Beneath the roots of Gaia, deeper than even time dared to tread, something began to move.
The darkness here was not absence but substance—older than light, older even than Gaia or Uranus. It curled like mist, thick with breathless power, and in that dark, eyes opened.
Not one. Not two.
A thousand.
Blinking slowly.
Not with fear.
But with recognition.
In the Echoing Hollow, Elias felt it like a ripple in the still water of his realm.
Not violent.
Not urgent.
But profound.
He stood beside the Tree of Echoes, listening not to wind or leaf, but to the tremor that ran down through the world's foundation.
"They stir," he murmured, fingers grazing bark.
From the Hollow's horizon, shapes began to press against the veil.
One of them—tall, robed in deep shadow that breathed of night's first silence—entered without sound.
Elias knew her instantly.
Not because they had met before.
But because no one could forget Nyx.
She was not a Titan.
Not a god in the way the younger pantheons would understand.
Nyx was concept before form—night made sentient.
Her robes were darker than void, her skin pearlescent like oil on water. Her hair bled into the air like tendrils of starlit smoke, and her eyes...
Her eyes contained the first dream of fear.
And beside her, at a distance yet always near, followed a man of no face—only shape. Cloaked in shadow deeper than even hers. That was Erebus, the primordial dark, and her eternal consort.
Together, they moved like memory forgotten by day.
Nyx stood before Elias, unblinking.
"The world prepares to scream," she said.
Her voice was soft but final, like a closing door.
Elias inclined his head in respect.
"I know."
"And yet you let the dream bloom."
"It is not mine to pluck," Elias answered.
She stepped forward. "Gaia remembers us. She calls to us in root and whisper. But the sky smothers."
Elias nodded. "And still, she waits."
"Too long, perhaps."
A pause.
Then Erebus finally spoke, his voice like gravel soaked in the River Lethe.
"The prisons beneath her skin ache."
Far beneath the Hollow, the Cyclopes stirred.
One opened a single vast eye, white and blazing, and tried again to lift the chains bound in living rock.
The Hecatoncheires, too, groaned in their sleep.
Their dreams were violent—storms of arms and ash and endless screaming.
They had no speech left.
Only rage.
And somewhere, Gaia listened.
Elias walked with Nyx along a path that had not existed moments before.
Around them, the Hollow shifted into a reflection of their passage—branches curling back, stones rolling aside.
He glanced at her. "You came not to warn me. But to remember."
Nyx's gaze was unreadable. "Yes. To remember the cost of light."
They stopped before a mirror of stone—tall, smooth, humming with unreal glyphs.
Nyx touched it.
A child's cry echoed from within.
One of her own.
Not born yet.
But destined.
Elias stepped back.
He knew who this cry belonged to.
Thanatos. Hypnos. Moros. Hemera. Eris. Nemesis.
The children of Night.
Fates in shadow, waiting.
Back on the surface, Kronos wandered alone.
The sickle was slung across his back like a quiet companion.
And Gaia's voice—no longer just breath in stone—had begun to take shape.
She spoke to him now through roots that moved.
Trees that bent toward him.
Rocks that hummed in patterns only he could decode.
"You are not yet my wrath," she whispered. "But you are my will."
He knelt beside a stream, dipping his hand into the water.
The reflection was not his face.
It was Uranus's—vast and cold and endless.
The sky was watching again.
Kronos clenched his fists.
The time was not yet ripe.
But it was ripening.
In the Hollow, Nyx turned to Elias one last time.
"When shadow awakens, day will bleed."
Elias replied softly, "Then it will be born anew."
Nyx nodded once.
Then vanished—like mist under starlight.
Erebus followed her, without a word, swallowed by the curve of space itself.
And Elias was left with the sound of roots cracking far below.
Not breaking.
But opening.