The streets of the old western quarter were empty.
Every soldier in Orario was on the northern wall, and every civilian was locked in a cellar listening to the roar of the war. No one saw the tall red-haired man walk down the cracked cobblestones with two chains wrapped around one fist. No one saw the two figures stumbling behind him on their knees.
They were gods, and they were collared like dogs.
Zeus's white hair hung in matted ropes around his face. The lightning was gone from him entirely. Not a spark crawled across his hands, not a trace of thunder lived in his chest. Odin was bent nearly double, his single eye fixed on the stones, his staff gone, his runes cold. Their avatar bodies were still strong, and it did not matter. The collars were iron, etched with draconic script, but they were only leashes. What had stolen their divinity was far older and far simpler.
"Antares." Zeus's voice cracked. "Antares, I beg you. Spare me. I will kneel. I will give you the throne of Heaven. Take it, take all of it, it is yours..."
"You have nothing to give me," Antares said without turning. "I made your avatars."
Zeus went still.
"Every one of them. The cradle of flesh you took to be your own sons and daughters. The spell that let you wear them. I taught it to you, in a mage's robes, with a smile on my face." Antares's voice was flat, almost gentle. "Did you truly believe I would give you a lamp I could not blow out?"
"Please," Odin whispered. "Dragon King. There is knowledge in me that you cannot afford to lose..."
"I can afford it."
"I never lifted my hand against Ki!"
Antares stopped.
He turned his head slowly, and there was something terrible in his eyes. It was not rage. It was far older than rage, and far quieter.
"No," he said. "You stood and watched."
He walked on.
They came to a chapel at the end of a dead street, a ruin older than the Guild, its roof fallen in, its altar cracked. Antares lifted one hand, and the flagstones beneath the altar glowed red and melted. A staircase opened under them, narrow and steep, winding down into a faint, sickly light.
It was a door only he knew.
The air that rose from it was warm, and it breathed. Zeus heard it first, a long, slow inhale, as though something enormous had turned its head. He began to shake.
"Do you know why the dungeon hates you?" Antares asked, almost conversationally, as he dragged them down the first step. "Why it falls upon gods harder than any mortal who ever crossed its threshold? Why the walls close and the floors turn and the monsters swarm to your scent?"
Neither of them answered.
"Because the Lord of Light is starving." He took another step. "And what he starves for is divinity. A mortal feeds him a little. A god feeds him a feast. But not one of you would ever have set foot inside on your own. Ouranos's laws kept you out, and your own fear."
"So I brought you down."
The gods stopped fighting the chain.
"A mage called Seratna. A trick of avatars. The sweet lie that you had your glory back." Antares smiled, and the smile did not touch his eyes. "I forged every piece of this war. I marched you here with a promise of Heaven and Earth, and you came like lambs. The gods who died in the dark were wasted. A stain. But the first and the wisest of you will do."
"No," Zeus said. "No. No, no, no."
"Your deaths, in the dark, in his house, will give Anu enough strength to return." The red eyes were calm. "You killed my mother. You will feed my father. It seems only fair."
The stairs swallowed them. Somewhere below, the breathing grew louder, and the chains went taut, and Zeus began to scream.
No one in Orario heard him.
....
The eastern plain was still smoking when Damien got to his feet.
His armor had been torn open from sternum to spine, and the wound beneath it was closing in slow, stubborn ribbons of shadow. The domain was gone. When the blow had gone through him it had gone through everything, and the world he had built had shattered with him. He had landed on grass instead of the shore of a lake, and the sun was out, and the morning was very bright.
The man stood twenty paces away.
He was tall and heavily muscled, with tan, sun-dark skin and long blue hair that fell to his shoulders. His eyes were amber. His clothes were plain and dark. He stood with his hands loose at his sides and watched Damien rise with an expression of mild, almost fond interest.
Damien looked at him.
There was no divinity. No dragon pressure, no Monarch's weight, no trace of anything unnatural. He reached out with every sense he had, and what he found was a man. Just a man. A man who had put a fist through armor that had turned back the sun.
And the face. That was the strangest part. Lying in the crater, Damien had tried to hold it in his mind and found only a slow, sliding blank. Now, in the light, it was as sharp as a coin. The line of the jaw, the shape of the mouth, the faint tired creases at the corners of the eyes. A face no one could possibly forget.
He had already forgotten it once.
"Who are you?" Damien asked.
"To you?" The man smiled. "No one. I am unknown to you. That is rather the point."
Damien's eyes narrowed.
'Unknown'
The word turned over in his head. Dine had said it in his office, sitting among the people who loved him. 'He is called the Unknown for a reason. Once he leaves your sight, everything about him leaves with him.' A man no god had ever heard of. A man that Anu himself did not remember. A man strong enough to take a hundred of the greatest heroes who had ever lived, and bind them, and turn them into a wall.
"You are the one who made them slaves," Damien said slowly. His voice had gone very quiet. "The Legion of Heroes. Albert, Fianna, Celdia, all of them. The one who forced them to be the third....."
"Seven, they call us." The man inclined his head. "I am the one they count as first."
The First Dungeon Rex.
Damien did not move, but the shadows around his feet were creeping outward, slowly, across the grass.
"Then answer me," he said. "Who are you, really? And how does a man become this unknown?"
The stranger regarded him for a long moment. The wind moved through his hair. Behind him, across the plain, the walls of Orario were roaring with victory, and the sound felt very far away.
"It does no harm to say," he said at last. "What I allow you to remember, you will remember."
He smiled, and the smile was tired and kind and a little ashamed.
"My name is Epimetheus. The oldest hero the world has ever known. And its greatest failure of one. The forgotten. The man who deleted his own name from history, so that no one would ever have to speak it again."
The name rang a faint bell from a life Damien had left far behind, and for the first time since that field had gone quiet, it did not slide away.
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