Betrayal
Hermes fell for eighteen days and eighteen nights. The impact shattered his bones and carved a crater off the land. He remained prone, incapable of movement, waiting for the final blow from Briareos. But it never came.
In between the pain — pain as he didn’t know an immortal could suffer — he thought of the War. For more than forty centuries the Titans had remained imprisoned, but on one fateful day they had fallen upon Olympus, together with the Cyclops and the Hecatonchires. No oracle had warned them, and nobody knew who had set them free from Tartarus. Hermes recalled the slaughter, and the words that Ares had told him before joining the fray resonated in his head. “Even an immortal can die. Such is the fate that awaits us all in the end.”
Zeus had sent Hermes to warn the other pantheons. After all, it was only fair: in this time and age, they were all weak and almost insubstantial, outliving their worshippers. But Briareos has fallen upon him and blocked his way. They had fought for days on end, Hermes desperate as he knew intimately that there was no way he could win that fight.
He opened his eyes and looked around, cursing his godly strength and stamina for keeping him alive but feeling the pain. He crawled his way out of the crater, and saw a featureless plain around him. Featureless, except for a hill in the distance. Hermes tried to stand but couldn’t, and so he dragged himself towards it. He had nothing if not time.
The hill was not a hill but a mountain, and it was a mountain Hermes recognized. Sysiphus’ peak, where the man had been condemned to torment by Zeus himself. Sysiphus, who had been king of Ephyra, greedy and deceitful, and also a murderer of the worst kind, since he had killed travellers under his protection. Worse yet, he had pretended to be more cunning than Zeus, and in fact he had even cheated Thanatos once, putting the deathly god in manacles. For some time nobody had died, and Ares was not pleased. Hermes almost smiled when he remembered the rage of his half-brother at this, and how the god of War had gone to free Thanatos and retrieve Sysiphus.
And still the treacherous man had cheated death once again, for he deceived Persephone, queen of Hades, and came back to reside amongst the living, until Zeus sent Hermes to capture him. Hermes brought Sysiphus to Tartarus, where he was assigned his torment.
And now — how much time had passed? Days? Weeks? — Hermes approached the mountain. Already on his feet, dried blood covering his bruised skin, he spotted a silhouette of a man up there, almost at the summit of the mountain. The man was pushing a large boulder up. Right then, the boulder skidded and rolled down the mountain. Such was the nature of Sysiphus’ torment, for the rock had been enchanted by Zeus and would never reach the top, a fact that would signal the end of his punishment. After a few minutes, the rock reached the ground level and continued rolling for a while, until it stopped. Hermes looked up, at the man on the mountain, who had already started his climb down. He decided to wait.
When the man was close enough, Hermes noticed something odd. And when he approached the god, Hermes was sure.
“You are not Sysiphus,” Hermes said.
“Greetings, my lord Hermes,” the man said. “I was expecting you. Sysiphus said you’d come. My name is Origenes. I was condemned to wander eternally in Tartarus for treason. And I would have remained so, were it not for Sysiphus.”
“How is it so?”
“When I met him, Sysiphus told me had plans to free us all and offered to exchange places. And I agreed.”
Hermes felt a knot in his stomach.
“Plans? Which plans were those?”
Origenes grinned.
“Oh, he said he was going to release the Titans.”
Hermes felt his head swirl. Somehow, Sysiphus had managed to liberate the Titans, and he had convinced them to wage war on Olympus. And he had also convinced the remaining Cyclops and the Hecathonchires to join them This was a war the Olympians would be hard pressed to win.
No matter how weak or ill Hermes felt, he had to get out of Tartarus and tell Zeus before it was too late.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Hermes felt then an even more pungent stroke of pain. He looked down, and saw the tip of a sword sprouting from his stomach.
“Hello, Hermes,” a voice said in his ear.
Hermes tried to speak but he found he could not. The sword slid out, and blood gushed from his abdomen. He fell to his knees, and a man came into his field of vision, large and strong, his skin bronzed and his beard black, his eyes gleaming with malice. Sysiphus.
“A Titan blade, my dear Hermes,” Sysiphus almost sang. “I’ve been waiting four thousand years for this. And now, if you excuse me, we have a job to finish. Come, Origenes. You’ll find we’re free to walk away. Zeus’ magic is no more.”Hermes felt his eyes close. Oblivion took him.
***
This week I’ve made a different decision. This is based on, but not exactly, my entry for Google+ Writer’s Discussion Group’s Weekly Writing Exercise: March 30-April 5, 2015.
As it often happens to me, I wrote a first version and then had to trim it to fit the 600-word limit. But this week, besides doing that, I felt like I could add a bit more, say, for emotional impact. And gore.
So this is the original, unedited story. The part before the break is the seed for my weekly entry (which can be read at the link above) extending a bit beyond 600 words; the additional ending is after the same break.
As an aside, the image accompanying this story, as almost always, is the same used in the challenge. Apparently, it’s been so widely used around the Internet that I cannot find the source.
