Chapter 3: That Which Could have been

“If these brothers [Zeus, Poseidon, Hades] are included among the gods, can we deny the divinity of their father [Cronos]?”Cicero, De Natura Deorum 3.17, translated by H. Rackham, in Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1933 (Roman rhetorician, c. 1st century BCE).

The swirling vortex of the time tunnel opened once again to receive the two Cronos from the moments of creation. A potent mixture of awe and ambition swelled within the younger Cronos. It was not just from what he had witnessed, but from the words his elder self had given him.

Everything put together, from the time tunnel to the words to the birth of the Primordials, he quickly found himself disoriented. For his part, the elder Cronos was patient with his younger self. There was an allowance for the unusual sense of vertigo. Perhaps, he was empathetic having experienced much the same once upon a time.

When he looked up, the recently imprisoned Cronos actually looked upon the time tunnel with a more critical eye. He recognized that it was a vast and endless corridor, much like a river combined with a storm of twisting colors.

The elder Cronos stood tall beside his more youthful counterpart. Just as the earlier version watched the tunnel, he watched his younger self take it all in.

“The Time Tunnel can have an exacting toll on us if we are not ready,” he said with understanding care. His voice cut through all of the chaos that surrounded them. “I feel it should as we are beyond time once again, but know, younger me, that this is how we are able to observe time in all its forms.”

This Cronos motioned to himself to look down.

The younger Cronos blinked. focusing on the sight below. There was a strange, twisting flow of lights that surged underneath them. Like a river flowing forward, there were many linking and branching glowing lines beneath him. With a complex network of streams, some of the streams twisted off in strange directions, going in directions that went out far beyond his sight. Others merged back with the larger surging light. The final ones seemed to flow out before fizzling into nothingness.

“What is this?” the younger Cronos asked. Though he said the words, they were practically choked out from the enormity of what he was seeing. His intuition already warned him of what he was witnessing, but he needed confirmation from his greater, more knowledgeable self.

“These are timelines,” the elder Cronos replied with an unseen smile. “Look at them closely. Each one is a continuity of events that define history, and not just ours and the land of Greece. There are realms stacked on top of realms. There are greater lands than ours. Just as you watch the timelines move, keep that in mind.”

The younger Cronos narrowed his gaze. The timelines themselves looked like molten streams of glowing energy. He could see faint differences in each, noticing their colors shifting between blues, greens, and golds. Where the rivers met and broke apart, the flow rippled, and sudden images flashed into his mind with painful clarity. There was a stinging pang in his head and a ringing that accompanied the scenes, such as Chaos creating the Primordials, Gaia shaping the earth, and the Titan War. However, as he looked, there was so much more. He could see moments from the branches in the river of time.

He saw Zeus with Hera. He saw Hera with another. He saw gigantic octopus-like creatures attacking Olympus. A hero battling some perverse version of himself with a golden sword of some kind on the back of a winged horse. He could not be sure. Then there was another version of himself being impaled by a crystalline structure as a bald, pale warrior walked away from Cronos’ dead body. Over and over, he saw different versions of himself. Another was a specter that mocked his grandson in a distant future. There was some winged golden version of him battling a version of his granddaughter.

More than these pivotal moments, his gaze allowed him to witness much more than himself and the possible futures he could have.

There were other beings. A black haired man with a lighter complexion and slanted eyes helped control day into night. Another being with a bird for a head wrote into a scroll both controlling the days and recording them. A blond haired man with a spear had powers similar to Cronos as he survived an onslaught of some kind of apocalypse. A bald woman with robes in front of an hourglass only for her control to shatter and that flow of time to break out into an infinite number of rivers of time.

He saw the spark of divinity in each. They were Titans of Time.

Those other forms of time were also somehow separated from his time. Maybe they had the same origin; maybe they did not. He could not be sure. But after a certain point, there looked to be river upon river bound up in themselves, like chords of rivers wrapped around a singular one.