Desert of Lost Souls: the wasteland east of Athens

The Desert of Lost Souls was an extremely large open desert that lay far to the east of Athens, cut off from every pocket of civilization and haunted by Sirens and other monsters. Beneath its shifting sands lay many ruins, the remains of what may once have been a city, swallowed whole across endless time. The wasteland served Zeus as a place of punishment, for it was there that the Titan Cronos was condemned to wander forever with Pandora's Temple chained upon his back. It was there too that Kratos came in search of Pandora's Box, the one weapon that could grant him the power to kill Ares.

A wasteland far to the east#

The Oracle of Athens described the desert as lying "far to the east" of her city, and every account of the place agreed that it stood apart from the known world. No settlement bordered it and no road led into it, and travellers who entered its sands did so alone. The Sirens that haunted the wastes were monstrous women who menaced any who crossed their territory with magic powers, and they were far from the only creatures that made the desert their hunting ground.

The desert's remoteness went beyond ordinary distance. Its heat and climate were deadly past anything natural, and it lay so far from Greece proper that daylight still burned over its sands while night covered Athens. When Ares struck Kratos down there, the god stood among his soldiers under a moonlit Athenian sky while his victim died in broad desert daylight. The Oracle herself did not simply point the way but used her magic to open a gateway to the desert, and through it the sunlit wastes could be seen from the darkened city. Kratos, crossing the sands on foot, felt more alone than at any other point in his life. The vast emptiness recalled the tales of the Titans' punishments in Tartarus, and the Spartan wondered whether the Oracle had tricked him and banished him from the company of mankind into some dreadful exile.

Scattered through the wastes stood the remnants of older builders. The many ruins half buried in the sand suggested that a city might once have stood there before the desert covered it entirely, and its name outlived whatever people had raised it.

The punishment of Cronos#

After the first Titanomachy, Zeus captured his father Cronos and made the desert his prison. The gods ordered the architect Pathos Verdes III to raise Pandora's Temple upon the Titan's chained back, and Zeus then exiled Cronos into the Desert of Lost Souls, condemned to wander its wastes forever while carrying the temple, until the desert sands ripped the very flesh from his bones. The sentence was as much a safeguard as a torment, for the temple held Pandora's Box, and a wandering mountain of a Titan was meant to keep it beyond the reach of any who might seek it.

For long years the arrangement held. The temple could not be found by searching, for Cronos never stopped moving, and the only way to reach it was to call the Titan to oneself and brave the climb up his body to the structure on his back.

Kratos and the Desert Sirens#

During the siege of Athens, Athena set Kratos on the quest for Pandora's Box, the item he needed to kill Ares, and the Oracle of Athens opened the gate to the desert and told him where the Box lay. The Box waited inside Pandora's Temple as its greatest treasure, still chained to the back of Cronos, and to reach it the Spartan had to cross the desert and overcome its guardians.

His first task was to hunt down and kill the three Desert Sirens, the monstrous women who preyed on the desert's travellers. Slaying them released their souls, and their release opened a door into a ruin that led deeper into the wastes. At the end of those Desert Ruins stood the Titan Horn, itself guarded by Sirens, and it was the only means by which anyone who wished to brave the dangers of Pandora's Temple could bring Cronos to them. Kratos sounded the Horn, and the Titan Lord came striding through the sands toward him. The Spartan leapt onto Cronos's body and climbed toward the temple far above, carving through the countless creatures and monsters of the temple with the Blades of Chaos as he went.

The pillar hurled from Athens#

When Kratos finally retrieved Pandora's Box from the temple's depths, Ares sensed what had happened, though he stood dozens of miles away amid the ruin of besieged Athens. The god of war tore a great pillar from the wreckage of the city and hurled it across the impossible distance with perfect aim, and it pierced Kratos through the chest. As the Spartan slowly died in the desert daylight, he watched helplessly while Ares's Harpies took the Box and carried it back to their master.

Kratos fell into the Underworld along with many other souls, but death did not end his quest. He escaped the domain of the dead, returned to Athens, reclaimed the Box from Ares, and used its power to slay the god. The desert had claimed his life once, yet it could not keep him.

The chained cyclops of the ruined city#

In the heart of the desert stood a ruined city, and at its center the giant Cyclops Polyphemus lay enchained. Warriors who faced the Trial of the Gods fought their way through those ruins against horde after horde of the desert's creatures, among them Satyrs, Harpies, Elephantaurs, Feral Hounds, Wraiths, Fire Taloses, Ice Chimeras, and Amazons, while fire pits and beds of spikes among the ruins claimed the unwary. The chained Polyphemus himself lashed out at any who came within reach of his hands. When the gods chose to intervene in the trial, the Spear of Olympus fell from the sky, and a warrior who claimed it could wound the giant cyclops and bring even that enormous prisoner to his end.

Vanishing and echo in Valhalla#

After Kratos opened Pandora's Box and slew Ares, Zeus learned of the Spartan's victory and unmade the desert's oldest sentence. The King of Olympus, with the evil of Fear consuming him, removed Cronos from the desert and banished him to the pits of Tartarus with Pandora's Temple still chained upon his back. In the same season of wrath he punished Hephaestus for his deceit, casting the smith god into the Forge beside Tartarus, and took Hephaestus's daughter Pandora and imprisoned her within a sprawling underground maze.

With its Titan gone, the Desert of Lost Souls passed out of every account. When the death of Poseidon loosed the flood that drowned the Greek world, the desert is held to have vanished beneath the waters with the rest of that ruined land. Yet the wasteland was not wholly lost. Ages later and worlds away, when Kratos entered Valhalla in the Norse lands, that place took advantage of his past and recreated the Desert of Lost Souls within itself, and the Ghost of Sparta walked its burning sands once more.