The Tyrant's Tomb

The god plucked the glass jar from his lap. He raised it on his fingertips
like a crystal ball. For a moment, I was afraid he would give it the gold-ax
treatment, melting whatever remained of the Sibyl just to spite me.
Instead, he assaulted my mind with new images.
I saw a eurynomos lope into Harpocrates’s prison, the glass jar tucked
under one arm. The ghoul’s mouth slavered. Its eyes glowed purple.
Harpocrates thrashed in his chains. It seemed he had not been in the box
very long at that point. He wanted to crush the eurynomos with silence, but
the ghoul seemed unaffected. His body was being driven by another mind,
far away in the tyrant’s tomb.
Even through telepathy, it was clear the voice was Tarquin’s—heavy and
brutal as chariot wheels over flesh.
I brought you a friend, he said. Try not to break her.
He tossed the jar to Harpocrates, who caught it out of surprise. Tarquin’s
possessed ghoul limped away, chuckling evilly, and chained the doors
behind him.
Alone in the dark, Harpocrates’s first thought was to smash the jar.
Anything from Tarquin had to be a trap, or poison, or something worse. But
he was curious. A friend? Harpocrates had never had one of those. He wasn’t
sure he understood the concept.
He could sense a living force inside the jar: weak, sad, fading, but alive,
and possibly more ancient than he was. He opened the lid. The faintest voice
began to speak to him, cutting straight through his silence as if it didn’t exist.
After so many millennia, Harpocrates, the silent god who was never
supposed to exist, had almost forgotten sound. He wept with joy. The god
and the Sibyl began to converse.
They both knew they were pawns, prisoners. They were only here
because they served some purpose for the emperors and their new ally,
Tarquin. Like Harpocrates, the Sibyl had refused to cooperate with her
captors. She would tell them nothing of the future. Why should she? She was
beyond pain and suffering. She had literally nothing left to lose and longed
only to die.
Harpocrates shared the feeling. He was tired of spending millennia
slowly wasting away, waiting until he was obscure enough, forgotten by all
humankind, so he could cease to exist altogether. His life had always been
bitter—a never-ending parade of disappointments, bullying, and ridicule.
Now he wanted sleep. The eternal sleep of extinct gods.