Date: The Age of Cronos The Long Stillness
Time, in the belly of our father, was a treacherous beast. It stretched and compressed, a vast, lightless river flowing towards an unseen, perhaps non-existent, sea. By the internal measure of my own growth, by the slow accumulation of weariness in my siblings' immortal eyes, decades, perhaps even centuries as mortals might count them, had eroded away. My own form was that of a mature god, no longer the child who had tumbled into this grotesque prison. The restless hum of my divine potential had settled into a deeper, steadier thrum, a power I could feel coiled within me, yearning for expression yet finding none in this suffocating, fleshy cage.
The six of us had fallen into the grim rhythm of eternal prisoners. The initial shock of each new arrival had long faded, replaced by a stultifying routine of shared gloom, punctuated by the violent spasms of Cronos's digestion or the more subtle, yet equally unsettling, shifts in his divine metabolism that served as our only calendar.
Hestia's light remained, a soft glow in the perpetual dimness. It wasn't as bright as it once was, perhaps, but it was unwavering. She spoke even less now, yet her stillness was a solid thing. When my own thoughts became too turbulent, I would often just sit near her; her quiet was a different kind of silence than the dread-filled quiet of our prison. Her presence was a reminder that something in us still endured.
Hades kept to the darker recesses, his form often little more than a deeper shadow. His words, when they came, were brief and cutting. "Another shift. Father's indigestion, no doubt," he'd offer, his voice a low rasp, when the prison lurched. His cynicism was a hard shell, but I recognized the sharp mind beneath it, one that missed little of our father's patterns or our shared misery. We didn't talk about better days; such talk felt hollow here.
Demeter's grief had settled deep within her, a constant, quiet ache that rarely showed on her face anymore. She was more withdrawn, her eyes often distant, as if fixed on landscapes none of the rest of us could see. The phantom scents of earth that once clung to her were almost imperceptible now, replaced by a profound stillness.
Poseidon's youthful, chaotic energy had not been entirely extinguished, but it had been… contained, frustrated. He still paced, his movements like a caged storm, and his outbursts of rage, though less frequent, were terrifying in their intensity, causing the very fabric of our prison to shudder. He directed much of his restless frustration towards Cronos, cursing his name in a low, guttural rumble that sounded like distant thunder.
Hera, ah, Hera. Her ambition had not withered in captivity; it had, if anything, become more concentrated, more sharply defined. She carried herself with an unyielding, almost painful regality, as if daring the squalor of our prison to diminish her. "If I were to order the cosmos," she would sometimes declare, her voice ringing with conviction despite the absurdity of making such pronouncements in the gut of a Titan, "there would be no such… untidiness. No such fear from the supposed sovereign." Her pronouncements were often directed at no one in particular, yet they were clearly meant to establish her own innate superiority, her own fitness to rule. Each such declaration was another small stone in the foundation of the profound dislike I felt growing within me for her particular brand of divine arrogance.
And I, Telos, continued my silent work. The Achieves of my mind was now a vast, meticulously ordered library of our shared damnation. Every tremor, every shift in the oppressive atmosphere, every word spoken, every sigh, every flicker of emotion in my siblings' eyes, all were recorded, cross-referenced, analyzed. My divinity, denied external expression, had turned inward, achieving a kind of perfect, terrible clarity about our prison. I understood its rhythms, its faint, leeching energies, the way our own divine essences were subtly suppressed. I could almost map the emotional landscape of Cronos himself, his anxieties pulsing through the walls of our cage like a diseased heartbeat.
This, then, was my unseen kingdom: an empire of pure information, built in the dark.
The knowledge of Zeus, the seventh child, the prophesied liberator, was the central, most heavily guarded chamber in that mental archive. It was a truth that both sustained and tormented me. Each passing year, each new layer of hopelessness that settled upon my siblings, sharpened the edges of that secret. There were times, during the deepest, most silent turnings, when the despair in our chamber became so thick I could almost taste it, when even Hestia's light seemed to waver. In those moments, the urge to speak, to offer that sliver of foreknowledge as a desperate antidote, was almost overwhelming.
But I held my tongue. What good would it do? To speak of a savior who was yet a child himself, if he even existed as the myths from my past life detailed? It would be a cruelty, a false dawn that would only make the subsequent darkness more profound. My divinity, the part of me that resonated with Truth, recoiled from such a deception, however well-intentioned.
Yet, sometimes, I felt him. Or, rather, I felt the effect of him. There were periods when Cronos's internal state would shift with a new, unprecedented agitation. A sharper, more potent fear would emanate from him, distinct from his usual gnawing paranoia. The tremors in our prison would become more violent, the oppressive atmosphere charged with a nameless dread that was not our own. During these times, I would retreat into my observations, my internal analysis, trying to correlate these disturbances with the timeline I carried in my memory. Was this Zeus, growing in strength? Was this the first, faint shadow of his inevitable challenge?
My siblings felt these shifts too, of course, but they interpreted them as mere escalations of our father's madness. "He grows more unhinged," Hades would sneer. "Perhaps he will finally digest us and have done with it."
"Or perhaps," Hera would counter, her eyes bright with a fierce, almost predatory light, "his reign is showing cracks."
Only I knew, or suspected, the true cause. This foreknowledge was a profound isolation. I watched my siblings, each locked in their own form of endurance, and I, the God of Achieves, of Knowledge, of Wisdom, of Truth, could only achieve silence, could only offer the mute wisdom of shared suffering, could only hold to the terrible truth of a future I could not prove and dared not voice. The map I clutched so desperately was leading somewhere, I had to believe that. But the journey through this long, living stillness was an agony of knowing, and waiting.