How long have we been here?

Hercules had lost all track of time. His existence had become one long shiver of distress written in a deep and enduring pen. Each slow breath in took forever, and each breath out twice as long. A thousand years could have passed, or only a few short minutes; he had no way of knowing which – or even if it mattered anymore.

Timeon had fallen asleep, exhausted by event and circumstance: he lay curled up in the curve of his protector’s arm, dreaming the dreams of the innocent. It was an escape that Hercules envied. He daren’t give in to the darkness which lurked at the edge of his sense; he suspected that if he did it might never give him up again. So he was using the ever-present pain as a focus, clinging to it with a sense of desperation and despair. Pain – nagging, inescapable, constant pain - wasn’t something he had much familiarity with; with the exception of a very few serious injuries, any hurt he’d suffered over the years had always healed quickly and without much fuss. He was rarely ill, and his body tended to function like a well greased war machine – no creaks, no complaints, and even fewer problems. His fitness was something that he tended to take for granted, which made his current state even harder to endure; the shivering weakness which had devoured every inch of him had begun eating at his spirit with equal efficiency.

How long?

He wasn’t entirely sure why he was still battling to stay awake. The fire in his shoulder – the embers of which trembled right down to his fingers, and burned across his back – had slowly been getting worse. His vision was blurred and his skin was caked with sweat; every breath was torture, and yet he went on struggling to draw the next, driven by a stubborn determination he couldn’t entirely define.

There was no real reason why he kept fighting. He knew he was dying, just as he knew there was no hope of rescue. But still he went on breathing. Went on, clinging to the pain, immersing himself in it, when it would be so easy to just let go. To just drift away.

Must not give in …

It had become his mantra, there in the semi-darkness. There was a spark of hope, still glimmering deep in his heart, a spark that reason and perception could not extinguish, no matter how bleakly they argued his case. While he lived, there was a chance and – while there was a chance – he could not accept that his situation was an inescapable one. The Fates had woven him into a dark and tangled corner of their tapestry. Reason tempted him to let Atropos cut the knot and so end his seemingly eternal misery; some deep seated sense of inner faith argued the conclusion and stubbornly held the shears at bay.

This is so hard.

Hard to endure, harder still to embrace that endurance, suffer it, survive it. He was beginning to understand now what his best friend might have gone through, when Hera’s Enforcer had broken his body beyond all mortal tolerance. On that day somehow, somewhere deep within himself, Iolaus had found an inner strength that - driven by sheer force of will alone - had enabled him to survive long enough to deliver his warning. The hunter had demonstrated that stubborn, deep seated determination on other occasions; more times, in fact, than Hercules really cared to think about. He was only too aware of the demands that being his partner could put upon mortal shoulders. Iolaus carried that weight with admirable ease, proving – time and time again – that the strength of his heart far outweighed the purely physical talents with which the son of Zeus had been gifted. Hercules wasn’t even sure he possessed that kind of strength; he knew he’d never been tested to that extreme.

Until now.

How long?

He didn’t know. He only knew he had to endure, and did so, resting his weakness against the unyielding stone while the pain devoured him and time stuttered into a halting eternity. He had no other choice, except to die.

So he lived.

And he waited.

Even if he had no idea what he was waiting for.

You’d better be alive down here, buddy …

Iolaus was having fifth thoughts about the wisdom of pursuing his part of the plan. Second thoughts had passed him by while standing on the mound, back in the late afternoon sunshine. Third thoughts had haunted him as he’d half slid, half scrambled down the slick, earth packed slope into the nest, seeing the bright circle of the outer world grow smaller and smaller above him until it had vanished altogether. Fourth thoughts had taken root as he’d hastened after the oblivious ant, following the barely visible gleam from its abdomen. He’d quickly tripped over an unseen ridge in the tunnel floor, bruising himself on hard packed earth, and then, having picked himself up again, promptly brained himself on a jutting tree root which angled across the passageway. That had been the point when he’d begun to think he’d set himself an impossible task, particularly since the moments he’d taken to stagger back and re-orientate himself had meant nearly losing track of his chosen guide. Fortunately his eyes had then begun to adjust to the gloom, revealing a world of looming shapes and half glimpsed movements; the upper part of the nest was filled with busy ants, extending the tunnels, carrying indistinguishable burdens or just jostling past him in both directions.

The place was a nightmare of skittering limbs and jointed legs; too many legs for human comfort. For a disconcerted moment the hunter was somewhere else entirely, in a deep and dank cave festooned with webs and barely glimpsed menace. This wasn’t Arachne’s lair, and the she-spider had long since taken up residence in Tarterus where she belonged, but the memories of that day were stark; the clatter of chitonous joints brought them all back in a heart churning rush.

Come on, Iolaus. You don’t have time for this. Deal with it later.

Much later …

He pushed the shiver of helpless terrors away with determination. This time it wasn’t him lying trapped and immobilized, waiting for a rescue that might never come. This time he was the one charging to his sword brother’s rescue – and he’d better got on with it, before time ran out on them both.

From a steep descent and a series of twisting turns, the confines of the tunnel had opened up into the sense of a much wider space, one defined and divided by a combination of hard packed earth pillars and angled tree roots. His guide had hurried into this labyrinth, weaving its way along a well travelled path without hesitation. The hunter had had to follow it almost at a run, ducking under obstructions and dancing out of the way of passing ants almost as if he were in combat, trusting to his instincts and using them to read the impressions of shape and space around him. The cavern, like the tunnel they had just left, had been built to accommodate the ants’ compact height; the roof pressed in from overhead, imparting an uncomfortable sensation that the whole thing might collapse at any moment. He’d been decidedly relieved when his guide had descended another slope, and plunged, once again, into a narrow tunnel – this one speckled with patches of the softly glowing lichen, which clung to earthen walls dampened by hints of moisture. The increase in light had been welcome relief after the early part of the journey – although the nightmare it revealed might have been better left in the dark.

There were alcoves dotted along the length of the tunnel. Some of them were occupied by the massive, menacing soldier ants, each one looming out to check the acceptability of the passing traffic. The first time his presence had been challenged, Iolaus had been rigid with panic, afraid that his hasty disguise might be overwhelmed by the inevitable sweat which now beaded his skin. He’d stepped up close to his chosen guide – probably closer than he really wanted to be – and had held his breath as the soldier had dipped its head to examine him. Whip like antenna had brushed across his head and arms, their roughened surfaces tangling in his hair and tugging at the fabric of his jerkin. For an almost unendurable moment the creature had hesitated – and then it had spat at him, painting him with a viscous spattering of unspeakable goo.

He’d fought down nausea with difficulty; the slime was a concentrated dose of the stinking sweet odour of ant, and – where it dripped across nettle tender and torn skin – it also stung, like raw vinegar rubbed into a wound. Since the soldier had immediately stepped back and ignored him completely, Iolaus had cautiously reached up and wiped the stuff away from his eyes.

"Now, what was that for?" he asked the general air, shaking his now dripping hands in disconcerted disgust. Nobody answered him, which was probably just as well; since his guide was rapidly vanishing further down the tunnel, he gave into necessity, hastily wiped his palms down his pants’ legs and ran in pursuit.

In between the posting of soldiers, there were other, equally specialised ants lined up in the alcoves along the tunnel. There were creatures whose angled joints were coated with thick, heavy incrustations like monstrous beads; others with bloated, distorted body parts. It was a grotesque freak show, immersed in dimly lit shadows and attended by monstrosity; he hugged the opposite tunnel wall as much as he could, relieved to find that, now he reeked as much as the rest of them, the soldiers simply ignored him. The patches of light were growing bigger, the soft glow from the lichen outlining the occupants of the tunnels like some weird shadow show, and it became harder and harder to be sure of his guide. He hurried closer, dodging passing traffic and trying not to look too closely at the burdens they carried.

An ant with a huge, liquid swollen abdomen loomed out of the dark; his guide had paused for a moment, laying down its load so that it could rear up and press its mouth against that of the bloated creature in a parody of a kiss. Iolaus bit back a sudden surge of nausea. The workers were using their fellow ant as a living reservoir, some bringing it water, others taking it – and his guide had merely stopped for a drink.

Gods …

It was probably all, perfectly natural, normal behaviour. But it was behaviour magnified to unspeakable levels, steeped in a sweet foetid scent seemingly mixed from vinegar, honey and decay. The hunter had a strong stomach – but, while he could, and had, happily helped himself to the sweet swollen bellies of honey ants that Athenian gourmets praised as a special treat, the sight of this obscenely distended creature, disgorging the contents of its stomach purely so that others could quench their thirst, was almost more than his sensibilities could bear.

He turned his head and hurried onwards, fighting the churning in his guts and trying not to breath in any more of the overpowering scent than he had to. He could wait for his guide further down the tunnel; all he needed was a few moments to regain his equilibrium – and maybe a little fresh air, although he didn’t hold out much hope for that.

His haste to leave the scene of his revulsion proved to be his undoing; since he daren’t glance at what the other occupants of the tunnel might be doing in case something equally revolting loomed out of the dark, he kept his eyeline high, fixed on the glimmer of phosphorescent moss at the junction of wall and ceiling. He never saw the sudden dip in the tunnel floor. Never even suspected it was there – until his feet went out from under him and he fell – swallowed by the hidden, almost vertical shaft, taking a sudden and terrifying plummet into the dark.