There’s a story this song wants to tell.
The themes are simple. The time is ancient, the boy a stable-hand in a great and dark fortress. The lord is a cruel lord, filled with nothing but the lust for his own appetites and power. He’s conquered the world, and none will conquer him, for he consumes any whom come against him whole, even his own children.
There is darkness everywhere. The only light left is gathered in the hearth of the fortress is caged in a huge bronze sphere chained to the floor, fire wrapping through the seams and cracks. Outside the walls of the keep, things made of scales and teeth hunt in the shadow, some in service to the lord, some in service to their own hunger.
The boy labors for millennia, or maybe only his whole life – its been forever for him. He hates the lord with a passion, but he knows what lies outside the keep, and for a long time, the fear of what lies outside is greater than what he endures.
He watches as the lord rapes, consumes and tears apart his subjects. The children of the union of are of the greatest importance to the crowned beast – he consumes them whole, completely in one horrible gulp, to ensure that no child of his would come to kill him for his crown.
The slaves are forbidden from speaking to each other, so to keep himself sane, the stable boy whispers his terrors to the horses, two great stallions, jet black with sky blue eyes.
The stables are next to the prison. The lord often hunts for slaves and concubines outside the walls, taking a flaming torch from the great hearth and mounting it on his golden chariot to drive off those terrors so consumed with hunger that they would attack any but him. The prisons are never full for very long before a new hunt arises. The only light that those outside the walls know brings a demand for sacrifice, and they pay it, for if the light never comes back, the ice that consumes most of the world will overwhelm it.
The boy whispers to the horses for years. The horses learn to trust, and eventually love him. Years of brushing, caring, cleaning and stitching the whip wounds, his heart begins to beat as theirs, and they understand each other beyond words.
Then one night, he hears sobbing. He dares not speak – he’d lose his tongue for less, but he can’t help but sneak a look at the girl lying in the cage down the hall. The lord has had his way with her already, and her belly is beginning to swell. She is pretty, the kind of girl he’d want to fall in love with. She sees him, dries her eyes and looks him straight in his.
“Raya” he thinks she whispers as she points at herself, or maybe it’s “Rhea” – he’s not sure – but he makes out what she says next.
“The fire burns all chains”
And then he hears the lord coming and he’s scurrying down the hall back to stables, and he sees the horses back from a hunt, still harnessed to the chariot, the gates still open because who would flee into the darkness?
Down the hall, she screams. He stops, sees the long torch still mounted on the chariot side. His eyes meet the blue eyes of the stallions, sees whats in their hearts. They understand. Together, the three of them take a deep breath.
He grabs the torch, swings open the doors to the great hall, heart thumping, to see the hearth burning in the great bronze sphere. He takes the torch and strikes the chain at it’s base, the torching suddenly flaring into bright blue as it seared through the iron. He grabs a cold part of the chain, ties and locks it to the chariot, and shouts out in his full voice for what may be the first time.
“Old Cronos, you may chase me around the world, but you’ll never steal a son again.”
He leaps into the chariot as the halls shake with the lord’s roars of rage. The horse’s hearts and his beat as one. As the lord charges down the hall, the boy sees the girl slip out of the cage, scampering away behind him.
“Run.”
He barely murmurs it – doesn’t even have to raise the whip – the stallions lunge forward, straining. The great bronze ball of the hearth begins to shift, roll, cracking, flames whipping up. The stallions are trotting then running then charging out the gate as the hearthfire spins and richochets and smashes along behind them. The hoofbeats match the heartbeats, the shared breath, interspersed with the skittering of sparks and hooves and the rattle of the golden wheels.
The heat is everywhere. The stableboy and the horses are burning and rising but it doesn’t matter – they’re moving faster and faster as Cronos desperately chases them, the darkness fleeing before them. The sphere behind them begins to crack and shatter completely, until they’re pulling a great burning ball towards the heavens.
The chariot charges upwards to meet the stars, galloping across the sky. The old god could not catch them, but he never tired. And so it came to be that every day Cronos chases the stableboy over the earth, and finally into the ocean each night.
But even in the depths of the ocean, the sunfire keeps burning, and no matter how many times the boy and horses plunged into the western sea, they’d become the sunrise of the eastern ocean the next morning.
And the girl slips away from the crumbling fortress, abandoned by its lord as he hunts the sun.
The sunlit world is a new world. The ice recedes further with each new sunrise. The midnight things flee underground or into the wilds. Now the old god is naught but the terror that brings night and horror and slavery.
And hidden far away from Cronos, deep in a cave on a hidden island, Rhea gives birth to a baby boy.
She names him Zeus.