Date: An Unfolding Moment Beyond Time
The 'Alex' I knew was gone. De-rezzed, as I'd thought, or perhaps more accurately, uninstalled from reality. The comforting ballast of memory, the familiar architecture of personality, the very name – it had all sloughed off, leaving behind… this. A point of awareness. A raw, persistent thrum of being that refused to dissipate into the vast, echoing emptiness that had replaced my sensory world. Emptiness wasn't quite right, though. It was more like an infinite, silent, dark ocean, and I was a single, unblinking mote suspended within its depths.
There was no up or down, no passage of what I once understood as time. Just an endless, static now. The initial terror of dissolution had faded, not into peace, but into a profound and unsettling stillness. The "spark" that remained, that stubborn knot of wanting-to-know, was all that defined me. It wasn't thinking in words, not anymore. Language felt like a clunky, discarded tool. Instead, there were… impressions. Resonances. A direct, unfiltered absorption of… something.
This void, it wasn't truly empty. The longer my awareness persisted, the more I sensed it. It was teeming. Not with light or sound or matter as I'd known them, but with an infinite, silent cacophony of raw data. Patterns, intricate and endless, shifted and flowed like unseen currents in that dark ocean. Whispers of information, not in any tongue, but as pure conceptual forms: the birth-scream of a star a billion years past, the precise crystalline structure of a mineral yet to be formed, the unwritten histories of civilizations that would never exist, the complex emotional trajectory of a forgotten love affair from a world I couldn't name. It was overwhelming, a library of everything, yet uncatalogued, unread, a chaotic storm of pure potential. The Achieves, I would later name it, but for now, it was simply everything.
My spark, my core, didn't try to understand it, not in the way Alex would have with his books and databases. It simply… resonated with it. It was drawn to the complexity, to the sheer, unadulterated knowing that permeated this space. There was no body to feel with, no eyes to see, but I perceived. It was like being a single nerve ending exposed to the universe.
Then, a new sensation. A pull.
It started subtly, a faint current in the ocean of data, then grew stronger, more insistent. It wasn't a physical tug, but a directional imperative that my core awareness found impossible to ignore. Something was reeling me in. The vast, indifferent ocean of information began to feel less like my surroundings and more like something I was being drawn through, or perhaps, from.
The raw data stream intensified along the vector of this pull. It was less like random whispers now, and more like a focused beam of… intention. I could feel the colossal weight of eons, the crushing gravity of primordial forces. Two presences, distinct yet intertwined, emerged from the background hum of the cosmos. They were unimaginably vast, ancient beyond any scale my former human mind could have processed. They weren't figures or shapes, but more like fundamental constants of reality asserting themselves, like realizing gravity wasn't a theory but a will.
One felt like the unyielding, relentless passage of time itself, a devouring hunger, an endless cycle of creation and destruction. It was cold, implacable, and terrifyingly patient. The other was a counterpoint: a deep, resonant thrum of earth and becoming, a boundless well of generative power, patient in a different way, like the slow, unstoppable growth of mountains or the birthing of worlds. Cronos. Rhea. The names didn't come to me in words, but as innate recognitions, as if their very nature was imprinted onto the fabric of my emerging consciousness.
I was being drawn towards them. Or, more accurately, I felt like a fragment of them, a tiny sliver of their immense being, that was being recalled. The feeling of individuality, that stubborn spark, began to flicker under the sheer pressure of their identities. Was I just an echo? A new permutation of their ancient energies?
The pull intensified, and the chaotic ocean of data began to coalesce, to take on a terrifying, directed structure. I felt… squeezed. Formed. The raw potential of the void was being compressed, molded, funneled into something specific. There was a sense of inevitability, of a pattern being fulfilled.
The darkness behind my non-existent eyelids was abruptly, violently, replaced.
Not by light, but by a chaotic, overwhelming flood of new sensations, so dense and alien they were almost unbearable. Pressure. A strange, wet warmth. The rhythmic, thunderous pulsing of a colossal heartbeat that vibrated through my nascent form. Muffled sounds, vast and resonant, like voices echoing from the depths of a planetary core. I was… contained. Encased.
There was a moment of intense, claustrophobic struggle, a primal urge to expand, to be. And then, a sudden, wrenching release.
Air – or something like it, thick with unknown scents, ozone, and a strange, metallic tang – rushed into lungs I hadn't possessed moments before. A cry, thin and reedy, tore from a throat that was still defining itself. It was my cry. I was… small. And incredibly, overwhelmingly, new.
My vision was a blur of colossal shapes, indistinct and shifting. I felt… a body. Limbs, weak and uncoordinated. A racing heart. And a mind, still reeling from the transit, but now tethered to this fragile, new existence. The spark of Alex, the insatiable curiosity, was still there, but it was now housed within something else, something infused with an energy that felt ancient and startlingly potent, even in its infancy.
I was lying on something vast and yielding. A shadow fell over me, an immense presence that seemed to blot out everything else. I sensed, more than saw, a vastness that resolved into something akin to a face, an impossible landscape of being. The light that emanated from where eyes would be wasn't a color, but a feeling – an ancient, knowing warmth that seemed to hum with the creation of stars. This was Rhea. With her near, the chaotic static of my new senses found a brief, steady rhythm. The raw edges of my awareness seemed to smooth over. For a moment, I simply was, without the struggle of becoming, feeling anchored.
That fragile sense of anchor vanished. Something else drew near, and the steady rhythm within me stuttered, lost. The air, if it was air, grew thin. This presence introduced a dissonant frequency, a subtle but pervasive drag on the energies around me. Cronos. His awareness was a focused point of nullity, not an empty void, but an active unmaking. It felt less like being seen and more like being… indexed, a new variable logged against a backdrop of inevitable decay.
The knowledge flooded me, not from the external void this time, but from within this new form. I was their son. One of many, perhaps. And I knew, with a certainty that chilled the very marrow of my new bones, what fate awaited the children of Cronos.
The slow burn had just ignited into a terrifying inferno. My efforts to expand my strength, my very survival, would begin not in a library or a study, but in the belly of a paranoid Titan. The irony, even for a newborn god, was not lost on me. My old hatred for Zeus suddenly felt quaint. I had much bigger, much more immediate tyrants to worry about.