“I need a weapon that can kill a god.”
I suppressed a sigh. Barely.
The kid, and he was a kid, no older than 19, looked deadly serious. Grim. The armour was Hellenic. One of the soldiers from the endless meat grinder of the Trojan war then. Realistically, he could have been from any of the Greek planes caught in endless skirmishes, but I recognized the armour, there were only a few Greeks who had something quite so ornate.
I quirked an eyebrow. “A weapon to kill a god?” I asked, “Why do you need something like that?” I knew the answer would be some kind of revenge, it always was. The boy seemed to almost chew on the question, as if he had expected me to simply nod sagely and give him Murders-The-Gods-And-Shatters-Their-Skulls and sent him on his way without a word.
“Because,” he finally said, his voice a low, hard, strained growl. “He killed Patroclus.” Ah, yes. The specific flavor of grief that demands a young man seek self-annihilation in the pursuit of righting a wrong that can’t be righted.
I mustered the most sympathetic smile I could. “That really sucks, kid. I’m sorry.” I meant it. There aren’t really any words that help when the pain is that fresh. The look he gave me suggested that I had perhaps not used the adequate amount of tact. Customer service had never been my specialty. It’s why my forge was in the middle layer of the most inhospitable plane I could find. To deter having to play nanny to angry children.
Not that it had deterred this particular angry child. “So you’ll make me one? A weapon to kill a god?”
This time I did sigh.
“Slow down kid. Killing a god is not a trivial thing. They’re not called ‘Immortals’ because people ran out of things to call them.”
Killing a God is not impossible, but it’s not exactly easy. “Have you heard of Osiris?” I didn’t pause to let him interject, I knew a potential monologue when I saw one, and I didn’t especially want to hear his protestations. “Egyptian god, not really your wheelhouse, I know. His brother Set, who was also a god, decided he didn’t need the competition. Cut him into pieces, scattered the pieces everywhere. A whole ordeal.” I paused for a beat here, watching the kid’s furrowed brow as he seemed to work his way through it. “Didn’t work. Osiris survived. Became god of the underworld.” I knew all too well that if this story was enough to deter someone they weren’t the type of person to have made it to my forge, but I had to try.
Rage was welling in the kid’s chest, I could tell. The way he looked at me like he wanted to cut me down. “I’m not some cowardly Egyptian God sneaking around in the middle of the night and hoping I don’t get caught.” he sneered, red hot disdain aimed squarely at me.
I suppressed a smirk. I remembered what that felt like. Knowing yourself an implacable force that would smash through anything in your path. It wouldn’t do for the kid to think I was making fun of him. “Alright, fine kid, let’s imagine you have a God-Killing… What, sword, spear? Let’s just say a spear.” I nodded at the spear clenched in his hand, shaking with barely suppressed wrath. “What God are you engaging in glorious combat?”
“Foul Apollo” he almost spat out the name. “Whose accursed hands guided Hector’s spear.”
You had to admire the balls on the kid. Or the sheer arrogance. It was hard to tell the two apart. “Apollo, sure” I said, “Immortal deity. Has been running variations of the Trojan war for centuries, son of Zeus and Leto.” I considered the angle. “Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, Apollo descends onto the field of battle to face you directly. Maybe he’s having an off day or something, I don’t know.” Getting a God to get off their ass and do anything other than meddle indirectly was always an undertaking, the kid didn’t realize how much work that assumption was shortcutting.
“You heft your spear, and before you’ve taken a step forward Apollo has skewered you with maybe three hundred arrows. You don’t even get to close the distance.” The kid began to angrily protest. I raised a pacifying hand. “Yes, yes, you can bring a shield. He’s a God of Archery. That means that there’s no shot he can’t make. No infinitesimal gap he can’t hit. No impossible shot he won’t land. Being behind a wall or being out of sight might help. Slightly. His arrows could pierce through any wall that wasn’t reinforced by an opposing divinity. He doesn’t need to see you if he knows you’re there, and conveniently, he’s a God of Prophecy. He knows you’re coming.”
I could see it under the simmering fury. The desire to throw my words back at me. To take his spear and make me take them back. He probably didn’t consider the idea that someone who makes weapons to kill Gods might have a bit of insurance laying around. No, I could tell that what stopped his hand was the idea that I might be right. “What then?” he managed instead, his anger barely contained. “He just gets away with it? I refuse.” The last word was more of a scream than a word.
I let him let it out. It hurt like only a raw wound could, I knew. “Look kid. Killing Gods almost never works out.” I continued, my voice gentle, almost conciliatory against the rage. “If you want to hurt Apollo, there are ways. You know that. But killing him? He’s out of your league.”
He deflated. There was an almost imperceptible sag in his posture. He’d come here expecting to leave with a gleaming suicide pact, and I had just told him he wasn’t going to get it. Usually what followed was bargaining.
“I don’t care.” The words were quiet. Silent in comparison to his previous volume. I almost wasn’t sure I had heard them. “I don’t care how hard it is. I don’t care what it costs. I need to see him bleed.”
“You’ll die. Or worse.” I spoke it quietly too. The kid had a right to choose. There’s an unbearable agony when someone is ripped from you. A hollow void that can only be filled with rage. A pain so intense that the only path seems to be self-destruction.
It wasn’t my job to pull him away from that. The only person that could do that was standing in front of me seemingly uninterested in the task.
“I don’t care. I’ll do it. With or without your help”
I felt weary like I hadn’t in a long time. But this was the job. You don’t tend to the Godkilling forge if you’re not ready to feed the souls of aspiring champions to it. The kid was going to get himself killed, and all I could do was give him the tools to make it less futile.
“Sit down then.” I gestured to the wooden bench. “How much do you know about combat theology?” I asked, already knowing the answer. The blank look confirmed it.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Alright. You might as well strip out of your armour too.” I continued, pulling out my copy of Applied Thaumatological and Theological Concepts. Volume I. “This is going to take a bit.”
“I am going to skip the math. Both because you don’t need it, and because giving you a rigorous education on the morphology of divinity isn’t going to help you in a practical way.” I pondered for a second, feeling out the shape of it. They say the best way to realize how much you know is to try to teach someone who knows nothing. “Let’s start with what a God is, shall we?”
The look of confusion from the kid suggested that he hadn’t even considered the question before. A God was a God. Water is wet. The sun is warm.
“Gods are what happens, roughly, when mortal-level beings overlap with a concept or series of concepts to such a degree that they become embodied forms of them.” I could see the sheer befuddlement on the kid’s face. Right. “Gods haven’t always been and aren’t permanent. They’re the result of a mortal becoming so entangled with an idea that it warps them, they become part of the idea and the idea becomes part of them. These ideas, in the field of combat theology, are called domains, or mantles, and yes, there’s a distinction, no it doesn’t matter here.”
“A domain is, at its core, the idea that defines a thing. A God of Swords can make a sword do anything a sword could do, taken to absurd extremes: cut through anything, parry a blow it shouldn’t be able to, even reshape something into a sword. But critically, it’s not about what the God decides. The God of Swords can’t just declare that mountains are swords and claim power over mountains. What matters is collective mortal belief. If everyone agreed shields were a kind of sword, then he’d have dominion over shields.” I paged through the book, found the relevant paragraph and started to hand it over to the kid, when he stood up with a roar.
His face was contorted with rage, brow furrowed. “Enough old man.” I’d clearly exhausted his patience. “I was bathed in the river Styx as a child, no weapon can kill me until I achieve my glory! Which means no matter how many arrows Apollo chooses to sling at me, I will survive until my moment of crowning triumph! Now will you give me a weapon or not?”
I slammed the book shut.
“Yes, yes. Achilles son of Thetis. Great hero of Troy. Choosing renown over a long life. I know all about you.” This time I raised my voice, just a bit. “You really think a heroic domain and a prophecy will protect you from Apollo?” I flipped the pages of the book to show the domain overlap diagram. “While Apollo is bound by the threads of prophecy, renown can mean any number of things. He doesn’t need to kill you. Just hit you with a plague so virulent that your limbs rot off as you try to hobble your way across the battlefield. Everyone will know the tale of the heroic struggle of Achilles, who crawled his way across the bloody hills of Troy, agonizing, his flesh betraying him, but too proud and stubborn to stop, until at last his agonizing corpse was displayed as a trophy by the Trojans. Is that better, kid? Is that the glory you seek?”
I didn’t pause. I turned away, leaving the kid there. Strode with purpose into the forge. It hungered with potential, pulling at me, but I wasn’t here to work. Instead I unslung a spear from the far wall. It almost purred under my touch, hungry for blood. I stormed back into the room. Achilles was still clearly trying to work out what to say. I threw the spear at his feet. It clattered as if disappointed. “If you want to be an object lesson kid, don’t let me stop you. That’s some of my best work. See if a pointy stick will help you fight a God.”
He looked at it. Gears turning. He picked the spear up, almost with reverence. The tension coiled in his body, as he turned the spear and offered me the haft. “How long will this take?” he asked, the words drawn tight as a bowstring.
“No longer than you spent sulking in your tent nursing your injured pride.” I said, taking the spear. The words were cutting, they were meant to be. Ego was all fine and good, you had to have a healthy ego to think you could take on a God and win. I’d landed a blow, and his first instinct was to lash back out. I just held his gaze, his dark brown eyes mirrored in mine. He let out a shaky breath. “Fine. How do we begin?”
I smiled. “Do you know how to peel carrots?”
It turned out that Achilles, the immortal hero, slayer of men, scourge of the Trojans, could, in fact, peel carrots. Neither of us was a great cook, but I had had centuries to perfect the art of making an edible stew, and so dinner that night, and every night for the following weeks was hearty, serviceable and a bit boring.
In the mornings we talked through theory. In the afternoons I quizzed him the concepts from the morning as I worked in the forge. Achilles was not the best forge assistant I’d ever had, but like his carrot peeling, his help was serviceable. Rage and impatience boiled under the surface of every conversation, and when it became too much, I let him channel it into a plan. A plan to slay Apollo.
As much as I was forging a weapon for the kid to use, I was forging the kid into a weapon.
“A mortal can never wound a God with a mortal weapon. You know that much or you wouldn’t be here” I had explained on the first day, as I worked the forge. “The why is trickier. All Gods have a shard of true immortality. Not invulnerability, but you cannot kill the idea of the sun, or of music, or of prophecy by just stabbing it.” My words were punctuated by the hissing of steam as I plunged my hand into the pool of quicksilver. “No, the only thing that can wound a God is an opposing domain. A heroic domain will do, if it’s aimed just right, but what you really want is the most opposed domain from another God you can find.”
The kid cut the resonator at my nod and the forge was plunged into darkness. “If you’re fighting a God of Darkness, a light domain is about the best you can do. But there’s nuance there” I picked up the spearhead. Cracked. No good. I tossed it back into the central column, and picked up a different piece of ore. “Specific beats broad. If you’re fighting a God of War, they’re going to be good at all the war things, but a God of Archery will still be better at archery, and more importantly, their domain would, in the narrow field of ‘fighting with a bow’ be more powerful than the God of War’s.” I didn’t include the dozens, no, hundreds of caveats needed to clarify that point. The strength of the Gods mattered. The location mattered. The specific approach mattered. A God of War might leverage shields effectively enough to stop a blow from a God of Archery.
The work was different from what Achilles was used to. I could tell that his brain and his muscles hurt, but he was too proud to complain. Which was good, because I was not willing to tolerate whining. I immersed myself in teaching and forging. Nothing else mattered. I couldn’t save the kid, but I could give him my undivided focus, overwhelming as that might be.
“By now, it should be obvious that just a weapon isn’t going to let you kill Apollo. To even have a chance you need to leverage everything at your disposal. This won’t be an honorable stand up fight where you stride into battle and exchange blows.” the kid’s pride would have chafed if he hadn’t been bone tired and in the middle of peeling another small mountain of carrots. “If we had all the resources I’d like at our disposal, we’d have something from one of the more powerful Gods of War to really make this hit hard.” I swept the carrots into the pot. “Ares would do just fine, but I don’t think he’s taking requests. I don’t have anything from Sekhmet, Kartikeya or Odin, and stealing from them is almost more of a death sentence than your current death pact” the stew simmered contentedly. “Fortunately for you I’ve spent a while collecting trinkets. So I have something that will do just fine.” A fragment of Fragarach, the terrible sword that could cut through any armour. It had belonged, at some point, to a deity, but the legend had faded enough that the power had dimmed. It oscillated right on the edge between heroic and divine. It was as good as we were going to get.
The kid’s patience was fraying. I could tell by how clumsily he sorted the forging salts. He was better than this, but his mind wasn’t where it needed to be. He didn’t lash out because I’d already made my point, and his pride demanded he be a good student. It wouldn’t be long now. I’d given him all the information he needed. The weapon was done, really. I’d been taking my time on the finishing touches. Delaying the inevitable.
He just needed a final piece. I took the crimson vial from his hands, causing his attention to snap back to reality. I shook it gently, watching the salts turn from green to a soft glowing amber. “What causes a legendary site to manifest?” I asked him. We’d been hammering that point home recently. “Legendary sites are created when a location becomes tangled up with a legend, or series of legends and starts to resonate and amplify them. Like how the pyramids are so steeped in divine lore, and stories about death that they become a place where one can slip into the kingdom of the dead.” The pyramid example was from the textbook, but it seemed to have stuck with the kid.
I let out a deep sigh.
“Let’s finish this, shall we?”
He stood up, somewhat pale. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or excited. I pulled out the spear. It was a beautiful object. A head taller than either of us. A polished shaft that seemed to be made of quivering smooth glass. The tip a sharp contrast to the elegance of the shaft, a honed edge of cruel iron, almost jagged. I slowly spread the salts over the spear. It had taken a week to distill them from the nine sacred herbs. It was not the protection I had wanted to give the kid, but it was the best I could muster.
I plunged the spear into the rolling pool of moonlit water, collected from a spring near Cyprus blessed by Asclepius. It was done. All it needed was to sit there overnight.
“It needs a name.” I said, both of us tearing our gaze away from the weapon. “Names have power.” The kid only hesitated for a second. “Patroclus’ Revenge”. He said. There was power in that too. We both felt it. I nodded.
“Alright kid, I’ll peel the carrots tonight.”
Neither of us slept that night.
In the morning I handed the spear over to him. Offering it, haft first. He didn’t thank me. He didn’t have to. “I never asked. What is your name?” He seemed almost embarrassed at the question. I gave him a smile, not letting any sadness seep through. “Kill Apollo, bring back Patroclus’ Revenge, and I’ll tell you over a bowl of stew. Good luck kid.”
The forge seemed silent in his absence.
I sat in the center of it. I could see how it would play out. If the kid was smart. If he’d learned his lessons. If he’d paid enough attention.
The first step in fighting a God is to bait him down. Fortunately for Achilles, that would be the relatively easy part. Apollo cared about the Trojans. It made sense. The Trojans shaped him as much as he protected them. Their belief fueled some of his powers. All Achilles needed to do was what he did best. Slaughter them. Desecrate them. Mutilate their champions and shout blasphemy at Apollo. It would only be a matter of time before he’d send a champion.
From a champion’s tether you can pull down a God, if you’re ready to commit to it. A champion is nothing more and nothing less than a mortal hosting a fragment of divine power. The more the God has to pour into the champion, the more present the God is. Achilles could, if he pressed, demand all of Apollo’s attention. Have him pour his domain, himself into Hector, a willing cup being filled with divinity.
The more powerful the champion becomes, the more dangerous he is. Achilles didn’t see that as a problem, but it would become one when the arrows began to rain down on him. Furious Apollo, aiming through the bow of his champion. Blows that could not miss, guided by the divine power of the Archer God himself. Arrows that could pierce any armour, even the aegis of the waters of Styx.
An aegis Achilles had already abandoned. As a heroic mantle, Stygian Invulnerability consists of two parts. Invulnerability, of course, the ability to resist all mortal blows, and the power of the river Styx itself. The river Styx is a place of darkness, gloom and night. Of shadows and destined fate. The place where all fates end. Properly flexed, it can be a cloak against prophecy.
For a few moments. Which was all Achilles would need. A lifetime of invulnerability burning up in minutes to cloud the prophetic eyes of Apollo.
This would not be enough to stop the arrows. No. Nothing short of a divine shield or a terribly powerful wall could stop those. Legendary walls. Walls that had stopped a siege for a decade. That had endured endless assaults without cracking.
The walls of Troy. Infused with the belief of a city, and the obsession of the sieging armies. Of poems and legends. Walls so strong that they would only fall to deceit. With the walls between himself and Hector, and Apollo blinded by the absence of prophecy, a smart god would simply retreat. Deny Achilles his glory. Let the soldiers on the walls swarm him.
Apollo would not do the smart thing.
No, proud Apollo, angry as only the Gods could be, would call down a plague upon Achilles, the men on the wall, and anyone between him and his target. A torrent of pestilence that would rot the body of his champion, demanding even more effort, more energy to be poured into Hector to keep him alive, functioning, and fighting.
The weapon I had given Achilles would buy him time. I had not been able to infuse it with divine level protection, but a sufficiently strong heroic ward, bolstered by Achilles’ own determination, would buy him minutes before his flesh too would rot. He was already dead, no matter what happened. Now all that remained was to close the distance.
This is where strength and power would win the day. The defenders struck down by plague, arrows deflected by the walls, Apollo would call upon his rapidly dwindling box of tricks. The power of song. Like the sirens, it would tug at Achilles, draw him away, sink him into melancholy.
Achilles would have predicted this. Prepared for this. Music cannot move the deaf. So without hesitation or pause, he’d sink the bronze needles into his ears, crushing his eardrums. A more brutal version of a ploy Odysseus would pull on the sirens.
I could see it with clarity. The moment his eardrums ruptured, the quiet setting upon him. The way his footfalls would feel on the walls, the texture of the rotting bodies as he stepped on them, and then leapt, closing the distance to the rotting shape of Hector, now glowing with divinity, twisted between man and God. The way Apollo would lift one hand, bringing forth the radiant power of the very sun, heat and light designed to sear Achilles off of the face of the earth.
The way the Stygian mantle would serve one last purpose, engulfing the sun in darkness for a split instant. Just long enough for spear and man to merge with God and sun.
Then blinding light. The scream of an injured God. The sound of a spear shattering. The birth of a legend. A prophecy fulfilled.
Peace.
Well. That’s what I preferred to imagine. Achilles’ achieving his desired destiny. Or at least dying in glorious battle. The alternative was too grim to bear. If he succeeded fully, if Apollo was a second too slow to raise the terrible power of the sun, if he refused to kill the Trojans with plague, if Achilles had a plan more clever than I had imagined, then Apollo might lay dead at the feet of Achilles.
Then the kid would be at a crossroads.
Absorb the power of Apollo. The mantle would twist him, change him. Not all at once. Not yet. But in a century it would be his hand guiding the blow that killed Patroclus. Not his Patroclus, not his Achilles. But Patroclus all the same.
Consume the mantle, and assume his own legend. Godkiller. An insatiable rage and hunger that would consume him. Force him to storm Olympus itself. Vengeance feeding vengeance feeding vengeance until the worlds ran red with blood and ichor. Until he was worse than Apollo ever was.
Do neither. Walk away. Assume the lesser mantle. Become Master of the Godkiller Forge.
Like Achilles before him.