Patroclus had been close enough to the fight to see Ares’ defense of Aphrodite, and hear his pleas for mercy. Diomedes was, until today, among Ares most ardent worshipers. He lived and breathed war, and not only the strategic aspect of it. He’d loved fighting and killing because he was good at it. But despite Diomedes’s devotion, Ares had been willing to turn against him the moment his lover called for help.
Many Greeks would denigrate Ares for this. He’d broken vows and commitments he’d made for his love of a woman. Patroclus wasn’t among them. Patroclus remembered Achilles telling stories of competing against Ares in the game to win Helen’s hand. Achilles had described the fights, yes, but had also told him of the tears Ares shed when he learned he’d accidentally killed some innocent animals, and his outright refusal to participate in Artemis’s hunt.
He was a more complex god than others seemed to realize, and that was something Patroclus sympathized with. The duality of their lives was the same – war and love. Everyone else seemed to value the former over the latter, and Patroclus had never understood that. It seemed that Ares had understood it, but had never embraced it so thoroughly as one might expect.
The fight had broken up for the day. The sight of one god dying while another three fled was too terrifying for Greeks and Trojans alike. All that remained by Ares’s side were Patroclus, Menelaus, and a small number of Myrmidons who Achilles had sent to look over Patroclus in his stead.
Ordinarily, men stared up at the sky when they died, and the first act of respect was to close their eyes. Sadly, Ares’s face was so thoroughly destroyed above his teeth, that it wasn’t an issue. Menelaus attempted to lift one of Ares’s axes, but found it impossible to budge. Compelled by curiosity, the Myrmidons did the same, even trying to move the axes as a group, but the weapons remained firmly planted on the ground. Not wanting the Trojans to potentially retrieve the weapons, they dug under the axes, and then covered the weapons over. Hopefully no one would notice the piles of overturned dirt among the carnage of battle.
“What do we do with him?” Menelaus asked, “We can’t just bury him with our men.”
“Shouldn’t we though?” Patroclus said, “Where else should the god of war be interred, but amidst the heroic fallen?”
“How?” one of the Myrmidons asked, “He’s massive.”
"We could burn his remains here," another man suggested, "And carry his bones back."
"Does he burn?"
"Even if he does," Menelaus said, "I don't want to build a pyre and then stand around out here in the open to observe its consumption of Ares's flesh."
“Your spears,” Patroclus said, “Lay them down in parallel. We’ll roll him onto the shafts, and then lift him, two men to a spear, six men to a side.”
They did as he instructed, and then began to roll Ares over onto the spears. They had to roll him a full three hundred and sixty degrees to get him squarely in the middle of the shafts, and then adjust him so that the men could lift him without having to grab the spear heads. In the middle of the adjustments, Patroclus – weary from battle – slipped in Ares’ god blood, and fell to the ground right next to him. He landed face-to-face with the mutilated corpse, gasped and rolled away, coughing.
“You okay?” Menelaus asked.
“Yeah…” Patroclus coughed some more, “Yes. Don’t know what got me there. Felt like a fly flew down my throat.” They lifted the fallen god and began the long march to the beach.
As they walked, Ares’s legacy, Kasios, swam through his new host’s bloodstream and crawled up his nervous system to his brain. It spread itself across Patroclus’s neurons, instinctively creating its own connections until it reattained consciousness.
Unlike Morgania, Kasios had been trapped in Pandora’s Box with many other Legacies for decades, and had suffered the same programming corruption they had. He didn’t clearly remember his namesake, the powerful engine of unearthly destruction that Morgania had sent to battle Prometheus and Oranos, or Prometheus’s human warrior, Typhon, whom he’d possessed the first time he’d been released from Pandora’s Box. He did remember that it took time to mesh with a human mind, to make their body suitable vessels for their power, and to establish a connection with the host consciousness beyond spurring simple drives. Going by the fight that had ended Ares’s life, Morgania had figured out how to quickly bond with a human host well enough to accomplish a simple goal, but then – that was Morgania. One of the few things Kasios remembered was that Morgania always figured out a way to get what she wanted.
Fortunately, while Kasios was not as adept at host manipulation as his former ally, he could be patient, and his own game was far from over. He’d offer his new host what help he could, and if a stronger host succeeded in killing him, then he would trade up.
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