Where Myths Are Born

"Even stars hold their breath before the first cut of a new world."

There is a stillness that wraps the world just before the moment history turns.

It is not silence.

Not peace.

It is anticipation pressed so tightly that it becomes unbearable. A stillness that hums beneath the skin, whispers behind the leaves, and breathes in the hollows of gods.

All across Aetherion, the breath before severance began.

Beneath the twin suns, the skies of the world shimmered with unease. Birds with wings of thought and beasts made of echo turned their gazes upward. Mountains leaned. Rivers hesitated at their banks.

Time did not stop.

But it flinched.

Kronos stood beneath a great stone arch near the edge of Gaia's surface. The air here was dense with myth not yet written. Above him, stars gathered not as constellations, but as witnesses. The sickle was sheathed across his back now—no longer humming. It had become quiet. Patient.

Like a blade that knew it would soon be remembered.

He waited.

For his siblings.

For the sky.

For the voice of the world to crack and let him through.

In the Hollow, Elias was preparing.

Not with weapons.

Not with spells.

But with structure.

His hands moved over a vast floating tapestry made of light and thread—a weaving of dreams and soul-memory stretched across the realm's central sky. Every line shimmered with a myth that had not yet occurred. Every knot was a moment of choice.

At the core of the tapestry pulsed a single rune.

A new one.

Not made by language.

But by intention.

The rune meant: "If the world breaks, let it break clean."

Elias breathed softly.

He did not speak.

But his mind moved like wind through reeds.

"The cut is necessary.""But unnecessary things carry the most weight."

He stepped back and opened the Hollow to witness.

In the skies above Aetherion, Uranus stirred.

He did not sleep.

He never truly had.

But his awareness was distant, stretched thin across the constellations, spread through the laws of weight and wind and wrath.

Until now.

A ripple disturbed the pattern.

The laws he had written into the stars began to shift. Not crumble. Just twitch.

One constellation blinked and reformed—not in the shape of order, but change.

Themis had done this.

She had used her quiet lawcraft to bend reality slightly, hiding future threads from Uranus's grasp.

And now, he noticed.

For the first time, he looked down.

Toward Gaia.

Toward the seed of rebellion he had once ignored.

Themis felt the sky's gaze.

It did not pierce her.

But it was close.

She stood at the outer boundary of Aetherion, where time folded like silk and truth walked backward. Around her hovered twelve scrolls—contracts waiting to be spoken.

Each scroll had one word burned into its cover: "If."

She placed them in the wind and let them drift toward the future.

She whispered to the stars:

"Even order must bend when truth turns."

Then she vanished into a spiral of light and was gone.

Far below, Nyx watched from the shadow-veins beneath the world.

Beside her stood Erebus, quiet and deep-eyed, his skin like the void between stars. Their children flickered behind them: Moros, Hypnos, Thanatos, and the silent child, Oneiroi, who dreamed the dreams of the unborn.

Nyx whispered into the darkness:

"Do you feel it?"

Erebus nodded once.

"It begins."

"Will you protect the gates when the Titans rise?"

"I will hold the night together, even if the stars tear."

Nyx looked upward.

And for the first time, the darkness blinked.

Rhea arrived first to Kronos.

She wore no armor.

She brought no gifts.

Only her presence—warm, steady, and filled with sorrow.

"Have you chosen the moment?"

Kronos looked into her eyes.

"No. But the moment has chosen us."

She touched his shoulder, and he did not flinch.

Hyperion followed, with golden fire in his blood.

He said nothing, but stood beside Kronos like a pillar waiting to be carved.

Then Coeus, quiet and sharp-eyed, his gaze drifting into futures only he could read.

Then Oceanus, vast and half-formed, bearing a flask filled with the First Water—he would not strike, but he would wash away what remained.

And finally, Iapetus—tall, grave, carrying no weapon but the weight of all action's cost.

The siblings were gathered.

The children of Gaia had come.

Elias drifted above them, unseen by most.

Only Kronos looked up.

Their eyes met.

And Elias bowed.

"You remember," Elias said, voice woven into wind.

"I never forgot," Kronos replied.

"Then choose your breath."

And Kronos inhaled.

In the sky, Uranus descended.

Not fully.

Not yet.

But part of him—the voice—pierced through.

A rumble shook the ground.

"Children," it said.

The sound caused forests to wilt and rivers to reverse.

"What have you done?"

Kronos stepped forward.

"We have waited."

"You have been given everything."

"We have been given silence."

The sky groaned.

A cloud of starlight spiraled into a face—vast, undefined, made only of law and pressure.

"You would cut the sky?"

"We would free the world," Kronos said.

The wind stopped.

The stars froze.

Aetherion, in its entirety, took a breath inward.

Every myth, every dream, every unwritten future paused.

The first leaf in the world stopped mid-fall.

The sun blinked.

And beneath the Hollow, the Tree of Echoes began to shed its bark.

Elias wept.

One tear.

One drop of starlight that drifted down into the Hollow's soil.

Where it landed, a flower bloomed—a flower of memory.

He named it nothing.

And everything.

Then he whispered into the threads:

"Now."

Kronos reached for the sickle.

The moment stretched.

Not in time, but in meaning.

And as he grasped it, the blade responded—not with a glow, not with heat.

But with stillness.

It had become part of the world's pause.

Waiting.

One cut away.

The breath before severance held.

And then began to fall.