Herculean (Cerberus Group #1)
Jeremy Robinson & Sean Ellis
Prologue
A distant land, long ago...
At last, he thought. The end of my journey is in sight.
While that was not entirely true, the location on the map was indeed close at hand. But reaching that destination would not mean the end of his quest. Finding the Source—Echidna, the Well of Monsters—would merely be the halfway point. He would also have to make it back home, to the other side of the world.
To come this far, he had endured stormy seas and worse, entire oceans, where there was no wind at all. He had crossed deserts where no rain ever fell and climbed mountains so cold that his breath froze into snowflakes. He had ventured into the eternal darkness of the Earth’s bowels, where only monsters dwelt. To return whence he came, he would have to tread those paths again, face the same perils one more time.
The return trip would not be as difficult though. The path was already traveled, the unknown stripped of its mystery. He knew the way now, knew which roads led to danger and which winds would blow him to safe harbor. He had the map to guide him.
And he was not the same man that had set forth on this desperate quest.
He was stronger now. Almost as indestructible as the lion whose impervious skin he now wore as a cloak. His trials had refined him, melted away the base impurities of his being, left him stronger, purer…god-like.
He had been worshipped once or twice along the way. At first, the adoration had pleased him, but the novelty of the experience did not last. Yet, there was nothing the simple folk could give him that he could not just as easily take for himself. Their adulation was empty, rooted in fear more than anything else. Worse, their sacrificial offerings were always accompanied by endless supplications for divine assistance. Destroy our enemies. Bless our harvest. Restore my virility. Marry my daughter.
No wonder it had taken him so long to make it this far. The return journey would go more swiftly. Of that, he was certain.
But first, this one last labor. A journey into Erebus, the primal darkness. The Underworld, realm of the dead.
More superstitions for the simple-minded.
But not even he could deny that this was a cursed place. A few days previously, he had stridden through a sea of golden grass, pasture for the great horned beasts that roamed in herds, stretching from one edge of the horizon to the other. But here the ground was scorched and lifeless. He could feel the heat rising up from the earth, burning the skin of his feet even through the leather soles of his sandals. Fumaroles belched out a poisonous fog. The rivers boiled. If there was a place where the wicked dead wandered in misery for all eternity, then this surely was its doorstep.
But the Underworld was not inhabited by the forsaken spirits of the dead.
It was a source of life.
He paused, and consulted the map again. The scale was too broad to show him the way now, but he knew he was close. He turned in a slow circle, his sharp eyes searching the landscape until, at last, he saw the path marker.
He moved in the indicated direction, maintaining a straight line to the extent the treacherous terrain permitted. There was no trail. It had been a long time since anyone had walked this ground. The living rarely had business in such a blighted place. There were, however, a few signs of more ancient travelers. Footprints, stamped in soft mud long ago, baked by the sun and the terrible heat of the Earth itself, until the mud was as hard as stone.
Had Typhon walked here once? He did not know the answer to that question. Perhaps the man who styled himself both a sorcerer and a god had procured the source of his power in some other way, not daring to brave the terrors of the Underworld. That would be so like him. He was a coward, who used others to accomplish his ends. There were braver men in the world, men willing to face such danger for the right amount of gold.
Some of the prints did not belong to a man, or even, judging by their size, an ordinary beast of the Earth. Those prints, if he read the signs correctly, led away from the entrance to the Underworld.
He found a second marker, then another, and then, as if drawn like iron to a lodestone, he entered a hollow depression in the scorched earth, where more ancient symbols indicated that he had arrived, warning him to proceed no further. It was a warning that he had no intention of heeding.
He consulted the map once more to find the words. They were strange, like nothing he had ever uttered before, and yet when he spoke them, the earth…changed. He was a learned man, far more knowledgeable than anyone who walked the world—even Typhon, the ‘divine intellect,’ was a mere child in such matters—yet he did not understand how it was possible for mere words to change the fabric of the physical realm.
When this task was complete, he would make a study of the matter, but for the moment, he could spare no mental energy investigating.