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Ares’ touch burned. Always had.

Just as Zeus’ true form turned Semele to ash and Heracles’ funeral pyre seared the mortality from his body, so does the mere graze of Ares’ half-contained form sear Deimos’ skin like meat on a hot pan. Even with his face buried in the cool sand of Thanatos’ realm the dead air radiates with heat, leaving wobbling patterns like the ocean he never got to see in his already-spiralling vision as he pants for breath.

“Again.”

Deimos drags himself upright by the chains. Ares is barehanded, and Deimos’ task is to beat him by any means necessary and any means possible. An impossible task – a mortal against a god – but impossible is no reason not to try when a god orders you to.

(There is always something more to lose.)

He feints to the side, then runs at Ares, manacled gauntlets allowed just enough leeway from the chains to get in range and swing, leg sweeping arm raised fist ready and-

Ares cuffs him to the ground like a misbehaving child and kicks him hard in the stomach for good measure. The skin his boot touches steams. Deimos knows only hours have passed since Ares walked into this room, yet he knows just as well that he would never know if it had been decades. Pain starts to smear into itself after the first ten minutes.

“Again.”

Deimos drags himself upright by the chains. Try, try again. (The broken skin stings, and he knows it will be worse when it is cleaned.) He runs at Ares, drives his shoulder into the god’s gut hard enough to wind, moves to duckunder-

A hard-shelled limb shoots out and jabs him in the belly, and Ares flips him back to the ground hard enough to wind him instead. Deimos blurts out a harsh cough that turns into a fit, grit under his tongue and caught between his teeth. Perhaps a curse is wheezed out of his split lips; it’s not like the war god would care enough to listen, anyway.

“Again.”

Deimos drags himself upright by the chains, still breathless, but determined. Even a mountain does not stand forever. He runs at Ares on legs that do not shake at too much weight borne too suddenly after an injury, deftly twists past the man’s first jab to dart behind him into the perfect position for his chains to tangle the god’s outstretched arm and wrench it-

A leg is swept under his feet and the chains are yanked back to their source in the same moment, and Deimos hits the ground face-first. Ares only laughs as Deimos is slowly dragged dragged by the wrists back into position, face pulled through the sand. He already knows cheating is forbidden: this is his own fault.

“Again.”

Deimos manages to drag himself up by the chains, painfully. A task is always impossible until it is done. He runs towards Ares, dodges under the god’s first clumsy blow and leaps onto his back to grab the god’s face from behind, hands on his cheekbones, thumbs bracing on his eyesockets, pointer and middle fingers so so so close to his eyes-

Two overlarge hands reach over the god’s shoulders and yank him off, tossing him to the floor, the god stamping on his knees afterwards for good measure. Deimos cries out at the blow; he cries out at the crack and spear of pain it sends shooting up his leg like one of Zeus’ own thunderbolts. He knows the rules: he knows that inflicting severe injuries is forbidden. He thinks that Ares is cheating at his own game.

“Again.”

Deimos tries to pull himself upright, but his knee gives out under him and send him back to the floor. His arms are wrenched back by the chains, but they do not hold him up, and he lands on his right shoulder with a thump that jars through his body hard enough for his teeth to clack together.

A moment passes like sand poured through the neck of a bottle, flowing like liquid, but gritty and painful to the touch as it digs into open cuts. Deimos gasps for breath as his skin tries to weave itself back together, bloodied mud shoved out of where sand has been worked into his cuts, breath fogging into steam, hair drenched and sticking to his forehead. His skin shimmers in the light of the braziers. He can’t tell if it’s burned or just soaked with sweat. With how much it stings, it could well be both.

Ares’ boot kicks him in the side, hard enough to roll Deimos onto his back. “Is this truly all you can give? All these years, and you fall after a mere few blows. Your homeland would be ashamed, warrior.” Almost as an afterthought, he petulantly adds, “Get up.”

Deimos can only cough, winded.

The war god grabs Deimos’ hair, yanks him up to look him in the eyes. “Get up, Spartan.”

Somewhat faintly (somewhat hysterically) Deimos notes that Ares is as cow-eyed as his mother: the eyes glaring down at him are round, shiny, a beautiful deep brown like Io’s in the stories. How strange that a man like him has soft eyes.

“You have the eyes,” he coughs, “The eyes of a cow.”

Ares’ face contorts in rage, and then Deimos is hitting the wall like a toy thrown in a toddler’s rage and falling to the sand-covered stone floor with a crack of bone, pain shooting up his side like Ares’ hand clamped to bare skin. He hears the stamping of Ares’ sandals on the sand, and a foot is slammed into his stomach hard enough to leave him retching in the dust.

“Get up, Spartan.” Ares grits out.

Deimos pants for breath, stomach twisting. He knows fighting back doesn’t solve anything.

“Get. Up.”

Deimos’ broken side sears with pain, enough to choke on as it claws up his chest like a fox caught in his torso. Is he dying? No, no, not yet, he can’t be, he hasn’t even seen his first battle yet –

“Get up.”

“Go to the crows.” Deimos hisses through grit teeth.

Kratos pokes him none-too-gently in the side with the butt of his spear, hard enough to make Deimos yelp at the jab. “You are a Spartan, are you not? Get up.”

“Brother, I think you broke one of my ribs.” Deimos whines. It doesn’t really feel bad enough for a break, of course, but it still hurts like a-

“I did not.” Kratos deadpans. A pause, then he crouches down next to him.“Do you think a real opponent wouldn’t do worse? Get up.”

Deimos groans and lies in the dust for another few moments, but takes the offered hand to pull him upright, picking up his spear with it as he’s hauled back onto his feet. When he is older, and wiser, he will wonder how his brother never seemed to have any issue lifting him even when he was barely any bigger himself.

“Do not let me flip you this time.” Kratos tells him, already backing up to a good distance. “Keep an eye on where my hands and feet are, and keep your form strong. Again!”

Once again Kratos manages to flip him like a tiganite, but he takes a while to succeed, and Deimos knows they’re both proud of him for how long it took, because even when Kratos starts telling him how to do better he’s grinning as he helps Deimos up. (This time he doesn’t need to tell Deimos to watch his opponent’s feet.) When the light wanes they run home dusty, bruised and scratched, but with the delighted confidence of young boys who think they’re ready to take on the world.

Ares beats him black and blue. Deimos loses consciousness quickly, and dreams of meat cooking over a fire.

Thanatos’ skin feels like old leather, worn soft and cracked by use under the hot sun, and leaves a cool numbness wherever it grazes. It takes hours for any limb he grasps to regain feeling. In death’s embrace, it only takes seconds for one to go as limp as a wet rag: how Sisyphus managed to imprison him in a chest is beyond Deimos’ imagination.

It is for that reason that he doesn’t squirm or twitch as the primordial shoves his limbs back into joint after one of Ares’ visits, splints broken fingers, scours burnt skin, aggravates cuts to clean and bandage them. (After all, what kind of story would it be if the doom of all Olympus died of a mere infection?) Sometimes he even keeps commentary while manipulating Deimos’ limbs like those of a doll; nothing as coy as acting out a play, just the idle commentary of a man with a dull job filling the silence. Half-joking sympathetic hisses and jokes growled in a voice like gravel as each wound is found and treated.

The primordial calls it “gallows humour”.

Deimos calls it sadistic.

Sometimes, he even calls it the worst part of everything he suffers here.

Truly, however, if scheming Hermes bound his tongue and stopped him from speaking anything but truth, he would be forced to admit that it is not the agony, not Ares’ training, not even Thanatos’ sense of humour that is the most painful part: it is the imprisonment in of itself that is the worst part. Death’s domain is where he has ultimate power: in the world above he only claims personally those the gods direct him to and Hermes guides the rest to the Underworld, but here he has more power than the gods themselves. Deimos cannot die here, not without Thanatos’ agreement. No matter what anyone does, he cannot die, not until death itself agrees to release him.

His mother had raised him to understand that for a Spartan death was a constant companion, the life of a soldier as liable to be short as that of a summer thunderstorm. A dozen or so pseudo-cousins he once had had died in the raising or in battle itself, sons of women his mother had known who had told their sons to watch out for the young ones in the street, boys whose faces blurred in his memory like mist on a spring morning.

(Does anyone in Sparta remember his face? Do they at least remember the dawn-red mark on it, like he’d been dragged face-down across rough stone?)

Sometimes, still, he is young enough to remember Sparta. Dust under his feet, a real spear in his hand that he was really too young to have but none of the other boys wanted to snitch about, the smell of fresh barley cakes as he ran home. The feeling of the hot sun on his shoulders, staying outside long enough for it to burn his skin red. Being too lively and full of life to care if he was injured by the sun that kept the world alight for him to run and run and run through like even Zephyr himself could not catch up to him, not with the winds, not with a hurled discus, not even with the lightning of Zeus himself. Being too young – no, being too unaware to feel any weight of the world he had been born into.

He misses it, sometimes. Sometimes he aches too much to let himself remember.

Thanatos slaps one clawed hand across Deimos’ face, fast enough for sharp pain to shear through him before the numbness digs its nails in, and follows his greeting by loosening the give of Deimos’ chains with a click of his talons. Deimos crashes to the stone below with a clatter of metal and a crunch of jarred bones, and a cry he does not let loose.

Deimos swallows the scream as the impact reawakens injuries he had forgotten about and leaves his limbs awash with aggravated pins and needles, swallows it down to curdle with every other cry in his belly that he refuses to let his tormentors hear.

A Spartan never lets his back hit the ground. Failing that, at least he can make sure his enemies never hear him scream.

Deimos wakes to a roar of thunder.

He lies, stunned, half frozen in fear at the noise as he blinks to wakefulness, waiting for another crash over the drumbeat of the rain on their roof of his home. The wind outside is howling, and it’s too bright for whatever hour of the night it is.

Lightning flashes throughout the room, and Deimos finally realises a window is open; the one by he and his mother’s bed, shutters wide but not clattering in the wind.

In the flash of light from another crash of lighting he can see his brother, still dead to the world in his own bed across the room, as Deimos rolls off his own and onto the floor. However loud he is in daylight, he is silent as a whisper under the sound of the storm as he sneaks across the room to his mother’s side.

She stands by the open window, arms folded on the windowsill and half leaning out, the rain soaking her dark hair as she watches the storm unfold, eyes wide and mouth set like she wants to climb out over the ledge and run out into it. Deimos has heard stories of people who go running out into storms, worse still about those who sail into them, and a childish chill of fear runs down his spine. She doesn’t even notice him whispering her name as she watches it rage, not even when he whispers it again and again.

Finally, he lets his voice creep above a whisper as he tugs at her skirt. “Mother!”

She startles, slamming the shutter and whipping around to face into the dark of the rest of their home. He can see her face still in the sudden dark, her wide eyes searching well above Deimos’ head, her shoulders blocking much of the light from the cracks between the window and the peeling shutters. It takes Deimos tugging at her skirt and whispering her name again for her to realise he isn’t a burglar or a soldier that had snuck into her house.

His mother heaves a sigh of relief and bends down to lift her boy, barely old enough to run, into her arms. “Deimos? Did the storm wake you, my son?”

Deimos nods, and she chuckles.

“Do not be afraid, my son. It is loud, and fearsome, but it waters the fields and keeps everyone inside while the nymphs celebrate. Zeus’ rage feeds us, you see?” His mother sets him on her hip and turns to open one of the shutters, letting the chill wind in and both of them see out to the rain pouring outside.

Now that he looks at it properly, it is pretty. Kind of. It’s too dark to see anything except for when the lightning flashes, but in those brief seconds he sees the clouds light up, the shifting grass, the overflowing streams in the distance as it rolls through like the wakes of boats on the river. And then it goes back to darkness with only the rain and rumble of thunder on the air, and the cold wind raising goosebumps on his skin.

“I met your brother’s father in a storm, you know.” His mother starts. He turns his head to look up at her, but she is staring into the storm as if she wants nothing more to walk out into it. Like there is a treasure there, something big and shiny and important enough to make someone throw aside everything just to hold it in their hands. “A brave, handsome man, there for me when no one else would even listen. I trusted him, you know? I thought...” She trails off, eyes still distantly focussed on the storm.

The lightning lights up the amber streaks in her eyes, like the embers still glowing in the fire before she douses it.

She laughs, softly, turning her gaze away from the raging sky to the warm darkness of the rest of their home. “Perhaps I am cursed. It would explain some things, wouldn’t it, my little terror?” His mother turns her face back down to him, smiling. In a flash of lightning he sees that it is wet with the rain, like her hair, stuck to her forehead.

Deimos smiles back with all his pearly white baby teeth, too young to notice anything amiss as his mother kisses his nose and turns back to the storm. They watch it rage across the rolling hills in silence, together, until Deimos falls asleep, lulled into Morpheus’ embrace by the drumming of the rain and the song of the wind, and his mother returns both of them to bed.

Later, he wakes to the smell of a storm on the breeze. Damp, fresh, clean; the smell of things that never occur in the realm of death. It’s...pleasant. Even as the breeze leaves him swinging slightly in his binds, toes just brushing the dust below (they’ll have the force the yew holding him to have another growthspurt soon), he drinks it in and lets it wash away the dry, sweet smell of rot that haunts Thanatos’ home.

It’s funny. Storms back home started with hot, heavy days rather than a sudden breeze on a day like any other. Not that Death’s domain has days: no, Thanatos is too good to let Helios or Selene ride through every now and then so his servants and prisoner can guess the time by more than their own minds.

The air is thick with ozone, Chills, though he denies them, run down his skin even as the change in atmosphere comes as a relief. One can enjoy the rain while fearing the storm, he supposes. He can enjoy the water and still dread the flood.

Something is coming, something worse than Death, than War, than near-enough anything else that comes to see him. He knows it well: he knows it comes without any purpose of shaping him, comes only to taunt a supposedly captured foe. Such is the way of kings – or so he has come to learn, here in the dim half-light of Death’s domain, torture a better teacher than any instructor at the agoge could’ve hoped to be.

He does not wince as his cell door creaks open. Thanatos’ voice is raw, raspy as ever, a crooked grin audible in his voice. It reminds Deimos a little of the elderly widows that haunted the town square like withered ghosts, eyes prideful as they watched their grandchildren at play.

“Here he is.” Thanatos rasps, receives no thanks as someone walks past him, footsteps loud, air heavy. The unfalling rain leaves the air thick enough to drown in.

Deimos looks up as the king of Olympus enters his cell, and does his best to keep his grin sharp.

Sometimes, Deimos dreams of Olympus.

He barely remembers it, the day torn away in a haze of fear and burnt skin and snowblind eyes from careless gods, but despite it all there are...glimpses, he would say. Snatches of memory.

His mother’s voice, calling him home. His brother, eyes narrowed and teeth bared in a snarl like a feral dog. Fire. So much fire, devouring houses and people the same as Deimos’ kidnappers rode past like ghosts among the smoke.

Riding on a horse, belly-down over its haunches as its rider laughed at something their companion said. Sun-hazed views of a great desert. Sand in his tunic and being too tightly bound to scratch at it. A pair of sad, grey eyes looking down at him, and a damp cloth wrapped around his overwarm head. Buildings in flame.

Rising, clouds like cold mist on an early morning crossed with spun thread in uneven piles. The hooves of a horse coated in that misty tangle, climbing it as easily as a donkey on a rocky hill, as if the stuff shouldn’t just collapse under their weight.

A city of white marble on a high peak. Being carried over a broad shoulder like a child caught stealing and dragged in for punishment, past buildings gilded with gold and marble, past shining figures that blurred like smeared paint as he was brought into a great golden palace. The smell of incense and honey.

Within that palace, eleven pillars of flame, sitting in judgement on a dozen golden thrones.

Then nothing.

The first blow breaks his nose. Blood spills down his throat in a tidal wave, spitting up coppery scarlet mixed with spit before it can choke him, bleary consciousness coming with all the ease of dry bread forced into his mouth.

He blinks away the lingering haze, lets his eyes focus on the colours in front of him. Orange, flickering and flaring like silk in a sea breeze.

“Lord Ares.” He chokes out, and the next blow knocks out two of his teeth.

What must have been only days after being taken from his home, Deimos awoke in Death’s domain. Caught like a sparrow in the branches of a yew sapling, hopelessly tangled in young branches and the chains wrapped around them, unknowing of his crime, his captor, his punishment, even as his gaze darted around the room for some clue as to what it was, and in his desperate, hopeless search from the yew’s branches he found nothing but sand.

Yelling did nothing. Struggling, bravado, even begging did nothing. Hours of panic passed before he even realised no one might be there; he might have just been left to starve, alone, trapped like a rat in a jar. The thought failed to ease his terror.

It must have been days before he saw another person, or, more aptly, a god. Ares strode into the room like some hero from the stories, as boldly as he would have marched onto a battlefield with his grin wide, hair aflame, and helm shining like the sun as he grabbed Deimos by the chin and asked,

“How are you finding your new quarters, little warrior?”

Deimos had frozen like a deer before the huntsman. Body quaking, eyes wide as plates before the god, not even noticing he hadn’t answered by the time Ares cocked his head.

That grin only fell a little, though it took on a distinctly sharper bent in exchange. “Did your mother not teach you to be polite to your hosts?”

“Y-yes, my lord.” Deimos stammered out after a long few moments, barely able to wrangle his mouth around the harsh grip on his chin and the fear turning his tongue to lead.

“Good. So,” The god gripped Deimos’ chin tighter, “Do you like them?”

Deimos felt his shaking grow stronger, if that were even possible. “I d-do. My lord.”

“A shame.” Ares shoved his face away like he was something rotten clinging to his fingers. “We will have to make them worse. Thanatos will be annoyed that his accommodations are already proving insufficient.” At the look on Deimos’ face, the god’s grin widened once more. “Oh, don’t look so surprised, little warrior. You must have already known you were not summoned before the gods for anything pleasant. Be glad your family remains unharmed. Behave, and they may even remain that way.”

Even decades later Deimos can remember the surprise he felt at that. A Spartan warrior would die before allowing himself to be defeated; what had happened to all that bravado his brother had so proudly displayed? Had it crumpled in the face of a true battle, nothing but smoke and bared teeth that blew away in the wind and shattered under force, crushed to powder under a single boot?

“Ah, are you surprised they weren’t hurt?” The war god coos at him, grin sharp, voice bitingly sarcastic. It feels like a trap. By all likelihood, it’s a trap.

And yet it’s one Deimos lets himself fall into – he’s not a kid, he knows better than to just walk into something so obvious – because he has to know. He might not get another chance. “A-a little, my lord. My brother-”

“Your brother was dragged off to the agoge not long after you got here. He’s far too busy now to worry after his little lost brother.” Ares leant in closer once again, hands clasped firmly behind his back but face close enough that Deimos almost expected the flames of his hair to burn. He could see his own face in the god’s wide, dark pupils.“Does that makes you upset, little one? Does it hurt to know you have been forgotten, abandoned, by the ones you trusted most?”

Deimos had no answer. His stomach roiled. Something prickled at his eyes, filled his throat until he felt liable to choke. Ares is trying to mess with him, he knows that, he’s not stupid, but… Kratos was going to leave for the agoge soon, anyway. Both of them knew that, half of the reason Kratos was so hard on him was that he was going to leave him alone.

It made sense. It made a horrible, bitter, angry kind of sense, and Ares’ grin widened. “Good. Let that anger feed you, little warrior, and you will see me again.”

With that the god turned on his heel and swept away out of the cell, leaving Deimos alone in the scratchy, twiggy arms of the yew tree, head full of questions and eyes fighting back tears. It was a pattern the god no doubt meant to set, the first of many to come, because he would be back – ready to kick him half to death, scream insults at him, set him on his feet and tell him to fight until he could no longer even stand.

No doubt he had meant to leave this first visit without a single answer, to leave the prisoner hanging in mystery and confusion, veils ready to be lifted only when the war god meant them to.

But from that day, Deimos knew something that the war god had not meant to tell him so soon. Every time the god returned, every time he brought torture, insults, pain... Ares meant to teach him to fight. For what purpose, only time would tell.

Part of him dreaded it. A small, eager part of him, the part that had watched the older boys go to the agoge with bare-faced jealousy, was excited.

“Hurry up, Deimos!”

“I’m running as fast as I can, you slow down!”

Kratos huffs in annoyance. The sun is beating down atop them like a heavy rainfall as the two boys run through the half-empty streets. Deimos’ feet are stinging from running and his legs ache, forehead wet with sweat and tunic damp. It’s way too hot to be running around fully-clothed in high summer, but someone had the bright idea to go to the river to cool off and decided it’d be fun to run the whole way.

“Slow down! I can’t keep up!”

“Then run faster!” Kratos calls back.

Deimos groans but does his best to, finally managing to make it up to only just behind his brother as he slows down to turn a corner without falling, and he strongly considers grabbing onto the edge of Kratos’ tunic so he can’t run too far ahead again. Like tying a dog to a post so it can’t go running off after every noise when it’s supposed to be guarding the door.

It’s just a race, and Deimos can win those most of the time but it’s hot and Kratos doesn’t even seem to notice. Because he’s older, probably, or at least that’s what Deimos chooses to think about it.

Then, at that exact moment he makes the turn, a pebble skids out from under Deimos’ foot.

He hits the ground with an oof before he even realises he’s fallen, beating by only an instant a spike of pain shooting up his ankle to his knee like a bolt of lightning striking a tree, except the tree is his ankle and the ensuing crack of thunder is Deimos squawking in pain.

Kratos skids to a stop the second Deimos cries out, whipping around to check and sprinting back to his side he sees his brother on the ground.

“Deimos! Are you hurt?!”

Deimos tries to brush him off, laughing weakly. “No, no, I’m…” Kratos pokes Deimos’ ankle, hard, and Deimos yelps. At the ensuing look he relents. “...Yeah. My ankle…”

There’s no more poking at it, but Kratos still looks it over closely. “Did you feel it pop when you fell?”

“No?” Is this a trick question? Gods, he hopes it’s not supposed to have popped.

“Good.” Kratos leans back onto the paving stones, looking much more relieved as he sits down, frankly too relieved for someone sitting on hot stone. “It isn’t swelling up either: you only twisted it. We’ll give it a minute and then you can try to stand.”

“I thought Spartan warriors don’t let little injuries take them down?” Deimos asks.

Kratos scowls. “Spartan warriors don’t make their injuries worse just to look strong.”

Point taken.

The two of them wait in silence for about half a minute before Kratos starts drumming his fingers on his knees, idly swaying as he turns to watch up the street as a few other boys charge past, spears and shields in hand as they chase another child out of sight.

Deimos watches them run behind the stone walls of a house in silence, holding it uncomfortably for a few more moments before turning back to his brother. “You can go, if you’re-”

“We’re waiting, Deimos.” Kratos’ tone leaves no space for argument, and Deimos wisely goes quiet.

More time passes, and Kratos goes from fidgeting with his hands to trying to do handstands while they wait. Deimos remains sitting on the ground, still, as Kratos stares him back down whenever he tries to stand or even shuffle any further than out of the sunlight. It’s annoying, boring enough to make him want to get up and bolt off just to have his brother chase him, but he knows better than to challenge the look on Kratos’ face.

(Later, wrapped in chains, he will decide his brother was just being an asshole. Later still, he will decide that his brother truly was just trying to stop him from hurting himself further, even if he was being an asshole about it.)

A few more minutes pass until his brother relents and checks Deimos’ ankle again, making nothing but a low grumble as he carefully pokes at the slight bit of swelling. “I think you should be well enough to walk, now. It hasn’t swollen.” His face scrunches a little. “…Not much, anyway.”

Deimos does not cheer, thank you very much, and his brother does not hide an amused snort at the display as he stands and offers Deimos a hand up that Deimos eagerly takes. Only to immediately regret it at the bolt of pain that shoots up his leg like hydra venom as he crashes back down to the ground, hitting the paving stones with a cry that’s as surprised as it is pained.

Kratos curses before crouching back down to Deimos’ level. “Hey, hey, Deimos, listen to me. You’re okay, alright? It’s not anything bad, you… just can’t walk on that leg for now.” He pauses for a moment, thinking. Deimos can tell the second the solution arrives, just by the set of his brother’s jaw, the way his shoulders straighten. “So I’m going to carry you instead.”

He nods assuredly before once again offering Deimos a hand up, telling Deimos to be careful to not stand on that leg again, and Deimos takes it, climbing onto his brother’s back and looping his arms over Kratos’ shoulders before he starts walking.

It’s slower going to the river, this way, but neither of them complains. Spartans don’t whine about helping an injured brother, in arms or not, and the sun can beat down all it wants, but they are going to the river and not even the Fates can change that. Both of them are going to get sunburn, but neither complains.

Deimos’ head slowly dips further down onto Kratos’ shoulder as they continue, the sun beating down like, well, a beating on his back as time wears on, nothing to do but sit there and wait until his brother gets them to where they’re going. It’s two long waitings in ten minutes, on a hot day, and it’s boring and Deimos is four. He starts falling asleep, lulled by the rocking and boredom into a comfy half-doze. Even when he starts to hear the soft murmur of the river, he doesn’t even question when the rocking stops for a moment, still only half-awake under the midday sun.

Then, Kratos jumps, and Deimos realises why his brother had stopped for a moment.

They hit the water with a splash loud enough to wake every nymph from there to Arcadia. River water shoots up Deimos’ nose; he claws his way to the surface sputtering and gasping, breathless and trying to cough up the bits of reed that went down his throat, but blissfully cool for the first time since the morning.

A shape moves in the water next to him, blurry yet familiar, and the moment he sees it Deimos is struck with exactly what he’s going to do next as his brother’s head emerges from the water.

Before Kratos has even blinked the water from his eyes Deimos smacks a wide spray of water into his face, muddy green and crystalline as the best-quality glass in the bright sunlight as his brother squawks in surprise, lurching away from the second, more unexpected dousing.

Deimos cackles as Kratos furiously wipes the water from his face, at least before Kratos promptly splashes him right back.

The reeds ring with laughter for the rest of that afternoon, yelps of surprise and the sound of splashing water over the low bustle of the street for the rest of that hot day, both from their battle and the sounds of other children that had had the same idea to beat Helios’ rays.

When the air had finally cooled enough to be bearable, Kratos had walked back through the streets of Sparta with Deimos on his back and both of them soaked through. The sun had long since dried the water from their clothes by the time they arrived home.

Time still passes in Thanatos’ realm. Helios and Selene continue their endless race across the sky, the Fates still spin their tapestry, Demeter’s daughter makes her yearly pilgrimage to and from her husband’s realm, and yet, in the realm of Death, not a speck of dust changes.

Deimos is older, he knows this. His shoulders broaden, his voice cracks, a beard has started to grow on his chin. And yet nothing changes besides himself and the branches of the tree, grown to hold the chains that bind him. Once, he spent months trying to talk to the nymph of it; no reply ever came, and he gave up when he realised that he spoke to either one already dead or one too cowed by the gods to dare speak to him.

Thrice have the manacles around his wrists been replaced. Thrice have new chains been brought in, a size that did not cut into his wrists and ankles and only bound them. Thrice has the skin of his wrists and ankles felt air since he was imprisoned.

There is still, however, a logic to them. They must bind, but not break: the gods want their destroyer punished; Ares wants his warrior merely held fast until he decides to undo the leash; Thanatos wants his prisoner to suffer, but not so much that he ceases to scream. A balancing act.

Years have passed since Deimos was brought to Thanatos’ realm, and Deimos has learned many things.

An impact knocks Deimos to the floor for the fifth time in the past hour, chains rattling as they pull taut. “Truly, you were trained well. You fight like a songbird.” Ares laughs. He laughs like a chicken crowing.

Deimos pants for breath on the floor, ribs screaming in pain and knuckles split like bloody slits in cloth. His chest hurts like someone dropped a boulder on him, which, considering the war god’s strength, may well be an apt comparison. Despite that, though, despite the dirt on his face and the blood on his tunic and the chains on his wrists, he is a warrior and he is one trained by a god. He is better than this. He’s better than lying in the dirt like a beaten dog, waiting for his master to decide the punishment has ended. He is better than he was when he first came here.

Breathe, he tells himself. Watch. Think. What is Ares doing?

Ares is standing above him, smirking, arms crossed and standing fully forward. Easy to throw off balance. Weak spots on full display. Confident of victory. So confident that an enemy has been defeated that he doesn’t care how he stands or how easy he would be to get the better of.

Deimos’ hands dart to Ares’ ankle like a striking snake and yanks. Somehow, by a miracle (are the other gods watching?) he manages to actually pull it forward: the god yelps, and Deimos slams his shoulder into the god’s belly before he can react as he tips backwards and lands on the sandy floor with a thud that rattles the wall sconces.

The room is silent, Ares’ aura drawn close like a dog cowing to the ground, in utter shock at his defeat. A chill fills the air.

But Deimos, for the first time since he was brought to Thanatos’ realm, feels warm as he looks over the fallen god.

Somewhere, deep down, Deimos is grateful for that little gift of the primordial’s when he treats the wounds the war god leaves. That when dead skin is stripped from burns and torn flesh is bandaged shut, he feels nothing for the hours after.

Thanatos is not a healer, but he is willing to assist in ensuring the marked warrior does not perish or grow weak from injuries piled on injuries until nothing solid remains underneath. Deimos does not know if it is sympathy for his pain, a desire to be on the good side of the Olympians’ doom when it inevitably comes, or nothing more than to put a stop his cries of pain.

Death is no healer, yet his touch soothes like snow on a burn, or perhaps rot on a corpse that at least renders the face unrecognisable. Agony vanishes like spilled water under the midday sun. Gradually, but quick enough that if you look away it’s gone when you look back.

That is, of course, not to say the primordial does not enjoy inflicting pain. A dead-limbed man cannot fight back, after all, only experience the pain inflicted on him for a crime he is yet to commit. It’s ironic how these things happen: Ares, the petty, cow-eyed god of savage war, venerated by Deimos’ homeland for traits he possesses none of besides stubbornness; Thanatos, the smirking, dark-haired god of death, whose touch soothes pain and yet loves to inflict it.

And yet, the primordial is quiet, too. Quiet as the grave, unlike Ares’ constant taunting and demands of more-better-stronger like a spoilt child losing a spar and whining until his opponent relents. Truly, he wonders how Ares ever was the god his home venerated most.

(He wonders if his mother and brother still pray at Ares’ shrines. Has his mother found another husband? Does he have younger siblings that he will never meet? Is his brother a soldier by now? Does he pray to Ares for victory before a battle?)

(Does he ever wonder where his brother went?)

“He has found a replacement, you know.” Thanatos tells him one day. “Someone better.”

‘Than you’ goes unsaid.

“Another ‘warrior of prophecy’?” Deimos grits out, ignoring the talon dug gleefully into an open cut. Another man found to be that prophesied doom means that Deimos no longer bears a purpose in Thanatos’ realm, but the Oathkeeper would not have directed his son to the wrong child. The king of the gods is cruel, but he is not foolish.

Thanatos laughs, low and raspy as his fingers gently brush over a burn. “He means to keep you here, still, Spartan. A replacement does not mean your freedom; only your obsolescence.”

Pain radiates fiercely from the aggravated wound, his knuckles bone-white on clenched fists before all sensation fades from the area, leaving nothing behind but soothing nothingness. What good would anger do now? There is no one he can take it out on, no body to strike besides Death itself.

Deimos rolls his shoulders instead, ignoring the sting of the dislocated joint as it’s shifted. “The gods will strike him down before he reaches Olympus. Or they will call one of Zeus’ sons to stop him. I hear Hercules has run out of labours: perhaps he will be eager for a thirteenth.”

Thanatos wrenches Deimos’ arm back into the socket, ignoring the man’s hiss of pain. “I hear he is a son of the Aegis-Bearer.”

“Many are.”

A low chuckle as Deimos’ chains begin to pull taut once more. “True indeed, warrior, true indeed.”

“Don’t let your guard down!”

His shield slams into his brother’s, both of them putting almost all the strength they can muster into trying to shove the other back. Deimos waits, grins, feels until Kratos relaxes for just a moment and shoves as hard as he can. His brother stumbles back, wide open for Deimos to charge forwards and drive a solid jab into his undefended chest.

But his brother twists forward at the last minute, driving the edge of his shield into Deimos’ broken defence and knocking him to the ground as easily as a piled tower of pebbles on the river bed. Another loss. Even after everything, his brother could still beat him in a fight.

He hits the ground hard, but even still he tries to push himself onto his elbows before Kratos is back on top of him, half-crouched, battle-ready and ready to force a surrender, spear pointed dead at Deimos’ neck.

The threat doesn’t need to be said, as his brother snarls, “A Spartan warrior never lets his back hit the ground! Even in death, a Spartan stands tall for battle!”

It’s too- he doesn’t know the word. Too much, too loud, even for his brother. It’s not his brother. Deimos dares to glance up from the point of the spear to Kratos’ face.

Anger. Fire. Disappointment. Fear?

“You are a Spartan, are you not?” Kratos shouts, voice as fierce as the spear pointed at Deimos’ throat. The point wavers for only a moment, an instant of hesitation before it digs into the flesh under his chin, too blunt to wound but pointed enough to make him wince at the jab.

“Y-yes, Kratos.”

The bronze point remains where it is for a long few seconds, almost too long before Kratos finally steps back to stab it into the dirt and offer him a hand up.

Deimos takes it without hesitation, like he always has, and like he has always been able to his brother pulls him back to his feet.

They say Death is kind. A promise that, however much you suffer, it will not last forever.

They lie.

Skin and the fat beneath bubble like oil in a pan, the howls of agony drawn from Deimos’ throat nothing more than the hiss of cooking meat as the ambrosia rubbed into his skin leeches into his cooking flesh.

One of Thanatos’ servants frantically tends the heads of more torches as the primordial presses them against Deimos’ side, barely more interested by the scene unfolding before him than by any of the previous times. The air feels cold, aimlessly bored as it flows over Deimos’ skin like snow pressed to the scorched flesh.

The torch is torn off the melted flesh and tossed aside. More ambrosia is slathered onto the wound, sickly sweet and just on the warmer side of lukewarm, burning and soothing in the same instant as it soaks into cracked skin, slipping deeper into open wounds and lingering there like a sickness. Even long after the primordial and his servants leave he feels it squirming under his skin, healing wounds even as it burns away at his viscera. If he didn’t see it so often he’d be convinced his blood was turning to honey, ivy, something alive on its own terms rather than his.

Another torch is pulled from the fire and jammed against the fresh ambrosia, that honeyed smell caramelising as the heat bakes it into Deimos’ skin. Half-deliriously, Deimos wonders if the gods have taken to eating mortals while he has been imprisoned, if their intended means to avoid the prophecy they feared so deeply is to roast him like a prized cow, carve and serve him for one of their feasts.

Once this torch has burned down to nothing Thanatos tosses it away with the others, the clatter and hiss of steam echoing off the cold stone. The servant hands him another, and a groan of irritation sounds from across the room.

Thanatos stops. The air stiffens, chills around the war god’s faux-relaxed aura. “Do you have a complaint, Ares?”

A squeal of rotten wood as Ares shifts in the chair one of Thanatos’ servants dragged in for him, not saying a word beyond another, quieter huff as Thanatos goes back to work.

If any of the other gods asked Thanatos would say the warrior had been tortured by flame. The gods would not know how deeply, or how long: Prometheus’ little trick all those years ago had proven they were far from all-knowing, and what they did not know would only hurt them when the job was done.

Nobody said burning away a human’s mortality would be easy, and yet Ares seems to believe it should have been.

The god grumbles like an impatient child as he stands, starting to pace as the smell of cooked, honeyed meat fills the air once again. As Deimos watches, hazy-eyed, his hair flickers, flares, flows like a campfire draped over his shoulders in a parody of a shawl, its light catching on the intricacies of his armour into thick rivers and streams of light. The footsteps echo over the hiss of steam and Thanatos sighs.

“Be patient, Ares, your project will continue.”

Ares spins on his heel as another torch is tossed away, flame spent. “Patience is not-”

“-In your nature, I am aware.” Thanatos growls. “But that is the price you have chosen to pay.”

More ambrosia. “All of Olympus is just out of my grasp, and you expect me to merely wait for it to fall into my hands?”

“You expect yourself to wait.” Thanatos jabs the torch into Deimos’ shoulder particularly hard, enough for Deimos to force out a groan like a dying animal at the sensation. “I am not your servant, Ares, only your ally. You would do well to remember that.”

Ares grumbles again, but passes more ambrosia from across the room at Thanatos’ request as he continues to pace.

The other gods visit infrequently. Demeter, once; Hades and Poseidon more often, to check on the prophesied threat to their realms; Zeus, once a month; Athena, once a year. Deimos tracks time by the latter two’s visits after a servant comments on the regularity of them within earshot.

Hope curdles like milk with every visit that goes by. Sour, sickening, roiling in the belly until it makes you vomit. Rescue is impossible from Thanatos’ temple, and anyone who could have – should have – rescued him has long since missed their chance on that day, and hoping that someone will try anyway is as good as swallowing poison and hoping the war god will die from it.

Spite is a better motivator. When his thoughts go back to that day, instead of wishing, dreaming that someone would have interfered, that that mysterious other rider would have said “no, he is just a child, I will not let you do this” he thinks: where was that bravado? The known possibility, the one that should have fought? Where was that refusal to be defeated? If “a Spartan warrior never lets his back hit the ground”, why, then, did his brother let himself lose so easily?

Hope burns when it is too heavy to hold. Spite sickens, sharpens the smile and fouls the soul, but it is easy to handle, already sharpened with a grip to hold as you point it. Or, as the case may be, hone it. Steel it. Hold it, ready to swing sure at those who have earned his ire, be they man or god.

He hopes, now, that on that bright day where Ares is foolish enough to release him onto Olympus he can make an escape back down to Achaea below. And on that day, he will do whatever it takes – kill whatever god dares to stand in his way, burn every field in the Peloponnese, slaughter armies, anything – to make his way to Sparta and burn it to the ground.

Ares tries, and fails, to beat his warrior back into submission.

A dog fed on what it should never have had is a dog that no longer knows respect for its master. It is a dog that sneers, barks, bites at the one voice it should obey above all others, especially its own. A self-possessed dog is easy to put down – unless it fights hard enough, and its master’s hand is restrained by another, one who demands the dog be spared despite its irreparable disobedience.

His warrior fights, refuses to be tamed, almost escapes.

The gods do not assist in killing Ares’ disobedient mortal, and it kills good soldiers, good allies in its escape. Alecto, Phobos, Megaera, Akhos, Tisiphone, Ania.

Despite this, Athena steps in and takes command of his warrior, forbidding him from killing it and passing it into the care of another, because Athena has not chosen a warrior since her Odysseus returned to Ithaca and Ares’ warrior is not a warrior of the mind and she cares only enough to stop her pawns from being destroyed.

Ares watches with clenched teeth as his warrior is passed into another’s hands, and plots his revenge.

There are unfamiliar footsteps in his room. Deimos cracks open his eye to watch, staying limp enough to pass for unconscious: Thanatos does not walk, and his servants do not hurry, but they prefer to take him by surprise.

The owner of the footsteps is a blur of red-on-white, a snake of red paint coiling around the left of the mass in a pattern like the birthmark that now burns eternal around Deimos’ own body, scorching metal hanging at both of its sides. The air warms, ripples like it does when Ares is near, thick and heavy like the waters of a hot spring. Is this a trick? Does the god stand before him in disguise? Or is it merely a servant of Ares? Willing, then, or another servant of war?

He blinks, and the figure has vanished out of sight. Yet the presence remains as it circles behind him, the sound of swords of wood, the feeling of a burning, humming, singing, raging aura in the air. It’s too intense to be Ares’: where Ares languished and stretched, a well-fed beast of prey, this is...unsatisfied. It wants – no, needs more, the dissatisfaction of a beaten dog at only being able to snap at his master’s enemies. The hunger of a fire kept at bay the bricks of the hearth, inches from dry wood.

(Deimos wonders how he will fare against an unfamiliar god.)