The smells of smoke, blood, and just a hint of charring flesh greeted him as he stepped out of Concept. He’d kept the presence of mind to appear on the front lawn, outside the building. If Moros was occupied, he might not have noticed the arrival of someone new, but it was best not to pin much hope on that; Doom was crafty, even in madness. The fire was almost surely Phlegethon’s work, and Apollo could only hope that the river god was already gone, had left Moros behind, to his…fun. Under other circumstances, he might have reflected upon the irony of a river god being associated with fire, but now he couldn’t afford such intellectual diversions.
He stood at the foot of the stairs leading up to the patio doors, doors that led into the main ballroom, where he supposed the main event had taken place. He’d been a part of war before, and had squared off against Moros on a couple of occasions, but he had to steel himself against the idea that Asklepios might still be there, might be maimed, mangled, or worse. He couldn’t let it distract him; assuming that he was still inside, still visiting atrocities upon corpses, or soon-to-be corpses, Moros would have to be dealt with before he could help anyone else. He could not let it distract him.
Reaching back, he freed the gleaming silver bow from his shoulder. Its filigreed surface, polished to a high sheen, sparkled suavely at him in the late afternoon sun. It was waiting, thirsty for a chance at vengeance, to redeem itself—and himself—from the humiliation they had both suffered at Doom’s hands the last time they had seen him. Gauntleted hands tightened and twisted around the curved bowstave.
He started up the stairs.
Scant moments later, the ornate French doors exploded inward, rockets of glass and wood propelled hither and thither, shredding the thin, gauzy material curtaining the scene from the outside world. And as Apollo, the Shining Son, clad in armor shining with the light of burnished gold, holding his silver bow at the ready with an ash arrow nocked, understood as his gaze settled upon the scene that it was fortuitous that the outside world had been spared this view.
It was the view of a psychotic’s fever dream, or perhaps one of the upper levels of Tartaros. Flames were licking up the far wall, greedily devouring more and more of the wall, and sending its first gluttonous tendrils to the ceiling. Furniture and instruments and champagne glasses were shattered and splintered, the pieces lay everywhere: on the floor, across overturned and broken tables, and over bodies.
And in the center of it all knelt Moros.
Almost by himself, he could have been the picture of nightmares. He clutched and tore at his hair, flailing about and all the while flinging about on his back what looked to be a cheap, perverse mockery of the bloody stumps of what had been Hedylogos’s back. Poorly-painted black feathers bobbed and twisted drunkenly on the duct-taped hangers he’d used to form the shape of wings, fastened to his shoulder blades with more of the handyman’s secret weapon. As Apollo watched, horror-struck, a single feather—a feather that recently belonged to the twisted corpse impaled Vlad Tepes-style on a spear next to Moros (doubtless the same used for Artemis)—broke free of the tape and fluttered down, limp and glad to be free of its captivity to the monstrosity above it.
Abomination was an understatement.
He’d meant to come in and simply start firing, allowing only the explosion of the door as an entrance, and that only to get the deflecting glass and wood out of his way. At the sight of this hell-spawned tableau, words escaped his mouth in a whisper that he could not have stopped had he recognized that he was saying them.
” ...I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around And strangled her. No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain.”
He loosed his first arrow at Moros.
OOC Note: My sincerest apologies to Robert Browning</small