Hera's Gardens

Some God of War fanfiction...if that's what you can call it.

And as he swung around the corner, he found the Mother of the Gods, Hera, lying on the muddy ground, clawing desperately at her flowers.

"Do you see what you've done?" she shrieked, her black eyes wide and frenzied against the ghostly pallor of her skin. "My plants are dying! Everything you touch dies!" In her palm there was a daisy, only its once green stem had now turned brown, and its beautiful white petals wilted and blew away with the soft wind.

"I hope you rot in this garden, Kratos, along with the rest of this rotting graveyard. You won't ever find your way out of here, and when you die, I'll be glad to see you suffer as an old man." And with that she stood up and wobbled around a corner, continuing in vain to try and save the things she loved more than her own children.

***

She clawed at Kratos' body, who's strong and muscular hands wrapped tightly around the frail and bony stature of Hera, a mud-covered blue and white tunic hanging off of her like rags.

***

He threw her to the ground. The silver crown that previously adorned her greying hair had cracked in two, and now lay in her troubled palms.

"What have you done, Kratos? What have you done?"

A momentary expression of sadness masked her pale face, her deep red lips now looking horrific and vicious against the ghost that this once proud woman had shriveled into.

***

His hands wrapped around her thin neck, and her useless sobs of mercy were instantly cut short when a crack rang out, and Hera ceased to live. Her body collapsed onto the floor, where a black spectral mass began dissolving her skeletal form. And as she became non-existent, all the plants in her garden perished.

Author's Note

As with many other pieces I've recently uploaded, this one shows another element that was very much present during 2010. This was right after God of War III had been released, concluding the main trilogy of games in such a tragic and bloody spectacle as everyone had come to expect from the creators of these glorious games. Some of the dialogue really used to appeal to me, and at times I'd enjoy handwriting some of the quotes, and in this particular case, applying them to actual, albeit lame, situations, describing what was going on during a particular scene or entire section throughout the game. In this case, the protagonist finds himself lost in an illusory garden on Olympus that belongs to Hera, whose appearance has withered from her supposed beauty as a result of Kratos having killed a number of gods already, and the elements that they used to control are now in chaos. In particular, from what I could understand, the death of Hermes releases a plague of locusts that feasts on all plant life, which as a result turns Hera's gardens into a plant graveyard - still glorious to behold, however. There's a trick to getting through the garden, and while Kratos is trying to figure it out, he meets Hera at intervals, and eventually crushes her throat after commenting on something that angers Kratos, the context of which would not have made sense to anyone who hasn't played the games. So yeah, as far as I can remember, some of Hera's dialogue in this is actually from the game.

Written 24 March 2010.