Pathos Verdes III

Pathos Verdes III was the mortal architect chosen by the Olympian gods to build Pandora's Temple, the vast structure raised to contain Pandora's Box. A zealot devoted to Olympus, he gave his life and his family to the work, and the temple became a monument to the madness that consumed him before he died cursing the very gods he had served.

Servant of the gods#

Pathos Verdes III was a fervent worshipper of Olympus with a wife and two sons. The gods appeared before him and charged him with a single task: to build a temple worthy of housing Pandora's Box, the most powerful weapon a mortal could wield. Loyal without question, he accepted the commission and set to drawing his plans.

Building upon Cronos#

To raise so great a structure, the gods themselves intervened. With their aid, along with that of Pegasi and their riders, the Titan Cronos was subdued, and Pathos began to build the temple upon the Titan's back. His earliest designs were straightforward, but as the work wore on they grew steadily more intricate and dangerous.

Descent into madness#

The architect's mind broke under grief. While the temple was still rising, his younger son died, and soon after the elder followed. Their deaths shattered his faith and his reason. He began to incorporate his dead sons' bodies into the temple's traps, and the snares he devised grew crueler and more elaborate as his madness deepened. Heroes who entered the temple in those years met their deaths in his designs.

The unraveling reached his own hearth. The use of his sons' corpses brought him to a bitter quarrel with his wife, and in his rage he stabbed her through the chest and killed her. With his family gone, Pathos could not bring himself to continue. He took his own life within the temple, cursing the gods he had served so faithfully.

The Architect's Tomb#

Pandora's Temple grew more treacherous the deeper one travelled into it, a record in stone of the insanity that had overtaken its maker. The work was never wholly finished; unfinished sections remained near the heights of the Cliffs of Madness, suggesting Pathos had meant to extend the temple further still. When Kratos passed through in search of Pandora's Box, he came at last to the Architect's Tomb, where he found the bodies of Pathos and his wife together with the final message the architect had left before his death.