The Primordial Goddess Stirs
* This chapter is depicted from Gaia's point of view.
Something snapped on Olympus. It was not the lightning that had shaken the mountain, nor the waves that had roused the sea, but something older and tougher than both—the force with which Cronus had gripped his throne. That final tremor ran down the roots of the earth, all the way to where I was.
I closed my eyes. It had happened upon the surface of the earth, and if I bent my mind to it, I could read both the shock carved into the stone and the stirrings of the gods who stood upon it.
The sea answering the lightning. The earth binding the Titan's feet. The hearth that fed its fire into that lightning. And the wisdom that had opened the way for all those powers to converge upon a single point.
"So Rhea's youngest has won," I murmured low.
Cronus's form could no longer be felt. In its place, time that had seemed frozen was flowing once more. He had thrashed to remain king until the very end, and at the last, it seemed, he had abandoned his body and chosen to dissolve into time itself. At least his end was kinder than his father's.
I stretched my consciousness a little further along the earth. Near the shattered palace of Olympus, a small commotion was already brewing around the new king. Metis and Poseida had seized an arm of Zeus's apiece; Demeter claimed the space at his back, and Hestia's flames barred the way ahead.
"Why is everyone awakening in such weird directions?!"
The new god-king's scream came rolling down over the rocks.
I raised a hand to my mouth. So he would not even have a moment to savor the joy of felling his father.
But my gaze soon drifted past them. At the edge of the palace, beside a fallen pillar, two goddesses stood. Hera and Aides. Propping each other up, they watched the other four.
Hera spread her hand. Between her fingers a golden thread gathered, then snapped. From Aides's shadow, too, a black door traced its outline and was gone.
"We're... family too."
Hera's small voice trembled across the stone floor. Aides clasped her hand tight.
"Yeah..."
The two of them could go no further. Before goddesses each trumpeting the share of the fight they had joined, these two children—who could not yet even properly wield their authorities—had fallen back a step. Did they believe the fault lay in their own insufficiency?
I traced the slender ends of that divinity. The door to the land of the dead. The thread that binds a household. Their most ancient roots still ran down to this place below—to the grip of me, Gaia.
When I opened my eyes, the sunlight of Olympus had vanished. Before me lay once more a deep and black darkness.
Tartarus. The deepest place in the world. An abyss where even a god, once fallen, must plunge nine days and nine nights before touching bottom. Later ages would call it the prison where guilty Titans and monsters are sealed away. But to me it was no mere prison. It was the primordial pit that lies beneath the earth itself—the deepest part of my body, a domain I had never wished to show to anyone.
The land to which the dead return. The first house that cradled life and carried on the bloodline. Even if Aides and Hera had been born the new owners of those authorities, the roots I held would not pass to them of their own accord. And at this very moment, part of that power was busy elsewhere—on the black crag before me, holding fast the man bound to it.
A god who had once been the sky itself. My first son, and my husband. Uranus, who to Cronus's scythe lost both his throne and the thing most precious to a man. Golden chains pinned his limbs to the rock, and beneath them the roots of the earth were woven tight. Dividing the power to hand to my two children from the power to leave here—that, too, I could put off no longer.
"M-Mother..."
Uranus called to me.
I leaned back against a throne woven of tangled roots.
"What is it?"
"That tremor, just now..."
"Cronus has fallen."
For a moment, light returned to his hazy, unfocused eyes.
"Th-then that bastard will be coming here too—"
"No."
I smiled.
"Rather than remain behind, foul as you are, he chose to melt into this world as time itself."
Uranus froze, mouth agape. Had he been hoping for someone to share his captivity? I did not trouble myself to ask.
"Uheheh... I-I'm shorry..."
A servile smile dangled from his lips once more.
"Darling... no, forgive me—Mother... pwease fowgive me..."
"And what is it you have done wrong?"
I asked, tender as ever.
Uranus shook all the harder.
"I... I shut Hecatoncheires and Cyclopeia, the children born of you and me, away in Tartarus... called them hideous..."
"Is that all?"
"I... I thrust the children born of your body back inside it... and caused you pain..."
I tilted my head.
"Bzzt. Wrong."
"Eep!"
"That is only half of it."
A root beneath the throne writhed. He swallowed his scream. Chin in hand, I studied my failed husband.
"Let us grant, a hundred times over, that you did imprison those children."
"..."
"You might even claim you had no choice, if it was to protect your royal authority."
A very small hope rose on Uranus's face.
"Th-that's right. I was the king of heaven, and—"
"But what came after?"
His hope froze solid.
"P-pardon...?"
"I asked what you meant to do with that royal authority of yours."
A small clod of earth rose from my fingertip. The soil became mountain ranges, and between the ranges rivers ran. Along the coast, villages of humans still without names appeared like sparks of flame.
"Did you think to lay roads?"
"..."
"To govern the flooding of the rivers?"
"..."
"To let humans reap more grain, to build harbors where they might trade goods with one another, to divide fitting lands and roles among your own children—did you ever so much as try?"
Uranus could not answer.
"You had not."
I answered in his place.
"You wished only to keep your power. Never once did you think what that power should do."
I closed my hand lightly. The world of soil crumbled back into a pinch of dust.
"How was I, the first of goddesses, to go on calling a man who lagged behind even me my husband, and endure it?"
Uranus whimpered.
"And so your repentance is still wanting."
I rose from the throne. There was nothing more to hear from him. With a flick of my finger, a vast map unrolled in the empty air.
Olympus. Achaea. The Aegean Sea and Anatolia. Beyond them, Egypt, Sicily, Italy. The map spread wider and wider—past the whole of the Mediterranean, until the entire continent of Europa stood before my eyes.
"I wonder how far this new god-king sees," I murmured to myself. "The eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean included?"
My finger traced the sea.
"A little further—the whole of the Mediterranean?"
My fingertip traveled on to the narrow strait in the west.
"Or, like me—"
The rivers and plains running north lit up one after another.
"All of Europa, at the very least?"
I had not yet exchanged a single word with the new god-king. Even so, the battle I had watched through the earth, and the scene that followed it, told me a few things. Zeus had not hoarded the credit for himself. He had acknowledged Metis's stratagem, and bound the strength of his freshly rescued sisters into one. He had not abandoned Aides and Hera, who had been unable to fight. Better than Uranus. Far better than Cronus.
But that alone did not make him qualified to be a husband. What would he do, once he had the throne? In what kind of country would he live with the family he had saved? That answer I would have to hear from his own lips.
And—just perhaps. If that child, too, knew the things I know...
I folded the thought away for the moment. Hope could wait until after I had confirmed it.
"Mother."
A cautious voice. Beside the great stone gate stood my daughter. Her single eye burned red as flame, and old chain marks remained on her hard arms. The primordial artisan of hammer and fire and metal. Cyclopeia.
"Do you truly mean to go to Olympus?"
"I do."
"And if the new god-king proves, in the end, no different from Uranus or Cronus..."
My daughter's single eye darkened. Her father, Uranus, had called her hideous and locked her away. Her elder brother Cronus had promised her freedom before he was king, then turned his back on that promise once he had the throne. I had trusted both of those kings, and my daughter had paid the price alongside me. So to tell her only that this king would be different would have been cruel.
I went to her and stroked her cheek.
"I will not ask you to trust him."
"..."
"I will look with my own eyes, and judge."
"But if you leave your place, Mother, this one will..."
Cyclopeia looked at Uranus.
I moved a single finger, and the roots of the earth rose up to bind him all the tighter.
"Eeeeek!"
"He will be quiet now."
"...That I do not doubt."
My daughter bowed her head. I took her hand. Beneath the chain marks I felt calluses—hands that had gone on making tools even here in the dark.
"Do not worry, my daughter."
She looked up at me.
"This time, I will win back at the very least your freedom."
"Only mine?"
"Your younger brother, Hecatoncheires, must be freed as well."
I smiled.
"And if the new god-king proves a finer man than I expect, we may yet win more than freedom."
"More...? What do you mean?"
"A secret, for now."
I released my daughter's hand and smoothed the fall of my dress. At my feet, soil bloomed like flowers; the ceiling of Tartarus split apart, and a road to the surface unfurled.
It was not the attire of one bound for a battlefield. It was the attire of a noble lady—come to have audience with a king, to negotiate if need be, and, should he please her, to raise the matter of marriage itself.
"I shall be off."
At my first step, the whole earth rumbled low and long. Far away on Olympus, the divine powers of the four goddesses were still locked in tense opposition. Who would claim the place at Zeus's side? That question alone, and they made this much noise. I laughed softly.
What I meant to ask of the god-king would not end with a single place at his side. First Wife. Queen. Mother of the heir. I intended to show him a future worthy of all three seats.
Just how far would he be able to see?
I set out for Olympus.