The Gifts of Pandora

Contents
The Gifts of Pandora
Extra Resources
Skalds’ Tribe
Prologue
Part I
1. Pandora
2. Pyrrha
3. Pandora
4. Athene
5. Pandora
6. Kirke
7. Pyrrha
8. Pandora
Part II
9. Pyrrha
10. Pandora
11. Kirke
12. Pandora
13. Pyrrha
14. Pandora
Interlude
Part III
15. Artemis
16. Athene
17. Pandora
18. Athene
19. Pandora
20. Pyrrha
21. Pandora
22. Kirke
23. Pandora
Part IV
24. Artemis
25. Pandora
26. Artemis
27. Kirke
28. Pyrrha
29. Athene
30. Pandora
The Cycle Continues …
Epilogue
Skalds’ Tribe
About the Author


The Gifts of Pandora: Eschaton Cycle
Tapestry of Fate Book 1
MATT LARKIN
Editors: Sarah Chorn, Regina Dowling
Cover: Juhi Larkin
Copyright © 2021 Matt Larkin.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Incandescent Phoenix Books
mattlarkinbooks.com


Extra Resources
For full color, higher-res maps, character lists, location overviews, and glossaries, check out the bonus resources here:
https://tinyurl.com/hw52dzss


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Prologue
2400 Golden Age
Fulminating clouds encircled the peak of Mount Olympus, every flash a testament to the power and self-aggrandizement of its new lord. Rough-hewn steps sliced the mountainside, weatherworn and slick, a remnant of the Time of Nyx. Oh, but Prometheus had seen them restored. In pyromantic visions, he had beheld the grandeur Zeus would erect upon his new home. Time and again, Prometheus had walked here in his prescient trances, half-aware of the marmoreal temples and grandiose Olympian halls that would limn this peak.
When the time came at long last, he would walk, half in a daze, as oft happened when an Oracle fulfilled his visions and lived in actuality a moment he had lived in prescience too many times. Thus, accordingly, he’d seen his own bemused steps.
Now, though, Titans passed him by, both ascending and descending, and so many pausing to gape at Zeus’s coruscating display upon the summit. Perhaps the self-styled god vented thus to announce his victory to the World, though the storm remained, even in Prometheus’s visions of distant days to come. If Zeus created this now in celebration, it would endure in perpetuity as a symbol.
Prometheus paused, halfway up the winding staircase, just before a raging cataract. A cool brume rose from where the fall hit the rocks, and he tried to revel in the way it tingled the bare flesh of his arms and shins. He wished he could luxuriate in the beauty of this place, but he could not suppress the shudder that wracked him at the foreknowledge of what fate would one day befall him here. So very like what awaited Kronos high above.
Zeus would not enact his father’s vile sentence until Prometheus and the others had gathered to witness it. The new king sought an exhibition to titillate and horrify, and he would have one, though he surely did not begin to grasp the import of all he had done.
An approaching woman yanked his attention from the cataract as she descended the peak. Zeus might want his spectacle, true, but many would not wish to watch what he intended for Kronos, Nike among them.
She paused before him, dark hair flapping in the wind.
“Did he say aught?” Prometheus asked, raising his voice to carry over the fall.
“He said a great deal,” Nike answered. “Not all of it made sense. Some of it made too much sense.” A hesitation. “Will you speak with him?”
Prometheus found his fists clenching. He wanted to refuse, but he owed Kronos at least the dignity of a final word. “I must.”
Nike frowned, looking like she wanted to say more. Like she was none too pleased at having helped Zeus begin his reign. Nor was Prometheus. Maybe none of the Titans who had sided with him were much pleased. But then, Fate had forced their hand.
With a nod of understanding, Prometheus left her and continued his unpalatable ascent. Flickers in his mind hinted at locations where an agora would one day rise, and beyond, upon the summit, where Zeus would erect his ostentatious palace. About that spot Skystones orbited, an archipelago of hovering rock islands, held aloft by their Otherworldly nature.
The fulgurations from the storm burst amid those floating isles, leaving them in turn radiant or tenebrous. Not so unlike the Titans claiming this place as their home, when even Kronos had not possessed the hubris to think he could dwell among such energies and remain himself.
Finally, Prometheus reached the summit. Here, snows lingered upon the rocks and flurried in the wind.
Others emerged from a cave that bored into the mountainside, hollowed out long ago, in the Time of Nyx, when Men touched something they ought to have left alone. And Zeus would build his throne upon a bed of cancer eating away at the foundation of the World, drunk on its poisons.
Upon the cave threshold, Bia waited for him. Auburn-haired and incarnadine-eyed, the Titan was, perhaps, the most violent of all Styx’s brood, and her visage held a sickening glee at what she knew impended. “The king sends for you, Firebringer.” The Titan licked her lips, her eyes gleaming. Was she actually aroused by these proceedings? Or perhaps she wished to discomfit him for her amusement.
Either way, Prometheus ignored her salacious airs. “Take me to him.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw Bia’s expression turn into a glower that persisted even as she guided him downward. Like the stairs rising from the base of the mountain, these were rugged, though in better shape for not having endured millennia of wind and rain. The path led them deep inside the mountain, past the chamber that housed the Oracle Mirrors that had, in their own way, helped ensure the damnation of Kronos. The quicksilver mirrors had shown more Truth than even one such as Kronos was prepared to handle.
Oh, Prometheus knew all too well the agony of foreknowledge and the anguish of unvarnished Truth—the Ontos of the World held no whit of pity. While Men toiled, suffered, and died, they did so in ignorance,