"Before every scream, there is silence. Before every cut, a whisper."
The Hollow was quiet.
Too quiet.
Elias sat beneath the Tree of Echoes, watching as its branches leaned not upward but inward, curling as if bracing for a coming wind.
Dreams no longer bloomed easily. They stirred and shuddered, folding in on themselves, trembling like hunted things. The Weft of Myth—the great net that spanned all soul-threads—was tightening.
He whispered to the Hollow, but even his voice sounded distant.
Uranus had not spoken again.
He had not needed to.
The sky had grown heavy, like a ceiling slowly sinking onto the heads of all who lived beneath it.
It was the weight of imminent violence.
And Elias felt it pressing even here.
Far beneath Aetherion's surface, Kronos knelt before a cluster of twisted stone roots. They thrummed with energy now—life stirring where silence had festered.
One eye blinked.
Then another.
Then a hundred.
The Hecatoncheires were waking.
Their vast limbs curled against the inner crust of Gaia's form, still bound by chains forged of sky and wordless law. The Cyclopes groaned beside them, their single eyes glaring upward, glowing faintly like suns buried alive.
Kronos stood tall, the sickle at his side no longer silent but singing. Not loudly. Not triumphantly.
A low hum, vibrating with expectation.
"Soon," he whispered.
Elias watched this through the Hollow's reflection pool—an expanse of still water that showed not just images, but intention.
Kronos's movements were deliberate now. His steps carved purpose into the earth. He no longer hesitated when Gaia called—he simply came.
The boy who had once flinched at visions of stars dying now moved like a creature of inevitability.
And Elias felt a pang.
Not pride.
Not fear.
Something older—a kind of grief for choices that must be made.
Even when they are right.
He raised a hand and drew a spiral in the air.
A whisper, born from a soul-thread not yet named, curved outward from his Hollow and entered Kronos's dream.
It did not speak in words.
It showed.
A field of stars collapsing.A mother's arms cut from the earth.A father's roar echoing across eternity.A son holding a blade.A silence after that could never be undone.
Kronos woke gasping—but did not scream.
He merely stood and began to walk.
He did not hesitate.
In the underworld-shadow, Gaia's breath thickened.
Her body was awakening more deeply now. Where once she whispered only to Kronos, now she reached out to others.
To Rhea—soft and strong, born of dusk and destiny.To Themis—still young, still forming, her sense of justice woven in silence.To Hyperion, whose fire could not yet burn the stars but had already scorched stone.
She called them not with words, but feelings—images pressed into their thoughts as they slept.
A world unbound.
A sky cut open.
A mother, free.
They awoke troubled, and none yet understood why.
But the dream had been planted.
In the Hollow, Elias met again with Iapetus.
The Titan of Endings had returned, this time with a simple question.
"What will we lose?"
Elias did not answer immediately.
He reached into the soil and drew forth a dying sprig of memory—a fragment of a myth that would never happen.
He held it in both hands.
"We will lose what could have been," Elias said at last. "Peace. Choice. The version of ourselves that walks away instead of striking."
Iapetus nodded. He did not speak again. But when he left, he no longer walked like one watching history.
He walked like one within it.
The veil above Aetherion stirred again.
Not an intrusion.
A presence.
Not Uranus himself—but something sent in his name.
A celestial being made of radiant geometry, faceless, wordless, and woven of silence and sky.
It pressed against the edge of the Hollow like a question with no answer.
Elias met it alone.
He stood at the border and lifted both hands.
"I have already seen your shape," he said calmly. "I have dreamed you, unspoken."
The being pulsed once, trying to pass through.
The Hollow resisted.
Not with violence.
With refusal.
And the being fractured—its geometry unraveling, spiraling outward into harmless light.
Elias did not rejoice.
He returned to the Tree.
And whispered again.
Elsewhere, beneath the western roots of Gaia, the Hecatoncheires began to move.
Their chains cracked—not broken, not yet—but weakened by time and memory.
The Earth trembled for the first time in an age.
Not from rage.
From preparation.
Gaia did not smile.
But she felt.
And that feeling echoed into her chosen son.
Kronos now stood upon the tallest ridge of the mythic world.
In the sky above him, stars rearranged.
Below him, his siblings stirred.
He did not speak.
He simply raised the sickle once.
And all of Aetherion watched.
The storm had not come.
But its shape had been named.