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I remember.
I remember warmth, and pressure, and hands. I remember being washed and wrapped in clothe. Being pressed to a breast and nursing sweet milk.
Mother, instinct whispered to me, part of you.
My mother kissed me, stroking her hand over my cheek and all was right in my world. I was warmed, safe and fed. Mother and I were together, not to be parted as I am her and she is me.
But then… the touch of a new hand, and to him I was pressed.
He is…. New. Foreign. He is not me like mother is me. I do not know him, and I do not like his touch on my body. He is too sudden and I do not like it. My mouth smacks, gummy and soft but my wail passes through with no resistance.
“Oh little one!” The voice is deep, grumbling and not me. “I did not much like being apart from my own mother, but I beg you to forgive me, I wanted to hold you.”
“Hades,” the voice roles out and it settles over me, quiet and gentle. This is new…. But I will allow him to hold me still as I settle into his chest. “My first and beloved son.”
“Strong and sweet,” he continues on. “I am your father, and I love you.”
“Give him here.” My mother’s voice, my voice says and I get a quick press of lips upon my head before I am passed back where I belong. I nestle in to her slotted in her arms where I belong. “He wants his mother.”
“Can I meet the baby?” Another voices asks, brighter and lighter like mine, but….. more of that. She is not me like mother is me, nor is she foreign like my father. She is something else.
“Hestia,” my mother’s finger traces down my back, and I peel my eyes open for the first time.
“Hades,” the new one breathes, and my eyes take her in for the first time. She is warmed, and amber. She is not of me, but she is made of the same.
“Hades!” Her voice is insistent and kind. My mother’s hand guides her to touch my back and instantly I am filled with…
Contentment.
She is warmth, she is the taste of mother’s milk, safe and the feeling of my father’s voice.
Sister.
“Hestia,” my mother’s voice chastises out from me as my father’s formless body comes to stand next to my sister. “Be quiet, he is a baby.”
“And for how much longer? I was a baby only for a few days,” she asks, removing her hand to be wrapped in our father’s arms. “I want to play.”
“He will grow in his own time,” father says gently, hoisting her upon his arm and flicking a piece of her curly flame made hair away from her check to press a kiss to it. “You came into your Dominion Over All faster than anyone has seen, most babies take years to find their’s.”
“Ask your grandmother to sculpt friends of clay, and I will give them time,” he tells her, and her lips purse into a pout as my mother presses me to her breast once more and I am lulled into sleep once more.
“Hades,” a gentle voices stirs me, but the hand that touches me is not gentle as it shoves me awake.
“What do you want?!” My eyes remain stubbornly closed but my voice betrays how quickly I am able to be roused from sleep.
“Mother is in labor!” Hestia’s voice is dripping with excitement and thrill. And I shoot up like a spout, and with fumbling fingers we work to rip my thin linen sheet off of me before bounding to my feet.
“Baby!” We both chorus, and we race to our parents chamber.
I hope the baby will grow quickly, I did not and Hestia will never forgive me for it. I spent time and enjoyment when my mother and I were one, learning how to be myself and growing at my own pace.
Like when Hestia was born, I was born with a Dominion Over All, but unlike her my power was not manifested in a few days. Allowing me the full access to my godhood, I stayed the age I was meant to be for however long I needed. I was an infant for two decades according to my father, with Dominion Over All Time, and I have been a child young since.
Hestia though? She was a babe for a scant few days before our parents found her cradle made of trees emptied and her tending to the hearth. Her eyes became small warmed flames of dancing orange and gold, complementing her deep brown skin. And wherever she stood everyone was comforted, calmed by the scent of a burning fire and what they found most soothing. Any food prepared by her hands instantly tasted of the favorited of whoever partook of it.
Goddess of the Home and the Hearth, what more fitting for the Titan of Time and Titan of Motherhood? She and I have wondered and speculated on what my Dominion Over All might be….
But I am in no rush to be, the burden of Hestia’s Dominion presses down on her. She’ll never say, but there are many hearths that do not live in homes, and many homes without hearths. How she remains looking as a child for the desperate sense of comfort of fitting into our father and our mother’s laps, of keeping pace with me as I grow.
Fire flickers stronger and brighter as we run by it, chasing each other through our home and looping towards our parent’s room where the new baby will be born. We try to be as quiet and soft as possible, childbirth is for our mother and our father, and we will not intrude. Mother deserves to touch her child first and Father deserves to have his voice heard first by the new one, just like it was for Hestia, just like it was for me.
Together we wait outside our parent’s room, playing silent games with thread and fire as we listen to the sounds of labor and delivery. And with my mother screaming once more, my father saying that the baby is born— we push past the curtain and enter.
Only the baby is wrong, they are blue, still and small in my mother’s hands. And I instantly know what they are…. What I am.
They were not born with a Dominion Over All. My mother screams, rubbing their chests and pressing her lips to their tiny mouth as she tries to negotiate them back to…. Back to life. Her tears and her screams falling into the open air as the world around her shakes with the full force of her desperation and panic.
My father though, he is stone faced, swift and unshaken as he grabs the baby from my mother. The thing betraying his own panic and grief is the ground below him, flickering to overturned dirt when this home was erected, to the marble that was set in, to cracked in millions of years when we will no longer live here. Losing control of his Dominion of Over Time as he holds his smallest, bluest most precious child.
“Demeter,” his voice is weak and frail, as he cups his youngest daughter. “My baby girl, my child youngest, please don’t leave me.”
My mother’s voice reaches a new pitch as she desperately clutches where her womb had stretched to hold her.
“Let her stay in! Let me have her again! I will hold her until she is ready! Kronos! Give her time!” Her voice pitches up as she tries to move to her knees, falling and there, before she can hit the marble, is Hestia. Holding my mother up as she stares pale and dull at the blue baby in my father’s arms. “Kronos!”
I am pulled forward, towards my father rubbing my sister’s blue fingers. I need to touch her, hold her. I can feel my Dominion Over All take shape in my hands.
But I stand still, I cannot will not take this from them. I will give them what my mother has begged desperately my father for, I will give them time. Darkness dances at the edges of my vision, punishment for my treason.
“No, no!” My father cries out, not sparing a look towards me as he gazes upon his daughter. “You will live! You will have time!”
And my mistake was shown, my father stared at his baby his Dominion Over All Time moaning and protesting all around us as he undoes the moment…. life does not move into her as much as the blue and the still leaches from her. And her body weakly, desperately, gasps for a breath that had never been completed.
“I will hold you little one.” My father, Kronos King of the Titans cries. Lifting Demeter to his mouth, and swallowing her down into his stomach.
Then and only then, does the darkness take me.
I awake to Hestia and my father beside me, his hand pressing to my forehead and the other one on his stomach bloated from carrying my sister. Hestia fast asleep upon his shoulder as he stares worrying at me.
“What happened?” I rasp out, and Hestia stirs slightly at my voice but does not awaken.
“Hades,” my father breathes out, stroking down my cheek as tears renew from his eyes. “Oh my son, I thought….”
“Father, the baby?” My father’s shoulders shake as he presses his hand tighter to his distended stomach, and there is begging in his eyes. Begging me to not make him retell this story once more, as he did for his mother, the other titans in his court.
He has been through this too many times, I sense, something I have no right to know. But something…. Like the instinct of when I knew who my mother was, I knew he told this story of his own father. How one day… he was gone and nothing could be done to save him. Nothing to be done to save my sister.
“My mother?”
“Your mother is resting, Hestia and your grandmother had been attending to her. She wanted me here, with you and for you to know she loves you.” His voice rasps out, sparing a careful glance to Hestia as he speaks before looking at me.
“The baby?” I press.
“Demeter was not born with Dominion Over All, like your sister, like me… like you. She took her life breath, but…. Hades, I do not know what happened to her or what has touched her, but I can keep her in the moment of the breath. I can keep her until she is ready and she will be reborn.” His hands find his stomach as he speaks, stroking where he holds his smallest where she will be safe entombed. “And she will be wonderful.”
“Death.”
“What?”
“That is what touched her,” I force my body to sit up, tears falling from my eyes as I revile what I am. “Death, dying, dead, my Dominion Over All. I have found it in the moment of her stillness, when her life breath did not sustain her.”
“Hades, I know it is tempting to blame yourself, but my son, you are not the cause of what has touched your sister.” My father reaches for me but I shirk away, the vines and ivies wrapping round my bed and I…
I touch them and they shrivel, yellowing and drying, flaking off in my hands as the new scent of dead, decay poisons the room. I did not cause their deaths with my touch, but… I allowed it to happen.
“I did not cause it,” I agree carefully, the knowledge of my Dominion Over All is new but mine as it has always been. “It was not created by me or for me, but it is needed. That much I know.”
“What is it Hades?” My father’s voice is shaking, concerned, scared.
“An ending, a stop to our forever life.” The definition flows from my lips and my body stretches. Contouring and cracking as it grows into its final form, my legs and arms become longer and roped with muscles, I can feel my face shift as fat is melted off and replaced with tighter and firmer skin. Gone are the cheeks my father so loved to kiss and longer are the hands my mother held to her’s.
“Please tell me it isn’t so.” My father closes his eyes, tears falling still thought the blanket of his lashes. “Please tell me my son, that I can hold her and I can undo this. Time does not bow to you.”
I do not have the heart to tell him that my Dominion Over All has existed long before him and his Dominion…. And it was chance that our roles were not reversed. Me sitting and comforting him over the death of my daughter and his sister, that would have been kinder. And my sister would have sat softly in my wife’s, not mother’s, arms before we buried her in the earth for my mother, not grandmother, to hold her forever.
Perhaps it would have been kinder.
“What a Dominion you have,” his voice hitches as he climbs next to me in my bed, too small and short for the both of us now, and I notice how my legs are longer than his when he sits next to me. I am too heavy for him to pull me into his lap, but I still melt into his side. Craving this bit of comfort from him and letting him take it from me. “How I wish it was not so, but I will keep your sister and I have to believe that one day she will be reborn. And I wish your Domain was never to touch your other siblings.”
“I love you.” He promises softly, buried his face in my hair.
What has she been now? I wonder, touching my father’s stomach and feeling her against his taut skin. What has my father swallowing her done? She has been birthed…. Is this her unbirth?
“I love you too.”
And so it repeats:
With Poseidon.
Conception
Birth
Unbirth
Hera.
Conception
Birth
Unbirth
Zeus.
Conception
Birth
Unbirth
Hestia and I do not question why our parents have put themselves through three more births and should be death’s. It is not our place to question them, and if they hope against all that this baby… this child would be born with more than one breath in their lungs and a Dominion Over All, then so be it.
Each time, we are there though. Hestia lunging to catch my mother as her wails threaten to rip her bone from bone, and me to give the baby…. It is not time that is my father’s doing. But I am allowing the prolonging, that I know. Other’s think I am giving a mercy… but I know I am being cruel.
“Hades,” my mother rasps, it is my turn to help her with recovery now. Hestia is helping our father, lowering him into a chair meant to support him and the weight of four still born babes now.
“Yes, mother?” I wipe her brow with a clothe scented with cool lavender and I wipe her tears with my free hand.
“I had thought..” Her voice breaks and she dissolves into a fresh set of tears. “My Dominion Over All is childbirth! Why?!”
“I do not know,” I whisper, and I close my eyes as I press my lips to her forehead. Neither one of my parents had said they have blamed me…. nor does anyone, but I cannot help but do so. I had wanted the babies so much too, built their cribs and helped Hestia prepare their rooms. I cannot help but wonder, if it was not for me would they have been born blue?
“It is not your fault mother,” she flinches when a familiar voice says her title, imagining the four others voices saying that as they meet their youngest brother.
“No more,” she gasps, grabbing my hand and bringing it to where her empty womb rests against her skin. “Hades, deaden my womb, do not let anymore seed find fertile soil.”
“Mother I—“
“Hades,” my father’s voice rings out, making me flinch as I try to pull my hand away. “Do as your mother says.”
“What is done cannot be undone, mother please do not ask me to do this.” I try to stress and Hestia materializes at my side. Grabbing my hand and removing it from my mother’s grasp and pulling me close to her. It is strange sight, my grown body leaning and cowering behind a child’s as she stands firm and tall.
“Hades and I will be back.” She says, sweeping me in her arms and leading me outside.
And under this cloud of darkness…. There we are, sitting side by side staring out at a wine dark sea.
“I cannot deaden her womb.” My voice comes flat as I stare numbly into the dark. “I cannot force death where it does not belong and it does not belong in her.”
The unspoken yet hangs in the air.
“But what about Father?” Her voice presses against me, and I inhale the scent of home permeating the outside air. “Hades—"
“Hestia, please” I interrupt her, scared that she has noticed what I have been hiding since the birth of Demeter. “Father is fine.”
“Hades,” her voice is gentle, but will not leave room for mine. “Dying, father is dying. He might not look it, frozen forever at his prime but you see it. Everything—“
Her hands flicker out, barely illuminating the grades dead where his feet had touched earlier when we had dined under this same tree and discussed nothing.
“He is stealing time from everything around him, speeding its life and bringing it to you sooner and sooner.” Hestia doesn’t notice that I had closed my eyes, drawing my knees under my chin and hiding myself from everything.
“I know…”
“Hades… it is not just him. I can feel it in my Dominion Over All, hearths are dying each time they pray to him. I can feel the hearth in our home, it is weakening and… he’s killing it.”
“We can speak to him, we can tell him of his incontinence,” I try desperately, lifting my head to plead with Hestia. “And all will be right! He will stop and—”
“Do you not think I have tried?” Hestia asks me, kneeling before me and I stare into her flame lit eyes. “Hades, he fears that if he passes the babies will not be ready to be born, at first he did not know but now? He is sending everything to an early grave.”
“Do you understand what I am saying?” She asks gently, and I shoot to my feet staring down at her horrified.
“You want me to deaden the babies?! You want me to kill our own flesh?!”
“No!” She snaps back, rising to her own feet. “I would never, but you and I know what father is doing cannot go on forever.”
“Why can’t we let him pass with dignity? Why this?” My breathes come shallow and weak but her hands touch mine and I am reminded of how warm she felt when she first touched me.
“Because if he does he will kill the siblings we have, and you and I were not born as king or queen of above. One of them must be.” She says softly, and I hate how we were not. She would have made a just queen and I would have made a fair king.
“How do you know one of them is?”
She doesn’t answer, and I swallow back bile. She does not know that I can no longer touch them, even when I attempt to push back past my father’s influence, if one of them is not destined king or queen…. I fear what will happen.
“Will you let me Hades, will you trust me?” She asks instead, and I cannot look her in the eyes as I nod.
Hestia is a good sister, she does not tell me of any plan of our father’s death. I admittedly wonder how, all things have sworn a sacred oath to our grandmother, the earth, never to harm her offspring or their offspring. I can put my hand in fire and not feel pain, swim to the bottom of the ocean and not need air, stand upon the coldest mountain and need no clothes. My father is the same just as me, and how does Hestia plan on killing him?
“Tonight,” she whispers in my ear, embracing me fully and handing me a bowl of soup from her pot before sprinkling another bowl with an herb from her garden. “Tonight Hades.”
I embrace my father tightly when I see him, I sit next to him eating my soup. Watching the grass rot out from under him, the bowl and spoon in my hand degrading and dissolving from the stone they were cut from, watching my father forget what he was saying. Looking at me with foreign glass eyes before remembering to whom he speaks.
I love my father in every form he has ever showed me, and I know he has loved me from the moment of conception. But this? A Titan with Dominion Over Time who cannot recognize his son? Who is unable to command his domain?
He truly is dying.
And there is Hestia, a faint bitter smile on her face as she sits next to me. Her own bowl in hand as she eats with him, our mother joining in with us. He cannot eat with us anymore, for the food will disappear brought to a point of time it has been eaten without us consuming it. If we can eat before the spoons and bowls dissolve in our hands. We laugh, we speak and we affirm our love for one another once more.
Then… Hestia hands our father a bowl of soup. Simple and warm, he takes one sip from it. My voiced is still and silent as he falls, and I realize the herb she had added too it. I can see it clear and true. The inclusion of thyme from her garden, and I feel in my stomach that it had never sworn to no do harm to the earths children. It proves a triumph over him. His throat closing and his body shutting down in panic.
“I love you father.” Her voice is soft, sweet as he dies. “I love you, forgive me!”
And here is where I move, her words spurring me to action. To try and stop the spread and leech of my domain, I must act. Even though my domain cannot touch my siblings, now my father is gone they might have reentered it.
I must act.
Reaching out to grab my father. To hold him close to my chest and reach down his throat, pushing back protesting sinew and and convulsing muscle to search for something—
I find feet first, and pull.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
My hands shake the entire time as I negotiated my siblings rebirth. All the while my father’s eyes look dead upon me.
Forgive me. Please father, please forgive me. But I did not want this world to die. I do not want to be left alone.
Slowly…. The hand that is not soaked in his bile and his blood close his eyes for the final time.
And then my mother screams.
My head whips up from where I have closed my father’s eyes. I do not know if she knew of what Hestia had planned, and if I have to tell my mother of our murder of our father but her eyes are not on my father’s corpse. But the babies—
Demeter, the last I pulled is still blue and naked, but I watch her grow before my eyes.
Grow but yet remain blue and unnatural, long lanky fingers but a child’s palm, eyes large and deep framed by a face belonging to a child upon a woman’s naked breasts. Her chest rising and falling with false half breathes just like the rest of them, locked between adulthood and the infancy our father trapped them in. Her stomach distended and bloated, lined with stretch marks as a hand tries to press through.
The soup comes and spills from my gullet to the ground.
Hestia was wrong to hope, just like our father and mother did every time they birthed a baby. None of them were worthy of being king or queen, but Zeus and Hera claimed the title by right of their birth. Hera forced our mother to give her the Dominion she had carried all her existence. Neither Hestia or my mother will speak of how that twisted thing threatened my mother to do so, or how my mother was able to give up her Dominion Over All…. My mother does not speak anymore either.
Zeus unstoppable he is, went to the giants with the bones of our grandfather, who had died before I came into being, at the same threat Hera used against our mother they forged our grandfather into a piece of white power which my brother named lightning and slaughtered them upon completion. Poseidon went to Oceanus and with one crack of his baby sized fist against his uncle slaughtered him dead there, taking his dominion.
And Demeter? Blue as she is, decided to take the world of green. She looked upon the trees and nymphs present at her birth and rebirth, opened her gummy and sallow mouth and wailed until all bent the kneel and swore a false dominion to her. The promise of wonder and love my father gave to her false, probably false as the child Zeus or Poseidon put in her womb. Goddess of Harvest, I call her mockingly, especially when all she touches ferments.
I should have never let my father swallow them, I should have brought them into my domain and spared this world from the fury they wrought.
“How does your dominion remain?” I spit bitterly at Hestia, hearing her footsteps and smelling her as she invades my space, staring at the footprints my father made now being overrun with new growth.
“All other flourish, that is what matters.” She whispers, fisting her hands in her black cloak and her head bent. The picture of a repentant child. But I know my sister and I do not believe that she can repent enough for this. “Hades I still believe that we—“
“We?!” I snarl at her, grabbing her shoulders and making her look at me. “There is no we here! I trusted you, and you— you!”
“You could have stopped them! You could have touched them! Do not blame this all on me when you had an equal role and bare it still!” She bites back and the flame of her eyes is burning a brilliant red and white.
“When will you admit you’ve made a mistake?!” I yell, my power snapping through the ground and turning it beneath my feet to deadened grass. And I cannot believe that she does not smell like home to me anymore, the only thing I can smell is the bile of that cursed day.
“I cannot take them Hestia! What happened to them in our father’s false womb has removed them from my touch entirely! Whatever they are, I cannot touch them and it is a fools errant if we try.”
“We have wrought the end, one day because of them all creatures will come to my domain even you will not be spared my touch. If we still had Father he would have given up them before us, but now!? We have doomed us all.”
My words cut deep, and she knows all will be true. And instead of screaming back, instead of striking me with her flame, all she does is wrap her arms around me. Bury her face into my chest and hold me close and I cannot help but do the same to her.
“They are weakening my domain, no one is home anymore.” She confesses to me, and my knees buckle as she takes my weigh guiding us both to the ground as the news of her eminent death hangs above us. She will fade… but I never will. “I wanted to save our dying world, I thought I was more clever than father but I fell into the same trap. And now I will leave you, my beloved and most precious brother.”
“I won’t let it!” I try desperately, but I know the words are a lie.
“Marry a god of spring, of life and death in the sun. Build a kingdom, one they dare not touch.” She leaves this edict to me before releasing me from her arms and standing while my legs still refuse to hold my weight. “I love you brother.”
And she leaves.
“Forgive me father.”