Date: The Age of Cronos – Year of Telos's Swallowing
My first awareness in this new world, after the disorienting transit from the void, was of sound and sensation. The vast, rhythmic beat of my mother Rhea's heart, a colossal drum that had been the backdrop to my brief gestation, was now a vital anchor. Her voice, when she spoke, was like the deep rumble of the earth, words I felt more than heard, understood through a primal connection.
She held me. I was small, a new godling, yet a god. A restless hum pulsed deep in my bones, a well of untapped power that felt both immense and dangerously unstable. My senses were a jumble of sharp, new sensations – too much, too fast. Strange energies webbed the stone of Othrys around us, thrumming like giant, unseen heartbeats. Sometimes, a tremor ran through Rhea, and the air would thin, carrying a scent like ozone and old grief – her fear, a near-constant pressure.
And I felt him. Cronos. He was a blank spot in the world, a place where the thrumming energies of Othrys seemed to just… stop. His power didn't radiate; it consumed. Even his silence had teeth. His authority was a suffocating weight on everything, the unspoken law of this age, born of his endless dread.
She named me Telos. "Purpose," she had murmured, her voice thick with a sorrow that resonated in my own small chest. Her immense eyes, the color of a bruised twilight, gazed down at me with a love that was a fierce, painful thing. "May you find yours, my son, beyond all this." A prayer and a curse. She knew. I knew. My memories from a life lost were a cruel clarity, denying me even an infant's ignorance.
The spans of light and shadow that passed for days were few. Rhea kept me close, her body a temporary fortress. I saw little beyond her vast chambers, halls carved from the mountain's heart, lit by the faint, inherent glow of their divine forms and strange, softly pulsing crystals. Other presences moved in the periphery, her Titan kin, ancient and heavy with their own power, their thoughts a low, complex murmur of fear, weary acceptance, and carefully hidden desires. None made a move to help.
My own awakening divinity was a strange companion. Infant my form might be, but the core of Alex, now merged with this divine spark, was keenly aware. Information flowed into me – the subtle shifts in power, the unspoken tensions, the very architecture of this mountain stronghold. That ocean of knowing I'd brushed against in the dark before birth felt a universe away, a barely-there whisper that offered no help now. Still, the drive to understand, to catalogue, persisted.
Then the atmosphere shifted. The ever-present thrum of Othrys faltered. A coldness seeped from the stones, from the air itself. Rhea clutched me, her great body rigid, her breathing shallow. Her sorrow wasn't a storm, no tears, just a terrible stillness in her, a silence that pressed down on me louder than any sound. She offered no soft words; there were none left.
Cronos entered.
He dominated the chamber, not just by his sheer scale – a being of shifting, light-devouring shadow and eyes like burned-out stars – but by an aura of crushing temporal decree. Time itself seemed to bunch and thicken around him. When his gaze found me, it was without recognition, without any hint of kinship. It was the flat, assessing look of one examining an object, a potential flaw in his careful, fearful designs.
Rhea's voice, usually a resonant power, cracked. She spoke, ancient words of appeal, but they were brittle, shattering against the wall of his unmoving will. He offered no response, his silence a heavy, suffocating thing.
He reached.
A spike of pure, cold terror shot through me. My divine nature recoiled, a pathetic flicker of protest, invisible, inconsequential. Rhea's arms were a cage of desperate love.
But Cronos's power was a tide. His touch. Cold, like stone from the deepest, lightless places. Vast. Encircling. A sound tore from Rhea, sharp and broken, a sound that ripped through me and lodged itself like a shard of ice in my new heart.
Then, the world dropped away, and I was rising. Her face – the last thing I saw – seemed to crumble, not into tears, but into an emptiness that mirrored the void I'd come from. Upwards. Towards the vast, devouring shadow that was my father. The journey to his maw was horrifyingly brief.
Darkness.
A brutal, enclosing pressure. Being pulled down, down. The air hit me first—a hot, wet blanket that stole my breath, thick with a metallic, ancient scent. My new senses, already battered, screamed. This wasn't the clean void; this was a place, and it was alive in some terrible way. Then I was falling, tumbling through a suffocating, slick passage, my small body tossed about like a stone. The fall ended with a jarring thud. I lay stunned in a vast, dim space. The light here was a weak, unsteady glow, like distant, dying embers, that seemed to seep from the moist, curving walls around me – walls that pulsed with a slow, horrifying rhythm.
My first coherent thought: Still alive. Inside him. The Alex-fragment of my mind was sickened by the grotesque reality. The new god, Telos, felt a primal fear, yet beneath it, a core of stubborn awareness refused to be snuffed out.
I was not alone.
As my sight slowly pierced the oppressive gloom, I made out shapes. Four of them. Huddled, still. My siblings. My foreknowledge was a grim map to this unexpected family reunion.
A gentle, steady light, like a banked hearth, glowed from one figure. She sat apart, an island of quiet fortitude in this desolate space. Hestia. My eldest sister.
She turned her head, her eyes, even in this dimness, holding an immeasurable sadness, yet also a resilience that seemed to burn away the shadows. Her gaze found me, the newest, smallest prisoner.
"So soon, another," a voice sighed from the gloom nearby, heavy with a resignation that felt ancient. Hades, perhaps, his bitterness already a deep-seated root.
But Hestia's focus remained on me. No words at first. Just a wave of feeling from her – no surprise, but a deep, shared sorrow and a strange, fragile sense of welcome. The unspoken bond of the devoured.
I was Telos, second son of Cronos, a god whose purpose was yet to be found. For now, I was merely the latest offering to my father's fear, in a prison shared with four older siblings. My grand quest for knowledge, for achievement, had begun in the belly of the beast. The slow burn of my existence was now an exercise in waiting, in hoping, within the confines of a Titan.