Dirge of Hell | Greek Mythology

1 Inside Cronus

In this universe, there was the God and there were gods.

Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, the leader of The Rebellion, looked down on his father’s unseeing, glazed eyes, the corpse of Uranus, the previous king, lying cold beneath his sandals, the golden ichor – the blood of the gods – gradually spreading over the earth. He gripped the Adamantine Sickle tighter in his hands as he surveyed his handicraft for a moment longer, basking in his moment of glory and triumph.

With his bloody hands, he reached for the golden crown on the corpse’s head and forcefully tore it away, the bones of the corpse’s neck making a snapping sound.

“Your stagnant rule is over father,” Cronus declared, raising the crown high before ceremoniously setting it on his blood-stained brow. “I am the king now!” He laughed lowly, gradually becoming louder and hysterical by the minute.

The primordial gods of night and darkness slowly walked on the heavens, their black, literally star-studded cloths billowing behind them, as they painted the heavens with their colors – the color of the night. Nyx, the goddess of night, gripped her husband’s hand tighter.

“It is over my love,” Erebus, the god of darkness, brother and husband to Nyx, whispered comfortingly as he held her in his arms, shielding her from the gruesome sight below. An immortal had just been made mortal and was murdered. The first deicide in history.

“I favored him,” Nyx whispered as she looked at the dead god, the previous god of the sky, who was now disintegrating and dissolving like sand into a thousand sparks. “I gave him the crown his son now wears.”

“I know,” he replied, running his hands up and down his wife’s back soothingly. “It is simply the ineffable fate.”

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Under the rule of the Titans, the Universe thrived. The duties to keep the balance of the Universe were assigned to the Titan siblings by Cronus. He made sure that everyone had a role in the grand system of the gods. The sky and the seas were under his government but he didn’t touch the realm below, the homeland of the Primordial gods. For him, the Underworld was not essential to his domain and thus was not a part of his kingdom.

Rhea, wife and queen of Cronus, was sitting beside the windowsill of the large extravagant bedchamber, looking out to the flourishing kingdom his husband had wrought, as she rubbed circles with her hands on her heavily pregnant stomach.

A large hand suddenly covered hers without stopping her ministrations. “Our first child,” Cronus sighed as he embraced her tenderly from behind. Rhea turned her head to look at her husband, smiled and pecked his cheek lovingly.

Our first child, she thought as she leaned on him and looked fondly over her well-rounded belly.

Suddenly a cramping, squeezing pain racked her middle. She gasped the first time it happened but ignored it, thinking it was one of the false contractions she’d been having lately. But when they came again, this time becoming more regular in frequency and stronger, she asked her husband for a glass of water. Cronus immediately ran to get her a glass of ambrosia but when he returned, Rhea was standing up with a steady trickle of water gushing from her legs.

“The baby, he’s coming out,” she told him and then calmly pointed to the bedside table. “Please leave the glass there and leave.”

Cronus silently left the goblet of ambrosia on the table. With a curt nod, he turned and walked out the door, closing it behind him. Like a loyal sentinel, he stood stoically outside their bedroom as he waited in anticipation for the birth of his first child, hoping for a son. Pained moans and heavy, rhythmic breathing could be heard from the other side of the door. He was excited yet at the same time frightened for his wife. As a male, he could never experience the pain of childbirth but if his strong, willful and ruthless queen could be reduced to expressing her pain then it must be really painful.