A month has bled away since the judgement. In a quiet room of the Underworld castle, Cronus lies unmoving. The only signs of life are the shallow rise and fall of his chest beneath the linens and the weak pulse beneath the fingers of the watching physician. The air smells of antiseptic herbs and the faint, metallic scent of old ichor.
Rhea sits beside the bed, a statue of grief. Her hand tightly clutches his bandaged one, her warmth battling the cold stillness of his.
A sound breaks the silence—a deep, pained groan from Cronus. His head shifts on the pillow. His eyelids, thin and bruised-looking, flutter open.
His eyes are clouded, seeing nothing. He blinks slowly, each blink a labor. The unfamiliar, majestic obsidian ceiling of the Underworld comes into a blurry focus. Confusion tightens the lines on his face. 'Where…?'
He turns his head. Blurred shapes loom over him. Fingers press into his wrist. A cold disc touches his chest. 'Who are they…?'
A voice, muffled and watery, shouts something.
"—onus!…us…CRONUS, please!"
He knows that voice. He turns toward it, his neck muscles straining.
Rhea's face swims into view. Her eyes are red-rimmed wells of exhaustion, her cheeks stained with tracks that gleam in the dim light. Seeing her is a key turning in a broken lock.
"Rhea…" The name scrapes out of a dry throat, but it is his.
"Cronus!" Her cry is a mix of relief and fresh terror.
He tries to push himself up on his elbows. A physician tries to force him to rest. "Wait! Lord Cronus! Don't do that! You are not—"
Cronus pushes him back. "Bullshit!"
AAAAAAA!!! Aaaaahhhh!!!
Agony detonates in his chest. It is a white-hot spear of pure negation, tearing through muscle and memory alike. A choked, hellish scream is ripped from him as his body convulses and falls back, a dead weight against the mattress. The bandages over the great vertical wound on his torso immediately blush a vivid, wet red.
Physicians swarm. Soft chants fill the air as healing spells weave silver light over the weeping injury. The coppery smell of fresh blood cuts through the herbal scent.
Through the pain haze, Cronus's mind claws for its oldest, most fundamental tool. He reaches inside himself, searching for the familiar, boundless river of golden power—his divine energy, as much a part of him as his own breath. He forms a command, simple and absolute: 'Time reversal.'
Nothing answers.
Not silence. Absence. Where the vast, responsive power should reside is a void, a flat, featureless plain in his soul. The knowledge of how to command it is simply gone, leaving only a phantom itch in his spirit.
'What… what was I trying to do? 'Reverse'? Is that… a thing I could do?' A cold, slick panic begins to rise in his gut. His hands tremble on the sheets. The faces around him smear into meaningless colors, their voices a distant roar. He is drowning in the sheer, helpless noise of his own body.
SLAP!
The crack is sharp and clean in the chaotic room. The sting on his cheek is a bright, singular point of feeling. The world snaps back into hard clarity.
He looks up, his hand rising slowly to touch the hot skin.
Rhea looms over him, her grief now burned into a furious, desperate love. The dark circles under her eyes look like bruises. "WILL YOU JUST STOP?" she screams, her voice raw and cracking. "FOR ONE MOMENT, WILL YOU JUST BE STILL?"
Her anguish is a bucket of cold water. The fight drains from him, leaving a hollow, weary shell. He sinks into the pillows, his body going limp. He gives one stiff, defeated nod.
The physicians finish, the bleeding stemmed. At Rhea's sharp, tear-filled glare, they bow and hurry out, closing the door on the heavy silence.
"Rhea," Cronus whispers, the sound barely air. "I can't… feel it. The energy. It's not there."
Her face does not soften. It fills with a pity so profound it is worse than anger. "Do you remember what happened during the judgement?" she asks, each word precise.
The question hangs. Then, memory does not return—it reconstructs him. Not images, but a full-body echo: Ananke's gaze, the sensation of something integral being unraveled and pulled out through his pores, strand by golden strand. It is the erasure of his power and all divinity he possessed.
"So," he breathes, the truth a physical weight on his lungs. "It is all gone." He tries to craft a smile for her, to offer some piece of the unbroken king, but his facial muscles twitch uncontrollably. A tremor runs through him, and the hot pressure behind his eyes breaks. A single tear escapes, tracing a path through the stubble on his cheek before he can think to stop it.
Rhea does not speak. She simply folds herself over him, her arms wrapping around his shoulders, pulling him into an embrace that is both prison and sanctuary. Her body shakes with silent sobs. "I'm here," she chokes into his neck. "I am right here."
He does not lift his arms to hold her—they feel like foreign, heavy objects—but he turns his face into the familiar scent of her hair and shuts his eyes tight against the world.
---
Outside the chamber, Hades and Hecate stand with their backs to the cold obsidian wall. The muffled screams, the slap, the weeping—all have reached them.
"It took centuries for him to earn that level of power," Hades murmurs, his voice low. "He lost everything in a single moment. Now he is just a being with an endless lifespan and the strength of a peak mortal." He lets out a long, slow breath.
Hecate's hand finds his shoulder, her touch cool and steady. "Then why not give him the ability to wield demonic energy? A few divinities native to the Underworld could be his."
"Hmm…Later," Hades says, his gaze fixed on nothing.
---
Days later, Cronus stands under the soft, eternal glow of Elysium. His body is healed, the scars pale and thick on his skin. He moves with a new, careful precision, every step a conscious act.
Minthe and Sebastian lead him and Rhea to the Life Jewel Tree. It is no longer a sapling but a young tree of vibrant health, its emerald leaves cradling buds of solid, pulsing gold.
Hades and Hecate stand before it. "It has grown well. It may bear fruit in a few years. Good work," Hades notes, a thread of satisfaction in his tone.
Eleos bows, her movement fluid. "We tend it as our own, my lord."
As Cronus approaches, Hades turns. "Father. How is your health?"
Cronus responds with a single, curt nod, his arms crossing over his chest.
Hades raises his hand. A flame the color of a mixture of gold, orange, red, blue, and purple ignites above his palm. It does not crackle but gives off a low, resonant hum. "Twilight Flame," Hades states. "It will forge a connection between your mortal frame and the demonic energy that permeates this realm. The energy is volatile. It resists. It is not as refined as divine energy, but it is applicable." He extends the flame toward Cronus. "The choice is yours."
All eyes lock on Cronus. He stares at the undulating twilight flame, his expression unreadable. The moment stretches, filled only by the whisper of the Elysian breeze.
Slowly, Cronus raises his own hand. He does not reach for the flame. Instead, he places his palm against Hades's wrist and firmly pushes the offering aside.
"Keep your flame," Cronus says, his voice like grinding stone. He turns and walks to the Life Jewel Tree. His calloused fingers brush its bark. "You see a tree in deep winter?" he asks, not looking back. "It stands bare. It does not beg for a stranger's sap. It does not pretend to be evergreen." He bends, with some stiffness, and plucks a single fallen leaf, its veins tracing gold. He holds it up, the light catching its edges. "It remembers the sun in its roots. It waits."
He turns to face them all. He is emanating something more absolute: Indomitable intent. The peaceful meadow air grows several degrees colder. Sebastian and Eleos instinctively fall back a step, their hands flying to hidden daggers, bodies tensing for a threat they cannot name.
Hades raises a calm hand, halting them. A slow, deep smile spreads across his face as he looks at his father.
Cronus's own smile is a fierce, bright blade in his weathered face. "I have been cut down. But I have not been uprooted. Let the winter come. I will grow deeper roots."
Hades smiles and thinks, 'I mistook his silence for surrender. But the man who rose on his own never bowed to fate. Not once. And even now—powerless, wounded—he stands as if the cosmos still kneels before him. Father… you always were stronger than the world allowed you to be.'
"Hahahahaha!!"
"Hahahahaha!!"
Hades's quiet chuckle swells into a full, echoing laugh of pure understanding. Cronus joins him, his laughter a booming, defiant counterpoint. The two sounds weave together in the tranquil air, a discordant hymn of resilience and madness.
From a few paces back, Rhea and Hecate watch. In perfect, weary unison, they both sigh and mutter to the grass, "Like father. Like son."
---
In the sun-drenched, marble-wombed heights of Olympus, in a chamber that smells of sacred beeswax and the ghost of ambrosia, Metis rests. Her body is a vessel of imminent divinity, her famed cunning softened, yet sharpened. A goddess who once despised love and affection now finds herself utterly focused on the child about to be born.
Servants move around her with hushed reverence, catering to her every need with a care that borders on fear.
Her gaze, wandering over the gifts and trophies that fill her room, catches upon an ornate, dust-shrouded case tucked upon a high shelf. A memory, sharp and old, surfaces: a prize, taken from the deep vaults of Rhea in the chaotic aftermath of the Titanomachy. She had taken it on a whim.
A strange pull, cold and slender as a spider's leg, tugs at her mind. She gestures to a servant. "Bring that to me."
The servant fetches the case, blowing a fine layer of gold-flecked dust from its lid before presenting it. The case is heavy for its size. Metis dismisses the servant with a wave. Alone, she releases the clasp with a soft click.
Inside, nestling on midnight velvet, is a vial of liquid so dark it seems not to hold shadow, but to be a fragment of shadow given form. No label, no inscription—only an implicit, ominous gravity. 'If I recall correctly, this potion shows the user a glimpse of their death.'
She slams the case shut, the sound like a bone breaking in the quiet room. She pushes it away on the table, turning her attention to the embroidery in her lap. But the thought of it incubates in the back of her mind, a silent, growing rot.
Hours pass. The sun wheels across the sky. She eats, she rests, she speaks with her handmaidens about the child. But her eyes keep drifting back to the case.
That night, under a moon that is a staring, baleful eye, she can bear it no longer. The curiosity has become a compulsion. She rises, wraps a shawl around her shoulders, and retrieves the case.
Sitting by the window in the silver moonlight, she opens it again. Her fingers, usually so steady, tremble slightly as she lifts the vial. The glass is preternaturally cold.
She uncorks it. The smell is not foul, but empty—like the air at the edge of a great cliff. She hesitates, the mouth of the vial an inch from her lips. This is folly. Knowledge of the end is a burden, not a gift. But she is the goddess of wisdom. How can she resist knowledge itself.
She tips the vial and drinks.
The liquid is vile. Thick as honey, it coats her tongue and throat with the cloying bitterness of wormwood and the cloying sweetness of spoiled nectar. She gags, forcing it down.
For a moment, nothing. Then, a coldness spreads from her stomach. The moonlight in the room seems to dim. The sounds of the night insects fade.
Her vision becomes hazy and blurry. When it clears.
She stands in her own chambers, her room appearing richer, more opulent, the walls hung with tapestries of her husband's victories. She is admiring a gown, a magnificent thing spun from captured dawn-light and storm-static, a gift. She feels a profound, unsettling contentment.
Zeus looms behind her. His form swells, breaking the bounds of the chamber, his skin crackling with a silent, oppressive power. His eyes crackle with lightning.
In one swift motion, Zeus grabs Metis with his massive hands and swallows her. There is no time to scream, to plead, to fight. There is only a rush of impossible force, and she is engulfed.
---
Metis awakes.
She is on the cold marble floor, her body curled. A ragged, soundless gasp tears at her throat. Her hands fly to her neck, then claw at the stones beneath her, as if she can dig her way back into existence.
Servants burst in, their faces pale moons of alarm, blurry through the tears she hadn't felt herself shed. "My queen! My queen, what happened?"
Their voices are muffled. The vision plays behind her eyes on a relentless loop, a perfect, horrifying memory of a moment yet to pass. The sensory details are too sharp, too vile: the texture of the gown, the smell of ozone before the shadow fell, the utter, vacuum silence of the end.
"Leave me," she commands, her voice flat.
"But, your grace, you fell—"
"OUT!"
They flee, sealing the door. She scrambles until her back hits the wall, then curls protectively around the curve of her womb, her arms a desperate cage.
"No," she whispers. "That can't be the future. That must be an illusion… yes, an illusion." Her voice grows stronger, hardened by a terror that is transforming into a cold, clear purpose.
"But what if it is true?" Her body trembles with an unknown fear.
Slowly, she uncurls. She wipes her face with a trembling hand. The fear is still there. "It doesn't matter whether it is real or not. I will prepare. For myself. For my child." Her hand gently rubs her stomach.
She lifts her head, and in her magnificent mind, new plans begin to align. Cold. Precise. Calculating every variable. And utterly, utterly without mercy.
---
In the crushing, silent trenches of the sea, in a garden of luminous coral, Oceanus moves with the patience of a retired old man. Orcanon approaches and bends low. "Greetings, Lord Oceanus."
"Speak," Oceanus says, not pausing in his gardening.
"Hyperion has committed suicide."
Oceanus's hand stills for only a second. "Hmm… that was inevitable. For him, his pride is more important than his life."
He strokes his beard and thinks, 'This judgement has provided more benefits than I anticipated. With Hyperion gone, the sky realm has become a soft spot. In past, I had to worry about Cronus escaping, but now he has lost all his power. It's same as being eliminated. Now, only a few obstacles remain in my path.
"Anything else?" he prompts, his voice a deep current.
Orcanon nods and states, "Metis carries Zeus's child. And the Earth Mother, Gaea, has summoned Zeus to her temple. Alone."
Oceanus sets his coral shears down. The water in the grotto grows dense and cold, pressing in on the senses. "Hmm… that is unusual. If that bitch is active again, then she must be planning something." His gaze, older than the continents, turns hard. He orders, "Increase surveillance around her temple and inform me of her every movement."
Orcanon bows. "As you wish, my lord."
Oceanus stands and stretches. "It is time to settle an old debt with my lovely daughter." Suddenly, the surrounding water grows cold and heavy.
Orcanon remains silent, but his lips curve slightly.