Sensation (Pre-Trojan War / Tyche)
It still felt unusual to him, this place. Home but not home. Hands tracing the spot where his chair had been, his favorite chair. No longer. Most anything that was wood had been looted from the building. For fireword? Something else? On his knees in front of the spot Prometheus could find no traces. Not even a whisper of it. Eternity was what he'd been prepared for, but eternity was something else. Eternity erased all messages, all remembrances, and what did it leave behind? Eternity was existing in the face of your own destruction. There was nothing left here. Not really. His sight had told him it would be true. Maybe he hadn't been ready to believe it, hadn't wanted to believe it. The truth didn't have patience for romantic points of view. The truth didn't wait for him to prepare himself. Holding tight to those memories, it left him to stumble forward into whatever was left of time.
There weren't many options left to him, were there?
Start over.
Hair was hanging in his eyes, long ragged hair that hadn't yet been trimmed. Prometheus couldn't see a reason to trim it. There was hardly enough in him to speak, to walk, to drink and move. Let alone present himself before other gods. The appearance didn't matter. Any more than the remnants did. He'd paid the penance for his 'crime', for the 'justice' of the king. A glance around the large room revealed little that could be said to have any value to him. Tables with no chairs. Windows with no curtains, no decoration. A staircase that led up, and a wide set of double doors that led to the forge. Apart from the creaky wooden door through which Kratos and Bia had entered a thousand years ago, there was nothing in it familiar to him. At last Prometheus sat on the very spot his chair had occupied. Imagined a jar in his hand. A jar of mead, a gift from ... he couldn't remember. It was long enough ago that the memory of it had faded from his mind, if not the sensation.
Sensation.
Cold running through his fingertips, but they were warm. Pain in his chest where the spear at last had been driven in. Was it a spear? He didn't remember that, either. Hephaestian chains rattling as his old friend secured him for the torments that were come. Even now he felt no fear, not really. There was enough of him left, the real him, to know that he wasn't in danger of being carried off again. No, not fear, but... changes. The changes had come without his asking, without his hoping. Mankind still drew breath on this earth. Hercules had told him much in that time they'd shared together, some small amount of time. Sensation was alive in his heart if memories were not. He remembered Io, the Argonauts. That was what Hercules had called them. He'd seen them as they sailed by, the great eagle by then devouring his liver. He'd been wrong.
He hadn't screamed.
Sensations were overwhelming him then. Softness of a woman's touch against his skin. The feel of stone beneath his legs. Water against his lips. Sunlight in his eyes. Rain pouring down on him, the lord of storms doing whatever he could to break the immovable will.
The immovable will.
Hands that held callouses for thousands of years were still proud. Still strong. He'd massaged chains against his palms to keep himself in some kind of sanity. Unable to escape, unable to move, but able at least to do that for himself. Hideous speech of steel against skin. Hideous sound of flesh giving way to the eagle's beak, a creature fashioned by his own brother. The knowledge of what had happened in his stead, his warning ignored. All evils unleashed against mankind, all wondrous destruction now in his domain as well as the domain of the gods. There was still hope that men could escape that cycle of violence, still one ray of light left to guide them. Prometheus knew what Zeus did not, what none of them knew. Mankind was wiser than the gods, who in their infinite wisdom repeated the same mistakes over and over until nothing was left. It might take mankind ten thousand years to reach some kind of peace.
But they would.
Their will, not Prometheus' will, was the immovable.
A sharp knock at the door roused him from his thoughts, and Prometheus stared with a scornful expression. Wondering if he should attend it or not, though in honesty he didn't have the best history when it came to ignoring knocks upon his door.