"Before revolt comes the ache. Before the blade comes the weeping."
The roots of Gaia reached into every corner of Aetherion, but her voice had become a whisper.
Elias stood at the edge of the Echoing Hollow, watching the horizon where sky kissed soil too tightly. Uranus hovered always, his vast presence stretching above the world like an iron vault. Lightless. Motionless. Unyielding.
Gaia did not speak in words. She had no mouth to scream, no eyes to shed tears. She was the world itself—to weep would mean mountains crumbling, rivers drowning valleys, and forests choking themselves in vines. And so, she grieved in silence.
And the silence was louder than any thunder.
Elias knew now what he was witnessing.
Not the moment of rebellion.
Not yet.
But the still, cold ache before it. The quiet horror of a mother who could not save her children.
He walked across her surface like a thought. He no longer left footprints. In the Hollow, time wrapped around him like a cloak. Outside, it curled loosely, following his will.
When he reached one of her deepest caverns, the place where the Hecatoncheires and Cyclopes slept, he felt it.
Not sorrow.
Not fury.
But weight.
Grief made solid. Pressure without form. Gaia was enduring her pain, but it was becoming unspeakable.
Elias placed his hand against the stone.
"You were made to bear life, not chains."
No voice answered, but a tremble passed through the ground.
A heartbeat.
He did not descend into the prison this time. He already knew the forms of those imprisoned. The hundred-handed ones who curled like windstorms held in glass. The one-eyed Cyclopes who dreamed of a sky they had never seen.
Instead, Elias sat on a ledge overlooking the sleeping world and began to write.
Not on parchment. Not with ink.
He wrote into the weave of Aetherion itself, a spell of remembrance that took the form of drifting petals through the Hollow, each one whispering a forgotten name: Briareus, Cottus, Gyges.
The moment he spoke them, the names became real.
From somewhere deep below, a hum rose. Faint. Long. Almost a moan. One of the Hecatoncheires had stirred again.
He wasn't sure if Gaia could feel it.
But then the wind changed.
That night—or what passed for night in Aetherion—Gaia came to him.
Not in form. She was too vast for that.
She came in presence. The trees in the Hollow bent inward. The soil breathed. The air thickened with scent: earth after rain, cut roots, the first spring.
Her voice bloomed like vines through his mind.
"We are watchers, you and I."
Elias sat cross-legged beneath the silver-barked tree.
"You suffer," he said. "And you wait."
"Because I cannot act without breaking what I love."
There was silence for a long time. Not empty—but full. Like soil that held seeds it could not yet grow.
Elias did not try to comfort her. There was no comfort for a mother burying her children in her own flesh.
But then she said something that changed everything:
"One of them grows sharper than the others. He asks questions."
"Kronos," Elias whispered.
"He is still gentle. But gentleness grows brittle under pressure. And his father presses harder each age."
Elias nodded slowly.
"He will act," Gaia said.
"Will you guide him?"
There was a pause. Then:
"Only as a river guides a boat. I cannot row it for him."
After she left, Elias carved a spiral into the base of the first tree. It shimmered softly, catching light that wasn't there.
Around it, he began to shape possibility.
He would not forge a sword.
He would not hand Kronos the sickle.
But he would begin to dream of one.
And dreams were dangerous things in Aetherion.
Elsewhere, Uranus stirred.
The sky tightened.
In the highest layer of the heavens, Elias saw movement—bright eyes scanning the world below. He felt, for the first time, a gaze turned toward the Hollow.
Not fully aware.
But curious.
Elias stepped back into the shadows of his realm. His presence faded to a whisper.
"Soon," he murmured, "the sky will bleed."