War of the Titans (Part 2)

However strong Gaia’s maternal love for Cronus and her desire to keep him safe were, her wish to kill Uranus and free the Hecatonchires was much stronger.

Cronus’s words about killing his father was all Gaia needed to hear. It did not matter to her that it was just angry, empty bravado because it was her only hope to kill her husband. Her mind had already been made up, her plan had already started to form, and with it the destruction of the human race had already been ordained, before even the first one of us was ever born.

A few days later Gaia called all the Titans to her house. Standing in the middle of the large house, she held up an enormous sickle and declared, “With this sickle Cronus shall kill that tyrant Uranus and free us all from his unbearable oppression. And we shall do everything to help him, we must all do our part.”

The Titans stood in stunned silence. Not one of them expected Cronus’s words to lead to the actual killing of their father, much less their personal participation in it.

“I never intended to kill him,” Cronus protested. “It was just my angry words.”

“But your words reflected your wish. And it is also our wish that you kill him.” Gaia looked at the other Titans and asked, “Is it so, my children?” It was not a question; it was a command, one that the Titans dared not contradict, not while she was holding the sickle, not while she would not hesitate using it. Gaia’s mannerism conveyed as much.

She continued, “Cronus, take this sickle. You are to sharpen it and learn how to handle it. You must learn how to wield it well, for it is your best hope to defeat your father.”

Cronus stood still; he knew not how to react. Gaia kept speaking but he heard not a word. The sheer weight of what he had been commanded to do overwhelmed his ability to think. His heart pounded in his chest; an enormous distasteful, burning bile blocked his throat; he struggle mightily just to breathe. Everyone and everything seemed to be spinning around him. His wobbling legs were going to give in at any moment now. But he determined to remain standing nonetheless, for what seemed like an eternity. When Cronus finally re-gained an awareness of his surroundings, the other Titans had already left.

What Cronus learned later was that during his temporary mental blackout Gaia instructed other Titans how to harvest the vines and weave them into ropes and make an unbreakable nest, as if they had all agreed to participate in their father’s murder. The actual killing was to be done by Cronus, however, for she insisted that he was deemed the bravest, and the most aggrieved among the Titans.

Gaia handed Cronus the sickle and said, “Now go. You must not stay here any longer lest your father suspect that we are plotting against him. Woe to us all if he ever finds out before you are ready. Now go!”

Cronus had no choice but to take the sickle home. It felt impossibly heavy to him, in his current state of mind. How would he ever hope to wield it successfully against his powerful father? But he must choose between a murderous, manipulative mother and a tyrannical, equally murderous, father. There was no other choice; that much was made clear by his mother. And he did not have long to contemplate his dilemma, either. The longer he waited to make his decision, the more likely that his father would find and kill him first.

Why did he have to open his mouth and made such a stupid statement? Cronus asked himself. But it did not matter now, survival was paramount and he would do whatever was necessary to preserve his life. He might even profit from it--from killing his father, he thought.

Cronus made up his mind. He wasted no time to begin sharpening the sickle and practiced swinging it day and night until it became an extension of his body.

***

Uranus, that wicked tyrant, was too arrogant to notice the conspiracy being plot in his very own house.

When Uranus came to Gaia’s room in search of sex Cronus had already been hiding under Gaia’s bed in an ambush. Cronus reached out and grabbed his father’s genitals with his left hand and with his right he quickly severed them with the sharp sickle and flung them into the deep, dark sea.

The pains of losing his genitals sapped Uranus his strength and his confidence. So he shrunk and retreated from the sickle that Cronus was swinging wildly at him. Seizing the opportunity, Cronus punched, kicked, and threw huge stones at his father, forcing him to retreat to the trap he had set up.

Uranus kept retreating until he got ensnared in that unbreakable nest. Cronus quickly jumped on Uranus and pummeled him with all his might.

Before taking his last breath, Uranus whispered, “I shall not ask for mercy from you and I hope that you shall not ask for mercy from your children either when your turn comes.”

With that Uranus lost consciousness and died. Cronus then bound his body with an enormous rope and threw it into the Tartarus. There Uranus’s body remained until this very day.

No sooner than he had killed his father that the blood-covered Cronus declared, “Unless someone comes forward to challenge me, I am now Lord of this house. You shall keep the position you have now. I shall be a fair, just, and predictable ruler of the universe, but I shall also be a harsh ruler should my wills not obeyed.”

Cronus looked at his stunned brothers and sisters while his hand held firm to the sickle he had used against his father. He was ready to attack anyone who showed any sign of wanting to challenge him. The other Titans cheered and acquiesced to Cronus’s ascendance to the kingship because they were unprepared to oppose him.

Cronus could barely believe that he had actually gone through with his plan to kill his father, but he was sure that he would fight his siblings to the death had they challenged him.

***

With his ascendancy to the position of the supreme ruler of the universe unchallenged, Cronus wobbled home to rest.

The killing of his father left him exhausted, both physically and mentally. He dropped like a sack of potatoes onto his chair when he got back to his house. There he sat, motionlessly and emotionlessly, for days afterward. His mind went blank and his body went limp. His eyes saw everything and his ears heard everything yet his mind registered nothing. During those days, Cronus was more dead than alive. Had anyone attempted on the new king’s life, the assassin would have been successful.

Strength of mind and body gradually returned to Cronus, and with it came a sense of guilt and shame. He knew he would forever be known as the murderer of his own father and the usurper of his throne. The guilt and the shame began to cause him pains and force him to ask questions: Why did he allow himself to be coerced into murdering his father? Why did he not fight harder against his mother’s murderous intent?

Because he couldn’t. Because that miserable, murderous, manipulative woman had set things in motion that left him with exactly one choice: kill or be killed. The more Cronus thought about the killing--the more he rationalized away his guilt, the stronger he felt. He did not do anything wrong, he had to do what was best for himself. Life’s highest duty and honor was to preserve itself, was it not? Everyone would have had done the same thing under the circumstances that he found himself in; it was not his fault whatsoever. He was not a willing murderer of his own father. He did what he had to do to survive; he was as much a victim as his father.

The real perpetrator was his mother and the real cause was the Hecatonchires. He did love them once, but no more. Why did they have to be born? Why did they have to look that hideous? Why did they not realize their hideousness and stay away from their father? Why did ugly people insist upon being treated the same as the beautiful? Why did she have to love them that much--enough to endanger his life, enough to kill his father? Was he not also her son?

Determining that his mother was the perpetrator and the Hecatonchires the cause left Cronus relieved and angry. It was not a raging, burning, or boiling anger that demanded immediate action, however. It was a deep, determined anger that required a steady, thoughtful, calculated long-term plan to accomplish that which would soothe its stone-cold fury. It was the kind of anger that wanted to see the enemy die in a slow, agonizing death rather than the kind of anger that wanted to see the enemy torn into pieces at its moment of white-hot fury. He resolved to make his mother irrelevant and the Hecatonchires withered. He would ignore his mother and treat her as the miserable, pitiful woman she was, and leave the Hecatonchires to suffer, from now to eternity, for being the cause of his father’s death.

The more Cronus thought about what he was going to do, the more he liked it. With his mind made up, it did not take long for him to recover fully from the trauma of his father’s killing. Cronus re-emerged as the powerful, glorious king of the gods, as a king who inspired respect and fear.

***

Normalcy did not return to the Titans’ lives until many months later. One day Gaia came to Cronus and said, “My Lord and Child, it’s been several months since you freed us from your father’s petty tyranny. Is it not time to free your own brothers Kottos, Briareos, and Gyges from their prison?”

To which Cronus answered mockingly, “My dear Mother, you are right. My brothers should be freed because, after all, I killed Father to free them too. They have been waiting for a long time and they have been withering, too. They must look much more hideous now than they did before, as a result of living in a deep, dark cavern. But I am certain that they can wait a lot longer, Mother, because they shall have to. And they might even have to learn to love living in a deep, dark cavern where the sun never shines. I promise you, Mother, I shall free them when they no longer remind me of what we did to Father.”

“Please free them as soon as the time comes, for I love them as much as I love you.”

With that Gaia left. She was so shocked at how her son had treated her that she couldn’t think of what else to say. She already knew that Cronus had decided not to free his ugly brothers.