(1 day till the start of the war...)
The silence that followed was a vacuum.
The battlefield—if it could even be called that anymore—was a ruin of broken stone, scorched earth, and golden blood soaking into the very bones of Tartarus.
Ares lay motionless.
Not dead—gods didn't die so easily—but he was as close to death as a deity could be without crossing the threshold.
His body was wrecked. Absolutely, irreversibly shattered.
His left arm was missing from the elbow down, severed clean in the final flurry of Hades's assault. Bone jutted from the stump, crusted in drying ichor. The remains of divine muscle twitched weakly, still trying to reform but failing—too damaged, too drained. His right leg bent the wrong way at the knee, a grotesque spiral of fractured bone and torn sinew.
