He is late.
The Mother’s song has long faded on the wind, the silence filled with the rustling of leaves and the whispers of golden fruit. I worry the folds of my cloak, glancing around the grassy plateau shadowed by a high ridge of stone at the crest of Mount Olympus. No one has ever been late before.
Themis, my fellow Titan, steps back from the trunk of the Hesperides tree into the circle of twelve standing below its branches. Her chest heaves. She should have returned her life-threads to the tapestry by now. She is breathing stolen time.
‘What do we do?’ her voice wavers across the mountain top.
‘We wait,’ says Prometheus.
‘Perhaps some of us should search the mountain?’ I offer. ‘In case he has been injured.’
‘No, Metis,’ says Atlas. ‘The Mother is never wrong. He will come.’
I am pulled taut, a bow string waiting to be released. Dread is slowly creeping through my veins, winding its way towards my heart. What if he never comes?
A breath later, he appears.
The clouds bleed behind him, stained crimson by the sun. He seems younger than in the vision shown to me by the omphalos stone. For a terrible moment, I worry I have made a mistake and misread Gaia’s life-thread image. It was my first time reading the future in the eye of the world. Yet as I watch him, I decide it is undeniably the same face, the same bones. My pulse calms. The mountain has not been kind to this one. He has a wild look about him, his hands and tunic stained with dried blood. I wonder if he fell foul of a boar’s tusks on his journey. It is no matter; his wounds will be healed soon enough.
He staggers to a halt and stares at us with eyes of sea and sky.
‘I am Kronos. The Mother called to me in my sleep and showed me the face of creation.’
Themis watches him, her gaze full of stars. I wonder if she is afraid. If I will be afraid, when my time comes.
Prometheus looks at me, seeking clarity that this is the one we have been waiting for. I nod. He turns to the newcomer and asks, ‘Are you ready, Kronos, to give your life to the Mother? To live and serve her as long as she commands?’
‘I am,’ he rasps.
His eyes meet mine and something stirs within my ichor. He is different, this Kronos. All who come to the sacred mountain carry the weight of the lives they’ve left behind, but there is something else he harbours. Something darker. I find I cannot look away.
‘Then come, taste the fruit of life. Eat, and you shall know the power and blessing of the Hesperides light,’ says Prometheus.
The man called Kronos walks forward. Phoebe begins to sing, and the rest of us twine our voices with hers, until all twelve of us raise our hymn to the heavens.
Gaia, mother of all,
we shall sing,
the strong foundation, the oldest one.
She feeds everything in the world.
Atlas unclasps Themis’ woollen cloak as she lifts her arms towards the tree. Her hands tremble as she presses them against the bark. By her feet, the omphalos stone gleams from its nest of roots, its shining black eye ever watching.
Whoever walks upon her sacred ground
or moves through the sea
or flies in the air, it is she
who nourishes them from her treasure-store.
Tears stream down Themis’ face as, behind her, Atlas fastens the cloak around Kronos’ shoulders.
Queen of Earth, through you
beautiful children,
