Chapter Text
BLAMELESS LIFE
Time awoke wretched, primordial, bloodied.
It slid from the river Styx and lay, gasping and naked, on the bank. Something struck its back, hard, until it retched and coughed. Its limbs were loosely shaped, its vision obscured with a veil of sodden hair. It scraped its head across the floor to part the curtain and shrieked, blinded, as the light pierced its soft, milky eyes. It tried to rise and fell, slipping, blood soaking every crack and crevice of its body. Above it loomed the vast caverns of Tartarus, where the worst of the undead were condemned. It was struck by an urge, a baser need much like the migratory want of a bird or the turning of a spider to molt, and rolled onto its front. Time dragged itself along the floor, diminished and instinctual. It could feel neither its left arm nor its right leg. It saw that it had neither and lacked the capacity to care.
Satyrs and shades swarmed it, pleading leniency, begging for grace. This was before the anticipated Time; they had not wanted to wake Him so soon, but they had no choice. Their machinations had come close to being discovered through sheer chance, a new guard patrolling along a new route. They would be routed and destroyed, along with any hope of His revival. It must be now, and it must be like this, and the Styx was the only place left to hide Him, and could they ever, ever be forgiven?
It braced its hand to the first perch of the thousand-step stairway that led to the House of Hades and dragged. Its remaining arm gave with a hard crack. It discarded the hand and continued, grinding what remained of its forearm into the next step to gain purchase, and raised itself on it. It did so over and over. A word rang in its mind, a tolling bell, one-two, 'Chro-nos'. A horrific noise tore from his broken jaw, like metal scraping against glass. He bellowed the first word of the new age.
"HATRED!"
Hooks and spears and weapons embedded in the shifting stone of his skin. His priests, in direct contradiction of around a hundred strictures, dragged him backwards, expediently mending his wounds even as he thrashed and roared and crushed them. He knew his nature was Time, and he could be postponed, but never, ever, ever stopped. Bound and restrained, he was compelled to hammer his head against the ground to count the seconds.
"HATRED! HATRED! HATRED! HATRED! HATRED! HATRED!"
He climbed the thousandth step. The dripping sound that maddened him in his ascent had ceased as the blood dried to his body, replaced with the buzz of flies and the staggered tempo of his exertions, of his aching feet against uneven stone. The attendants simpered and fretted. Hrodreptus was still missing, but perhaps it could be found, and He could be purified and cleansed before—
With a roar, Chronos swung his arm, sending them crashing down the stairs. They followed him no further, chastened by their god, and left him leaning against the stone door hewn into the cavern wall. He pushed. His son was so arrogant that he had not even bothered to lock the gate to this blasted prison.
He entered the House of Hades, his gait slack and pained, dragging himself down its halls, bumping his head on the doorways, new sensations on new sensations, the tile, the carpet, the cheap copper stink of blood, the disgust of it crusting on his skin, the relentless humidity of Tartarus, the swing of his own arms against his body, his rattling breath in his chest as he was forced to walk unaided, as well as the old, the hatred, the hatred, the hatred.
The guards let him pass, frozen in an electric terror, staring at the relentless advance of the incarnadine Titan like a fisherman stares at an incoming squall. The very tallest came up to only his thigh. He wandered, he didn't know where, until he found another guard posted directly in front of a large, ornate door.
"This," she said, her voice as frail as silk, "is a private party."
Chronos stopped. He turned, slowly, to look down at the guard, meeting her eyes. She relented, resolve collapsing, and cast herself away from the door, stumbling and tripping. Chronos braced his fingers on its handle, on the treated, ugly wood, and heard the symposium, the low conversation, and smatterings of laughter. He could do what needed to be done here and imprison everyone present with a snap of his fingers. He declined to. He wanted them to see what they had done. What was to be done to them.
Chronos opened the door, ducking underneath its threshold, and entered silently, closing it softly behind him. He looked over the assembled guests, eating, laughing, drinking, cloistered in various groups, with dutiful houseservants running between them. He observed from his dark corner. Hades was a man now, well into middle age, with broad shoulders, a foreboding countenance, and a prodigious beard. He held his lovely wife, bracing his forehead to hers and cupping her face. They seemed the picture of happiness.
Chronos looked at his hand, admiring how the scars glinted in the dark, even through the dense crust of congealed blood. The low murmur of the party died, replaced with a thick, terrified silence. Chronos did not look up. He would not be rushed.
At last, two stepped forward. A slight, dark-haired man with a laurel crown, and a towering attendant in a large-brimmed hat who gripped his shoulder tightly, her eyes alight. The young man spoke, voice quivering but controlled, and looked Chronos over, starting from his feet and moving, slowly, towards his head, a motion that moved his whole body in a wide arc.
"By the gods! Are you... Are you hurt, sir? Do you need aid?"
He gained a little confidence, stepping forward again. Chronos looked down on him, unblinking. Stupid. Stupid and naive. Utterly hopeless.
Hades stared at Chronos in blind, dull-eyed panic, his mouth open, his lip quivering like a dog's. He turned to his lovely family.
"Run," he whispered.
"Yes," said Chronos. "Run."
Hades had not managed to land even a single strike with his shortsword. His swings were clumsy and disconsolate, his vision fogged with tears. "How?"
"I had help. They await as we speak, ready to take your House."
"This was not how this was—"
Chronos dodged with a small movement and met his son with a crushing blow to his stomach, driving a pained noise from the deepest part of him. "You forget yourself, Hades. If you insist on acting like a disobedient child, I will treat you as such."
Hades took on that sickening tone of voice, as if Chronos was a wild animal to be pacified, as if his rage was not well considered and dispensed appropriately. "Father," he said softly, "please. We took no joy at all in what we did."
Chronos kicked him, which made his posture recede to that of a scolded adolescent, quivering on the floor. "No joy? No joy? You warred with me. You took up arms against me, my siblings, my consort, and you want to pretend like this is my doing? How many aeons has it been to you, you stupid little boy? To me it was this morning," he seethed.
"You started that damnable war!"
Another hard kick. "Do not lie to me, whelp."
"Blood and darkness. You truly do think I'm lying, don't you?"
Hades did not even have it in him to protest when Chronos gripped his son by the collar and brutalised him, blow after blow after blow, a steady, striking metronome against blood and bone.
"Fight back," Chronos snarled. "Do something. You cannot raise your hand against your own father? Where was this fealty before, you ungrateful brat. You bastard! I renounce you, you traitorous bastard!"
Another two strikes, half-time.
"My family," Hades croaked. "Spend all eternity doing this, Father. Please. I beg you. Spare my family."
"This again. You haven't changed. Take me, spare them, boohoo. Wretch! Do you think this self-sacrifice is a sufficient replacement for courage?"
"Spare my family," he repeated. "I beg you, Father, at least spare her."
This blow was off-beat, syncopated, compound time. "Her? I have no intentions of taking whatever low, ill-bred little wife you've fallen in with. When have I ever given you cause to think I would do such a thing? What monster have you made of me in your mind?"
"Spare her," Hades burbled. "Spare her. Do not do what you did to us."
"Fight back. Fight back! Are you such a disappointment," Chronos hissed, gripping his son by the shoulder, "that you would rob me of even my triumph? Fight—"
Chronos gripped his boy by the head and smashed him against the tile.
"Back!"
The blows became weaker and weaker. Hades was already unconscious, incapable of anything but stubborn contumacy to the very, very end.
"Why make war with me, my child," Chronos pleaded, "if you cannot even...?"
He dismissed Hades at last, binding him in magicked chains and banishing him with a snap of his fingers. Chronos rose, shaking from the exertion. He hissed when he moved his arm, the knuckles of his hand bloodied and raw. He rubbed the taut, bony flesh from the tendons under his fingers over and into the sticky skin of his juddering palm. He could no longer bear it. Chronos shambled, falling forward only to catch himself against a wall, or a table, until he finally found the House balaneion and collapsed into it, submerging himself entirely in the near-scalding water. He scraped at his skin and hair, rinsed the blood and bile from his mouth, dug at his flesh with a strigil, over and over, before crumpling against one of the outermost rings of the large, circular pool that made up the central chamber once he was finally clean. He floated, anchored only by his sore arm against the stair, and traced the patterns of the ceiling with his eyes. Every limb and segment of his body, his fingers, hands, arms, legs, thighs, genitals, rear, back, torso, neck, and face, was lined with gilded scars. Chronos looped them with a bony finger, over and under, as if he could make sense of them, as if they were the tendrils of some living thing underneath his skin that he could beckon and divine.
Too many, and Time would cease to function. Too few, and he would reform, and their victory would be undone almost immediately.
His own children, before their final confrontation, had conferred regarding the best way to butcher him.
He imagined his sons gathered over a crude drawing made in sand, arguing, thrusting sticks and branches at one another like boys playing at war. A slice here, a cut there, too much, not enough, should we take some home with us? Serious Hades, who would be the one to weigh the risks and plan accordingly, contingencies on contingencies on contingencies. Poseidon, desperately sad, laughing and joking about the whole sordid affair under the mistaken impression that his cheer would be appreciated. Decisive Zeus, who was to do the deed.
His youngest son.
The only one with the stomach for it.
Chronos laughed mirthlessly. He let go of the step.
He sank beneath the water.
Chronos re-emerged some hours later, not invigorated in the least, and made himself leave the dulling comfort of the baths. He found some linens and made a shendyt so that he might reclaim an ounce of dignity. Chronos saw himself in the mirror as he dressed and was horrified by his cadaverous appearance, at the sickly, ashen tint of his skin, at how damnably old he looked. He made a feeble attempt to fix his hair but was too exhausted and let it hang limp across his forehead, like sun-bleached kelp. He left the balaneion before he carved himself up and hurled his own scattered body back into the Styx. He could smell the blood from even up here. He had to drain it. It would be his first order of business.
Chronos cheered himself, however vainly, by taking count of his captives. The house servants had fled but would be compelled to return when informed their employment was secure. There was Mother Night and her son, Thanatos. The Furies, and a court harp-strummer. A fair-haired woman of early middle age in a billowing peplos, her hand braced to the small of her back, her eyes fixed in fear, and her teeth clenched tightly in her head. As he drifted by, he noticed she smelled faintly sweet and familiar. Honey recollected, distinct from its honest scent, alongside something clean and pleasant, like fatty soap. His sense of propriety was stronger than his curiosity. He left well enough alone.
Where, then, was the young man? And where was Hypnos, and the woman in the hat? What did it matter? Why should Time concern Himself with petty gods? Frozen or free, it was all the same.
He surveyed his new, gaudy kingdom and this new, gaudy age, taking a measure of the place. It was opulent, grand in all the ways he didn't like, with ornate columns, frankincense burning in every hall, shrouds hanging from every ceiling, and glittering gemstones that twinkled in the dark. And the dark! He could barely see. Why build such a sumptuous House if a rank cave with a sputtering fire would suffice? All of it would have to go. A space like this was better suited to bare, light decor, and fine marble made beautiful in its impurities, so sparse that his orders could carry to the furthest of his generals without raising his voice. Pleasant and civilised, not dark and damning. He had, after all, no need to punish the wretches who pillaged their way across the worlds of men and languished here as a result. Why, when they would make for such cruel soldiers?
He pleased himself with thoughts of his new and well-appointed House. Tartarus would need to be changed, chamber by chamber, to suit his needs, its intricate magicks and recondite processes replaced with simple, elegant machinery. He considered his loyal followers, his priests and priestesses, his servants and attendants, who had and would serve him faithfully over the countless ages, how they had toiled endlessly to see to His resurrection, and how they waited just beyond the threshold, delirious to serve Him, to sate His every need before even an urge arose. Endless comfort and banquets and orgies and tending, if desired, Saturnalia forever, until He bowed and folded Past and Future together, and all became Nothing.
Chronos thought of how he had awakened and decided his most loyal followers were just going to have to wait some fucking more.
He peered into the banquet hall and taverna. Their presence invited rabble-rousing, so they would be closed. The bedchamber he would make his own, after some refurbishing. He did not need a nauseating little love nest. A new throne better suited to his stature, naturally—
Chronos paused at the threshold of the door. He gazed back into the bedroom. It was so softly lit that he almost missed the demarcation in the wall: a door, slightly open, next to a padded rocking chair. In it, he sensed movement, Time passing through and over something. He nudged it open and sank low to crawl inside the nursery, his shoulders butting against the ceiling, and felt his spirit plummet within him.
Chronos was met with scattered platagi rattles, to ward off bad luck, and the soapy-sweet smell of breast milk so dramatic in its power that it arrested him, forcing his hand to his eyes. He quashed his dislocated love. He composed himself, steadying his trembling lip.
By the cradle was a clumsy, unfinished carving of a bird, already dotted with a signature on its underside. 'Z'.
He turned it over, holding it in his fingertips, trying and failing to parse the name carved amateurishly across it.
Meli? Meri? Mani?
The beast within the crib stirred gently. It resembled a fat, white grub, topped with clumped silk for hair, moving blindly and stupidly. His voice was a gentle hush, more by habit than real consideration.
"How did you resist my spell? Are you so puny that it didn't think to regard you as living?"
His gut, the nature of his divinity, told him that suspending this thing in Time forever was unwise, if it had already had the good fortune to avoid his magic. But the thing represented a greater threat than an idiot grandson. He could only be what he already was. This, if allowed to grow, could be anything at all. But a nascent god was still a god, and killing or crushing the beast would not suffice, as it would simply re-emerge somewhere else. He would not leave an infant to languish in Tartarus with the most abominable of the undead, far from any help. Besides, that did not solve his problem; anybody could find and lay claim to it, and with it, legitimacy and access to his new House.
He observed the creature with an imperious mien. If it could not be slain, he could only consume it and trample it under the weight of his overwhelming divinity, crushing it within his body, forever made placid and witless, never to be born again.
Chronos steeled himself for the task, to move from ascendant parsimony to raw, stinking flesh and brain, braced himself to dash this infant against the churning rock of his earthly body, leered at it like a long-limbed spider over a morsel, a speck, a nothing, he salivated as if to vomit, he had to do it, it was the only thing to be done, he had to do it, it will be done, it will be done. After an aeon of abstention, blood would pass his lips for the second time in one day.
"I cannot do it," he choked. "I cannot."
Chronos left, found the taverna, procured some wine to wash down the infant, and returned.
He retook his position. Quickly. Quickly! He struck out, gripped it by the head, but was rocked by a sensation of displacement, wrongness, panic. He felt as if he were in the middle of a wheel. It turned around him, he heard the spokes click and felt the motion, moment by moment, but he could not see where he was made to go. He felt, suddenly, sick, and lurched away from the cradle. Chronos felt the sickening touch of omen, prophecy, an inevitable future, a yoke that clashed with his nature, his being, his anemos, the unshakable part of him far greater than his flimsy body, culminating in a feeling of fallaciousness: this was wrong, and everything that would come of it was wrong, and there would be no hope for it to ever be right. Something, like a bone, had been broken. The only solution was to end it all, for everything, suicide by continuum.
He looked at the half-made little bird, taking auspices.
"I find the youngest of my line unattended. I cannot find your brother despite combing the House. This was not supposed to go like this, not here, not now. Not in this way. Then, damn it all, how was it..."
He dragged his hands over his face and cursed himself for giving any thought to the petty suppositions of the Fates, but he could not help it. What to a mortal, or a god, would be a chill, or the turning of a leaf in the air, presented itself to him as an uninvited hand gliding from the small of his back and up his spine to rest at the nape of his neck, a familiar dread. The dread that drove him to battle his own children, the dread that left him scattered in Tartarus, all parts of him observing the passing seconds in syncopation, one, one, two, three, two, an age of stuttering, unendurable pain.
He was doomed.
Everything was doomed.
"I have walked from one prison into another. I have not had even one day of freedom."
Chronos looked at the roof of the chamber in a cold, serene hate.
"What would you have of me? This thing is scarcely three days old! Appear to it so that I might ask you, what would you have of me?" He made his way back to the cradle, bested by a helpless child. "I feel six cold hands upon my neck, you wretched little worm. It would seem a decision has been made for us. So what am I to do? Every choice I am about to make, I have been made to make."
He rocked the cradle to give himself something to do. He had always intended to imprison the Fates. That, at least, was an option. Once that was done, he could plan. He had not arisen merely to die again. Breaks could be mended. Bones could be set.
"If I slay you, I will fail. If I spare you, I will fail. If I abandon you, I will fail. I am tasked with making the wrong decision, or the wrong decision. Here, you are older than I. Allow me, then, to defer to experience. What would you have? If you wish to live, make it known. If you wish to be free of this pitiful life, be still. One bite and it will be over. Choose. Life or death."
The thing let out an ear-piercing squall, the kind of sound that shook the walls and rattled the metal stripes in his body. Chronos sighed.
"So mote it be. Shh. Come here. Silence, child. Oh, what am I to do with you?"
He scooped the infant up in his cupped hand, delicately unwrapping it from its shawl. It was bewildering, to think that something like this could ever be a god. It was strong and vibrant, kicking.
"A girl," he said, breathless. "Oh, to have had a girl. I never had a daughter..."
The word, and the soapy-sweet smell of her skin, made it real, fixing him in a kind of deranged helplessness. He tested the words as one would test the balance of a sword.
"My daughter."
The rush of love was so immediate and overwhelming that he almost toppled. He failed to blink the tears back and finally wept, his body shaking, small, ugly sobs bubbling from his mouth. She would be wasted on Hades and wasted in death. War was a matter of course for their family, almost impersonal in its regularity. To hide away this child and reveal her, casually, socially, as if it meant nothing at all, would tear Olympus asunder. Her happiness and prosperity would be his greatest possible vengeance.
He could imagine their wails when they found out. Perhaps they would rampage through their own home, or lay waste to the world of men in a selfish tantrum. They would know, then, that their weakness, their endless capacity for failure, was theirs, in the face of his child, loved and keen and cruel when required, a blade with a silken sash affixed to its handle.
He had to be cunning, especially since the Fates had set to weave upon him once again. He would not keep a thing from her, neither her status as princess nor her lineage: she was his paternal granddaughter, claimed after Chronos overthrew her sire. He knew better than to tempt Fate for the sake of mere technicalities. She was to be the supple instrument of his will, his vengeance, his beloved child, his living weapon, his triumph, his joy, his killer, his beloved, his adoratrice. She could be a gifted musician, or a poet, a general, a slayer, an intellectual, a priestess, or perhaps an athlete, or an orator, a warrior, a strategist, she could be anything, anything at all, but she was his and would have access to the finest possible education in the living or unliving world, so why couldn’t she be everything and more?
He thought of the wooden bird. Meli, Meri, Mani. Meli, Meri, Mani. She keened, still a suckling, and squashed her face into the bony nub of his collarbone to nurse. He found the means to speak, though stuttering.
"Shh, shh. It will be alright," he said, in part for himself. "It will be alright. Your mother is imprisoned nearby; you will not want for food. As much as you can stand! I need you healthy for the task ahead, hm? Come along. How blessed I am to have another child at my age! Would that I had anyone else to celebrate with. How blessed I am, how blessed. You shall always love me, won't you? You shall always love me..."
Her cries settled at last. She merely wanted to be held. So young, and already so indulged.
"Once, in a time distant from your own, my name was Seb. You will know me as Chronos. One day, far from now, I will be Saturn. If I am to indulge you, I ask that you indulge me, Meri." Chronos smiled. "Have you heard the name before? A little old-fashioned. There is little of Kemet here. Our natures have changed and will change again. And I was not permitted to name my sons, so..."
Chronos felt a wave of unusual diffidence, as if she could understand him and might raise an objection.
"Meri. It means beloved."
He pressed her gently to his body, swaying. He buried his nose in her soft, fine hair and inhaled.
"Meritates," he whispered. He braced his teeth against her soft skull in case he felt another change in the wind, another turning of a leaf in the air. "Beloved of her father."
