ADRASTEIA (OF INEVITABILITY) by DRAKE SPARO
A child god who is destined to destroy the world grows up, seen through his caretaker's eyes.
They had no name for what he was, or what he was to be. Not at the time. But like all names, they had to be given. Zeus, many called him. Judgment, others. Tyrant and rapist, others still. They say that I should have killed the boy in his crib. For even when he exploded the cerulean sky with spears of alabaster lightning, when the air ignited with fire as hot as the sun, when the heavens themselves bled wine-colored seas into the crevices of the world, when the earth shook to the very foundations and peeled back to reveal a pit as black as Night herself, from where awful horrors spilled forth; even then, I did not regret what I did.
***
His mother came to us with him before the oceans had formed, and the first sunrise embraced the earth in cinnabar warmth. Hair of fire and emerald-eyed, she was a titan like us, one who had seen the creation of the world; one who had helped see it forged, but we were mere insects to her greatness. As the seedling resembles the mighty oak. It was worse than that—we had no chance of ever growing to her heights.
He was a little boy with skin the color of fresh-forged bronze and hair of the purest gold. Each strand curled perfectly over his face, and when he cried, the earth of our halls seemed to weep with him. His mother trusted us—me, and my sister Ida—to his care. We were his nurses. Our she-goat fed him; Amaltheia she came to be known as—that which cannot be weak.
We watched him grow, aware of his destiny, but powerless to alter its course. Our halls echoed with his thunderous cry, the walls themselves trembling. He danced below the high gilded arches, through rooms of warm gray stone close to the heart of the earth, sheathed in our tapestries and our carpets. We believed those walls could contain him, protect him, just enough. And perhaps we could teach him.
Just as the sparrow finds the cave to nest and retract its wings and raise its young, in those days we hid beneath the earth, out of sight, weaving cloth and staking the garden. We taught him words, the language of the titans. We sung him songs, Ida better than I, of the golden age of the world. We spoke images into his mind, of kingdoms of plenty; milk, honey, and ambrosia, the immortal succor that sustains us. A world we had once known. In those days, the fields grew in matter of days, but they always required a tender hand. He was like that, too. Or so we believed.
One day he came to us, and said, “Mark me: I shall take the world as my bride.”
I looked at my sister and thought nothing of it. Running my fingers through his hair, I said, “Silly boy, go play with the goats.” Turnips and beans bubbled over the hearth, wafting with lemon balm and pepper. “Your dinner is not ready yet.”
He waddled off, and Ida played with the sleeve of her dress.
“What if he speaks the truth?”
The question hung in the air.
In opposition perhaps to the stillness that visited the land in those days, after Kronos had supplanted his father and seized the yoke of the world, we tried to make every day glorious. Song filled our halls—I played the reed pipes, while Ida sang—and the little boy danced. Our halls might have been under the earth, but they were not cold. A fire always burned in the hearth, and the floor warmed our bare feet the color of poured bronze.
We taught him how to play, and soon his talent exceeded our own. He sang of strolling among flowers. His brothers and sisters trailed beside him. Then the flowers would burn, singe to ash, and ash would fill the world. Blood would pour from the heavens, and the earth would split open. He would reign supreme on the dead bones of his father and take his spoils from among those still living.
I shall take the World as my bride.
I broke the reeds after that, and there was no more singing.
We set about showing him how to care for himself. How to make things, how to create. If he knew how to create, we thought, he would not be quickly inclined to destroy. To take. The soothing rhythm of my push loom click-clacked, and Ida’s gold sewing needle, sharper than the edge between good and evil, pitched between the threads of twenty tapestries. We sewed great underlying patterns of water; the lifeblood of rivers. Meanders and curls. Nymphs we were, daughters of Okeanos, and water swam in our veins.
Like most things, he took to the talent effortlessly. But patience was not his virtue. Each thread of the loom needed to be looped individually through the eye. And there were hundreds of eyes. Tapestries were no better. To get the finest pile, we worked with threads as thin as hairs. After a long day of resetting the threads, he screeched and the walls wobbled, then he snapped the loom in two with a single blow, and he threw the tapestries on the fire.
***
His mother visited when he was six, all fire-hair and motherly fury. We asked her, “Why us? Why not hide him with great Helios, behind the sun? Or with Okeanos, in his deepest depths?”
She cared for our question much like the master cares for the musings of his servant.
“Where is my prince?”
We shewed her our care: vividness in his skin and rosiness in his cheeks. He had eaten well and grown strong in her absence. Deep though we were, near the bowels of the earth, we wanted to prove to ourselves as well as her that life could be lived here. Joy could be found.
She tore the flower crown Ida had woven for him from his head.
“A crown of gold befits my son,” she said, casting it down. “And a crown he shall have. Not these… weeds.”
“Apologies, my lady,” Ida said.
She shooed us from the room and shut the door. We did not know what she said, or whether he said anything in return. Whether he was required to say anything, or if she governed his world as well as ours. Yoked to the daughter of Gaia, the titan that had birthed existence itself. I suppose we are all beholden to our parents in some way. Life and breath were gifts given to us in those days, and they are even more so, now.
“She worries for her son,” I reasoned. “She knows what destiny lies ahead of him like the arrow in flight. It is inevitable. Fate cannot be changed, as much as we would like it to be.”
Tears formed blue crystals on Ida’s eyes, though the words came steady. “Then we must protect him as much as we can.”
The ball I made from the body of an old goat that dropped dead in the paddock. Pale leather stretched tight over dried guts, sewn up; I gave it to him as the father hands over his daughter to be married. He threw that ball so hard and so many times at the walls it left divots. His love for the thing made me grin.
“Do not tell your mother about it and hide it when she visits,” I told him. “You do not want her to take it from you, do you?”
The laughter he drew from it filled my heart with joy, and I would not allow her to steal it from him.
He shook his head vigorously. “Never.”
I should have realized in that moment he learned how to lie.
***
Kronos’ ire turned on the earth, and he sent his followers all over the wine-dark sea and the gray land to find us. Titans pulled up continents and lifted seas. We knew that Kronos would find us eventually, as time wears down even the tallest mountains.
Near the entrance to our cave, we felt a strange presence. Like someone watched us as we tilled the soil of the fields and milked the goats. Though my hands needled in fear, and my legs turned to liquid, I called out.
“Reveal yourself,” I said. “We would invite you inside. We have plenty of ambrosia, nectar to satiate you.”
Knowing they could not choose to hide their true form inside our home, just as the brown leaves could not choose to stay on the tree in autumn, they fled. I only saw the flicker of a shadow as it sped out of the canyon where the cave’s mouth stood. The sky was black—Helios came to his role whenever he felt like it, then—so I lost sight of it immediately. Whoever they were, they were fast.
Realizing at that moment that his father would never stop hunting for him, we moved the goats and the sheep inside, and put rocks in front of the entrance to the cave.
“You can never go outside,” we told him. “We forbid it.”
Pleased with the novelty, the little boy bellowed and thundered down the halls, shouting to the hearth and the tapestries and anyone who would listen that he was forbidden from leaving. He deafened some of the sheep, whom, ever after, trailed behind the others. He was still young, then, of course, and did not understand. He did not understand our fear, the looks we gave each other when we heard scratching on the walls, or felt the earth move, as though Kronos might reach down at any moment and lift the top off our halls, kill us both, and take back his son. Eat him as he did his other children.
One day when he was seven, the ball left his hands and did not return. It always returned, but this time it did not. He screamed and tore through the marble walls, dug up the ground, ransacked our kitchen. I was heartbroken when I heard his inconsolable cries. They echoed through our palace, rippling the foundations and threatening to bring the whole thing toppling down. We stopped our home from crumbling, but we could not stop him crying, and the ball was never found.
I retreated to the entrance of the cave, hoping for some reprieve to his crying, when I heard scratching on the walls. My heart reached into my throat and the back of my legs prickled in fear. They had found us, called by his cries like the field mouse called the owl with its rustling in the grass.
Racing back to the hearth, I snatched up a pot and a wooden ladle, and started banging. If I could not stop him crying, maybe I could drown out the noise. Ida slapped her hands over her ears. The noise echoed down the hall, loud off the stone walls in resonance, but I needed to make it louder. This little god wouldn’t be eaten by his father, not if I could help it.
Unblocking the entrance with a flick of my wrist——I peered out. In the sky above winged creatures circled, nasty things with hooks for hands. Kronos’s creations, his thralls. They screeched and wheeled in the sky, their wings black like thoughts of death.
I stepped out and smacked the pot, over and over again. The creatures dove down and wheeled about me, snarling, inspecting me with their hooded yellow eyes. Claws as long as sickles pushed out from their lithe arms, deadly and keen. I kept banging. This boy would not be the death of me and my sister.
“You will find naught but dissatisfaction with your intrusion, here. I shall tell your master of your visitation, without invitation, and he shall be horrified. Go on, before I tell him, go away! Find another cave to haunt.”
They screamed and flew off, like pheasants staring down the hunter’s bow, until they were naught but dark shapes in the sky, and they finally winked over the horizon. I looked down and blinked in horror. The ladle had snapped in two, and the pot had a crack in it.
***
Years passed, and eventually the boy forgot the ball, and made a new game of riding the ram, using the horns as his reins. They chased down every hall, chased my sister, who would encourage his games, while I kept the house in order. His limbs had lengthened, and his chest had grown outwards, and though he was only twelve, he looked like a hero that slayed monsters.
I do not know when he learned how to change his form, but one day I was grooming the sheep, trimming their tails, and I saw a giant bull in the paddock. The color of whitest milk and standing as tall as two regular bulls, I cried seeing him, for he had learned duplicity. Duplicity the color of the palest alabaster, prized muscles, and eyes of precious rubies—that was why I cried. Even his lies came like priceless treasures. Yet he had learned this from us. I remembered what I said to him about the ball.
Do not tell your mother about it.
But perhaps it was inevitable.
***
Iapetos announced himself from outside the mouth of the cave, and changed everything. He laid his spear, helmet, and shield aside and presented his arms wide so as to not look a threat. Gold of skin and lustrous of hair, his eyes flashed with quickness and wit. The father of Prometheus, ender of ages. Apples do not fall far from the tree, and though I knew not of his son’s destiny at the time, there was a deep weir of imagination and curiosity within him. I also knew it was inevitable that Kronos would send him, eventually.
I smiled when I saw him. Rhea’s love of her brother extended to our goodwill, as she was our patron. We could not refuse him, and Kronos knew this.
“I bear you gentle nymphs not ill,” he said. “I swear a solemn oath on my father, elemental Sky, that no harm will come to you should you invite me in.”
“You think we’ll invite you in?” Ida said. I smirked and folded my arms, wanting to hear his answer.
“I did not travel so far to be refused, but such is your right as the host.”
The laws of hospitality were as essential to our existence as breath given from great Gaia. Eschewing them was like preventing fate..
I clicked my tongue. “Make it quick, Iapetos.”
We came to the table next to the hearth, where the fire blazed and the floor warmed our bare feet. Juicy new lamb roasted over the coals, with marinade of honey and rosemary. Ida entertained the boy with the lyre, and they sang so that Iapetos and I could talk. They sang of a mother and son who visited a river—a mortal song.
He did not eat, I remember, though he thanked us for our hospitality with a gift, producing it from a sack he had brought with him. A flat gray stone. There was nothing remarkable about it—perhaps it was remarkable because it had no marks whatsoever. It was completely plain and smooth, as though it had been sitting in a riverbed for many years. I was not sure what to make of it. It took up no more than the broad part of my palm, and I wondered if he might not have been playing a trick.
“A guest usually brings a gift worth something,” I said. “Did you pick it up outside?”
“It is for the boy.” He looked at me flatly, and after a pause, said, “His grandmother entreated me I deliver it to him.”
We smiled. Gaia’s stratagems were well known.
“How are your sons, Iapetos?” I ate the lamb while he watched, and I dipped my fingers in the plentiful ambrosia as a chaser. “You have four, if I recall?”
He kicked up his feet on the table. His long legs flashed like flat-hammered bronze, and I bristled at his cheek.
“I invoke curses should I speak of my own children in anything other than positive ways, so I shall not.”
“Why are you here, son of Ouranos?”
“You assume I am here for something, and not just a visit? Do you see through me as though I were fine glass?”
“I do. I think that if you wore even the most polished, shining armor, I would still be able to see through you.”
“I am flattered the daughter of all the oceans thinks of me, in and out of armor.”
I ignored his barb, after a moment. “You are here to make a deal with me, which gives me power.”
He removed his feet from the table to lean forward. “Do you like having power over me?”
I stood. His was an impossible sort, so I set about to clean the hearth and dispose of the lamb carcass while I waited for him to reach his point. Iapetos came up behind me and placed his hand on my wrist. I could say I hated the imposition, but that would be a lie.
The song washed over us, Ida’s dulcet tones and the boy’s expert playing. The boy chased after the fish in the river, but all escaped him. He went deeper and deeper, until his waist was under the surface.
“Adrasteia,” he said, using my name. In all my life I had never been called by my name—it had only ever been nymph, or woman. I saw tears in his eyes.
“I’ve insulted you, and for that I ask for your forgiveness, and offer you a gift of my own: the truth. As my father, elemental Sky bears witness, it would be a wearisome business to tell you all I have been through to deceive my brother of our meeting.”
He fell to his knees, and though I was shocked, I rather enjoyed the prospect of one of the most powerful titans begging at my feet.
“Adrasteia, daughter of divine Okeanos, whom engirdles the world with his great ocean, I abase myself at your feet, and I make a last appeal to you for common sense. Hand over the child.”
I turned. Now I took issue. “You have dined with us, and I have fulfilled my obligation as host. It is time now for us to say our farewells.”
Iapetos’s hand tightened. I thought he might take liberties, but he saw my eyes flash with anger and released my wrist.
The boy went up to his neck in the water.
“Know that I do not ask lightly. He is just one boy. But if he lives, this age will end, and the world will be destroyed. War will destroy it, destroy everything. Our halls and our palaces. I will die, and the titans will be struck down. Have you so little care for me?”
“So, it is selfishness, then?”
“My own boys will be left without a father.” His voice was a low hiss. “I care for only one of them, who shares my love for mortals. Ill-advised perhaps, but I would give an intact world to him, if I can help it.”
The current pulled the boy under.
I left him by the hearth and went to clean the table. “You would seek to undo the fate of the world.”
He stood and threw a hand out. “The life of one boy for every titan that still lives.”
I scrubbed and scrubbed. “Change comes, and we cannot stop it. Kronos will get his retribution, as he deserves.”
“Then you have killed me and so many of our kin, as surely as if you were holding the blade to my throat.”
“You hold the blade to your own throat, by denying fate.”
“Then have it done, as elemental Sky is my father.”
“Perhaps I will castrate you as Kronos did your father.”
“Use my spear—I will hand it to you myself.”
“How can you take his side?”
“How can I take his side? I take no sides. I would end the cycle of violence. End this, now. He is only one boy. You would do no better than that in any fair trade.”
“You say fair trade, I say I would sooner trade away a limb. I cannot give away a child I nursed, cleaned, raised, taught, and loved. How could you ask me to do this? You would know—and for the love you bear your sons know that mine is just as deep. As deep as though the boy came from my own womb.”
The boy’s mother chased after him, and was dragged under the current with him, and they both drowned.
“And yet you ask for the sacrifice of mine own sons in futile war. I would not ask, otherwise. It means the end of the reign of the titans. The end of this golden age.”
“Then let it end.”
He looked down, shoulders slumped. “I had thought you to be reasonable, daughter of Okeanos.”
“Goodbye, son of Ouranos.”
When he turned to leave, he said something neatly under his breath. “Make him mortal, so that he might escape notice.”
He took up his spear and shield and helmet, and departed, taking the paths between the earth that only titans and gods know. That would be the last time I ever saw Iapetos, but his words stayed with me until long after he was gone.
Make him mortal.
When I returned to the main hall, Zeus and Ida were lounging at the table, laughing, and I asked them what was so entertaining. I had, after all, refused a genuine plea from a son of elemental Sky, one I could not easily see the wrong in, and I did not find myself in a tickled mood.
They pointed at the table, where I had rubbed the table so much it shined like a bright mirror.
***
The next day, Helios sat in the sky again, and cinnabar warmth fell on the land. Unbelievably dangerous as I think of it now, but I took Zeus outside, in opposition to his uncle's words. I wanted Helios and Iapetos and all the rest to see him, to see my defiance of Iapetos’s words and Kronos’s rule. It was selfish, yes. But how is a mother anything but selfish when it comes to the pride she feels in her child?
He went down to the river, and I followed. His golden limbs flashed in Helios’s light as he splashed in the water, and I imagined the jealousy that the titan felt looking upon his beauteous cousin, and I smiled. After swimming for a while, he took up a tree and bent it double—without splintering it—and put it over the water to use as a bridge. I gaped my mouth, and clapped in my pride for him.
Make him mortal.
Iapetos’s words again struck me like an arrow. What if I did make him mortal? Dumb and weak, not like a god nor a titan. Kronos would forget him since his destiny would become unfulfilled. He could live. And I could have a son. I shoved that thought to the back of my mind, but it came roaring back, a million trumpets clear and ringing.
I could have a son, forever.
Make him mortal.
“Step off that tree, and put it back, stupid boy. Know the only person you are impressing is yourself.”
He looked at me, puzzled.
“Listen to me.”
“I can do a trick, see—” He plucked a rabbit out of the grass by its neck. He increased its size, doubling it, and made it speak. I could have cried for the beauty of it.
I scolded him. “Now look what you have done. That rabbit’s line will die because it will scare off every mate that comes across its path. What kind of rabbit talks? Put it back, now.”
He frowned, confused. I had betrayed him. Iapetos sought to smother the boy’s divinity out of selfish preservation of titanic rule, and yet I let Iapetos’s words take hold of me. Desperation is a poor substitute for love.
I took his hand. “Come with me,” I said, and took him through the secret paths that titans used to traverse the earth, paths that the gods now use. We came to the beach where Kronos had thrown his father’s testicles, and looked out on that flat water, where the greenness of shore mixed irrevocably with the blue, unable to be tallied or riven apart.
“You will overthrow your father and castrate him just as he did your grandfather. I sought to prevent that, but for all my love, I was selfish, and weak. Not anymore. I will live in fear no longer. You will become the divine justice for Kronos that you were always meant to be, and I will show you.”
He embraced me, and I sobbed into his arms.
I imagined myself as Gaia, having created the world, proud of the potential that lay within it. I was immensely proud of what he had become, and what his future held.
Zeus did bring war to our world, and many of us were killed, and many more were imprisoned. Iapetos’s stone, through Gaia’s machinations, was swallowed by Kronos, and forced him into regurgitating his children. Zeus’s brothers and sisters. Those that took the side of the father lost, and I never saw Iapetos and his ilk again, nor those horrors with scythes for hands. No, I saw the wine-dark oceans boil, and all manner of creatures emerge from the uncovered seabed. Monsters with a hundred hands pulverized mountains and hauled apart the earth. My boy grew to be the god that I wanted him to be, but like the stubborn mule pulling against the yoke, his heels dragged another way, too.
Perhaps I should have done more. Or perhaps it is my nature. I act with inevitability, after all.