The Games Gods Play

Athena greets the champions in a colosseum where they will need to face a maze. To shake their morale, she creates an illusion where the heads of Neve, Isabel, Dae’s grandmother, and Boone sit on spikes. Lyra calls Athena a monster multiple times, while Dex seems off and adamant about wanting Lyra dead. Athena fills the maze with overgrown insects and tells them the first champion to conquer the maze will win her Labor.

With a snap of Athena’s fingers, the champions are transported in the maze. Lyra runs the maze and is soon caught in a spider’s web. She untangles herself, and as she’s running, summons her tarantula, fox, and panther to help her. The tarantula communicates with the maze’s spiders, and in exchange for not killing them, the spiders agree not to attack her. With the fox and panther, Lyra devises a system where she sends them in opposite directions at crossroads to find the best way forward. A bullet ant attacks her.

The panther clashes with the ant, and they continue forward. Lyra then encounters Trinica, who asks for directions. Lyra helps her, despite Trinica’s refusal of her proposal. Lyra is again attacked by a bullet ant. The panther kills it, too, just as Dae arrives. He offers her a healing petal in exchange for safe passage past her summoned animals. She agrees. After ingesting the petal, she runs off again, only to encounter an invisible Dex.

She fights with Dex with the help of her animals. Through the crystal walls of the maze, however, she sees that Meike has overcome the maze and won the Labor. But within seconds of her victory, Dex chokes her. Lyra runs to them and attacks Dex, but just as she thinks she’s subdued him, he lunges and kills Meike. He looks stunned at his own actions and then tries to kill Lyra by choking her, too, but in their struggle, Dex is pushed onto Zai’s sword and dies. Lyra whirls on the gods and accuses Athena of interfering by influencing Dex. She calls her a monster a fourth time, and Charon appears to take her away.

Charon calms her, and grief overtakes her. She asks why Charon came to retrieve her instead of Hades. When he tells her he was away for unknown reasons, Lyra is bitter at Hades’s indifference. She walks away and ends up at Hera’s observatory. Cerberus finds her with Charon, and they try to reassure her of Hades’s feelings. Inadvertently, they reveal that Persephone isn’t dead as everyone believes; she is trapped in Tartarus. Hades appears.

More than the anger she feels for being kept in the dark about Persephone’s alleged death, Lyra feels jealous of her. She and Hades argue about her name-calling Athena. Hades dismisses Charon and Cerberus, who hesitate to follow his order out of concern for Lyra. She accuses Hades of manipulating her for his gains. Though she lost in the Labor, Hades intimates that there is still a way for her to win—by killing Diego. He offers her anything she wants, but she declines. A shadow passes overhead, and suddenly, Lyra can feel Hades’s fear.

The Daemones capture Lyra. Hades tries to attack them, but because he agreed to the terms of the Crucible, he cannot harm them. When he threatens to kill them, Lyra interjects and refuses to let anyone die on her behalf. Zeles tells them that she won’t be harmed, despite Athena calling for her death. They will incarcerate Lyra where neither Hades nor Athena will have access to her.

Lyra settles into her jail cell. She thinks being in the cell is the most protected she’s felt since she was three years old. She asks for a change of clothes and then goes to take a shower, where she allows herself to crumble emotionally. She then uses a provided laptop to search the web and finds headlines about Meike and Dex’s deaths. She thinks about using her remaining pomegranate seeds to avoid participating in the final Labor.

After three days in the cell, Lyra is on good terms with the Daemones and plays cards with them. Zai arrives to visit her. The guilt of Dex’s death haunts him, and Lyra tries to unburden him. She explains that she’s only incarcerated because of Athena. He tells her that he and Hermes have made a deal to bring back Boone if he wins. Lyra asks for a favor.

On the day of the last Labor, Aphrodite visits Lyra. She tricks the Daemones into leaving them alone, and she tells Lyra the favor she asked from Zai was unsuccessful: Demeter refuses to visit her out of her association with Hades. Lyra reveals to Aphrodite that Persephone is alive, and since Diego is Demeter’s champion, Lyra believes Demeter could figure out how to save Persephone when she wins through Diego. Aphrodite refuses to tell Demeter, because she believes it might start another war amongst the gods. When Aphrodite leaves, Lyra reviews her relationship with Hades and knows that some moments were truthful. A Daemon comes to retrieve her for the last Labor.

The minute Lyra leaves the incarceration facility, Hades appears, checks in on her well-being, and tells her he’s required to take her to the last Labor. She admits to confessing about Persephone’s situation to Aphrodite and wanting to do so with Demeter, which infuriates Hades. She tells Hades that if he’d told her the truth from the beginning, they would be facing different prospects, but Hades admits that everyone he’s ever trusted has betrayed him. Before she leaves for the Labor, she asks whether he’d been honest about making Boone a god. Hades only tells her to finish the Labor, return home, and forget about everything.

Zeus welcomes the champions to the final Labor in Death Valley, where they will need to escape monsters and clear three gates. He adds that whoever wins the Labor adds three wins to their tally, making it anyone’s game. Zeus summons a minotaur as the first monster.

Samuel finds Lyra and hands over what appears to be her axe relic—only, she has it already. She deduces that Zeus has stolen its twin, which belonged to Hades, and given it to Samuel. While the champions run to escape the minotaur, Lyra plants her last dragon teeth before joining them. When the minotaur closes in on her, she feels her two axes come together and propel the minotaur away with a shockwave. Zai and Jackie assist her as her bone soldiers emerge. Lyra orders them to protect them from the monsters. Together, they close the first gate.

As the minotaur charges the gate, the champions run to the next one when their next monster emerges: a kraken. While the bone soldiers defend them, the champions dodge its attacks. As Lyra is running for the second gate, she fails to notice an oncoming attack, but Jackie saves her and brings her the rest of the way. When they all make it to the gate, they close it, too.

Beyond the second gate is an impenetrable darkness. Something starts to sing, and Zai deduces their third foes are sirens. Everyone but Lyra, Jackie, and Samuel falls under their spell, and though they try to stop the others, the thrall is too strong. The three remaining champions follow them to save them from the sirens, with Lyra using her prize from Apollo’s Labor to see through the darkness. Before long, however, all the champions are snatched away, and Lyra is alone. Cornered by a siren herself, Lyra keeps perfectly still. The siren, however, cannot see her because sirens crave a human’s love—something Lyra cannot give because of her curse. She deduces that Hades chose her as a champion not because she is special, but because she is unlovable.

Lyra believes Hades must have known about the sirens. When the siren leaves, Lyra chooses to save her fellow champions instead of winning the Labor for herself because she suspects Zeus would leave no champion alive but the victor. She concludes that Hades wouldn’t want her to leave the others to die either, because ultimately, she believes he wanted her to choose her path for herself. She uses one of the pomegranate seeds to make her way to Anthemusa, the Isle of Sirens. She finds Zai, Rima, and Diego in an amphitheater, but not the others.

Lyra makes her way around the amphitheater and finds Jackie and Samuel. She shows them the seed and they gather Dae, Amir, and Trinica while the sirens squabble. She teleports all four of them back to the darkness and instructs them to get to the gate before taking another pearl back to the Isle to Zai, Rima, and Diego, where she proceeds to teleport them, too. When they’re back in the darkness, they all run for the gate—only to find the others waiting for them. Collectively, they all decide to let Lyra go first and win the Labor. She crosses, and all parts of the Labor disappear, but suddenly, Cerberus appears and growls behind her.

Lyra hears the three heads of Cerberus calling for her death before it lunges for her. Its attack sends her flying, and her bone soldiers attack in retaliation. They critically injure Cerberus, but the pain brings back his lucidity. Zeus appears, and when she looks at him, his face seems painted on. He suddenly recalls the curse he placed upon her, but he refuses to let Hades win and hits her with lightning. With her last pomegranate seed, she sends Cerberus to the Styx to heal. As she lies dying, she feels bad for Hades but faces Zeus all the same.

Hades appears, and he and Zeus face off. Hades, however, is clearly stronger. He confronts Zeus about all the ways he cheated throughout the Crucible, and the Daemones take him away. He then goes to Lyra, and she questions whether he didn’t let her love him on purpose so she would remain immune to the sirens, which he confirms. As she feels herself slipping, she tells him to visit her in Elysium and not to burn down the world.

Lyra wakes up and feels power and a light pulsing through her. Hades has made her into a goddess and queen of the Underworld by sacrificing his own essence and role. He confesses that the paradise he sees in Elysium is of the two of them together, and he’s seen it for a very long time. He tells her to be the queen there and to keep him at her side.

Lyra and Hades prepare for the crowning ceremony. Hades reveals he knows someone with foresight, which is how he knew about her and the sirens, and why he broke her heart. They dress in fine clothing and their new conjoint symbol, two butterflies unified to form one in the center of a black-threaded star. Lyra joins the other champions alone as the Daemones enter to announce the results: Lyra has won, and Hades is to be King of the Gods. To claim his power, Hades sits on the throne, and all the gods and goddesses bow to him, their power creating a rainbow of light that strikes him in the chest. He keeps his promise to Lyra and makes Boone the god of thieves. He then offers a gift to the other champions and abundance to their families and homelands. Hades then calls for Pandora’s box, the one step in his plan he never told Lyra about.

Lyra fears using Pandora’s Box, as it holds the power to unleash the Titans, but she believes in Hades. They go to the Underworld with other gods. In front of Tartarus’s gates, Hades slips Pandora’s box into a waiting lock. The door opens a crack. Boone grabs Lyra, but everyone is frozen still. Together with Boone, Lyra is sucked to the other side of the gates to Cronos, who looks astonishingly like Hades. The gates lock behind them, and Lyra realizes Rima’s apocalyptic prophecy wasn’t about Hades but Cronos.