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The statue stands before him, faceless and terrible, wrought in marble and bloodied iron. Rivers of bronze set at its feet have been made molten by the sun, spears and shields rippling in the light, staining scarlet into the floor beneath them.
All Kratos can think of to say is I don’t want to die.
His words rang hollow, like the clang of a shield in an empty temple, but it was the only word to describe the fate it offered. A death truer, yet worse than anything he could have thought of, truer than the waters of the Lethe, worse than an eternity of the life he had known. Nothing would remain, but the little left behind would turn oblivion into a mercy.
This was not dying, he thought. No, something worse than dying, a deeper part of him knew: he had felt death at the hands of Ares, the chill of the Underworld’s breeze as he fell with no Charon to guide him to its shores. Death was cold, uncaring, the silence of a tomb and the bright sunlight just outside the door.
What stood in front of him now was feverish, clattering, sharp with the scent of fresh blood. This was the shriek of a warrior new to the battlefield, half-fear, half-rage, all desperation to see the next dawn and terrified certainty he would not. This was the aching rasp of the veteran’s blade against the whetstone, a breath away from silence in the darkened barracks. This was the wail of the child seeing his father march off, the grinding crack of a widow’s voice when she learned her husband wouldn’t return, the crunch of a skull under a cartwheel as the supply line passed carelessly over it.
Fever. Blood. Bronze. Things he knew well, and things he could not more shy away from than he could shy away from his own flesh and blood. Things he could no more run from than he could run away from his two hands, or the chains wrapped around his wrists, or the nightmares that dogged his every step with blood on their teeth and his family’s screams in their throat.
And it was not death. It heralded it, knew it well, danced and sang and fought with it as though the two were brothers: but it was not death.
And as Kratos lay there on his knees, feverish with new divinity, he knew with fierce, terrifying certainty exactly what it was.