Rhea leaves the Isle of Crete in the care of Amalthea and the Kouretes. She now resides in the Underworld, within the castle she shares with Cronus.
In the garden, she paces. Worry pinches the corners of her eyes and tightens her jaw. Her steps are short and measured as she wears a path along the black stones.
Hecate appears at the garden's edge and watches the Titaness. Her eyes narrow. 'What troubles her so?'
She approaches. "Lady Rhea? You have worn a trench in that path. What has happened?"
Rhea sighs, the sound heavy in the stagnant air. "For days, Cronus has trained like a madman. And he has failed. Again and again."
Hecate crosses her arms, rubbing her chin. "So you worry for him."
"Partly. Today, he took a massive sum of gold from our vaults. I fear he involves himself in some shady business. But that is not the core of it." Rhea stops pacing and faces Hecate directly. "I have known Cronus for millennia. When he cannot get what he wants by any means at hand, he creates new means. He crosses lines. He shatters limits."
Hecate goes very still. A cold suspicion forms in her gut. Just a few hours ago, she saw her sister Judora skipping from the castle, humming a strange, greedy little tune: 'Gold is best, gold is everything...'
'Could she be involved?' The pieces click together with dreadful logic. Judora's cheer, Cronus's gold, his desperate search for power.
"Hecate?" Rhea's voice cuts through her thoughts. "Your skin is pale. You stand like stone."
"Nothing!" Hecate says, too quickly. Her pulse jumps in her throat. "I merely... recall a pressing matter in the judgment hall. Forgive me, I must take my leave." She offers a shallow bow, her mind already racing.
Rhea nods, but her eyes linger on Hecate's retreating form. The departure is too abrupt, the shoulders too tense.
Hecate finds a servant in the corridor. "Where is Judora?"
"The Lady Judora browses the markets of Inferzals, my lady."
Hecate massages her temples. 'Of course she is.'
---
Meanwhile, in the volcanic highlands of the Inferzals land, Cronus climbs. Jagged rock scrapes his palms. Sulfurous heat wafts from fissures, and distant rivers of lava glow below.
"Are you certain this is the place?" he grunts, hauling himself onto a narrow ledge.
Behind him, Judora climbs with unsettling ease, a gold coin dancing over her knuckles. "Absolutely sure! The Demonic Flame Pond is at the peak. The best place to find pure demonic energy in the Underworld!"
Cronus mutters a curse but continues. He looks up; the cliff seems endless. He looks down; the ground is lost in a haze of heat and cloud. "I once ruled the whole sky. Now I struggle with rock and slope." A weary sigh escapes him.
Hours later, sweat-drenched and soot-stained, he pulls himself over the final ridge. He stands, wiping ash from his chiton.
A sharp whistle cuts the air. Judora sits perched on a giant obsidian rock, swinging her legs. "Took you long enough, old man."
"Where is it?" Cronus demands, his voice ragged.
Judora's cheerful mask slips into something colder. "Is age blurring your vision?" She points a slender finger forward.
Cronus stares. There, in the center of the plateau, is a small, unremarkable pit, no wider than a chariot wheel. His hands clench into fists, knuckles white. "Have you lost your mind? Or do you take me for a fool? That is a hole, not a pond of demonic flame!"
In a flash, Judora is before him. Divine energy sparks around her hand as she seizes his wrist. Her strength is immovable. She drags him toward the pit.
"Release me!" Cronus snarls, struggling uselessly. As they reach the edge, he sees the truth. The pit is a narrow mouth, but inside, it plunges deep into the mountain's heart. At the bottom, a fissure bleeds not lava, but cold, silent, black-purple fire that twists and churns with chaotic energy. No heat radiates from it, only a deep, soul-chilling wrongness that raises the hair on his arms.
Judora releases him at the very edge. "See? No lies. No tricks." She turns away with a theatrical pout.
Cronus stares into the abyssal flame. It seems to reach for him. He gulps and closes his eyes. His fingertips tap once against his chest. 'To rise again, I must first walk through madness.' He opens his eyes, his gaze sharp and resolved.
He steps off the edge and falls into the pit.
"OLD MAN!" Judora's scream is genuine. She lunges, her fingers stretching out. They only graze the rising hem of his chiton before he is gone, swallowed by the swirling darkness. A tendril of black fire licks her fingertip.
"Aaaah!" She jerks her hand back as if struck by a viper. The skin of her finger blackens and crisps, the smell of burnt ozone filling her nose. Panicked, she blows on it, channeling her divine energy to force the corruption out and heal the flesh. It takes a full minute before her finger is whole again, pale and unmarked.
She crawls to the edge and peers down. Only the churning, silent black fire stares back. No silhouette. No movement. The blood drains from her face, leaving it ashen. A tremor begins in her hands and travels up her arms.
---
Within the pond, Cronus burns.
His hair and beard vanish into ash. His skin blackens, cracks, and melts. Blood sizzles as it seeps from his pores. His body's innate life force fights a futile war against the corrupting energy, a mere candle against a hurricane.
He ignores it. He forces his ruined body into a lotus position at the hellish bottom, his spine straight. His eyes squeeze shut as he tries to meditate.
He tries to grasp the demonic energy present in the flame. Success does not come.
The flame reaches his organs. Agony becomes his entire universe, a white-hot sheet that obliterates thought.
Then, a sudden, profound silence falls within his mind. The pain is still present, but it is distant, an echo. His thoughts are cold and clear. A voice, chilling and intimate, whispers in his consciousness.
"Do not tame the fierce beast. Befriend it."
The message echoes in repetition. "…Befriend it."
'Demonic energy is the same as a fierce beast. The more you restrain it, the more violent it becomes. The more you oppose it, the more vigilant it becomes.' He understands. He stops resisting. He lets the demonic flame baptize every cell. He focuses inward, not on the burning, but on the moment before the burn—the instant of corruption, where a foreign, chaotic energy invades and twists his tissue before igniting it.
There. He isolates that precise point of infection in a shred of his own flesh. With a thought, he burns a fragment of his life force to capture that specific corruption. A single, viscous drop of dark purple liquid, pure demonic energy, filters into his burned palm.
He absorbs it. Pure demonic energy rushes into Cronus through his seared skin and all his orifices. His consciousness snaps away.
He opens his eyes and finds himself in a void that is familiar, yet utterly changed. Once, the epicenter of his soul was a vast, white star of Time. Now, only a faint, guttering ember remains, adrift in emptiness.
A chilling voice surrounds him. "Your divinity fades. We can restore it… for a price."
He turns. Where his white star once shone, a dark purple star now pulses, grander and more menacing, its light casting long, grasping shadows.
"Once you ruled the cosmos. Now you cannot steady your own hands." His hands are before him, trembling violently. He tries to stop them. They shake harder.
"You lost everything… and yet you pretend redemption is possible?" A shadow flits at the edge of his vision.
"I-I have Rhea…I-I…," Cronus whispers, but the doubt is there, a cold knot in his gut.
"She pities you. That is not love. Power is the only language she ever respected." A feminine shadow materializes, its cool hand gliding over his to his chest. An image flares: Rhea in the arms of a blurred, powerful stranger, kissing him with a passion Cronus cannot remember receiving.
"NO!" he roars, charging at the image. It dissolves into black smoke.
He blinks. He is in his old throne room on Mount Othrys. Shadowy hands curl around him and whisper in his ear, "Redemption? You do not want forgiveness. You want your crown back."
The room melts into shifting black sand. He falls. The Crown of Heaven glitters just above him. His fingers stretch, grazing its cold metal.
"Stop lying to yourself, Cronus. You hunger for power more than peace."
Another blink. He is in Tartarus, bound in chains so heavy they grind his soul. "Let go of guilt. Let go of restraint. Let us devour what remains of the old you." A giant maw opens to swallow him. Cronus closes his eyes in reflex.
When he opens them he is in the judgment hall. He stands chained before Ananke's impassive gaze. The feminine shadow embraces him from behind, her shadow hands caressing his chest, her lips at his ear. "Admit it, Titan King—you never wanted justice. You wanted to win." Shadow hands cover his face.
Cronus opens his eyes and finds himself again in the empty void. A multitude of shadowy hands erupt from the darkness, clutching at his limbs, his torso, his face. "Take us in… let us shape you… and you can rise again."
"Break… burn… become. Let your sins be fuel. Let your shame be the tether. Let us carve a new crown upon your soul."
The hands multiply, pulling him down, smothering him. A raw, defiant fury, older than the stars, erupts from his core.
"I… NEED… NO ONE…" he growls, the pressure building in his chest. "NO ONE'S HELP, TITLE… TO JUSTIFY MYSELF AS KING" The energy explodes outwards in a silent, violent wave, shredding the shadowy hands into dissipating mist. "AS LONG AS I KNOW I AM A KING, I AM KING OF MYSELF!"
The void trembles. Violet particles, countless and vibrant, stream from the nothingness. They coalesce in the center, merging not with the guttering white ember, but around it. They form a massive, pulsing violet star. And beside it, kindled by his sheer, unbroken will, a new, small, but fiercely bright golden star flickers to life.
Cronus feels the demonic energy within him—now his to command—flow outwards. He raises his ruined hands and directs it, a torrent of dark power, into both stellar bodies. A laugh, harsh and triumphant, tears from his throat and echoes through the sanctum of his soul.
HAHAHAHAHA!
---
At the mountain peak, the air shimmers. Hecate arrives with Rhea beside her.
"WHERE IS HE?" Rhea's voice is raw panic. Her eyes sweep the plateau and find Judora, who looks up with a face bleached of color, her lips trembling.
Judora can only point a trembling finger at the pit.
Rhea rush to the cliff and moves to leap. But…
Psychic.'
Arcane energy,pure and silver, wraps around her mid-air and sets her down gently but firmly.
Hecate steps between Rhea and the edge. "You will not."
"He is mortal in there! It will kill him!" Rhea's breath comes in short gasps.
"Everything in the Underworld answers to King Hades," Hecate states, her voice leaving no room for argument. "Even this flame. His fate is not yet sealed by its corruption."
Rhea stares, the logic battling the terror that tightens her chest. Hecate turns to Judora, her gaze icy. She kneels and wipes a tear from her sister's cheek, her voice a low whisper only for her. "For this reckless gamble, your gold stipend is revoked for five years."
Judora's knees buckle. Color floods back into her face in a flush of despair. "Sister, please! I didn't know he'd jump! He said he will use for experiment! Please…Make it two! Please forgive me this time!" Her words tumble out in a desperate stream.
Sigh~
Hecate's expression does not soften. "Five. Be grateful it is not ten. Now, promise you will never meddle in such affairs again."
"I promise, I swear, just—"
The mountain lurches.
BOOOM!!!
A deep, subterranean trembles and rolls through the rock. The pit erupts. Not with lava, but with a geyser of black demonic fire that fragments in the air like burning obsidian rain.
Hecate throws her hands up. A dome of shimmering arcane energy shields the three goddesses. The black fire spatters against it and vanishes with a sound like cracking ice.
Their eyes are drawn upward, through the clearing shower of darkness.
A figure shoots skyward from the heart of the explosion, clad in and wreathed by the same chaotic, chilling demonic flame. It hangs in the air for a moment, a silhouette of dark power against the underworld sky, before the flame begins to recede, drawing back into the form like a retreating tide.