The scream rent the sky and scalped the earth. Three miles away, a flock of three-hundred-sixty-one pigeons took startled flight. Waves of nearly tangible pain radiated from an epicenter, causing fish to swim in erratic circles. Locust, normally expert navigators in their crowds of thousands, jumped into each other, collided with walls, or spasmed on the ground in a sea of sporadically twitching legs. Nearby, trees shivered. Clouds condensed into hail. Honey bees lost their way, returned to the wrong hive, died from exhaustion after flying too far. Fighting through the expanding hurricane of these phenomena, an island lay in the now roiling seas of the Mediterranean. On the island was a goddess, body wracked with pain as immortal as she.
She screamed again as another contraction seared her lower body, shooting lightning up her spine, tensing, cramping, seemingly tearing every muscle that once comprised her core.
The pain was too great to understand, too horrible to remember.
Rhea’s next ragged scream shook the foundations of Tartarus. Amalthea, trembling in her attempt to resist the radiating waves of agony, gently coaxed a tiny form from the cavern of his mother’s womb into the living air.
It was a slow process, painfully slow. It took hours for the head to appear and hours after that for the face.
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After nearly fourteen hours of repeated martyrdom, Rhea took her first shaky breath without wanting to cry out in pain. Despite being a perfect immortal being, every divine centimeter of her body was sore and her soul was nearly depleted of will. However, at least the racking torture, the agony which had spilled out and disrupted nature itself, was gone. It had been transformed, pushed out of her flesh in the form of an infant god squirming like a maggot in Amalathea’s arms.
“He’s strong.” Amalathea either didn’t know or didn’t care how much Rhea hated that lump of hurt at this moment. No promise of future power could make up for what she had just gone through.
She lay on her back gazing at the sky, ignoring everything. Her other childbirths had been bad, but this had been the worst. She could only hope that the child would indeed be everything Prometheus promised.
Amalathea bounced the baby as he began to cry. After all that he had just put Rhea through, he had the nerve to cry.
Rhea turned her face away from the sound.
“Mistress.” Amalathea prompted.
Rhea pretended not to hear, not willing to go through the effort of anger. And she would be angry, if Amalathea proffered the child to be held.
“Mistress,” Amalathea prompted again. “A name? You must give your child a name.”
The sky. A roiling storm cloud. An eagle. The electric blue-white clap of lightning reaching gnarled fingers across the firmament to connect the world of gods to that of mortals.
“Zeus.” Rhea said.