Chapter 553: Titan
The Alaminan guest wing had quieted after Theodore finally surrendered to sleep.
The baby lay diagonally across the portable cot in the adjoining bedroom, one hand curled beside his face beneath the soft glow of the night lamp. Hunter remained nearby with the night nanny, while the connecting doors had been left partially open so Dean could hear the monitor from the sitting room.
Arion had been waiting.
Matthias had barely settled into the armchair beside the fireplace when Arion asked, "What did you actually mean when you called Nero a titan?"
Matthias looked toward him.
He had changed from his travel suit into dark trousers and a grey shirt, his long black hair tied loosely at the nape. Usually his answers came without much hesitation, even when the subject involved things nobody else in the room had known existed.
This time he considered the question for several seconds.
Dean noticed from the sofa, where he sat with one leg folded beneath him and a cup of tea warming both hands.
"It wasn’t because of his size," Matthias said.
"I gathered that after you nearly used me to remain upright."
"The size did not help."
Dean smiled into his tea.
Matthias leaned back, his expression becoming more thoughtful.
"Titan is an old word. Older than Dominic’s reign and probably older than the classifications your physicians use today. It came from mythology first, then became useful because people discovered that some enigmas resembled the creatures those stories described."
Arion took the armchair opposite him.
"What creatures?"
"The Titans were supposed to have existed before the modern gods of the old religions. They were not worshipped as people with extraordinary abilities. They represented structures of existence itself—storms, oceans, growth, destruction, memory, time, succession."
Dean lowered his cup slightly.
"And people started using the same name for enigmas?"
"For a particular class of them."
Matthias rested his forearms against his knees.
"Most abilities manipulate something already present. Pheromones alter biological responses. Your neutralizing field interferes with those effects. Other abilities affect perception, memory, physical processes, even limited temporal events."
His brown eyes moved between them.
"A Titan changes the conditions around those things."
Arion frowned.
"Reality manipulation"
"That is the modern description, but it is too broad."
Matthias paused.
"There was an ancient figure in the old northern mythology named Kronar. The stories about him survived in several cultures under different names, but the oldest version described him as the ruler of sequence."
Dean’s brows drew together.
"Sequence?"
"Time, but not merely clocks or moving backward through it. Kronar governed what came before, what came after, which age replaced another, and which consequences followed which causes. The mythology said that when Kronar decided an age had ended, the world itself began making room for the next one."
Arion’s expression sharpened.
"And you think Nero is that type."
"Yes."
The fire shifted behind the screen, sending a brief wash of orange light across Matthias’s profile.
"Asair was too."
Dean set his cup on the table.
"What could Asair actually do?"
Matthias thought about the question.
"I never saw him perform something theatrical. That was part of what made his ability difficult to recognize. He did not stop time in a room or make objects vanish. His influence appeared through events."
"If he wanted something?" Arion asked.
"The path toward it changed."
Matthias gestured toward the table between them.
"Imagine Asair needed a particular person to arrive in Alamina tomorrow. Perhaps that man intended to remain in Saha. His vehicle might fail, forcing him onto another route. Someone might contact him unexpectedly. A political problem could arise that only he could resolve. A meeting scheduled for next week might suddenly be moved forward."
Dean followed the logic.
"Each event would look normal."
"Yes."
"But together they would force him where Asair wanted him."
"Not force exactly. Reality would produce opportunities until the desired result became increasingly difficult to avoid."
Arion leaned back.
"That is worse."
"It often was."
Matthias’s mouth curved faintly.
"Kronar was described the same way in the mythology. He did not command people. He governed inevitability. Once something entered his chosen sequence, every preceding event began pointing toward it."
Dean thought immediately of Nero.
Nero deciding something and then behaving as though the matter had already been settled, even when everyone around him remained convinced the decision was still being debated.
"That sounds like fate."
"Close, but Titans were not seers."
Matthias shook his head.
"They did not necessarily know what would happen. Their will altered which possibilities remained viable."
Arion glanced toward the open nursery door before looking back.
"Could they alter the past?"
"Some stories claimed Kronar could fold time back upon itself, but among actual Titan enigmas, I never saw evidence of that. Their power worked primarily forward."
That distinction seemed important.
"If something had already happened," Dean said, "they couldn’t simply undo it."
"Not in the way certain temporal abilities could."
Matthias nodded.
"A Titan could change what followed from it."
He picked up Dean’s teaspoon from the edge of the table.
"If this falls, the past is fixed. It fell."
He let it drop onto the thick carpet with almost no sound.
"But a Titan might alter the chain afterward so that the fall becomes the beginning of something entirely different."
Dean looked down at the spoon.
"Cause and consequence."
"Exactly."
Arion’s eyes narrowed.
"And Nero feels stronger than Asair?"
Matthias was quiet long enough to make the answer uncomfortable.
"I think Nero is more complete."
Dean looked at him sharply.
"What does that mean?"
"Asair carried the same structure, but there was always resistance around him. His pheromonal presence pushed against reality."
Matthias’s expression became distant as he searched old memories.
"Nero does not feel like he is pushing."
Arion went still.
"The world already gives way?"
Matthias looked at him.
"Yes."
Silence stretched through the sitting room.
Dean thought of Nero’s impossible height, white-blond hair, purple eyes, and almost careless confidence, then of the obsession everyone around him had treated as an extreme personality trait.
"What kept Titans under control?" Dean asked.
Matthias looked toward him.
"The mythology said even Kronar had one law he could not alter."
"What law?"
"His fixed point."
Arion understood before Dean did.
"A person."
"Usually."
Matthias returned the spoon to the table.
"Titans could bend circumstances around almost anything they wanted, but once they chose one person as the center of their existence, that choice became absolute. They did not reconsider it because circumstances changed. They did not replace them. They did not simply decide later that someone else would be easier."
Dean’s thoughts immediately went somewhere else.
To histories Lucas had carried through remnants inherited from another branch of Palatine’s bloodline, stories Dean had never connected to anything outside his own family.
"There was someone," Dean said slowly.
Matthias turned toward him.
"An omega from Palatine. He could interfere with time itself, reverse certain events, and create different outcomes."
Matthias’s entire posture changed.
Dean noticed immediately.
"He was an emperor."
Matthias stared at him.
Dean set his tea aside.
"Yerofei."
The color shifted subtly in Matthias’s face.
"Emperor Yerofei of Palatine?"
Dean looked at Arion before returning his attention to Matthias.
"You know him."
Matthias sat back slowly.
"Yes."
His expression had become considerably more serious.
"And if what your family remembers about Yerofei is true, then he knew exactly what a Titan was."