In the first ages of the world, long before the bright halls of Olympus were ever raised,
before mortals lit their first fires or sang their first songs beneath the stars,
the cosmos belonged to the Titans.
They were the elder children of Gaia, the broad and deathless Earth, and of Uranus,
the vast star-filled sky who lay stretched out above her in the dark.
Twelve of them there were, mighty and ageless, and they moved through the young world like living mountains.
But mightiest of all and most cunning was the youngest of that ancient brood.
His name was Cronus.
He remembered well in the long silence of his reign how he had come to power.
His father Uranus had hated his own children.
As each was born, the sky pressed them back down into the hidden depths of the Earth,
into the groaning dark of Gaia's womb, and would not let them rise into the light.
The Earth herself ached under the weight of her imprisoned sons, and at last she could bear it no longer.
From the gray flint of her own body she forged a great jagged sickle,
and she begged her children to take it up and to free themselves.
But the Titans were afraid, all of them but one.
Only Cronus had the daring.
He took the sickle in his hands and lay in wait,
and when the great sky came down at evening to cover the Earth, Cronus rose up and struck.
With that single terrible blow he overthrew his father,
and the rule of the cosmos passed into his hands.
So Cronus became king of all that is,
and beside him reigned his sister and his queen, Rhea, gentle and patient,
lovely as the deep and secret places of the world.
For a long season the cosmos lay quiet beneath them,
and it seemed to be a golden age, an age of plenty and of peace.
And yet Cronus could not rest.
The very manner of his own rising gnawed at him in the watches of the night.
He had lifted his hand against his father and unseated him.
Might not the same fate be waiting now for him?
It was no idle fear.
Gaia the Earth and the dying voice of Uranus had spoken a prophecy over him,
clear and cold and certain.
That Cronus in his turn was destined to be brought low by his own child.
One of his own sons, they foretold, would cast him down into darkness,
exactly as he had cast down the father before him.
The words lodged in his heart like a splinter of ice and would not melt.
He had won the throne of all creation, and he would not give it up,
not to a rival, not to a stranger, and least of all to his own blood.
And so the king of the titans made a monstrous resolve.
No child of his, he swore, would ever live free and grow into the strength
that might one day destroy him.
When Rhea first grew heavy with child and brought into the world the bright goddess Hestia,
Cronus did not take the infant up to bless her.
He seized the newborn from her mother's trembling arms,
and before Rhea could so much as cry out,
he opened his mouth and swallowed the child whole.
Down she went into the living darkness of his belly,
neither slain nor freed, but sealed alive within the body of her own father.
Rhea stood with empty, trembling arms and could not grasp the horror
of what she had witnessed, but it was only the beginning.
Each time she gave birth, the same dreadful scene played out again.
Demeter was born, golden lady of the grain and the growing fields,
and Cronus swallowed her.
Hera came into the world,
she who was destined one day to be the queen of heaven,
and he swallowed her as well.
Then came Hades, silent lord of the unseen places below,
and after him Poseidon, who would one day shake the earth
and command the roaring sea,
and each newborn god was taken in his turn
and gulped down into that endless hungering dark.
One after another, Rhea's children vanished into the body of their father,
entombed before any of them had drawn a single free breath of the living world.
Again and again the mother's arms were emptied,
again and again the cradle stood cold and unused,
and in her long and silent grief something within Rhea slowly began to change.
Sorrow hardened by degrees into resolve
and resolve into a quiet, burning purpose that her husband could not see.
As for the titan king, he believed at last that he was safe.
The prophecy was buried, he told himself,
sealed away inside his own flesh where no hand could ever reach it,
where no rival could ever rise,
but he had forgotten two things.
Grief does not die so easily, and neither in the end does prophecy.
