29 A Mandatory Vacation part - 3

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"But...they didn't worship you directly, did they?"

"What difference does it make?" he asks rhetorically. "If their pleas were directed to the very idea of Time or to myself? I am but one of Time's infinite faces. Its devotees are mine, and my devotees are theirs. Those imprisoned within Tartarus prayed to Time, even if they did not make offering or sacrifice, their vehement pleas and supplications were more soothing than any balm and sweeter than any nectar." He looks over your shoulder, lost in reminiscence.

The implications of his words slowly dawn on you like the first dislodged shard of ice heralding the tumult of an avalanche. "And just like it strengthened you, it would strengthen me as well."

Something akin to pride appears across the Titan's face. "And now you begin to understand. You live in a world of mortals, immersed in a realm that is alien to that of the divine in both substance and desire. None among the ichor-blooded worship Time for they have been granted eternity, but Man, the world of the ephemeral, Time dominates every one of their waking moments.

"It is the source from which their need to immortalize themselves in some way emerges, serving as the driving factor of each of their greatest and most terrible deeds. Even though they may not know your name, or who you are, you are not some middling godling granted a domain at the whims of the Sisters Three. You are a face of Time, a thread in an infinite cosmic carpet of impossibly vast proportions."

So, enraptured are you with the Titan's tale, you don't notice as your cocoa mug refills itself back to brimming.

"So, what happened?" you press. "The Olympians must have discovered you, then."

"Just so," he inclined his head. "the Great Stirring the fools called it. I dare say it may have been the only thing to unite my children to a single cause since the war. Even recovered as I was, I knew I was far too weak to challenge my sons once more. So, I went willingly and played my part of a reticent father who had failed his children." He frowns deeply.

"And now here I am," he gestures derisively to Paradise, "King of Elysium, Land of the greatest heroes to ever walk the earth! A people who have no need for time for they have everything they could possibly desire."

He turns to you with a deathly serious gaze. "You will not share my fate. I refuse to allow it."

"While I appreciate the sentiment," you say to your surprise with true sincerity. "I'm strung up with chains made by the Smith God himself, watched day and night by guards who wouldn't hesitate for a second to put me down."

"Then you take your freedom. They do not call me the Crooked One for nothing and you are not my son by look and power alone, but cunning as well. A truly great plot is much like a flower, for it to flourish, you must have a gentle hand and most of all, time. And we have all the time in the world."

You mull your father's words quietly, nearly drowning in the vastness of their implications.

"You know this means I'm stuck in the worst place possible besides Elysium itself," you point out. "stuck on an island inhabited by immortal warriors who have nothing but hate for me, and definitely no fear of death."

Kronos' lip twitches into a smirk. "They were mortal once before, these Amazons, no? All of humanity knew to fear Death...you must simply make them learn to fear Her call again."

You cross your arms across your chest and lean against the solid trunk of an oak tree, brow furrowed.

"A tough ask seeing as I'm strung up by unbreakable chains and basically defenseless. The Amazons have little to fear of me."

"Sometimes weakness is actually a strength of a different sort. They believe you weak, and so long as you play the part, inevitably they will grow arrogant and lax in their guard."

"Let's say that works out and the Amazons stop guarding me day in and night out, what then? What's my ace in the hole?"

"Ace? I have never heard that turn of phrase before even more, the newly arrived dead," Kronos mutters, conjuring up parchment and pen from thin air and scribbling quickly. "Humans can be so interesting, perhaps Foresight was right to grant them Fire... but that is a topic for another time. As for an advantage, why my dear child, your captors have brought you right to it."

"I don't know why all the authority figures in my life like to play 20 questions every chance they get but can we get to the point?"

Kronos is unfazed by your clear agitation, reclining in his wicker chair and stroking his long beard with a contemplative hand.

"These Amazons...they are servants of my children are they not? Trusted and devout in their service?"

You nod warily. "Their leader is a granddaughter of Zeus, and they claim to be blessed by all the goddesses of Olympus."

"A shame that I will have to machinate my great-granddaughter's destruction then," he says flippantly.

"Did you know when I was first overthrown, my sons attempted to destroy my throne? It was a nexus for my power and had they been successful, I would never have been capable of reforming even the barest hint of a conscious. But even their power together served only break to into a dozen pieces, and so they scattered it across the world, entrusting them into the care of their most loyal servants."

"You think there's a piece like that on Themiscyra?"

Orbs of molten gold gleam maliciously at you.

"I can feel its very presence upon you, a piece of my throne, an extension of Time itself, no doubt nestled away deep within Gaea and guarded even more severely than you. Your birthright and the key to your escape," The Titan Lord smiles sardonically. "Time makes fools of us all, does it not?"

Your father sighs deeply and places his cup before suddenly lifting himself out of his chair. He looks at you with impatience.

"Your training begins now."

"Now?" you echo, rising out of your own chair.

His lips twitch into something approaching a smirk. "Do you have somewhere else to be?"

"Well, when you put it like that, no."

"Excellent," he claps his hands together and you feel a cold shiver run down your back at the malicious glint in Kronos's eyes.

"It's about time to graduate out of your parlor tricks if you wish to have any chance of escaping your current situation."

"And is the scythe really necessary?" you ask, edging just a bit away from the wicked sharp edge of the weapon that had apparated into existence within his open hand.

"Who's to say one of us can't have fun while doing this?"

You had a strong feeling he was not talking about you.

If nothing else could be said about your father, he was undoubtedly the harshest taskmaster whose tutelage you'd ever had the painful displeasure of being under.

That in of itself was a great compliment considering your past mentors were: an assassin who thought attempted murder by frag grenade was a suitable substitute for an alarm clock and a neurotic billionaire who discovered sixty-four forms of karate and spandex were the cure to childhood trauma...they were in fact not, or at least not for you.

The Titan of Time had no need for such crude instruments of training when he could bring the full brunt of a universal force down upon your head whenever the mood fancied him. Just as he did now to show his displeasure in your failure to slow down his scythe from cutting you into many little Cadmus nuggets.

"This is the most basic of techniques," Kronos snaps, a vein visibly pulsing on his forehead in irritation. "How are you unable to perform a simple dilation at this age?"

You're unable to respond, considering your reaction time has now been reduced to the scale of hours. Your father steps closer, eyes narrowed.

He examines you quietly for a long moment. "Now I see the source of your malfunction. You reek of Ananke's wretched children, the Lords of Chaos, pah! Nothing but minnows ignorant of their place in the ocean. No, that will not do. Did you not think it would be important to mention you had an encounter with such a loathsome entity?"

The overbearing presence on your shoulders suddenly disappears. You massage your jaw at the sudden return of feeling.

"I might have if I knew what the fuck a Lord of Chaos exactly was. Can you get rid of it?"

"If I could not, I would not have said anything, now would I? Your ignorance of the wider world, on the other hand….now that, I can't promise that I could remedy with even millennia at my disposal, but I shall endeavor to do so, as is the duty of a father."

He punctuates the statement with an almost dramatic sigh as though shouldering a terrible burden.

"Wow, I can really feel the love, dad."

He nods sagely. "I am making an effort to be a better father, clearly I was far too easy on your siblings to see them reduced to such pathetic excuses for deities."

You don't think that was the correct takeaway but you weren't going to argue that with a Titan with a very sharp scythe and a few dozen millennia's worths of pent-up aggression to burn and you being the only nearby target to expend it on.

"So...these Lords of Chaos, you make it sound it like you know them."

"I have had the unfortunate honor of crossing paths with their ilk many times during my reign, them and their damnable kin, the self-styled Lords of Order. A better title would be Lords of Pain my Titanly ass." His face pinches as though he had sucked on a particularly sour lemon.

"Deities that have been squatting on the universe since the very beginning, forever locked into battle over balance of Chaos and Order, as though waving around such grand and abstract concepts would justify their childish and interminable infighting."

He spoke so flippantly as though the beings in question were not capable of crushing a large part of reality like it was a mildly irritating insect, perhaps that was how Kronos also viewed everything not divine, so far below him that it did not even justify an iota of his attention.

"The beginning of the universe...but they couldn't have just popped up out of nowhere," you counter. "Everything comes from something."

"A logical step of deduction, and you are both correct and incorrect."

Before he could respond, the world suddenly begins to shake violently, and the earth beneath your feet cracks into a wide and yawning chasm. Far away in the distance, you could hear what you thought was a woman's voice.

Kronos frowns. "It appears you have visitors, lucky you. My children never visited me unless they had pressing business, do you have any of your own that may be visiting?"

"I'm eighteen."

He shrugs indifferently. "Never too early to start, until next time, my boy."

Your vision goes black.

You return to the waking world in the same state that you had left it, arms stretched to both sides of your head, knees scraping against cold marble, and the cold winds of Tartarus lapping at your back with a living hunger.

It is night, and the moon casts a faint pale light through your prison, illuminating the old stone walls and most interestingly, the silhouette of a figure standing just above your field of vision. Tilting your head, you come face to face with a girl that bore a startingly resemblance to Diana, with the same sculpted features, dark raven hair intense electric blue eyes, and full lips pursed currently pursed into a small frown.

She looks exactly as she did when you first arrived on Themiscyra, down to the same midnight black costume dotted with stars and a glowing golden lasso at her side.

Donna, you remember her name was.

"I've been calling you Titanspawn in my head, but it sounds super racist, you know?" She says casually, swinging her legs over the ledge, idly kicking them into the open air.

"Like I get why Diana calls you that, considering you are, well that, but calling someone a named based on something they can't control is something we're kind of phasing out in the twenty-first century."

You blink and then blink again to make sure you're not in a dream....or a nightmare.

"Neither is imprisonment without a trial," Your voice is gruff and grating from disuse. You don't how long it's been since you were last awake, and this was the first time you were deprived of the certainty of time. It's an unsettling feeling, to say the least.

She shrugs casually, but her whole form radiates an inexplicable tension as though prepared to fight at any moment. "We can't all be perfect."

What could bring Wonder Woman's protege all the way down here to visit you? Simple curiosity? You doubt it, Diana would be able to answer any questions she had...unless she was doing this without her permission, maybe even out of spite? Your thoughts return to that single moment the two shared just after your arrival.

"You're not ready," had said, and you had seen the barest glimpse of bitter indignation in her doppelganger's expression at the rebuke. Was this a spat of rebellion then? A way to prove herself in her master's eyes? You could use that.

"Didn't Diana tell you to stay away from me? Not great at listening to orders, are you."

Her jaw clenches tightly and her eyes turn almost luminescent. You bite back a smile, this one wears her heart on her sleeve.

"I can take care of myself," she says with false bravado.

"Your master does not think so,"

"She," Donna whispers harshly, planting a hand on her knees to lean over and glare at you, her expression a window into long-held insecurities plainer to read than the headlines of a newspaper. "is not my master."

You're almost embarrassed on Donna's behalf in how easy it is to get a rise out of her.

"So, what is this then? Proving that you won't be led around on a leash...or is it lasso?"

She reins in her composure with visible effort. "I wanted to get a measure of the first guest our island's had in a century, They talk about like you're the boogeyman come to life, all hush-hush." she says conspirationally and with no-small-amount of derision as though you fail to meet her lofty expectations.

Even your anger is muted by the old magics that are emblazoned upon the chains of Hephasteus which glow brightly in attempting to quell you back into passivity. The wind howls and your eyes turn a brilliant encompassing gold.

"And what do you think, Donna? Do you think I'm something to be feared?" Your eyes pin her in place. And a new emotion appears on her face, fear. She stumbles back from the ledge, putting distance between the two of you, muscles knotted with tension, a hand on her lasso and yes flicking across the room preparing for the attack.

Her reaction piques your interest, to see a cocksure heroine who only seconds ago was so secure in her safety reduced to a deer stuck in the headlights, face awash with fear, suggests that her reaction was instinctual to her, ingrained into her, perhaps even taught. It reminds you too much of the hate written plain among the Amazons' faces, instantaneous from the moment they saw you, their judgment of you passed long before you arrived on the island.

The implication gnaws at the back of your mind, and you begin to question if simply the fact that you were the son of Kronos was enough to inspire such universal revulsion. Chiron, The Trainer of Heroes was celebrated and revered and he too was born to the Titan King, that alone suggested to you that something else was afoot that you did not realize.

"You've heard of me long before I appeared on Themiscyra, haven't you?"

Donna's face turns deathly pale as though the heroine realizes she has made a terrible mistake coming down here, and without a response she storms out, leaving you to your solitude.

In the silence left after Donna's hasty retreat, the realization that you had no idea how long you'd been down here slowly settles on your shoulders.

The certainty of time is no longer a luxury you can afford, and it feels like a part of you has been torn out, leaving an empty jagged wound in the center of your chest. The world is uneven, deprived of the universal rhythm and structure that Time provides to reality, leaving you awash in a chaotic sea with no assurance of what is and what will come next.

You receive no further visitors to mark the time by, and the silent sentinels of the Amazons that watch from high above are ever-present. The days and nights pass in uneven strokes as with each setting sun you retreat into the world of dreams and your father's implacable tutelage.

"Chaos has left a disease in you," He says, once when you return after Donna's interruption, brandishing his scythe with cold intent. "and until it has been excised you will have no possibility of recovering from what has befallen you."

The scythe is no scalpel and just as he had promised, the process to expunge the taint of Chaos, is long and painful, to say the least. Though it is not the blade that slew Ouranos, the damage it wreaks on you makes it hard to tell the two apart. Each strike spills black tainted blood that smolders and seethes on the soil of Elysium, taking a part of you for each part of the disease it removes.

Days, maybe even weeks pass in the purging of your body, and the world of dreams, once a refuge of safety, now replaces the world of the living for where the majority of your consciousness resides. The Amazons would undoubtedly be glad that their prisoner was for all intents and purposes comatose, their joy would quickly turn sour if they were ever to discover just what you were doing in your dreams.

Once Kronos decided that you had sufficiently recovered from the ham-fisted metaphysical surgery he conducted on you, your training resumed in earnest.

"By this point in your life, hopefully, you've realized you have the ability to hold vast amounts of information, recount small inane details that no one else possibly could."

"Because of my eidetic memory, right? Perfect recall."

"You're not actually remembering things, child, you're more like projecting yourself back to the moment in question, taking in all of its details as though it's occurring in front of you all over again."

"Awesome...how does that help me?"

Kronos pauses and in the greatest show of his exasperation, pinches his nose and sighs deeply. "You," he begins slowly. "are capable of going back to any moment that you have ever experienced and examining it from a new angle, learning from your past mistakes, able to see details that you missed before. Move, touch, smell, hear...a pseudo-projection if you will, but only as an observer."

He says the last part with a clear warning, heeding off you from entertaining possibilities that shouldn't be considered.

"That means I can see Themiscyra," you realize. "I can figure out a way to escape."

Kronos's eyes gleam with malicious pride.