Chapter 194: Advice
Sparta
The air in the ruins of Kratos’s city was thick with the taste of old smoke and dust. It was a dead place now, the echoes of its destruction settling like a shroud. He sat on a broken block of what was once a granary, methodically sharpening the Blade of Chaos. The rhythmic scrape of stone on metal was the only sound he allowed himself to hear.
An old man picked his way through the rubble. He moved with a careful slowness, a gnarled walking stick tapping against the cracked stones. His robes were simple, travel-stained, and his face was a web of deep lines, but his eyes held a peculiar, un-aged sharpness.
He stopped a respectful distance from Kratos, not out of fear, but out of a simple, weathered courtesy.
"A grim place to rest," the old man said, his voice a dry rustle, like leaves over stone.
Kratos did not look up. "There is no rest here. Only quiet."
"Quiet can be a kind of rest," the old man replied. He found a low, flat piece of wall and sat with a soft groan. "For the bones, if not for the mind."
The scraping continued. Kratos’s massive shoulders were a wall of muscle and scar tissue. A warning.
The old man, Hades in his borrowed skin, watched the methodical, violent motion. He saw the story written in the scars, in the permanent grimace, in the pale ash that seemed baked into the man’s very skin. He saw a reflection of his own brother, Zeus, in his younger, more wrathful days—all thunder and lightning with no thought for the scorched earth left behind.
"I have seen cities fall before," the old man began, his gaze drifting over the shattered pillars. "Not like this. This was... personal. This was a man, not an army."
Kratos’s hand stilled for a fraction of a second. "You see much for an old man."
"I have had a long time to look." Hades leaned on his stick, his posture one of weary observation. "I had a brother, once. A proud man. A man of... great passions."
He paused, letting the words hang in the dead air.
"He was wronged. Or, he felt he was wronged. It is often the same thing." Hades picked up a piece of broken pottery, turning it over in his fingers. "He spent years chasing the ghost of that wrong. Hunting the one who caused it. His whole world became that hunt. His joy, his family, the sun on his face... it all turned to dust in his mouth, because it was not revenge."
Kratos finally lifted his head. His eyes were chips of flint, holding no light. "And did he get his revenge?"
"Oh, yes," Hades said, and a genuine, profound sadness touched his borrowed eyes. "He cornered the man he hated in a valley far from home. He broke him. He left him broken in the dirt. And do you know what he felt, in that moment?"
He looked directly at Kratos.
"Nothing. A great, hollow nothing. And then... the regret began to creep in. Not for the man he killed, but for the man he himself had become in the process. The years he had thrown away. The light he had extinguished in himself. The revenge was a feast he had starved for, but when he finally ate, it turned to ash in his belly."
Kratos looked away, back towards the horizon where his own path of destruction began. "His pain was his own. My path is my own."
"Is it?" Hades asked softly. "Or is it a path someone else laid for you? A betrayal, a cruelty... they are like a sickness. The man who inflicts it moves on. But the one who is wronged? He carries the sickness inside him. He lets it fester. He lets it become his only companion. In the end, he destroys himself far more thoroughly than his enemy ever could."
The wind whispered through the ruins, a lonely sound. Kratos’s knuckles were white around the hilt of his blade.
"What would you have me do?" Kratos’s voice was a low growl. "Forget? Forgive?"
"No," the old man said, his tone firm. "Not forget. And forgiveness... that is a luxury few can afford. I would have you stop. Look at this." He gestured to the devastation around them. "This is the outside of you. This is what you feel within, made stone and rubble. But it does not satisfy, does it? The rage is still there. It is a fire that consumes the wood but is never quenched."
He pushed himself to his feet, his joints protesting. He stood before Kratos, an image of fragile mortality against a monument of wrath.
"There is a world beyond this rage," Hades said, his voice dropping, becoming more intense, more personal. "It is a quieter world. A smaller one. It has no grand victories, no thunderous applause. But it has sunrises that do not remind you of blood. It has the simple weight of a tool in your hand, for building, not breaking. It has peace. Not the peace of the grave, but the peace of a soul that has finally laid down a burden too heavy to carry."
For a long moment, Kratos was silent. The image the old man painted was so foreign, so alien, it was like describing a color he had never seen.
"That world is not for me," Kratos said finally, the words tasting like ash.
"It is for any man who chooses to walk into it," Hades replied. He took a slow breath, the disguise feeling thin for a moment. He saw not just the Ghost of Sparta, but the potential for something else, a king of a different, darker realm, yet one who could rule with something other than fury. "The chain of your past can be broken. But you must be the one to break it. No god, no spirit, no act of revenge will do it for you."
He turned to leave, his message delivered. The tap-tap-tap of his stick echoed again.
"Your brother," Kratos’s voice stopped him. "What became of him?"
Hades paused, looking back over his shoulder. A flicker of something ancient and powerful crossed his face.
"He rules a kingdom of light and air," he said. "Surrounded by sycophants and the spoils of his victories. And he is the loneliest man I have ever known. Because he won his war, but he lost himself."
He gave a final, slow nod.
"Do not make his mistake, Spartan. The greatest prison is the one we build for ourselves, with bars made of our own regrets and rage."
And with that, the old man shuffled away, disappearing into the skeletal remains of the city, his form blending with the shadows of the fallen stones until he was gone.
Kratos was alone again. The silence rushed back in, heavier now. He looked down at the Blade of Chaos in his hands. The edge was razor-sharp, gleaming. It was a perfect instrument of death.
He looked around at the city he had destroyed. The old man was right. It was the inside of him. And the emptiness here was vast.
For the first time, the weight of the blades in his hands felt less like a purpose, and more like a chain. The fire of his rage still burned, but now, for a single, fleeting moment, he felt the cold of the ash it left behind.
A single, clear thought surfaced in the storm of his mind, a thought that was his alone.
This... is not a victory.
He stood, the blades clinking at his back. He did not look back at the ruins. He simply began to walk, leaving the dead city to its silence, his footsteps the only sound on the road to an unknown future.