1.14: Titan Fall

The next morning, Prometheus stood on top of a hill to the northwest of Knossos with Macaria, watching the port city, Heraklion, to his northeast. He couldn’t see Tiamat closing on the city, but he could see Oceanos’s iron-prowed war galleys chasing her. The troops around him began shouting, and he turned his gaze southward – Kasios was rounding the walls of Knossos, trudging along in some sort of gigantic mechanized suit he’d created from his memory of their home world. Human troops pursued him with slings and spears, but they plinked off his alien armor – good, Kasios needed to think they weren’t a threat.


“Are you ready for this?” he asked Thanatos’s widow.

Macaria anxiously rolled a glowing green orb back and forth between her hands, “That monster took the love of my life away from me,” she said, “I’ve spent every waking hour since I recovered plowing through Tartarus’s memories to find you the information to make this. I’m ready to see it used. Just remember – the effect will last a few minutes at best, and they’ll need to be close together.”

Tiamat finally reached the port city and leaped from the water into the city streets as a leviathan, she was at least eighty feet long – the largest shape-shift Prometheus had ever seen anyone perform – and about a fifth of that was in her long, crocodile-like head filled with hundreds of teeth the size of spearheads. The soldiers positioned in the small port city were supposed to give her a fight when she made landfall, but it went about as well as Prometheus expected. Tiamat thrashed about, turning several buildings to dust and snatching up a number of men in her jaws. Oceanos’s ships closed in behind her and began firing their ballistae at her. That motivated her forward, and she stretched out into a more mobile, serpentine form that slithered quickly through the buildings and out into the plain where Kasios was waiting to assault Knossos’s damaged northern wall. Tiamat transformed again into a hulking crustacean-like creature that began ripping through the abandoned outskirts of Knossos and spewing corrosive fluid at one part of the main wall. Kasios marched down another street in his mechanized suit, opening fire on another part of the wall.

“Why don’t they focus their fire on one point?” Macaria said, “It’s like they’re trying to keep some minimum distance between each other. Do they know what we’re planning?”

“Kasios and Tiamat have been at this a long time,” Prometheus remembered the virtual war they’d spent millennia locked away in, “I’m sure that’s taught them a strange sort of caution.”

“Well, they need to be closer than that for this to work,” Macaria hefted the orb.

“I’ll see to that, you strike when the time looks right to you – I’m going to be too busy to give you the order.”

Prometheus strapped on his armor and checked his weaponry. He’d attempted to replicate the weapon he’d handled in the simulator, hoping to arm his troops with many copies, but he hadn’t had long enough to study the weapon to get to know it well. He had to fill in gaps using his future memory and more than a bit of imagination. As a result, out of one hundred attempts to create the weapon, only one had manifested as a working device – the other ninety-nine were essentially inert props, their moving parts fused at the molecular level. Prometheus carried the one working ballistic weapon, and his vanguard carried the dummy weapons slung on their backs – a small bit of psychological warfare.

Prometheus walked out in front of his troops, who stood sharp at attention in a phalanx formation, “What you see on the plain below us is a kill box,” he explained, “Our enemies have allowed themselves to become surrounded because they think we can’t hurt them with the weapons we have. We have the means to level the field in our favor, but it’s going to require sacrifices. Some of you standing in front of me will surely die within the next hour. To those of you who will not return from this battle, I salute you. To those who do return, I promise you’ll feast in Knossos tonight.” The men cheered wildly, few mortals had ever seen the inside of the city of the gods, so it was no small enticement.

Prometheus mounted his motorcycle and laid his spear across the handlebars before gunning it down the hill towards the outskirts. His vanguard began a brisk march downhill after him, while the rest of the men spread out and prepared their bows and slings.

Prometheus raced through the streets towards Tiamat, and loosed the iron chain that was wrapped around the bumper bar at the back of the motorcycle. He hefted his spear, with one end of the chain connected to it, and closed in on Tiamat. He threw it with as much force as he could muster, harpooning a vulnerable soft spot where her ventral and dorsal carapaces met.

Tiamat screamed as the iron spearhead sank into her flesh. The metal burned her so furiously that boiling ichor poured out of the wound. She tried to pull the spear out, but Prometheus had barbed it, and every tug inflicted incredible pain. Prometheus drove hard away from Knossos, dragging Tiamat on the chain like an angry mother pulling a screaming child’s ear. Tiamat tried to fight him, struggling and vomiting acid at him, but the pain was too intense for her to mount a coherent counterattack. They broke out into the open and Prometheus suddenly swerved to one side – Tiamat stumbled, and found herself face to face with his vanguard.

She took a breath and finally yanked the spear out with a deafening screech. She began to summon up a stream of noxious fluid, but before she could unleash it on the troops, her back side was pelted with a dozen painful projectiles. She turned and saw Prometheus holding a rifle aimed right at her. He fired another burst and the steel-jacketed ammunition punched through the chitinous armor on her chest, boring painfully into it. Tiamat screeched again and turned to escape, but saw that Prometheus’s troops were now brandishing the same weapons – enough to shred her. She turned and launched herself past Prometheus seeking her consort for reinforcement.

Kasios had already withdrawn from the outskirts to help her, and the shoulder-mounted launchers on his mechanized suit began lobbing explosives at Prometheus’s men. They raised their bronze shields for protection, but it did little good – many of the men were blasted into bloody bits of bone and leather. The men rushed towards their attacker, but as more of them fell before Kasios’s onslaught, they lost momentum, and the survivors eventually turned and ran. Kasios moved to pursue them, hoping to turn their route into a massacre, but Prometheus raced past him and opened fire on Tiamat again.

Tiamat ejected the steel-jacketed bullets from her body and changed back into her serpentine form - Prometheus immediately regretted having to make the bullets with steel instead of iron. Tiamat began trying to dodge Prometheus, while Kasios tried to attack the titan, with his arsenal of weapons, but it took several shots before Kasios scored a hit that unmounted their enemy. Prometheus grabbed what was left of his bike, spun, and threw it at Kasios along with one of his fireballs. The makeshift explosive detonated in Kasios’s face, staggering him for a moment. Prometheus opened fire on Tiamat again, but his gun’s large magazine went empty, leaving him with naught but the fires that ignited in his hands.

Caught up in their fury and sadism, Tiamat and Kasios closed on Prometheus slowly – so slowly the titan had time to wonder if Macaria was ever going to make her move. Just as Tiamat raised one of her mantis-like claws to impale Prometheus, a great vulture flew overhead – Macaria in her avian form – and dropped the glowing green orb over their heads. Prometheus launched a fireball straight up and shot the orb out of the sky, detonating it. A cascade of green light whooshed out of the orb and left behind a rainbow-colored aurora in the air. In a sudden sparkle of light, Kasios’s armor disintegrated, reverting back to the nothingness from which it had formed. Kasios tried to conjure his weapons and armor again, but nothing happened.

The monstrous man growled, “Doesn’t matter, Tiamat’s not the only one who can shape shift.” He grew into the same large, three-headed beast form that Prometheus had seen him use in the simulator, “Can kill you just as easily this way, Prometheus.”

“Maybe,” the titan pointed to the sky, “but I think that without your weapons, you’ll have considerably more trouble with them.”

Kronos swooped down from the clouds with about a hundred of Knossos’s titan warriors, each carrying a brace of steel throwing spears. Kronos gave the command and they loosed their spears on the two monsters, the first salvo panicking them. They fled east, first, but ran into the army that Kasios had largely ignored before. The human slingers fired off round after round of small iron balls that burned and bloodied the two of them. The iron bullets effectively trapped Kasios in Tiamat in their current forms, and forced them back towards the remains of Prometheus’s vanguard, who had rallied and returned, backed up by the rest of his troops that had been waiting on top of the hill to their west.

Tiamat and Kasios turned north, planning to try to break through the naval blockade and regroup on the nearby island of Dia, but Prometheus closed the noose. He’d used his powers as little as possible so far that day, saving much of his energy for this one maneuver. He reached out with his mind to find the hundreds of solid iron pikes that his troops had buried in the field the night before, and with a great effort, the master of metals heated them pikes and commanded them to launch violently from their hiding places. Glowing red iron skewers erupted from the earth in Tiamat and Kasios’s path, a few skewering them and the rest blocking off their retreat. Kronos’s airborne titans swooped in to release their second salvo of steel death.

“Hekate!” Kasios shouted, “Save us!”

A black cloud appeared before Prometheus, and suddenly the witch queen was standing before them.

“You’ve picked up some new tricks,” Prometheus said.

“Oh, I've been using that trick for a while. How do you think I got into Tartarus,” she said. "I've been honing some older tricks too, though," Hekate unleashed her voice in a single piercing high note. Kronos’s titans lost their orientation in the air, fumbling their spears and crashing into one another.”

Prometheus slid Pandora's Box out of his coat and lunged at Hekate, but she turned to mist again and he tumbled through her straight into reach of Tiamat and Kasios. The two monsters closed on him, intent on finishing him despite their considerable injuries, but evidently they didn’t recognize the threat in Prometheus's hands. The younger titan inserted the coin, twisted it to the 'capture' position, and popped the box open, holding his breath. He held the box out before him as the two monsters roared forcefully at him.

Their roars, though initially terrifying, sputtered out into hacking coughs as their A.I. partners ripped free of their nervous systems, streamed out of their lungs and flowed into the box. The two ancient monsters staggered backwards and began to involuntarily shape-shift back to their natural forms. Prometheus didn't bother to prepare a coup de gras; Kasios and Tiamat had been fighting with some of his iron pikes still lodged in them, and while they had been painful hindrances in their gigantic forms, they completely disrupted their return to their normal size and shape. Both of the monsters splashed to the ground as yellow-green organic jelly.