Gaia did not weep.
She endured.
The world called her Earth, but she was more than that. She was bearing. The bearer of seed, of sorrow, of slow and silent wrath. Her body was the ground upon which all else stood. But none saw the fractures forming in her soul.
Elias felt them.
Not in his Hollow, where silence cradled his thoughts, but when he drifted near the heart of Aetherion. There, deep beneath the surface of Gaia's body, the echoes of pain curled like roots in the dark.
He followed them.
It took no steps, only will. He passed through stone as thought, deeper and deeper, until he stood in a realm that was not a chamber but a wound—a vast, lightless cavern, echoing with breath.
Breath that was not Gaia's.
They were there.
Herchildren.
The ones Uranus had forced back into her—children too monstrous, too strange, too full of potential for him to permit them freedom.
Elias saw them, half-formed and restless.
Three beings with fifty heads and a hundred arms each—the Hecatoncheires, whose names had not yet been given. Their eyes shimmered with innocence and rage.
Near them were the Cyclopes, one-eyed and silent, curled around each other like abandoned thoughts.
They were not evil. They were unfinished. They were mythic concepts yet to be shaped by time or tale.
Gaia's sorrow wrapped around them like a lullaby of soil.
Elias knelt and pressed his palm to the cavern floor. It pulsed—not with heat, but yearning.
He closed his eyes and listened.
"They sleep beneath silence. But they are not forgotten."
The voice was Gaia's, though it came from every direction at once. Soft. Hollow. Like wind beneath roots.
"I cannot set them free," she whispered.
Elias did not speak.
"But I can remember them," he replied.
In his Hollow, he carved a grove of twisted trees—each bearing one fruit that pulsed faintly in the dark.
Each fruit bore a name that did not yet exist. He planted one for each hidden child, shaped from the sorrow he had heard.
And from them, he began weaving a new kind of echo: remembrancethroughpain.
He learned that myth was not born from victory alone—but from the ache of what is caged, what is cast aside, what is buried.
Time passed.
Perhaps centuries. Perhaps hours.
In Aetherion, the sky remained still. Uranus continued his descent—pressing, claiming, smothering.
He was not a tyrant in form. He was a fear given shape.
His presence was not angry. It was afraid.
Afraid of change. Afraid of children. Afraid of becoming unnecessary.
Elias watched him from afar.
The sky-god hovered above Gaia every night, never rising, never resting. His essence seeped into every corner of the world. And with each passing age, Gaia withdrew deeper into herself.
The voice beneath the stone grew quieter.
One evening in the Hollow, Elias walked the grove and plucked a single fruit from the tree marked with a name not yet spoken.
He held it in his hand and whispered a thought into it.
"One day, the buried will rise. Not to rule—but to remind."
The fruit dissolved.
And somewhere beneath the stone, one of the Cyclopes stirred in his sleep.
That same night, Logos returned.
Not as a shape, but as a glimmer—like the flicker of meaning between two lines of forgotten text.
"You feel it now, don't you?" Logos asked.
Elias looked toward the stars.
"Yes. The coil tightens."
Logos shimmered, rippling between idea and speech.
"Soon, a choice will be made. One that bleeds the sky."
Elias did not answer. He already knew.
Kronos had grown in the shadows. The youngest of Gaia's children. The quietest. But within him churned something no god had yet embraced:
Rebellion.
Elias returned to the chamber beneath Gaia's skin one last time.
He found her heartbeat slower than before.
The children stirred uneasily, restless with dreams.
And from above, the pressure of Uranus pressed harder.
In the silence, Elias knelt once more and placed his hand against the cavern floor.
This time, he did not whisper remembrance.
He whispered a single question:
"Must sky always crush earth?"
A tremor passed through the stone.
One of the Hecatoncheires opened an eye.
The first ripple of resistance had begun.