"Above, he arranges stars. Below, she prepares a blade."
The sky was no longer still.
It shifted in strange, deliberate ways. Constellations that once spun idly through Aetherion's vastness now crept along new paths. They moved like game pieces on a divine board, their edges too sharp, their alignment too precise.
Elias noticed first.
Sitting beneath the Tree of Echoes, he raised his gaze and narrowed his eyes. The stars above were no longer singing in harmony—they vibrated with calculation.
"He's begun," Elias murmured.
Uranus, the Sky-Father, had taken notice not only of Gaia's stirring, but of who moved in the shadows.
He had begun to play.
Far above the Hollow, clusters of light twisted into unfamiliar constellations: a chained hand, a severed crown, a bleeding wheel. Symbols that had no place in this age—prophecies forced into the sky too soon.
They were warnings.
Or perhaps claims.
Elias stood at the Hollow's highest spire, its pinnacle where dream brushed against real, and extended his will into the veil.
The stars pushed back.
They weren't just moving—they were watching.
He raised his hand, and the dreams that formed his realm coalesced around him, forming shimmering shields of memory, myth, and echo. The Tree of Echoes pulsed in response, its roots curling inward, protecting the souls unborn.
A celestial thread, golden and serpentine, struck from the sky.
It passed through the veil—
And shattered against Elias's realm like glass on stone.
At the same time, Kronos stood deep in Gaia's soil, the sickle strapped across his back, silent and hidden.
Before him lay a hollow, pulsing knot of earth, humming softly—not with life, but with trust.
It was not just another part of Gaia's body.
It was her Heartroot—the oldest core beneath all life, a truth too dangerous to share, too sacred to bury.
No Titan had seen it.
No Titan had even felt it.
Until now.
The root rose slowly, curling into a spire of glowing red-amber wood, so ancient it bent time around it. Images bloomed on its surface—Gaia's laughter before the sky silenced it, the Titans being born from dirt and starlight, the night before Uranus chained her children in the dark.
Kronos dropped to one knee without knowing why.
The Heartroot did not speak in words.
It spoke in weight.
And Kronos understood.
She had chosen him not because he was strongest.
But because he listened.
In the Hollow, Elias lowered his hand.
The broken thread from the stars evaporated, its pieces fading into silence.
But now he knew.
Uranus was no longer content to watch.
He was trying to rewrite the myth.
From above.
From without.
From before.
Elias turned back toward the center of the Hollow, the dream-forge where the soul-shells waited. Each glowed with a different essence.
One pulsed erratically now—a soul not yet born but already hunted.
The soul of the one who would be Zeus.
Too early.
Too dangerous.
Elias waved a hand and the shell vanished, hidden beneath twelve layers of sealed time.
"Not yet," he whispered.
That night, Gaia appeared to Kronos—not as soil or voice, but as form.
She rose from the root's spiral, towering and serene, her eyes deep brown laced with silver veins of grief and resolve.
She placed her hand upon his chest.
And Kronos remembered the moment of his birth—not the pain, but the silence that followed. The way the sky had smothered her before she could even cry out in joy.
Now, Gaia did not speak.
But she placed something into his hand.
A stone.
Small. Smooth. Dark.
And alive.
It pulsed with a rhythm he had only felt once before—when he first dreamed of rebellion.
She was giving him a seed.
A piece of herself.
Back in the Hollow, the veil pulsed again.
This time not from the sky.
But from beneath.
Something… old was rising through the cracks.
Elias stepped cautiously toward the edge, toward the Wefting Gate—the boundary between his realm and the World-Soil.
The veil rippled.
And a whisper escaped.
"Dream-shaper…"
The voice was strained. Curious. Not divine. Not Gaia.
Iapetus.
Titan of mortal end and endurance.
He was approaching from the mortal edge of the world—not through divinity, but through understanding.
Elias stilled the Hollow.
He could allow this.
And so, Iapetus entered.
A tall figure clad in fragments of bone and dust, his eyes the color of stormclouds ready to break.
He bowed slightly—unexpected.
"I did not come for answers," he said. "Only questions."
Elias nodded. "Then you are welcome."
They sat beneath the edge of a dream-glade, silence heavy but not empty.
Iapetus finally spoke.
"Do we survive this?"
Elias said nothing.
But a single leaf from the Tree of Echoes drifted down between them. On it, a sigil—a blade above a mother's hand, and below it, a child held in shadow.
Iapetus read it and grimaced.
"Some of us do not."
"No," Elias said. "But those who fall are remembered."
In Gaia's soil, Kronos stood and turned toward the sky.
He could feel the stars shifting again.
Not to guide.
But to threaten.
He raised the sickle—not to strike, but to test its weight.
It did not tremble.
Neither did he.
The sky would come.
The sky would bleed.
And the world would breathe.