1.19: Secrets

Amalthea told her story hesitantly - Pandora had come to her and persuaded her that it was time to reveal the palace's secrets, but Amalthea had spent so long keeping them, it was difficult.

"Decades ago, Kronos - at that time prince of Knossos and ruler of this stronghold - decided that he needed to dispose of his legitimate children. Not permanently, mind you, but until he could ascend to the throne. He was sincerely afraid his mother and father would simply pass the throne off to one of their grandchildren, and pass over him entirely."


"That's why he sent them to Tartarus, yes," Prometheus had heard some of the story before.

"Yes, Kronos wanted to minimize how much interaction they had with his parents, so that none of them would have the opportunity to make too much of an impression on their grandparents."

"When you say, legitimate children...?" Echidna asked.

"Kronos has many bastards in Crete, and even beyond its shores," Amalthea said, "But most of them have been with humans or titans from very weak bloodlines. The royal family will soon have eight children that would be viable heirs to the throne."

"Eight?" Prometheus asked, "You mean six, right?"

"Kronos has six legitimate heirs, yes," Amalthea said, "But gossip from Knossos is that Lady Nyx is with child, and that Kronos is the father."

"So?" Typhon asked, "Queen Rhea is his wife, not Nyx."

"Nyx is an incredibly strong warrior," Prometheus said, "The offspring of Kronos and Nyx could be formidable enough that the technicalities of heredity wouldn't matter."

"That won't sit well with the others..." Echidna said.

"So one by Nyx, six by Rhea. Whose bastard is the eighth child?" Prometheus asked.

"Rhea's," Amalthea said, "And as Oranos's daughter, her bastard could claim the throne just as easily as Nyx's child could."

"I thought Rhea had only ever had six pregnancies?" Prometheus asked.

"That's true..." Amalthea said, "But what even Kronos doesn't know is that Rhea's last birth yielded two children."

"Wait, what...?" this was a major curve ball for Prometheus.

"I've overseen six pregnancies as Queen Rhea's midwife. At the time of her last pregnancy, Kronos had two boys by Rhea - Hades and Poseidon - and three girls - Hera, Demeter, and Hestia," Amalthea explained, "but Rhea's sixth pregnancy produced a third boy, Zeus, and a fourth girl, Aphrodite."

"Twins..." Prometheus was shocked.

"Actually, half twins," Amalthea said, "I don't know how Rhea knew, but the recognition was instantaneous the second she saw the baby girl."

"Half twins?" Echidna said, "That's a thing?"

"Yes," Prometheus said, "Though it's more common among titans than humans, to be sure. Okay, so Aphrodite is Rhea's bastard, making her one of King Oranos's granddaughters. Amalthea, who was the father?"

"Well, that's the reason Rhea kept Aphrodite's existence a secret. The girl's father was Oranos."

"What?!" Prometheus exclaimed.

"But I thought Oranos was Rhea's father...?" Typhon asked.

"Yeah, but Kronos was Rhea's brother, right?" Echidna said, "So I don't know why we're shocked. Kronos's bastard child by Nyx is the only one that's not likely to have serious issues."

"It works a little differently with titans," Prometheus said, "Our genes are more... flexible than yours."

"Oh, great," Typhon said, "We're becoming members of a species that celebrates incest."

"'Celebrates' would be inaccurate," Prometheus said, "Tolerates it between siblings, maybe, but between a father and his daughter? Never. What happened to Aphrodite?"

"Well," Amalthea seemed slightly pleased to know so much, "Kronos was a chronically uninvolved father, so Rhea and her mother hid the baby girl in the last place Kronos would look - in Tartarus with the other five children. They loaded Zeus's biometric data into the pod, so that if Kronos ever accessed Tartarus's virtual world remotely he'd see six children that would all look like his own."

"So... Aphrodite's been raised from birth thinking she is Zeus...?"

"Yes, in the virtual world she experiences everything through a construct based on Zeus's genome, and that's likewise how everyone in there sees her."

"What does that mean?" Typhon asked.

"It means Kronos's baby girl was raised as a boy," Echidna said.

"Fascinating," Prometheus said. Gender was always a flexible issue for a shape-shifting race such as theirs, but this was taking the nature-vs-nurture debate to the extreme. "Okay," Prometheus focused back on the topic, "Where is Zeus, then?"

"Right here," a thunderous voice boomed from the door.