να πέσει, to fall

A deep inhale; and then a cry.

He was the first son to be born to the Lord Kronos. He vaguely remembers struggling to open his unproven eye lids and glimpsing the world he had been brought into for only a second.

A scream echoes through the air and he's snatched from his mother's breast and once again is met with darkness. But this was not the same comforting warmth as his mother's womb. It was a constricting plummet into an acidic cell. This enveloping damp pit within his father's stomach would be his home for what seemed an eternity.

Yet he was not the first to have endured such cruelty. Hestia had been the first to be plucked from their mother's embrace and swallowed like venison by their Lord Father. Demeter and Hera's fate had followed the same course as their eldest sister; his luck was no worse. Over the millennia, his mind and body matured. He began to believe they had all been abandoned; forgotten by those who had conceived them. It was not until much later that he learned the truth of his cruel fate.

A blinding light from the unknown above fell blaringly upon his blanched face and something tumbled down into their imprisonment. Another child had been born and hurled into their lurching pen. With the arrival of Poseidon, the likelihood of fleeing their perpetual chamber seemed unattainable.

He had expected another additive to their paternal band of hostages that had been formed in the bowels of their loving patriarch; but a rock, was not what he had anticipated. Surely, there had been a mistake of some sorts. For lying at their feet was a rock that had been swaddled in an infant's attire. It was then that he understood that some deception had been conspired presently. Hope and redemption had been pitched down into that despairing cavity that day; and he grasped onto that chance and awaited what was to come.

If you've never heard the sound of a Titan retching before, I'll try to explain: It sounds like a surge of wind and water toppling an entire continent. Think about a house being blown down by air and liquid; and then multiply that by a town. Then a city. Try a state. Now a country. It is the most petrifying noise that you will never hear; and he was in the center of it all.

If he was ever asked, he would say he didn't remember much of the war. There was a feeling of being rammed upwards; like a geyser jetting towards the air. He remembers looking up towards the sky and a heat spreading through his being and giving him the strength to stand. There, in full maturity were his siblings; all gods and goddesses bred with immeasurable and varying power. The one he did not recognize would be known as the King of the Gods, the Almighty Zeus.

The battle that ensued would be known as the Titanomachy; a decade of grueling bloodshed against their jailer. The only images he could recollect were familiar faces frozen in agony and the sound of metal slicing into flesh. He had almost gone mad through the fighting after only being ensnared for centuries in the belly of his enemy.

Finally pinned and defeated, he and his brothers began to hack away at their father's form. The Titan howled and writhed beneath his scythe's puncturing blade. But he reveled in his own father's anguish for each carve was a screeching triumph within. He sensed a darkness seep into his immortal soul and as the thrashing ceased, a malicious smile stole unto his scarred face.

Straws were drawn and he was cheated out of his birthright, but he was weary and took his claim with resentment bubbling there beneath his skin. As he turned and departed, a dark haze surrounded him and pulled at his very essence. The earth beneath his bare feet trembled and invited him into their depths. A cool ambience spread through his being and crept into his ever beating heart. Priceless metals and gems broke through the surface of the firm ground as he stalked by and retreated again when he was out of reach. He journeyed into the deepest reaches of the earth and there he began: Hades Aidoneus, the Lord of the Underworld.