The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 20
When Elder Powers Collide
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Zeus flung so much lightning at the walls that I was momentarily blinded. But when my vision cleared, I saw that he had little to show for his efforts except a few charred spots on the rapidly moving stone.
“No time for that approach!” shouted Hecate. “And you might destroy us all using such power in such a confined space! Use brute force instead!”
The Hecatoncheires, already in motion, braced themselves and stretched out their numerous arms to hold the walls in place. Straining as hard as they could, they managed to slow the walls to a crawl. I could still see some motion, though. They had bought us time, but by themselves, they couldn’t solve the problem.
Poseidon expanded his trident to be as wide as the remaining space, then wedged it in between the walls. Hades did the same with his bident. That really did stop the walls, but I could hear grinding noises as they continued to try to close in. We might well be on the verge of finding out whether adamantine weapons were truly unbreakable.
“We need to get out of here,” said Hera. “These measures won’t hold indefinitely.”
“Tartarus is too powerful to defeat outright in his own realm,” said Hestia. “We need a way to escape.”
“That won’t be any easier than holding the walls back,” said Hecate. “The space around us is so thick with Tartarus’s magic that no method of magical travel will be able to penetrate it. Trying to cut through the walls might work if we coordinate our efforts, but the process will take too long and leave us exhausted by the end of it.”
“Well, Tartarus was intended to be an inescapable prison,” said Hades. “We just didn’t anticipate that we’d end up being prisoners.”
While they talked, I tried to use the Philosopher’s Stone to transform the rock from which the walls were made into something else. I had more power to deploy now that the stone didn’t have to compensate for the soul of Hermes being inside my body. But despite that gain, I had little luck. Tartarus-saturated stone resisted alchemical manipulation too well. At most, I could turn the equivalent of a grain of sand into water or air. By the time I’d transformed enough to free us, the Titans would have conquered Olympus, and God only knew what the Telchines would have been able to do to Hermes. What we needed was a faster solution.
Persephone and Demeter started feeding life force into the Hecatoncheires to regenerate their strength and enable them to hold position longer. But even the power of the two vegetation goddesses wasn’t infinite.
“There is one way in which we might be able to prevail,” said Hecate. “We could call upon Gaia for help. She’s an elder power with about the same amount of strength as Tartarus, and as we’ve already discussed, she interacts more than elder powers generally do.”
“Yet she will demand a high price for her help,” said Zeus. “She wants all of her children to be free.”
“Well, now they all are,” said Hecate. “Except for us. Perhaps we can gain her help without having to guarantee freedom for the Titans. In any case, what choice do we have?”
Zeus looked as if he wanted to start throwing lightning again. Instead, he nodded to Demeter, who began to invoke Gaia in a loud voice.
“It may take Gaia a while to answer,” Hestia said to me. “Let’s get that spear out of you and get you healed.”
She was far from being an expert healer, but with the power of the stone at my disposal, I didn’t need one. With surprising gentleness, she pulled the spear out. The stone, which had already stopped my bleeding, began to repair the damage with greater speed than I had anticipated. I felt little more than a warm, tingling sensation, which gradually faded as my healing neared completion.
“Why do you call me, child?” asked a distant voice. It sounded as if it was rumbling through stone, yet it was also gentle and far more human than the way Tartarus or even the Telchines talked.
“Mother of us all, we find ourselves trapped in Tartarus, who is attempting to subvert the natural order. We ask that you free us.”
“Gladly—if you will free all my other children.”
“They are free already,” said Zeus.
“Do not take me for a fool,” said Gaia in a much less gentle tone. “You will imprison them again the first chance that you get.”
The Hecatoncheires groaned in unison as the pressure on them increased. The points of both the trident and the bident sank into the stone.
“Their freedom is a threat to the rest of your children,” said Zeus. “You know this as well as I do. However, I will agree to allow them greater liberty—if they will swear an oath on the River Styx to become peaceful members of divine society, accepting both that they must harm no one and that I have the right to command them as their king.”
Gaia didn’t immediately reply. All I could hear was the stone walls scraping forward, inch by inch.
“I accept your word,” said Gaia. Though no Styx Water was present, I could feel magic tightening around Zeus. “But the penalty will be grave if you violate your oath. To fulfill my part of the agreement, I will get Nyx to persuade Erebus, whose realm stands between you and me, to allow me to pass through. This negotiation will hopefully be fast.”
“Thank you, Mother,” said Demeter. “We will eagerly await your help.”
“I hope that was not an error,” said Hera.
“Their freedom will be conditional,” said Zeus. “If they will swear the appropriate oaths, I may not like having them free, but I can put up with it.” He managed a tight smile. “Of course, some of them may not be willing to bind themselves with oaths.”
I was pretty sure that he would prefer an outcome in which none of them were willing. Personally, I’d be much happier either way than I was now.
Unfortunately, the walls kept moving, and Gaia couldn’t immediately intervene. Zeus and his sibling grew to gigantic size and braced themselves against the walls to help the Hecatoncheires. The walls stopped moving again, though how long that would be the case was anyone’s guess. I worked on transforming the stone into air, and my results were marginally better than before. We were wearing Tartarus down, but probably not fast enough to save ourselves.
After a while, the wall started pushing harder. The Olympians and the Hecatoncheires started shrinking to delay being crushed, though they remained braced against the wall. The trident and the bident continued to be pushed farther and farther into the stones.
Where was Gaia? Was Erebus trying to block her? By all accounts, he was an elder power who hadn’t become particularly interactive. But he and Tartarus both had a connection with shadow.
That gave me an idea. I couldn’t counteract the stone particularly fast, but perhaps the lumen naturae could counteract the shadow power that was reinforcing it.
I ran to where the trident and bident were imbedded in the stone. The points on their prongs had created holes slightly larger than the prongs themselves and much wider than the space the shaft of each would need to pass through. The result was some space around both the trident and the bident—a way for light to reach the inside of the stone.
I shined the lumen naturae into that space as intensely as I could. Tartarus fought back, and I could feel his power squirming in the walls. He couldn’t have beaten any ordinary light, but light derived ultimately from the Holy Spirit was one force that could beat him if I could keep it up long enough.
The wall with the prongs in it shuddered to an abrupt halt. I kept the light shining through that wall but simultaneously tried to shine it through the holes in the other one created by the weapon shafts. There was far less extra space, but I got a little light through, and the power of Tartarus convulsed at its radiant touch.
I had a second to congratulate myself before I heard stone grinding against stone above me. I looked up to see the ceiling descending toward us with disturbing rapidity. The stone was perfectly even, so there was no chance that I could shine light into it.
It hit the two walls with a resounding crash. They should have held the descended ceiling up, but the work I had done to drive the power of Tartarus out of the rock had been successful enough to make the first wall I’d worked on shatter on impact. The other one held, and the ceiling slid to rest diagonally upon the wreckage. We were still trapped, but at least neither walls nor ceiling were moving at the moment.
“What did you do?” asked Hecate.
“I discovered that the lumen naturae from the Philospher’s Stone can force back the darkness of Tartarus,” I replied, trying not to sound too smug.
I heard another grinding sound and realized that Tartarus was trying to reshape the surviving wall so that it would allow the ceiling to finish its descent and crush us. For that move, I had no immediate countermeasure.
I tried desperately to think of some alternative, but fortunately, the ceiling and roof both shuddered and moved grudgingly away from us.
Gaia had arrived and fought with Tartarus to gain control over the stone barriers. She might not be able to do much about shadow, but stone was well within the range of her earth power.
I wasn’t as good as Hermes at measuring the stability of an area, but I remembered that this part of Tartarus had already been strained almost to the breaking point. I should have thought of that earlier. What effect would the unnatural tug-of-war between Gaia and Tartarus have?
I tried to focus my ability to see magic in a way that would help identify possible tears in reality. Sure enough, I saw cracks spreading through both rock and shadow.
“They both need to stop!” I yelled. “If they continue to struggle, this whole area will disintegrate.”
Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades all looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Hecate looked skeptical, but she also squinted at her immediate environment. “Stop! The mortal speaks the truth.”
“Great Mother, cease your struggle,” yelled Demeter.
Unfortunately, there was no one there to make a similar appeal to Tartarus. Gaia stopped struggling in answer to Demeter’s shouted prayer, but that left Tartarus free to start flinging walls and ceilings at us again.
Praying that I didn’t do the wrong thing, I focused on the cracks running through the reality around us. I surrounded myself with lumen naturae and sent it out in all directions, seeking Tartarus through the cracks that he had helped to create. The light flowed through the rock and ate into the surrounding shadow. I thought I might have heard a scream, but I wasn’t sure.
I was expending the stone’s power so quickly that it would soon be depleted and have to recharge. I’d wounded Tartarus, but I couldn’t kill him. What would happen when the stone shut down?
As if that weren’t enough, I had an even bigger worry. Despite the fact that Gaia and Tartarus were no longer fighting, the cracks in reality had started to widen. I had no idea what would happen if that process continued, but the look of horror on the normally stoic Hecate’s face made me shudder.
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