by A. J. Rocca
Well, let us be the first to congratulate you: may they live, dear aunt, may they live! We know you did not believe you’d conceive again since the last of your children was born, and you have changed much since then: the molten flush of first youth is gone, and the waters recede to expose cracks, crags. Do you doubt your powers to bear healthy Titans again? Oh, sweet aunt, may they live, may they live, may they live!
But will they live? Are you sure you wish to ask us that? Then listen: you shall never give birth to another Titan again. The three inside you now shall be called Hecatoncheires, fifty-headed, hundred-handed apples of your eye. None like them has there ever been before. Not even we three Moirai can fully apprehend them. But we can offer you a glimpse. Let us part time’s weave and tell you what to expect from these most unexpected children.
#
As you complete your precession and Vega becomes the polestar again, your Hecatoncheires are barely the size of Ithaca. Even now they drift up from your core, riding convections of your hot, inner current towards the surface. Can you feel them coming, your three little questers? Already they start to take form. Aether meets Earth, his quintessence combining with yours into quartzes, feldspars, pyroxenes, micas. Then begins the work of division: division into tops and bottoms, division into torso, arms and legs, division into livers, lungs, intestines, brains.
This is just how it happened with your Titans, of course, but your Hectatoncheires are different. They divide further and faster in the most unpredictable ways. Each one is an infant fractal dipping tips of little branching buds and limbs into liquid infinity.
#
At six precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are about the size of the largest of the Cyclades. By now, they have finished their journey up from your core and implanted into your lithosphere. Each is encased in its own plutonic sac, gradually expanding to displace the surrounding limestone and shale as your molten blood is piped in hot to feed them. Slowly their outer layers cool into coarse-grained granite, and already there are some distinguishing marks: one glints with silvery veins of crystallized galena, another receives an extra infusion of muscovite to speckle him over a delightful rosy pink, maybe. Mostly, though, they are still inchoate: as their bodies cool, they reveal a shifting landscape of hills and cliffs, jagged promontories jutting out into magmatic seas. The whole fetal mass shivers with regular quakes: their little hearts beating just beneath the surface.
On your own surface, new river valleys form in the places where the bedrock bulges to make room for them. Volcanic activity must cease in order to save nutrients for your growing Hecatoncheires. Their father finally notices after several thousand years without eruption.
#
At sixteen precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are about the size of Lesbos. They now begin to take on more definite form: their hills yawn open and blink eyes of garnet, eyes of topaz, eyes of tourmaline perhaps. Their promontories shape themselves into corded flesh and fingers, this one swatting while that one’s grasping while this other’s curled in sleep. As they grow, your plates shift steadily to move them up towards birth. You feel these many brave new limbs jab and kick below. They have a knack for sticking you in your faults right when you’re trying to sleep.
As their father falls to embrace you, he feels the hundreds of little quakes across your surface. He wonders just how many children you’re planning to give him.
#
At thirty precessions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are each the size of Crete and ready to be born! It shall be a long process. Your grounds shall convulse with each contraction, ripping Europa wide. A chasm splits down your eastern plains, and finally the first head crowns in a burst of agony and shale; we regret to inform you that you still have 149 heads to go. A thousand summers wash over them as they come. Rich layers of topsoil form, and ash and spruce take root upon the slopes of chubby cheeks. Adders, badgers, finches, foxes burrow under eyelids still shut in prenatal sleep. Entire graveyards fill their shadows.
Eventually the last head crowns, and they are born the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen. Enjoy this moment — it will not last long, and the rebirth will be harder.
#
At thirty-two precessions pregnant we must leave the islands, for now your Hecatoncheires are each the size of the Peloponnese. You shall feel every cubit of their dimensions as they’re forced back inside you. Their father refuses to believe your Hecatoncheires are his. You do not need us to tell you of his pride: the shining, perfect orbs studded across his silk black frame, revolving in precision to the slow music of his sleek and lusty self. Nothing he does is ungraceful, nor does he surprise; even his orgasms are solstice-timed. These new children do not reflect him the way he wants to be seen.
He blames you for this chaos of limbs and squalling heads.
He accuses you of cheating with Tartarus.
He names them bastards unworthy of his starry light.
He forces them back down your deepest trench.
Into the dark and crushing heat they plunge, as deep as he can make them go. His aim is to undo them using the same furnace from which they were forged. The pressure builds, and it’s terrible for mother and child alike. Again you shall feel their many arms beneath your skin, but now it’s desperate flailing. They punch, they kick, they rip open your veins with their 150 shard-toothed heads. You feel their screams in your very bones.
But you, dear aunt, do not scream. You keep silent and plot revenge.
#
At thirty-six processions pregnant, your Hecatoncheires are each their own Hellas. Volcanoes open to vent pressure around the spot where they’ve been forced down: open, angry sores constantly weeping into your oceans. From these you gather the obsidian to knap a sickle for your son—Hyperion, or maybe Cronus, we are not sure; we can barely glimpse him for the burning brightness of his fury. With one fell sweep, your son robs his father the power to make more children to abuse. Victorious, he forces a golden age. Grains and lives will both grow long before falling to his sickle’s sweep. Chaos is banished, ugliness erased, ambition swallowed squirming. He measures his kingdom in perfect circles. Creation dances, and he counts the time.
But, alas, you are twice betrayed. Like the father he hates, your son cannot bear his sibling Hecatoncheires. He cannot imagine a place in paradise for these wild, writhing bodies, and so in your dark and deep they must remain. Superheated magma presses in all around them, but they do not succumb. Instead, they change. Their flesh warps into banded gneiss and greenschist. Jagged shards of rubies, jaspers, lapis lazuli spot them. Their hearts turn diamond-hard.
#
At forty processions pregnant, the pressure is finally too much and your belly bursts. The blast throws pyroclastic clouds in the air that block the sun and charge the skies. Ash and lapilli rain down, and your spilling entrails boil seas, kill continents. At the bottom of the new caldera are three great, terrific things each swelled up the size of Asia Minor. So much you’ve suffered, wretched aunt, but at last your Hecatoncheires are freed! They climb to the top of the great crater and find at last an ally waiting. This new conqueror pulls lightning from these hellborn skies and helps your Hecatoncheires up from the depths. He does not see their beauty. To him they’re monsters, but he’ll suffer monsters to walk an earth he gets to rule. And so is set the stage for war.
Beyond this we can say no more. Futures can only ever be seen in natal form, gestating in the womb of present time. We can scarcely imagine a world in which your Hecatoncheires stand free and fully formed and shudder to think of the wonders to be worked by their many fearsome arms. Will mercy still exist in hearts pressed to hardest stone? We cannot know. All we know for certain is that there’s nothing that can stop them.
So congratulations, dearest aunt. Your children are coming.
~
Bio:
A.J. Rocca is an English instructor and journalist from The Republic of Forgottonia (also known as Western Illinois). He specialized in the study of speculative fiction while pursuing his MA, and now he writes both SFF criticism as well as his own fiction. You can find more of A.J.’s work collected on his website: theymightbewindmills.com
Philosophy Note:
Ever since my wife first became pregnant, I have been haunted by these lines from On Children by Kahlil Gibran: “You may house their bodies but not their souls, / For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.” A big part of being a parent, I’ve found, is anxiety over what that unfathomable house of tomorrow might contain. Even during the pregnancy itself, we were constantly looking for little signs that the baby would be okay and for the germ of the person she might become. Websites and books like What to Expect When You’re Expecting exist to scratch this itch in future parents.
I wrote this story in the last month of the pregnancy to unfold the epic dimension of what drives new parents to those silly pastel pink and blue websites, which compare the growing fetus to different kinds of fruit. It’s no less than the desire to know fate, and if that’s not a theme fit for Greek myth, then I don’t know what is.
