Titans of Chaos

"Would you have preferred to be raised by strangers? Enemies?" I could not keep the bitternessout of my voice. I was thinking of all the birthdays my mother never saw, my first steps, firstwords, first dance, first infatuation.

"For the isolation of your youth, I am deeply sorry, Miss Windrose, but that was a matter out ofmy hands. There is a war, you know, between Cosmos and Chaos, between order and entropy,between reason and unreason. This forms the fundamental basis of existence; I do not see howany victory or lasting peace is possible. The most one can hope for is temporary compromises,temporary armistice. You are not the first victim of this terrible conflict."

Strange. I remember Victor saying something of this sort back when we were all aboard theSilvery Ship: that no victory was lasting, no solution perfect.

I asked, "I don't understand how this whole situation arose: Hermes and Dionysus and Athenaconspire to overthrow Zeus, and enlist the aid of Chaos: they succeed, and Zeus is killed byTyphon, right? But then Dionysus and Athena turn on Hermes, and someone else shoots him-Iforget who-"

Boreas said, "It was the Huntress. The Lady Phoebe of the Moon. We stood on the plains ofVigrid, where the brink of Chaos roared, and the Gates of the World's End had been torn fromtheir hinges, and lay stretched for miles along the plain. To one side reared all the armies of aunited Chaos: a fearsome sight." And now his eyes grew haunted with old memory. "I sawphantasmagorical dream-legions from outer realms of eternal night, sons of Morpheus andNepenthe; I saw fallen spirits from the Abyss, armed and armored with incontestable magic;above them and below, a hundred miles or more in length, the soulless monsters from the Void,with all their engines and molecular alchemies of matter and energy; above and beyond them,nigh-impossible to see or to imagine, were your people, Miss Windrose, creatures too perfect to bethreatened or deterred: the uncreated thousand-dimensional superbeings from the unthinkableprimordial prereality, before the geometry of space-time was drawn. A sight to stir the soul, Iassure you, to look upon those beings, some brilliant with the splendor of eternal night; somewretched and lightning-scarred, yet smoldering with the burned remnants of angelic majesty;others yet with no souls at all, implacable and cold; others far too strange and wondrous ever tobe allowed inside a sane universe, too large by far for space itself to hold.