Body Burner: the cursed keeper of Pandora's Gate

The Body Burner was the gatekeeper of Pandora's Temple, an undead wretch condemned by the gods to tend a great funeral pyre on the cliff beyond Pandora's Bridge. He had been the first mortal ever to enter the temple in search of Pandora's Box, and, in his own words, the first to die in it. For that failure the gods sentenced him to burn the body of every soul who perished within the temple after him, a duty he carried out for centuries with the help of the Harpies that served him. Only he could open Pandora's Gate, and it was through his gate that Kratos finally entered the temple no mortal had ever conquered.

The first to enter, the first to die#

Long before any of the soldiers whose bones littered Pandora's Temple, one mortal made the first attempt on the treasure the gods had hidden there. He entered the temple, and he died in it, the first of countless dead to come. The gods did not let his failure end with death. As punishment they sentenced him to burn the body of anyone who perished in the temple after him, binding him to the cliffside beyond Pandora's Bridge for as long as the box remained within.

The curse made him immortal of spirit but not of body. His flesh rotted on his bones while his soul was held fast inside it, leaving him a shambling, decayed figure with grey skin and black eyes, and it was possible his ruined appearance owed something to burning as well as decay. One of his arms ended in a stump, believed lost during his own doomed quest through the temple. The centuries that followed were not kinder. His labor grew harder as he lost further pieces of himself to accidents and to the vultures that scavenged the bridge and picked at him.

In this the Body Burner was unlike the common dead of the Greek world. The ordinary undead of Greece were soulless things, corpses moved by no will of their own, but the Body Burner kept both his soul and his mind. That distinction was its own torment. Because his spirit never left his body, he was denied any afterlife at all, and he endured his whole sentence on the outside of Pandora's Temple in flesh and spirit alike, while the warriors he burned passed on to the Underworld and the release he could not have.

Keeper of the gate and the pyre#

The Body Burner's post was a large pyre on a cliff beyond Pandora's Bridge, set just before the entrance to Pandora's Temple itself. There he burned the carcasses of all the people who died attempting to reach Pandora's Box, and there he watched for anyone else who wished to make the attempt. Pandora's Gate, which stood beyond the bridge, was the only true entrance to the temple, and the Body Burner was the only being who could have it opened.

He did not tend his duty alone. A group of harpies served him, retrieving the bodies of those who failed inside the temple and dropping them straight down into his fires. The same creatures worked the gate itself, hauling it open when their master gave the signal. What became of the charred remains was not entirely known, though the burned dead did not always stay gone; bodies fed to the pyre were said to return within the temple as new horrors set against later challengers, and a number of corpses were simply left where they fell inside, beyond even the gatekeeper's reach.

No one passed the gate untested. When a challenger presented himself, the Body Burner first proved the newcomer's strength by loosing a group of Cyclops Desert Kings against him. Only if the Cyclopes were defeated would he signal the harpies, and only then would the gate open onto the temple. Year after year he opened it for more and more soldiers, and year after year he placed more and more bodies on his pyres. The gods had hidden Pandora's Box in the temple so that no mortal could ever claim its power, and for centuries the Body Burner's fires were the proof of it.

The Spartan at the gate#

The challenger who ended the pattern arrived after climbing the bound Titan Cronos for three days. Kratos crossed Pandora's Bridge, past the dead bodies and scavenging vultures at its head, and came before the gatekeeper. The Body Burner spoke to him in a flat, worn voice, monotonous and jaded, as though he were reciting the same speech he had given every soldier he had ever admitted. He told the Spartan that no one had ever conquered the Temple of the Gods, that sooner or later the harpies would bring back what was left of him to burn, and that if he were in Kratos's place he would leave at once. Seeing the Spartan's determination, he relented with the same tired courtesy he must have offered a thousand doomed men: "May the Gods grant you strength to conquer the perils that lay before you. Good luck, Spartan."

In that first meeting the gatekeeper also passed on one of the temple's rumors. He guessed that the temple's builder, the mad architect Pathos Verdes III, might still be alive somewhere within his own creation. Kratos would later find the truth of it in the Architect's Tomb.

Kratos fought his way through the Cyclops Desert Kings, the gate was opened, and the Spartan entered the temple. What followed confounded every expectation the Body Burner had built over his long sentence. As Kratos climbed through the temple's upper reaches, the gatekeeper was seen outside, openly surprised that the Spartan still lived and was still ascending. Where every previous challenger had come back to him as a corpse in a harpy's talons, this one was succeeding.

The prediction half kept#

The Body Burner's forecast of death was not entirely wrong. Kratos claimed Pandora's Box, but before he could use it, Ares hurled a pillar across the Greek world and impaled the Spartan upon it. The gatekeeper's harpies did come for what Kratos carried, though not to feed the pyre; they tore Pandora's Box away and delivered it to Ares himself. Death did not hold the Spartan. Kratos escaped the Underworld, reclaimed the box, and destroyed the god of war with the power inside it. The first mortal to fail Pandora's Temple had at last watched a mortal conquer it.

Release#

The temple did not outlast its purpose in place. In the years that followed, Zeus banished Cronos to the Pits of Tartarus, and Pandora's Temple was still chained across the Titan's back when Kratos found him there. Of the Body Burner there was no sign, and his presence in the temple's ruin was unknown. With Pandora's Box gone from the temple, the sentence he had served for centuries had lost its object, and it was presumed the gods finally allowed him to rest.

He was not the only servant the gods had chained to an eternal task. The ferryman Charon, condemned to carry the dead to the Underworld forever, bore a punishment of his own whose cause he never named, and he told Kratos that the gods would release neither of them from their tortures. Whether that held true for the keeper of Pandora's Gate, no chronicle recorded. The last certain fact of the Body Burner's existence was the pyre on the cliff, burning year after year for every soul the temple killed, until a Spartan walked through his gate and did not come back as a body.