Atlas Ascends

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I am Atlas of the Mountain.

In the stratagem of battle I was second only to Cronus, our king. With my guidance, Cronus led our kin into war and waged heavenly slaughter.

But when the Olympians defeated Cronus and sought to strike me down, I was swift to surrender – scrambling for sovereignty over a more putrid punishment. I remained free while my kin fought on and into doom. The Titanomachy, the primordial battle between the Titans and the Olympians, was ended, and the Olympian gods meted their retribution as promised.

Cronus was brought before Zeus, his son and successor. He was strung upon Zeus’s cosmic spindle, and Zeus spun him around and around and around – skin tearing, muscles bending, bones breaking, mind mangling. And so Cronus was spun into thread – a fine, golden thread that glistened in the darkness of a proto-world torn apart by the Titanomachy. The spindle was passed to the Moirai, the Fates. They wove a tapestry with the string that had been king, and henceforth the fabric of Time began.

Hyperion was brought before Poseidon, and he was engulfed in the fires of the forge. It roasted and rendered him into a dark, raging ball that was his soul – a shining, shimmering obsidian orb, in which Hyperion’s screams of agony were reduced to a whining hymn. So Poseidon struck the orb with his three-pronged tine, and Hyperion exploded into cascading oratorio. His angers, his musics, inflated wide into the cosmos to match his ego, and henceforth the symphony of Space began.

Coeus and Crius were brought before Demeter – as was her right for what they had done. She took the Sickle of Cronus and castrated them, quartered their bodies, and then in her rage she swung the sickle back and forth, back and forth. So Coeus and Crius were sliced into a thousand trillion wriggling pieces; still Demeter swung her sickle, until the titans two were a seething sea of energy and mass. She poured their entrails into the expanding Hyperion. The pieces of Coeus and Crius, light and dark, surged across the infant Universe, and henceforth the song and dance of Matter began.

Iapetus, my father, was brought before Hades. He was heaved towards the upturned Helm of Hades, a large iron basin at the bottom of the world, filled with the oily waters of the River Styx. Hades pitched Iapetus headfirst into the basin’s broth; and there his body boiled as Hades held him still. His soul dissolved into the acids of the Styx, leaving his body a small, crusted pit stuck fast to the Helm – but still my father survived in the waters. Hades emptied the living, milky spirits of Iapetus into the halls of Time, Space and Matter, hallowing them.

Tears are funny to me; they make their presence known well before they arrive and yet arrive suddenly all the same, and upon your skin they are cold like slim cuts of a dagger down your cheeks.

At last, the turn was mine. I had been crafty, I thought, to have stood with my kin but avoided the blame and the putrid punishment. I had known when our time was up and it was time to broker peace. I had chosen the path of dignity.

Zeus himself came to me. He spoke in a sublime and benevolent voice – as an equal, I thought. He brought me to the rim of the infant Universe.

“Do you see the world we have wrought?” he said. “Do you see its chaos and infirmity? Do you see how your kin writhe?”

I saw.

“Now, do you see what is above them all? Above Cronus and my thunderbolt-spindle? Above Hyperion and his horrid verse? Above Coeus and Crius and their axial anguish? Above even your father? Do you see the Sky?”

I strained my eyes, and I saw it. A swirling place, pure, untouched by the frenzy of the Titans – a captivating vista, bearing down on the burdens below. The two of us stood alone before its majesty.

“That is our celestial heaven, born out of the asymmetry with the blood of the Universe.” Zeus, the new king, turned to me. “Before our war with the Titans, I swore that any god who sided against Cronus would retain their old titles under my rule. This I have done for all such gods, and you are my last. You fought for Cronus at the onset of this war, yet your heart was changed and you saw the prudence in my sovereignty. For that I am glad, and I bestow upon you now a special honour – if you are willing to take it – with my sincerity as Zeus Areius, the atoning god, for the grievances we have caused.”

I bowed, but my lips were taut as I hid my secret joy. “I accept this gladly, and I am honoured to stand beside you in our sovereignty.”

Zeus did not reply.

He took me into the Universe, to a rocky planet besmirched by fire. “This planet is Mount Olympus. It is the bridge between the Sky and the Universe. Without it, the Sky would topple upon the Universe and both realms would be destroyed together – a mutual annihilation.”

I bent down and touched the dirt and rock of Olympus with my bare hands. It felt warm and soft… Like home.

“My father is here,” I said. “His essence.”

Zeus raised his arms. “Your father is everywhere; as are the rest of your kin, serving the punishments they were given.”

A tremor hit the planet, and the land shook viciously. The Sky above, roiling in its plasma, careened about Mount Olympus with increasing fervour.

Zeus warned, “Mount Olympus cannot take the weight of the Sky alone. The Sky shall soon come crashing down on your kin and end them all – and us.”

I knew what I must do. I knelt before Zeus Areius and swore my unending fealty. I swore to atone for my transgressions against the Olympians and defend both their kin and my kin. I swore to hold the Sky as my sovereignty, the most important honour in all creation, for the mutual love of all that lived and was yet to live; as Atlas of the Mountain; as Atlas Telamon; as Atlas Enduring – until the thread of Cronus was spent.

For the first time, Zeus smiled. Then he laughed, a bitterness turned sweet and luscious.

“Farewell, Atlas Telamon.” And without another word he rose into his heaven.

“I shall be seeing you soon?” I asked, still kneeling. There was no response.

And then the Sky came crashing down upon my shoulders. I bore it with my back and pressed on it with my hands. Hard as rock it was, yet soft as silk. Its bulk stretched beyond my comprehension.

I tried to stand. The Sky did not budge. The Mountain was unyielding. I tried to ease the pressure on my spine, but my hold upon the Sky waned and I felt it about to crush me. I tried even to move, but one shift of my pinky brought the whole world a-trembling.

Was I free to leave? Was this a test of loyalty? Would Zeus come swiftly back to say that I had passed, and I could ascend? To join his ranks as part of the Olympian pantheon?

“Zeus,” I cried. “What have you done? What have I promised you?”

But I heard nothing – nothing but the echoed memory of his laugh, dark like his father before him. There was a terrible, terrible silence in the Universe.

The burden grew. My muscles shivered and shook. It was as heavy as the weight of the Olympians above me, as heavy as the sins of my kin below me. Sweat dripped from my forehead and soaked into the ground at my feet, swirling with the concentrated spirits of my father that lay there.

I knelt, waiting for someone to return. Zeus, magnanimous, would surely return with someone to bear the load with me? To take turns?

Perhaps he would return with his pantheon. They would celebrate here on Mount Olympus and give toast to their victory – our victory.

Perhaps he would bring my fellow Titans, my brethren. There were those who joined Zeus well before the fighting began: Oceanus and Tethys of the cosmic rivers; Helios and Selene of the celestial lights; Mnemosyne and Themis of the all-knowing laws. And of course there were my brothers, Prometheus and Epimetheus. They all had sided with Zeus, like me! Like me…

Tears are funny indeed. The dagger cut like a scythe on my skin.

Years passed and passed overhead. As I suffered under the weight of the Sky, I had begun to hear the Titans that writhed below me. I could hear Cronus on Zeus’s thunderbolt-spindle – a lame, old madman as the Fates spun his destiny into fabric. I could hear Hyperion’s song – a pining tinnitus that rang like a battle hymn. I could hear Coeus and Crius, mindless, and I could bear witness to the miracles they made: planets and moons, comets and meteors, stardust and supernovae – miracular, but mindless. I could hear my father – but only in the recesses of my memory. I could feel him only in the coagulated spirits layered across Mount Olympus. I could hear all my kin, dying in the dark as the Olympians lived in the light. I existed in a world wrought of sin.

Zeus had tricked me. It had taken me nigh on a thousand years to realise it. My blood boiled. I heaved my chest to swear a terrible oath at Zeus, son of Cronus – but at once the Sky shimmied out of my grip and forced me back into my kneeling pose. The sky had frozen me in the act of pledging myself to Zeus’s servitude.

Now I imagined the Olympians in the Sky laughing at my expense as they partied in their palaces:

“What did you tell him, Zeus? That it was a special honour? And he believed you?”

“What was it that he called himself? Atlas Enduring?”

“Did he say he would stand beside us in our sovereignty? Beside us? The gall…”

Or maybe – and an icy cold filled my heart – they were not talking about me at all. Perhaps none of them were. Perhaps Zeus had not told the other Olympians what he had done to me. Perhaps Zeus had forgotten completely about me. To him, I had been just another Titan to tie up like Cronus on his spindle.

No one was coming for me.

I called for help, spittle flying, but could not shout. I grew angry, sweat pouring, but could not rage. I cried, tears falling, but could not sob. Because shouting and raging and sobbing were emotions too noisy for the Sky, my sovereignty, and then it would all come crashing down. The Olympians in their high towers would fall, and the Titans in their squalor would be crushed.

And would the gods not deserve it?

But if I were to drop the Sky and end it all, it would kill what little family I had left. Even if they did not know it, I was saving them. I was saving them for the rest of their lives and mine. And they would never know it.

They would never know it.

The weight of the Sky was not what pained me, even as years turned into centuries, into millennia. It was the way it hung in my heart – lowly, sunken, yet empty. It was a ball of ice in my chest, chilling and killing me. I could let go at any moment, and it would all be over.

But something stayed my hand.

Something moved on Mount Olympus. Carefully, I inched my eyes down to my feet. Far, far below, the planet had been transformed. My tears, my sweat, my spittle, had rained down in plumes across the planet. All of Olympus’s fire was gone, replaced now by water. And under the planet’s surface – layered, latent – were the concentrated pockets of the essence of Iapetus, that had come here eons ago when Hades had emptied his Helm into these halls to hallow them. And as the fluids of my torment and of Iapetus combined – the joint pain of father and son – something became more than just essence.

Something wriggled and arose at my feet.

Henceforth, the tragedy of mortal Life begins.