The duration within the living prison was an agony of immeasurable, undefined persistence. Arkos, if he could still lay claim to that Name which felt like a fading echo from a distant, almost irrelevant existence, found the lack of temporal markers to be a unique form of torture. Time had been a companion in the Great Archive, measured by the slow creep of light across the scriptorium floor, the rhythmic tolling of the city bells, and the gradual decay of parchment that necessitated the endless cycle of copying and preservation. Here, there was only the unending, viscous present, a state of being suspended in the warm, oppressive darkness of their shared confinement.
He attempted to impose his own internal metrics in the early phases of this imprisonment – if "phases" could even be applied to such a monotonous eternity. He counted his divine heartbeats, a slow, powerful thrum that resonated within his immense, unseen form. He tried to measure the intervals between the more violent lurches and contractions of the living stomach that held them, the unsettling shifts of their unseen jailer. But these efforts were futile. The rhythms were inconsistent, chaotic, and his perception of duration became hopelessly distorted. Were it days? Years? Centuries? The scholar in him, the part that craved order and precise categorization, railed against this temporal ambiguity.
The other presences, his unwilling companions in this grotesque entombment, remained a constant source of irritation. Their raw, unfiltered emanations of fear, rage, and despair washed over him in waves, polluting the sanctity of his internal space. Over what felt like an age, he refined his ability to shield himself mentally, creating a conceptual barrier, a silent scriptorium of the mind where he could retreat. Yet, their proximity was an undeniable, physical reality. Sometimes, the churning movements of their prison would force them closer, their immense, intangible forms brushing against his own. The contact was repulsive, like being forced to share a cramped cell with unruly, emotional primitives.
He began to differentiate them further, not by sight or sound, but by the unique timbre of their divine essence, the signature of their nascent powers. One, he now recognized with a cold certainty, pulsed with an almost unbearable, arrogant radiance, a crackling energy that spoke of lightning and dominion – this was the one he had first sensed, the future Zeus, though Arkos knew him not by that Name. Another possessed a heavy, oceanic depth, a turbulent, restless power that ebbed and flowed like immense tides – Poseidon. A third was a vortex of chilling stillness, a profound emptiness that seemed to draw all warmth and light into itself – Hades. There were others too, female presences, one radiating a fierce, protective heat that felt almost like a physical flame (Hera), another a sorrowful, nurturing warmth that spoke of growing things (Demeter), and a third, a quiet, almost self-effacing glow (Hestia).
Arkos felt no kinship with them, no flicker of shared identity despite their common parentage and predicament. To his analytical mind, they were simply different manifestations of divine power, each with its own inherent properties and, he suspected, its own inherent flaws. Their emotional outbursts, their undirected rage against their confinement, struck him as profoundly illogical. What was the utility in such displays? Did they imagine their fury could breach the fleshy walls of their prison? It was a waste of energy, descending into the chaos he had always sought to order through knowledge.
His divinity, he was beginning to perceive, was different. While they were raw force, elemental power, his was… information. Structure. The very essence of the Archive, magnified to an impossible degree. He found that he could, with effort, access the entirety of his mortal memories with perfect, crystalline clarity. Every character on every page he had ever read, every nuance of every forgotten language, every intricate diagram and faded map – it was all there, an internal library of perfect recall. This became his sanctuary, his only solace. He would spend uncounted eons re-reading the texts of his past life, analyzing them from new, divine perspectives, seeking patterns and connections he had missed as a mortal. The Codex of Aramond, in particular, he revisited countless times, its cryptic symbols now resonating with a deeper, more terrifying significance in light of his current, inexplicable existence. The Name he had glimpsed, which had pulsed within him during his transition, felt like a crucial entry in a lexicon of unimaginable scope.
Sometimes, a new kind of "knowledge" would filter into his awareness, unbidden. Faint, fragmented impressions from the being that contained them – Kronos. He sensed a vast, primal hunger, a gnawing fear of displacement, a tyrannical will to power that was terrifying in its simplicity. These were not thoughts in the human sense, but raw, instinctual drives that defined their jailer. Arkos cataloged these impressions with the same detached precision he had applied to ancient trade manifests, adding them to his ever-expanding internal Archive. This entity, their father, was a force of destructive time, a being who devoured his creations to maintain his dominion. The irony was not lost on him.
On rare occasions, the internal turmoil of Kronos would reach a crescendo. The fleshy walls would constrict violently, the ambient heat would spike, and a wave of pure, undiluted terror from their father would wash over them. In these moments, the individual miseries of the swallowed gods would momentarily align. Arkos would feel the radiant one (Zeus) flare with defiant energy, the oceanic one (Poseidon) surge as if to break free, the chthonic one (Hades) withdraw into an even deeper coldness. Even Arkos, in his detached observation, would feel a primal urge to resist, not out of solidarity, but out of a fundamental opposition to the overwhelming, irrational force that sought to crush them.
It was in these shared moments of acute pressure, these unwilling symphonies of divine discomfort, that the faintest, most unwelcome thought would sometimes brush against the edges of Arkos's consciousness: the presences of these others, however irritating, were the only other fixed points in his current, horrifying reality. Their chaotic energies were a known variable in the otherwise featureless void of his imprisonment. This was not a thought he lingered on. It was an anomaly, a piece of data that didn't fit his preferred hypothesis of absolute self-sufficiency. He would quickly dismiss it, retreating once more into the silent, ordered stacks of his internal library, the only domain where he still felt a semblance of control. Yet, the thought, once having occurred, was now part of the record, filed away in the deepest, most unvisited recesses of his divine mind. The walls of his prison were unseen, but the presence of his future siblings, however odious, was becoming an undeniable, and perhaps, in some distant, unimaginable future, a relevant factor.