlier. Though the circumstances continued to nag at her, any opinion Hermes offered on the matter would be suspect.
“It wasn’t like that,” she answered.
“Oh, ‘it wasn’t like that.’ I see.” Hermes chuckled. “It’s as plain as the stupid on Ares’s face that you’re not so sure. Zeus tricked you into thinking he hasn’t tricked you, hasn’t he? The cad! You see what I mean. He’s had millennia of practice.”
“So have you. You’re trying to trick me into thinking he tricked me into thinking he hasn’t tricked me.”
“Oh, that was good. Are you dizzy?”
“I’m getting a little tired of it all, no matter who’s doing it!”
“I’m only trying to give you more information.”
Tracy wheeled on Hermes. “No! You’re trying to do your own—”
Hyperion tore off a piece of rock above them before she could tell off Hermes. Both of them flew skyward on instinct.
With a pat on her shoulder and a cry of, “Think about it!” Hermes shot past the Titan, poking him in his remaining eye as he went. Hyperion roared anew and blindly hurled the gigantic rock at Tracy.
Yet it was just rock, and poorly thrown at that. She caught it in her bare hands. Harnessing the power of every ounce of the frustration she felt over the constant manipulation assailing her on all sides, she phased the rock to pure energy and hurled it back at Hyperion with a furious yell. It exploded in the Titan’s face with a blast that would have been much more satisfying were she farther away. She regained consciousness halfway across the battlefield a few moments later.
There was no sign of Hyperion.
The rage of battle around her gave her no time to think. Amid the bitter aftertaste of Hermes’s words, Tracy resumed the struggle, teaming with Leif and Jerry to combat the remaining Titans.
One by one, their dwindling numbers and battle-weariness in the face of Zeus’s fresher forces pushed the Titans back through the vortex until only Cronus himself remained. Now enraged by both his former imprisonment and his utter failure to skewer Zeus on a pike, he stood at the very peak of Mount Parnitha clutching a spear stolen from Ares in one hand and the (divinely reinforced) roof of the Parthenon in the other, and there he screamed for his children to try to throw him off.
Zeus turned to Apollo and the Neo-Olympians. “Wait here,” he ordered. “I must do this myself.”
Without waiting for acknowledgment, Zeus moved to answer Cronus’s challenge.
His brothers did the same. Each charged their father alone only to have their attacks rebuffed. The inexorable Hades ran inexorably into Cronus’s shield before his father kicked him straight down the mountain. Poseidon turned aside Cronus’s spear with his trident only to be knocked senseless by a fist to the face. Zeus tackled Cronus straight on. Lesser gods scrambled for cover as the two tumbled halfway down the mountainside in a rolling melee that sent their weapons flying, until Cronus finally picked up Zeus and threw him straight at the vortex.
He might have gone through were it not for Baskin. Unable to stand idle, he dived for Zeus and batted him to safety with his giant pink spoon at the last moment.
Yet Zeus and his brothers were only a distraction. Hera, Demeter, and Hestia, having taken the mountaintop during the struggle, plunged down on Cronus. Once Demeter’s and Hestia’s net wrapped the ambushed Titan in temporary helplessness, Hera slashed into Cronus’s backside. He pitched farther down the mountain, struggling to tear the net from his body when Hades was suddenly upon him, seizing up the net’s loose ends. Even then Cronus forced his way to his feet. Poseidon knocked him off his feet with an earthquake, and still Cronus resisted, finally blasting the net apart in a flash of power. He fought his way free again, roaring in rage as five of his children grappled him about the legs, arms, and neck. Yet the five were weary. They only slowed Cronus, able to neither drag him down nor lift him off his feet.
Zeus brought the stalemate to an end. Rushing back to the fight, he hurled lightning repeatedly into Cronus’s chest. Focused on Zeus’s siblings, Cronus took the full brunt of the attack. Zeus wasted no time. He grabbed his stunned father from the frazzled grips of the others, yanked a fragment of extra power from Cronus’s essence, and then hurled him single-handedly into the vortex.
Cronus didn’t have time to even curse.
Zeus shot a triumphant grin at Tracy. Leif and Jerry cheered as Baskin, bubbling with battle lust, regarded the Olympians. Apollo only heaved a sigh of relief from where he watched over Artemis, who lay weak and wounded from the fighting. Zeus indicated for them to wait and be ready, and then he turned to deal with his brothers.