But that service is done. The chains are gone and the blades with them.

Now he has nothing. Is nothing. Whatever has not abandoned him, he has thrown away.

No friends-he is feared and hated throughout the known world, and no living creature looks upon him with love or even a hint of affection. No enemies-he has none left to kill. No family And that, even now, is a place in his heart where he dare not look.

And, finally, the last refuge of the lost and alone, the gods…

The gods have made a mockery of his life. They took him, molded him, transformed him into a man he can no longer bear to be. Now, at the end, he can no longer even rage.

“The gods of Olympus have abandoned me.”

He steps to the final inches of the cliff, his sandals scraping gravel over the crumbling brink. A thousand feet below, dirty rags of cloud twist and braid a net of mist between him and the jagged rocks where the Aegean crashes upon them. A net? He shakes his head.

A net? Rather, a shroud.

He has done more than any mortal could. He has accomplished feats the gods themselves could not match. But nothing has erased his pain. The past he cannot flee brings him the agony and madness that are his only companions.

“Now there is no hope.”

No hope in this world-but in the next, within the bounds of the mighty Styx that marks the borders of Hades, runs the river Lethe. A draft of that dark water, it is said, erases the memory of the existence a shade has left behind, leaving the spirit to wander forever, without name, without home…

Without past.

This dream drives him forward in one final, fatal step, which topples him into clouds that shred around him as he falls. The sea-chewed rocks below materialize, gaining solidity along with size, racing upward to crush his life.

The impact swallows all he is, all he was, all he has done, and all that’s been done to him, in one shattering burst of night.