Midas

King Midas of Phrygia was a mortal cursed with the golden touch, by which all he laid hands upon turned to gold, his own daughter among them. In his wanderings he was found by Kratos in the Canyons of Sorrow, where the Spartan cast him into a river of lava and turned the king and the stream alike to solid gold.

The king of the golden touch#

In the older tales of Greece, Midas was the king of Phrygia, son of Gordias and Cybele, famed for the power to turn all he touched to gold, a gift granted by Dionysus. At first he turned a tree and a stone, but when he sat to feast his food and drink turned to gold in his hands, and at last his own daughter Marigold was changed when he touched her. Loathing the gift he had craved, Midas begged Dionysus to be freed of it, and the god bade him wash in the river Pactolus, where the power flowed from him into the waters and turned the sands to gold. So the river was said to have grown rich, and all that Midas had transformed, his daughter among them, was restored.

In later days the king retired to the country and worshipped Pan, and once at a contest of music between Pan and Apollo he alone objected when the mountain god named Apollo the victor. For this Apollo gave him the ears of a donkey, which Midas hid beneath a headdress until his barber, unable to keep the secret, whispered it into a hole in the ground; reeds sprang up and told the tale to all who passed, and the shamed king died of grief.

The broken king of the canyons#

When Kratos passed through the Canyons of Sorrow in search of his lost brother, he came upon the corpse of Marigold, turned to solid gold by her own father. Moving deeper into the caverns among waterfalls and pools of lava, he found Midas kneeling beside a river of fire, sickly and emaciated, dressed in filthy rags yet still crowned, weeping over what he had done and warning the Spartan to keep away lest he be turned to gold as well.

In his anguish Midas mistook the lava for the River Styx and, believing himself already dead, plunged his hand into it; the hand burned away, and the king fled in agony, while the severed hand turned the river to gold and opened the way forward. Kratos crossed and found the king weeping once more in a cave. Ignoring his warnings and avoiding his deadly touch, Kratos seized him, beat him senseless, and dragged him to the lava falls at the end of a tunnel. With a final plea to the gods, Midas was thrown into the fire, and the whole stream, and the king with it, turned to solid gold, so that Kratos could climb across and go on his way. In casting him in, the Spartan, himself a god at the time, had granted the king the death he had so long desired.