Hope: the greatest weapon in the world

Hope was a blessed power of the Greek world, described by Athena as the greatest weapon in the world, strong enough to kill even the mighty Zeus. Athena hid it at the bottom of Pandora's Box as a counterweight to the evils sealed there after the Great War, and it passed unnoticed into Kratos when the Spartan opened the Box to destroy Ares. Buried for years beneath his guilt, the power woke only when Kratos found forgiveness within himself, and with it he ended the reign of Zeus. Rather than surrender Hope to Athena, he turned the Blade of Olympus on his own body and gave the power to mankind.

A Counterweight Sealed in the Box#

Long ago, after the Great War between the gods and the Titans, Zeus gathered the evils born of that conflict and sealed them within Pandora's Box. Athena dreaded what would follow if the Box was ever opened again and its dark forces loosed upon the world. As a safeguard she conjured Hope, a power great enough to kill a god, and placed it inside the Box beneath the countless evils, so that it might counteract them if the seal was ever broken. The Box was then hidden away within Pandora's Temple, behind trials meant to keep any hand, mortal or divine, from reaching it.

The nature of the power set it apart from every other weapon of the age. The gods of Olympus could not be slain by earthly arms. Only divine forces could end them, and Hope was counted among the few such forces in existence, alongside weapons like the Blade of the Gods and the strength of the Titans themselves. What Athena had built as a shield against the evils was also, by its very potency, the deadliest weapon in the world.

The First Opening and the Fall of Ares#

A thousand years after the Box was sealed, Athena set Kratos on the path to it. The Spartan, then bound in servitude to the gods, was directed to retrieve Pandora's Box as the one means of destroying Ares, the God of War. Kratos claimed the Box from the temple, opened it, and struck down his former master.

It was believed in the years that followed that Kratos had absorbed the evils of the Box to gain the strength for that killing. The truth was otherwise. What Kratos consumed was Hope itself, the hidden power at the bottom of the Box, and it was Hope that gave him the might to slay a god. The evils, freed from their prison, went elsewhere. They spread through the Gods of Olympus and corrupted them, and the greatest of the evils, Fear, took possession of Zeus himself. Athena had never anticipated that her safeguard would be swallowed by a mortal while the poisons she feared seeped into her own family.

Buried Beneath Guilt#

Though Hope now lived inside him, Kratos could not reach it. From the day Ares fell to the last days of the war against Olympus, the power lay trapped behind layers of guilt, walled in by the Spartan's grief for his slaughtered wife and child and by every sin he had gathered since. Apart from the killing of Ares, worked without his knowledge, Kratos never drew on the power in all those years. He carried the greatest weapon in the world through his reign as God of War, through his fall, and through his rebellion, and never once knew it was there.

The Empty Box#

When Kratos fell from Mount Olympus at the outset of the Second Great War, he encountered Athena's ascended form in the Underworld. She counseled him to seek out Pandora's Box once more, believing the power of Hope still rested inside it, and to turn that power against Zeus. The search brought Kratos to Pandora, the living key to the Box's protection, a child of Hephaestus's craft who believed with all her being that Hope was the core force that let the living keep on living.

When Kratos at last opened the Box a second time, it held nothing. The vessel Athena had counted on was empty, and had been empty since the day the Spartan killed Ares. The power she sought had walked beside her the entire time, sealed inside the one man she had aimed at the throne of Olympus.

The Awakening and the Death of Zeus#

The end came at the close of the Second Great War. With his body broken, the spirit of Zeus rose wielding the evil Fear and dragged Kratos into the depths of his own tormented mind, meaning to destroy the Marked Warrior inside his own guilt. There, wandering through the fear and chaos of his soul, Kratos was not alone. Pandora's voice guided him, and within that inner darkness the Spartan at last forgave himself for the deaths of his wife, his child, and Athena.

Forgiveness broke the walls that guilt had built. On a memory of the second opening of the Box, the long dormant power of Hope awoke in Kratos's hands. With it he escaped his own mind, tore free of Zeus's spirit, and forced it back into its dying body. Kratos cast his blades aside and finished the king of Olympus with his bare hands, fulfilling the revenge he had pursued across two wars.

The Release to Mankind#

With the gods destroyed, Athena appeared and demanded that Kratos return the power of Hope to her, so that she might stand as the one supreme god over Greece. Kratos told her the Box had been empty. She refused to believe him at first, then understood: the power she had hidden had been absorbed by Kratos during his final battle with Ares, while the evils infected the Olympians.

Kratos would not give her what she asked. Wanting only to escape the world, and perhaps to find his family again in the world below, he drove the Blade of Olympus through his own torso. The power of Hope poured out of him and was released to all those who had survived the calamities he had caused. Athena declared that mortals would not know what to do with such power, pulled the blade from his body, and walked away. Kratos lay dying on the stone, ready to let the Underworld take him. Yet when the ruin settled, he was gone, and only a trail of blood led back to the sea. Cursed to walk the earth for his sins, unable to die, the Spartan found no reason to remain in Greece and turned at last toward the Nordic lands.

Echoes in the North#

The gift outlived the giver's intent. With the power of Hope among them, the people of Greece learned to move on and to rebuild without the aid of the Olympian Gods, a recovery recorded on an amphora vase preserved within the vault of Tyr. The land Kratos believed he had destroyed found its way back to life through the very power his sacrifice had scattered across it.

Ages later, in Valhalla, Tyr helped the old Spartan look back on that history. He told Kratos that through his sacrifice he had given Hope to mankind, and that some of that hope still remained within him. Tyr believed Kratos had drawn on it again to bring peace to the Nine Realms after Ragnarok. Reciting Pandora's words about Hope, Kratos came to terms with the choices of his past and took up the throne of the God of War once more, not for the destruction that the title had once meant, but for what the power at the bottom of the Box had always promised.