Apostles of Doom

“He’s a demon! He kidnapped a knight of Tiernon and stole mana from a god!” She shook her head. “Even if the demon Tom could be trusted, Tiernon is not going to be happy about what he’s done, and anyone near the demon is going to be angel dust!”

Jenn paused for breath and no one said much of anything. “Wait, you said Edwyrd had a new home on another plane. They aren’t with the demon in the Abyss, are they?” She stared back and forth between Vaselle and Gastropé.

Gastropé laughed nervously and Jenn squinted at him suspiciously. He said, “That would be ridiculous. Humans can’t live for that long in the Abyss. There’s nothing to eat, and you can’t keep those little cool spells going for ever. Besides, you really think Edwyrd and Rupert would want to live in that dark cave of Tom’s?” He shook his head at the silliness of it.

“Rupert? Yes, given his previous actions. Edwyrd? I would hope not,” Jenn said, shaking her head.

Oubliette

Tom had tried to follow the training session on the consoles along with everyone else and correlate that to what the Rod was feeding him from Tartarus. It was tricky, though. Eventually he gave up and just followed the lecture like the others. A lot of the value came from Phaestus explaining the background of why things were the way they were.

One good thing was that the Command Center upstairs had summary consoles for monitoring and fine-tuning Tartarus so they wouldn’t have to keep people stationed down in the Oubliette. When things were working properly, the only times they needed to be in the TPCC was during prisoner intake and in emergencies where they needed full control of the system. Theoretically, they also needed to be there for prisoner release, but that happened very rarely.

“So let me see if I understand this,” Ayega Death Tusk asked. “We have the best prison in the multiverse, but we don’t torture anyone in it? They are all just sleeping?”

“It does seem like a waste,” Velma Snargspitter said.

Völund sighed, shaking his head. “D’Orcs.” He closed his eyes for a moment before opening them and continuing. “They are all in suspended animation — asleep, if you will — because they are much easier to contain that way. If we tortured them, they would wake up and fight us.”

“Yeah, but this place was built as a prison for the gods. From what I’ve heard, the gods like to punish their enemies far worse than simply putting them to sleep,” Ayega said.

Phaestus took over. “That is certainly true, so while we don’t physically torture them, their dreams are anything but pleasant.” That caused a few murmurs.

“What do you mean?” Velma asked.

“For example, one of the titans imprisoned here with a checkered history, both with the other titans and the Olympians, or more specifically with the husband of my accursed mother, is stuck in a continuously looping nightmare where he is chained to the side of a steep cliff and a giant eagle flies down and lands beside him and begins picking at his belly with its beak. Eventually, it reaches in and rather slowly and painfully eats his liver. Really long torment. And then it starts over again the next dawn.”

“Okay, well, I guess that’s a pretty good punishment,” Velma conceded.

“What did he do to deserve this punishment?” Ayega asked.

Phaestus shrugged. “Well, it’s very complex. But at the root, it was a betrayal of friendship. Officially, it was for teaching mortal mana users how to access the elemental Plane of Fire, thus giving them a very powerful weapon capable of challenging the gods.”

Tom shook his head. So that was the true legend. So Prometheus was in his dungeon? The Titan who had angered the gods by helping mankind and was doomed for thousands upon thousands of years to this horrible fate? Tom had a disquieting thought about releasing him. It would be the right thing to do. But it might also be a very stupid thing to do. He really didn’t need to be pissing off any more deities and if he had learned anything lately, you really couldn’t trust the legends you grew up with. So he would absolutely have to do more investigation before doing something that rash. If the guy had been down there for over fifty thousand years, what was one more year, or ten?

The class was wrapping up now and the D’Orcs heading out. Tom nodded at Phaestus. “Great introduction, thanks.”

“My pleasure. A burden shared is… somebody else’s problem.” The smith grinned.

“I was trying to follow what you were doing on the consoles with the Rod, but it really gets tricky,” Tom said.

“Yeah, the Rod has direct stream access to the animatic quantum core, so it is very direct,” Phaestus said.

Tom just shook his head, having no idea what he was talking about.

Phaestus smiled. “It’s like a techno-magical computer.”

“Oh, that makes more sense,” Tom said.