Oracle of Athens: seer of the besieged city

The Oracle of Athens was a mortal woman of Athens, the seer of Athena's own city and one of its many inhabitants. Loyal to her city and to its patron goddess, she carried gifts of foresight and wisdom that let her look into the mind of any person and see who they truly were. When Ares marched his army against Athens, she became the most important Athenian alive, for she alone held the secret that Kratos needed to hear. It was the Oracle who told the Spartan that no mortal weapon could bring down a god, and that only the power sealed within Pandora's Box would give him a chance against the God of War.

Oracles of the Greek world#

The seers of Greece were an old institution long before the siege of Athens. At the ancient city of Delphi lived a priestess known as the Pythia, keeper of the Delphic Oracle, a site where prophecies from the gods were received by mortals. Many people consulted her for knowledge of every kind, though her predictions were almost always vague about their true nature. The temples of such seers were often built so that a second person could hide in a concealed space beneath the oracle herself, lending his voice as "the voice of the Gods" during the recital of prophecies.

Athens kept an oracle of its own, and she was no trickster's mouthpiece. The Oracle of Athens was a young woman with red hair worn in a long braid, grey eyes, and a golden band bearing the Omega symbol upon her head, clothed in layered veils. Her loyalty belonged to her city and to Athena, and her powers of sight were genuine and deep.

The summons during the siege#

When Ares invaded Athens with his army, Kratos entered the burning city at Athena's bidding, tasked with killing the God of War to save it. As the Spartan fought his way deeper through the streets, an illusory image of the Oracle appeared before him. She told him not to fear, naming herself the Oracle of Athens, come to help him defeat Ares, and asked him to find her temple to the east, where she would show him "how to murder a god."

Kratos pressed on toward the Temple of the Oracle, a grand structure with an enormous statue lined courtyard whose rear entrance concealed a portal to Olympus itself. He reached her shrine only to see the Oracle attacked and seized by a flock of Harpies. From the town square he watched the creatures carry her away, and he gave chase. In the temple's outer courtyard he was met by a mysterious Grave Digger, an old man calmly digging a grave in the middle of a war, who claimed the grave was meant for Kratos himself and promised that when all hope seemed lost, he would be there to help.

Leaving the strange old man behind, Kratos continued his pursuit. The Harpies had dropped the Oracle at the temple's courtyard, leaving her dangling from a rope above a fatal fall. Kratos climbed to her and caught her at the moment she nearly fell to her death.

The reading of Kratos#

The Oracle did not thank her rescuer with blind trust. She suspected at once that Kratos was moved by something other than a desire to do good, and despite his protests she looked into his mind to see the man he truly was. The whole of the Spartan's past opened before her, from his brutal tactics in battle to his ambition that Sparta's glory be known throughout the world.

What she saw horrified her. She could not believe that Athena had sent such a man to save the city, and she wondered aloud why the goddess had chosen him as her champion. Kratos, angered, pushed the Oracle aside and warned her to stay out of his head.

The secret of killing a god#

Whatever she thought of the man, the Oracle helped him nonetheless. She told Kratos plainly that a mere mortal could not defeat Ares. The only power that could stand against the gods was the power stored in Pandora's Box, which lay hidden within Pandora's Temple in the Desert of Lost Souls, the wasteland far to the east where Zeus had condemned the Titan Cronos to wander with the temple chained upon his back. She warned the Spartan that not a single person had ever succeeded in retrieving the Box, but Kratos was undeterred.

The Oracle then opened the path to the Desert of Lost Souls, and following her directions Kratos set out on the quest that would carry him across the desert, up the body of Cronos, and through the deadly halls of Pandora's Temple. When word of her revelation spread among the gods, Artemis chose to bestow upon the Spartan the blade she herself had wielded against the Titans, so that he might conquer the temple and claim the power hidden within.

The fall of the temple#

Kratos won Pandora's Box, but Ares struck him down from afar and the Box was carried back to the god while the Spartan fell into the Underworld. When Kratos clawed his way out of the domain of the dead, he emerged beside the freshly finished grave the old Grave Digger had been making outside the Oracle's shrine, and he returned to a changed city.

The Temple of the Oracle had fallen into ruin, and among the wreckage Kratos found the Oracle herself, gravely wounded. With her remaining strength she reached out to him and told him that he was too late, that Ares had taken over Athens, and that all hope was lost. Kratos was unmoved by her despair. He walked on past the injured seer toward the Blade of the Gods, where he confronted Ares, reclaimed the Box, and slew the God of War.

The Oracle was said to have survived the events of Athens, though her condition when Kratos last saw her left her fate in doubt and no later account recorded it. Whether she lived through the greater ruin that followed, when Kratos's war against Olympus drowned and broke the Greek world, went untold. A vase kept ages later in Tyr's Temple in the Norse lands showed that Greece endured and was rebuilding, its surviving mortals living without the gods and sustained by the power of Hope that had been released to them.

Powers and gifts of sight#

The Oracle of Athens held the power to look into a person's mind and see their true self. The gift of sight and wisdom was thought to have been granted to her by her patron goddess Athena, or by Apollo, the god of oracles and prophecy. Her divination ran deep enough, by some accounts, to reach secrets and knowledge hidden even from the near absolute wisdom of the gods themselves, a reach that troubled Zeus, the King of the Gods.

Her sight took several forms. She could perceive the past and present of every creature, the gods included, and she received visions of the future that kept her informed of Ares's plans and of the progress of Kratos's quest. She sensed the presence of both hostile and friendly beings, which was how she knew of Kratos before ever meeting him, and she could enter the memories of others and walk through everything they had lived. Behind these powers lay a deep understanding of the world's workings, for she knew how to kill a god, along with many other secrets of the universe.