Chapter 2: That Which Was

If I could save time in a bottle

The first thing that I’d like to do

Is to save every day

‘Til eternity passes awayJim Croce, Time in a Bottle, from You Don’t Mess Around with Jim, written by Jim Croce, © Concord Music, 1972.

“I will,” the older Cronos said. “It is important that you understand why we lost to our sons.”

“Because they were more powerful,” Cronos shot back.

The elder Cronos seemed angry for a moment before letting his temper simmer away. “Well, not and yes. They might have had more power at the end, but they did not in the beginning. If we had struck at the beginning of the war, we could have won.”

“But we might have lost to Zeus!” Cronos the young exclaimed.

“Precisely!” Cronos the elder said back. “That is self-preservation, which is good, but our loss is our single-mindedness of Zeus.”

“How? How can that be?”

“Allow me to show you,” older Cronos remarked.

He waved his hand at the time tunnel and the imagery on the tunnel walls turned into an imagery of a scene with Rhea and Ouranos.

“Come,” Cronos motioned at the image to his younger self. The younger self looked unsure, but the elder Cronos pushed him into the rectangular scene. The divine magic consumed them both, taking them to a place and time.

The Primordial King wrapped his arms around his daughter as he could feel his manhood buried between her legs. She was moaning his name while he thrust into her.

In his eyes were the selfish desires of his carnal pleasure. Through her his plan for divine children to defeat the Progenitor was made possible.

Despite that, he cherished her sensual physicality. He craved how she desired him more than she could breathe. She existed to please him, crave him, and to belong to him. This was how it was meant to be. Chaos themselves must have given their blessing; after all, why else had this been allowed unless by the will of the Progenitor.

They floated above the scene, transparent to the world, near invisible to one another.

“Why did you show me this?” the younger Cronos seethed. He looked at his wife’s adultery with such vitriol that he might have struck at his older self with murderous intent.

“This is where it started,” the elder Cronos answered smoothly.

In that personal moment, the two of them looked at one another as polar opposites. Where the younger looked enraged to the point of breaking, the elder looked entirely disinterested in both the loathing in his previous self’s eyes and in the act of adultery down below.

“Our feelings of inadequacies.”

“I didn’t know!” Younger Cronos roared.

“Didn’t you?” Elder Cronos remarked blithely. “Didn’t we?” He looked at himself with a simple understanding of who they were. Such introspection did not exist for the younger Titan.

“No!”

“Yes,” the older Titan said back. “We knew the moment Gaia told us. Maybe not consciously, but in the back of our mind, we knew. We knew that something was wrong. We suspected Rhea’s compliance to lay with father, and the seeds of our inadequacies were planted.”

Rather than listen to any reply from his less experienced self, the more seasoned Cronos flicked his hand, opening a window to another moment in time. The undeveloped Cronos followed.

Cronos was sleeping comfortably on his throne. He had earned this rest. He had brought peace to all of Olympus and the realms below.

In his dreams, he thought of a realm that fawned over him, loved him, worshiped him. He had made his rulership about equity, not separating himself from his fellow Titans. Though he was their ruler, he had not made his throne room about wealth or pageantry.

He could not see or hear his youngest, white haired son coming upon him. The two Cronos’ could see this. They saw as lightning formed in the hands of Zeus. The younger god was charging up his energy to harm his father.

When the Titan opened his eyes, the bolts were released upon him to alter the future of Mount Olympus and the divinity of the land.

The once resting Titan was unable to slow the flow of time enough. He barely had enough power to shield himself from a lethal blow, but he did survive. The second King of Olympus was unable to prevent the release of his godly offspring from his belly.

The elder Cronos held his younger self back.

“Don’t!” the superior Titan warned

“We can join ourselves! We can stop Zeus!”

“To what end?” Cronos the elder asked.

“We win. Zeus dies.”

“And you and I will still have been imprisoned,” explained the older Cronos.

“What?” Younger Cronos wondered.

The elder Cronos rolled his eyes and turned. He opened another window into the time tunnel. The vortex of pure time returned. It was a swirling light, welcoming the Titans back into its depths. The elder Cronos stepped in with a familiarity the younger could not yet appreciate. The younger followed; once inside, he growled.

“What do you mean? We will still be imprisoned?”

The elder Cronos stopped and turned. “You still don’t grasp how time works, do you?” He was exasperated, but still, he exercised patience. He was speaking to himself after all. With time, the younger version would become him. After all, he already had.

The younger Cronos stared, unsure what in all of Tartarus this meant.

The tunnel around them pulsed with its ethereal glow. Shifting colors and flashes of images suspended on the walls of this tunnel of energy. The veins of reality were theirs to explore and command as it was the lifeline of time.

The elder Cronos waved his hand, and two windows within the tunnel appeared at his command. Through these windows, the images of the places they had been reappeared, but then next to them more came. The weapons given to his rebellious sons from the other children of Gaia and Ouranos was to the left. To the right was the final battle where Metis and Zeus fought him.

Finally, there was one where he was bound, asleep, and being dragged to the Underworld

“Every choice, every action, creates the people we are. Change one thing about this and a branch, a new timeline, is created,” the elder Cronos explained. “This is not conjecture but reality. The moment Rhea chose to betray you with Ouranos, our path was forged, leading to our downfall.”

“So what?” the recently imprisoned Cronos exclaimed. “If we stop Zeus from doing those things, we win the war, and we reign on Olympus.”

“For fuck’s sake, you can’t be this stupid!” cried the elder Cronos. He exhaled, knowing pushing himself would only lead to a needless fight. “Listen! Should we change anything in the past, a new branch will be made. Our timeline will remain the same, but we will have made a time and place where another version of ourselves reigns on Olympus. By doing so, we rob him of the wisdom or the challenges that make us as powerful as we are. A Cronos like that will be deposed by his children, or even our siblings, eventually.”

The younger Cronos clenched his fists. He almost punched the wall of time itself. He restrained himself because he was not sure what would happen. “Then what’s the point? Everything will lead to our defeat!”

“Yes,” the elder Cronos replied as firmly as a second. “But by knowing what was, we can see the possibilities for what could be.” The younger Cronos stared at the elder, irritated to be lectured to by himself. “Right now, we are outside of the conventional timelines. Even you must know that. While each window you see is real, each one a possible reality that has been or could be. With our power, we can choose at which time we enter our timeline in, or another branch if we so choose. Don’t you see, younger me? We can control our destinies. As the Titans of Time, we, and only we, can ensure the ending we want.”

The elder Cronos stepped closer to his younger self. The younger Cronos was taken aback when he saw the burning intensity within the elder Cronos’ eyes. “Together! We can rewrite our fate.”

Before creation took shape, before the heavens and earth, before even Mount Olympus, there existed only a swirling void of limitless potential. In the realm of darkness, dim light, and a platform for its Progenitor to stand, Chaos pulsed. They were both a formless entity of infinite power and yet not. They created a visage for themselves to contain their boundless will.

They were neither male nor female, neither light nor dark, yet both infinite and finite. Their essence would lead to creation in their endless expanse of possibility.

From within their form, a new being emerged.

He was tall and pale. His eyes were pools of black void. Light would be absorbed into these small seeing orbs. His short, inky black hair clung to his head like the shadows that trailed him.