Chapter 6: The Desperation of Hope and Optimism of Despair

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

— John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I, lines 254–255. Originally published in 1667 by Samuel Simmons, London. © Public Domain.

The dim aftermath of the cosmic clash told a tale of violent defeat. Nyx witnessed Hades laying near-lifeless on the ground. The golden pool around his body told her all she needed to know.

The son of Cronos had been battered and beaten by his own grandsire. Nyx could not help but pity this being even as he did not move and leaked ichor.

Ouranos, as Nyx recalled, had not been an overly violent brute during life. In fact, by her summation, he would have likely been a tamer aspect of the Great War if he had participated. Why then, she wondered, had he beaten his own descendent to near-death?

The Primordial of the Night had not observed the scene between them, so this left only supposition for her to lean on. Her starlit gaze had seen many days come and nights go, so she was adept at making guesses that turned out to be true.

Despite the suffering she was certain that the young king had experienced, she tilted her head in curiosity. She had known that Hades had fought in the Great War. He was potentially the strongest of the sons of Cronos, yet still, he had been no match for a Primordial.

How could that be? He was hardened from battles. There should be skills in that of the body and magical might conveyed through the Progenitor within Hades. Even if he was a lesser Primordial in terms of prowess, the continued conflict should have brought him to his highest mastery of might.

Were these younger generations of divinities simply weaker? If that were true, allowing one of these inferior gods to be the guardian of both the Titans and the dead would be a mistake.

Nyx realized that she might have to continue ruling over the dead as much as she loathed the idea of commanding others, and she did not want the responsibility to have to care for those beneath her. That was not to say she was without empathy because it was not true.

It was closer to say that, after having her children, she had fallen into aimlessness. There was a peace to that wandering, but because of this enjoyed detail in her life, she was aware that she lacked the selflessness to rule over any domain.

She was born to be night and of darkness. Nobility itself could not begin to describe her, for she was a child of Chaos, and Chaos was power unbridled. The Night Primordial came from this astronomically enormous celestial being.

The call of ruling officially should have been her calling as to be a queen was for Gaia or even that Hera girl or how being king was something craved by Ouranos and his grandson Zeus. However, for Nyx?

No.

For her, she was to be unbridled, free to consume light. She needed to be able to come and go at her whim, not by the restraint of another. Of this fact, she was certain.

As she glided to the ichor-seeping victim, she could see the ebb and flow of divine energy within him. He might succumb to the wounds inflicted by his spectral adversary but there was a might forcing him to live on.

For a moment, she paused. While she knew these seconds were critical if he were in life-threatening danger of death, she could not help but admire the tenacity of this young god. He was ... sublime. He had faced a Primordial by himself, which was overconfidence taken to the point of arrogance, antithetical to logic to the point of outright foolishness, and yet ... there was courage in his beating heart.

He held a value in that which he could not see, and in a Realm as dark as night like the Underworld, the ability to hold true to faithful attributes like courage, honor, valor, kindness, love, and trustworthiness was incomparable of a quality.

Because of this recognition, Nyx did not hesitate to extend her shadowy tendrils to enshroud Hades’ ichor-covered form. With a commanding sweep, her dress of blackened night encapsulated him away from the living world. She drew him back into the recesses of the Underworld.

He did not move much when she had picked him up and brought him back to her home. Whether that was from conserving his strength or from it simply being his nature, Nyx did not know, but she felt in her heart that he was trying to survive.

The realization that there was no strength to conserve struck her. For that, she held a compassionate pity for him. The compassion allowed her to relate to him, but the pity came from her superiority over him.

Never before had she entered a physical conflict that had left her in such a state. He was foolish to allow such a turn of events to take place for him.

Once within the hallowed halls of her dominion, Nyx went to her stores, leaving the nearly unconscious being on a pile of stones to rest. The Underworld did not have many palaces or temples. But why should it? Nyx had no need for opulence of worship. She existed and was and would always be. What did the fawning of the living Titans or their children do for her?

Her home was a small abode of granite stone and obsidian. There was no jewels or gold to accentuate the domicile. There were a few rooms, but mostly, it was an apartment for her rest and peace of mind when she wished to be alone.

She found a flask of ambrosia within her stores. The celestial libation crafted from the essence of starlight and divine power shined brightly, illuminating even the broken king. With deliberate care, she poured the elixir into Hades’ mouth.

She watched carefully to see if the divine properties of the drink would weave their magic.

The ambrosia’s radiant glow coursed through the King of the Underworld undoing most of the damage inflicted upon Hades. His strong, tan body slowly began to move up and down in the chest region from more easy breathing. The Olympian coating of his skin seemed thin by Nyx’s estimation; nevertheless, she would not comment on the fact that she felt the sandy color looked wrong on his body.

Furthermore, the scars that ran over all of his body were left untouched, which Nyx found strange. Had the wounds been from Ouranos?

Nyx snapped herself out of that thinking. No. He had once been within the belly of Cronos. Perhaps Cronos’ power over time or even the acid within had soaked so much into Hades’ flesh that no amount of ambrosia could undo the effects.

Still, the ethereal concoction did its work as a cosmic balm. Wisdom told Nyx that Hades would awaken from the crucible of celestial strife. His physical wounds were healed, but the knowledge that he was not strong enough to take on a Primordial by himself would likely fester. For that, Nyx would be unable to give any balm.

Nevertheless, she was certain that this new king would be able to walk and talk soon enough.

What he did after, though, would be up to him.

In the hushed expanse of the mortal realm, the Last Primordial slowly walked the lands. The sky still stretched like a vast canvas overhead; that fact made Ouranos smile because it allowed him to understand that much of his and Gaia’s creation had stayed the same.

Where sorrow entered was Father Sky noticed the difference. There were lesser, unintelligent beings in his world.

He did not know what to call these beasts. Some had wings and flew overhead. Others were four legged and made noises. There were scaly things in the rivers and lakes. Each of them were not part of Ouranos’ designs for the lands of Greece, yet they did exist.

Judging their existence would do him no good, so he pulled his mind from his verdict.

Looking down at his translucent and ephemeral form, recognizing that he was a ghostly echo of his former celestial majesty, he shook his head at his own thoughts.

This was not his world anymore. When he slept with Rhea, taking her behind Gaia’s back, he had created the divisive strife that caused his children to turn on him and be killed.

That allowed them to shape the lands how they saw fit. He had lost the right to make demands of existence when he was no longer in power. Victors decided the future of those beneath them. The vanquished have nothing, for that is all they deserve.

As he slowly, purposefully traversed the boundless expanse of the living world, he did his best not to fall into a melancholy of nostalgia for what had been. He was accepting the truth of his own philosophy, which was far more difficult than he had thought.

He did not know why that was, but the answer was obvious. While Chaos had made the outline for Greece, both he and Gaia had been the ones to fill in the pieces. That had taken a long duration of their marriage, including conceiving twelve powerful children. Every detail had been painstakingly gained. By being absent (through his own faults), Ouranos recognized, through his heavily weighing remorse, that more than time had been lost.

He had lost the chance to witness the birth of these animals with his wife by his side. He had lost the chance to dispense wisdom or justice to those beneath them. It was not that the domain was changed around him, but rather, it was that those alterations had come without his efforts. How different, he wondered, would Greece have been had he not fornicated with Rhea and destroyed his marriage with Gaia?

To this hypothetical, he had no answer, but he understood that this was no longer his world. Greece had changed in his absence; that fact was irreversible. His ancient hold on the realm had been dissolved by those of the living, little by little everyday.

The memory of his clash with his sons rang in his mind even if he recalled the stripling that had struck out at him only recently. Those thoughts lingered in his consciousness, bolstering his doubts.

He looked upon the bright heavenly stratum above. The sky was a tapestry of azure hues and golden rays. No matter what changes had come, his blue sky had stayed the same.

That brought a comforting joy to his heart.

As he looked upon the air space, he stirred with a newfound vitality, pulsing with the magic of life itself.

Subtle currents of rejuvenation were coursing through his spectral essence. The very fabric of the heavens responded to its lord and master as they should as he was the craftsman. Moment by moment, he could feel himself coursing with new energetic ... life.

Even as he basked in wonder at the generosity of his creation trying to restore its master, Ouranos knew he would be whole again. The heavens were him but apart from him. In that strange relationship, he instinctively understood that this process could restore him.

He could not explain how. Perhaps, this repair came because the sky cannot truly be destroyed, so the heavens were extending that privilege to Ouranos. It could have been because some of his very essence was in the firmament. Possibly, the sky returned loved its creator that it was righting a wrong.

Those were guesses, mere reasons, for what was happening. To Ouranos, they did not matter. What did matter was that there was a chance at being brought back to life.

Probability still allowed room for failure, so still, the Primordial King felt fear and uncertainty. Death had not been a consequence realized by the divine until Ouranos’ death. What were the consequences to being harmed in the living lands in the state he was in?

Youth and a crown had made Ouranos arrogant. Time and death had tempered him to be more cautious. He looked onto the world and knew it would be best to hide away.

To change his size to that of a Titan was easy enough. He might have turned into one of the winged beings in the sky, but to alter his form into another living being was not a power he had learned.

Perhaps, that was what Ouranos would do with his eternity. He could learn many things from these newer beings.

The once-great king looked around before spotting some mountains in the distance. It would keep him connected to the sky, so he could still heal and restore himself to life while also taking the time to discover more of these new divinities.

On Gaia’s tranquil island, Rhea and Gaia sat in solitude. Their secluded sanctuary was a paradise unto itself with lush greenery that came from the center of the land mass to caress the sandy shoreline. The waves of the sea only lightly touched the home of the Earth Primordial as if the domain of Pontus and Oceanus respected Mother Earth’s influence even when it came to the simple matter of her home.

As the sun dipped low on the horizon, casting a golden hue over the landscape, Rhea lay in the central meadow, stretching out in the grass. Gaia sat nearby, gazing into a small pool. She appeared at peace in her early domain.

In the water, strange images flashed.

Men were in armor, women wore beautiful clothes, and children were being born. There was peace and conflict. Caricatures of Olympus were formed on Gaia’s perfect land. Pathetic imitations of crowns were on the heads of these lesser beings. Then, they battled beings that Gaia was more familiar with. There were some beasts made by her grandchildren (Prometheus and Epimetheus). There were a combination of these beings and the animals. Zeus was going from one bed to another. A goddess or titaness moaned his name, and all too soon, reflections of her treacherous grandson were being brought into the world.

These were all displayed one after another in the water.

Rhea’s continued stretching betrayed a restlessness.

“How can you sit there and do nothing, Gaia?”

“Trying to unlock the secrets of the future is not doing nothing, daughter,” Gaia clipped back.

This was not the first time that they argued since being sent away to this island. With no one else to socialize with, and limited to a single island (no matter the miles on the island), the two were discovering an eternity together might be a greater torture than living under the reigns of their respective husbands.

“But we are away from Olympus and all the changes that the younger gods will be making,” Rhea whined. Her voice carried a hint of melancholy as she looked wistfully towards the distant horizon.

Gaia placed a hand at the edge of the water, choosing to contain her own emotions at Rhea’s impatience.

“I understand your longing, Rhea, but exile does not need to last forever. We are timeless beings, so we mostly need to wait. There will come a day when Zeus needs us. He cannot expect to leave us here forever.”

Rhea almost scoffed at her mother’s wisdom. She had considered her son needing them, but if she thought of this need and Gaia thought of it as well, surely Zeus had as well.