While the Olympians worry about the coming Gigantomachy, one primordial was worrying about the fate of the cosmos itself.
Deep withing a forgotten forest, night had fallen.
Not simply over the mortal realm, but across the tapestry of the world’s soul.
A silence, ancient and heavy, rolled like mist over mountains, through valleys, across cities where gods no longer walked and mortals prayed more out of habit than faith.
And in this silence, Nyx moved.
She did not fly or walk, for those were crude motions.
She unfolded, slipping through the layered veils of reality like ink through water.
It has been centuries since she last felt it, and she had never rested searching for it, but she had not found a clue.
That entity that slipped through thr cracks of the universe that was formed due to the battle between Hades and Uranus during the Titanomachy.
For centuries, she had sensed nothing but whispers. Murmurs in forgotten tombs, chill winds where none should be.
But years ago, she felt something.
He was nothing, at first glance. Thin, young, cloaked in threadbare robes, his home a crumbling stone tower at the edge of a dying village.
But his mind—Nyx could feel that this mortal comprehends knowledge beyond the current era.
He had not just abandoned belief in the gods. That was not uncommon. Many mortals did in this age.
No, this man had begun to write new laws—not of divinity, but of mechanics, of logics, of the very nature of the world.
His thoughts moved like rivers unseen, carving through future centuries.
With chalk and ink and charcoal, he sketched machines that had not yet been dreamed—gears that turned without fire, harnessed lightning in wires, used pressure to store and unleash force.
He wrote formulae that described the curvature of light and matter.
He measured time with precision only the gods possessed.
He called the stars by names no mortal had ever spoken. He whispered of "gravitational constants" and "wave duality" as if they were common terms.
And more troubling than anything, he predicted things—truths buried so deeply in the nature of this world that only beings like Prometheus or Nyx herself had ever come close to understanding them.
And if he had been allowed to live, his inventions would have dragged humanity out of superstition and starlight and into a world of steel and thought.
His very presence tilted the path of history. The world—the universe—should have responded with awe.
He was called mad. Not by the fools or the fearful, but by priests, scholars, kings. As though something whispered behind their ears, twisting admiration into revulsion.
They chained him in a town square, tore his papers to ash, and silenced his mind with fire.
As his body burned, he laughed—not from madness, but defiance.
And when he died, Nyx, hidden in shadow above, saw the way the sky shimmered, as if sighing in relief.
She narrowed her eyes.
"That man ... shouldn’t exist."
She descended then, not to intervene—too late for that—but to touch the ashes of his work.
They should have been mundane, and yet, what she saw was beyond that.
Because there, amid the cinders, were sigils. Incomprehensible, old, ancient, and ’wrong’ sigils that seems to have not come from this world.
A pattern older than this universe, a taste of something alien.
Nyx stood silently as the wind blew the ashes away, her hair cascading behind her like a sea of midnight.
Then, she moved. Faster than time, her consciousness expanded, casting her awareness over the world.
And she began to see it.
Incidents. Moments. Anomalies.
In the deserts of the south, a child born blind began carving star charts that predicted comets that wouldn’t appear for a thousand years.
In a snow-choked valley, an old woman dreamt of numbers and awoke to build a machine of copper and ice that spun endlessly on its own.
In a jungle swallowed by vines, a tribe constructed aqueducts and generators with no source of knowledge or outside influence.
Each time, progress bloomed too fast.
Each time, progress was snuffed out just as quickly.
Floods. Fires. Invasions. Executions. Murders. Coincidence upon coincidence.
"Something..." she whispered, standing atop a mountain of shadows, "...wants them to advance."
But not out of kindness. Not like Prometheus, who gifted fire in defiance of fate.
No, this was acceleration. Like rushing a fruit to ripen faster than it should be.
Something, or someo was fattening the mortal world for slaughter.
And she knew exactly who is the culprit.
She clenched her jaw and raised her hand.
"Erebus." She called out.
From behind her, space seemed to crack as her child, her brother, her mirror, rose from the folds of night.
Erebus was the breath of shadow, the ink between thoughts. Where Nyx was the queen of quiet, Erebus was the void behind sound.
"You summoned me, sister," he said, his voice a tremor beneath the world.
"I need you to watch the mortals. Closely. Something is stirring. Knowledge not accessible for this era has been planted into the minds of mortals, as if trying to use those knowledge to accelerate humanity’s advancements."
Erebus tilted his head, his hollow gaze seeing what few could bear to witness.
"I see. You want me to observe because you believe it has begun to act?"
Erebus nodded, giving no argument. "Very well, I shall observe the mortal world as you have instructed sister."
He stepped backward and vanished—his presence folding into a shadow that slipped beneath time, beneath cities, beneath every stone cast and story told.
Nyx remained alone atop her mountain of dusk.
Her thoughts turned grim.
"So... you finally decided to make a move."
The stars above seemed to twitch, subtly wrong in their rhythm.
And Nyx, who had walked through the womb of the universe before Chaos herself sang, whispered to no one but the dark.
"Since you have shown your tail, you better be ready for it to be grabbed. I will eliminate your kind that dared to invade my territory."