"To step beyond is to remember what the veil once hid."
Time in Aetherion did not pass. It breathed.
And with every breath, something forgotten stirred.
Elias walked alone in the Hollow, but he was never truly solitary. Dreams bloomed behind him, stitched from the minds of gods not yet born. The silver tree at the center of his realm now bore thirteen branches, each humming with prophecy, each dripping not sap but memory.
He had begun shaping souls.
Not from flesh or fire, but from concept—the essence of what a being could become when freed from form.
He did not name them.
That was not his right.
But he knew their paths.
One would weave fate.One would guard the door between life and death.One would walk through memory like others walk through fields.
And the last had just arrived.
She stepped into his Hollow as if she had always been there.
Elias turned before she spoke. "Mnemosyne."
Her presence was still. Not cold, not warm—timeless.
Her robes shimmered like wet parchment, marked with fragments of forgotten stories. Her hair fell in gentle waves down her back, and her eyes were the color of dusk over still water.
"Echo-maker," she greeted him, placing her palm against the nearest dream-vein of the Hollow. "You breathe what others dare not name."
"And you remember what others try to forget," he replied.
Their voices carried without sound.
They walked together beneath the canopy of drifting symbols. Mnemosyne did not look around. She saw everything already—through time, through loss, through the veins of history that hadn't been written.
"Gaia's dreams ache," she said softly.
"They deepen," Elias murmured. "They press against the skin of the world."
Mnemosyne paused beside a pulsing orb of soft light. A dream that had not yet taken form.
Within it, a child cried. Not with fear.
With clarity.
"The Hecatoncheires are beginning to remember their limbs," she said. "The Cyclopes their shapes. Memory returns where silence once ruled."
Elias nodded. "And memory brings identity. Which brings pain."
"Which brings myth," she replied, finishing the thought.
Far beneath, Kronos walked along the edge of a jagged ravine that pulsed like a scar on Gaia's surface. The sickle hung at his side, hidden beneath a fold of his cloak.
He had not yet raised it. Not even in practice.
To wield it before the time would be like speaking a prophecy aloud before it had settled. It would break.
He leaned over the edge, listening.
He had begun to hear them.
Not with ears—but with that deep Titan sense all the eldest children shared: a resonance with Gaia's heartbeat.
Below him, the buried roared.
Muffled.
Still distant.
But growing louder with each passing age.
In the Hollow, Elias shaped the first Soul-Shell.
He had no hammer.
He had no chisel.
He used the same tools that created the stars: memory, echo, intention.
The shell floated above a basin of stilled time, gleaming like carved obsidian etched with thought. Inside, it was hollow—not because it was empty, but because it awaited its truth.
Mnemosyne circled it once. "This is not for Kronos."
"No," Elias replied. "This is for one who will walk beside the fallen. Who will lead the forgotten back to their names."
She touched the shell.
A whisper ran through the Hollow.
Moirai.
Not born yet.
But fated.
Elias stepped to the edge of the Hollow and looked upward.
The stars were... trembling.
Not from fear. But from weight.
Uranus was drawing nearer again. His attention coiled like pressure against the vault of sky.
But it was no longer just a passive watching.
It was inquiry.
Soon, he would send his first true agent.
Not to Gaia.
To Elias.
That night—if such things could be called night in a place where time moved like slow fire—Kronos dreamt again.
This time, he did not dream of the sickle.
He dreamt of his siblings.
And in that dream, they stood before him—Coeus with his spiral gaze, Rhea with her twilight calm, Iapetus wrapped in storm, Hyperion flickering like a flame that could not die.
They said nothing.
They only looked at him.
And behind them, shadows moved.
Gaia's buried sons.
He saw one reach upward—not in plea, but in readiness.
Kronos awoke before dawn.
The dream clung to him like dew.
He turned to the east, toward the still lands where even Gaia did not whisper, and began to walk.
He would not speak to his mother.
Not yet.
He would speak to the roots.
And there, he would make his request.
Not for power.
Not for glory.
But for truth.
In the Hollow, Mnemosyne placed a hand on Elias's shoulder.
"Do you fear him?"
"No," Elias said. "I fear what must break around him."
She nodded.
"Then I will walk the dreams of his siblings. Plant seeds. Carry whispers. When it is time, they will remember why they act."
Elias's eyes glowed faintly.
"Then let the veil part."
And with that, Mnemosyne stepped into a silver pool of dream and vanished.
She had become the first Dream-Walker.
Not a god.
Not yet.
But a force that would outlast memory itself.
Above, the sky darkened.
A single shard of Uranus's essence began to descend—wrapped in thought, cloaked in brilliance, and humming with order.
It would reach the Hollow by next age.
And it would not come alone.
Elias sat once more beneath the tree.
He did not pray.
He did not hope.
He simply waited.
As the veil began to shiver.