The King of the Gods gave forth a sigh tinged with melancholy. “I loved Troy. Several of my sons-your own half-mortal brothers-perished trying to save that city. I will not be deceived again, child.”

“Deceive you, my lord? How could I hope to?” And why would I need to? she thought. Truth suffices. “Am I not Goddess of Justice as well as Wisdom? And it is justice that I seek here before your throne, beloved father. Kratos has suffered much at my brother’s hands.”

“Justice,” Zeus murmured. “Justice is a chain invented by the weak-”

“-to shackle the strong,” Athena finished with him. “I’ve heard you say so before.” A thousand times, she thought, but kept that disrespectful comment to herself. “It is not Kratos who asks. He has not called upon the gods for aid since that day he begged Ares to save him in the face of the barbarian horde. I ask, Father. Any instant may be his last,” Athena said. She opened her hand toward the golden fountain that burbled beside the throne of Zeus. “Behold.”

The fountain’s spray resolved into an image of the storm-tossed Aegean, littered with the wreckage of countless ships. At the heart of the image, flame and lightning blasted from flashing steel as Kratos used the Blades of Chaos like grapnels to chop into the vast reptilian neck that he climbed relentlessly, pulling himself up to where he could get in some cuts at the head.

“Is that the Hydra?” Zeus said with a faint frown of puzzlement. “Didn’t Hercules strangle that beast years ago? And was it always so huge?”

“This is a new Hydra, freshly born, my lord father. This Hydra is the spawn of Typhon and Echidna-the vast Titans you yourself defeated and imprisoned in the earth far deeper than the reach of even Tartarus. They are the ancestors of every disgusting perversion of nature that my brother inflicts upon Kratos.”