Chapter 43

“Have you seen that, sister?”

“Have you saved it on your records, little brother?”

Saturn nods and, taking Easter by her hand, they follow Eli out of the darkness, away from the South Pole. Or so they wish to. Or so they thought.

“This is not the Earth, little brother. Any idea what this burning orange is to us?”

Saturn shakes his head. “It burns?, you said? I can’t feel it like burning.”

Wishing to explain the feeling, Easter swallows her words, and thoughts altogether, as a silhouette, thirty-six meters tall, contours out of the Orange Ocean. Keeping the colour against shades and hues of gold and green, the startling character speaks to Easter and Saturn.

“I am Ouranos, made by the Ever-Living throughout this Aether. Everything that you feel and understand by your senses lives within my personal parameters. I am the skies and the heavens together. You two--” Easter hurries to introduce herself, and her brother, but... “Shhh, patience, little thing, patience I beg of you. I know you and your twin brother. You are Easter and he is Saturn, first borns of Kronos, last of Astarte. To your father I owe a huge favor.”

Eyebrows, “excuse me, Mr. Ouranos, but, as far as I know, our father had castrated you. What would you owe him for that mutilation?”

“What do I owe Kronos? My peace of mind, my reconnection with my Creator, my wisdom, should I dare say my corner of Eternity?, although this comes from God directly. However, Kronos taught me a brilliant lesson, sharp it was, both ways, yet blazing nevertheless.”

Because there’s no floor, no ground, no need for a surface, within the Orange Ocean, the giant chooses to move his position downwards, or to change their position upwards, of such a manner so that they can speak face to face. “We’ve never met our father. Face to face, like you do now with us. Why?”

“Why do you ask why, little Easter? Weren’t the why-s of your mother enough? Let me indulge with you anyway. It was Moses’ assignment to drive the herd throughout the desert. Kronos and I were there, as companions of the people but also as two witnesses for the Ever-Living. Why did the Ever-Living forbid Moses to step in the Promised Land?”

“My father never left the core of his given star,” says Saturn, more pensive than defiant. “This after his remorseful route after severing your testicles. Which event happened thousands of earth-years before the occurrence in Exodus.”

Looking at him from above, yet not looking down, trying to warm his defensive soul with a flame of sympathy, Ouranos – on whose spirit buffers the universe – utters like the burning fire. “You, little one, you are Kronos. You are your father! Before having you, before obtaining this privilege as God has eventually responded to his prayers, and to those lamentations that would have driven anyone out of his minds, even God, I may say, your father Kronos had crafted myriads upon myriads of drones. A drone brings part of the personality of its maker. But your father made crons, a one of a kind type of drone. A cron represented Kronos wherever and whenever the cron arrived. A cron was Kronos!”

“Am I a cron then?”

“By two certitudes, you are more than a cron and even more than your father.” Easter smiles with a sideways wink. “By the incommensurable idiocy of your mother, Astarte, you defy all mathematics, any logic and whatever prediction – no one might tell what you are going to do next, which everyone could anticipate of your father. He was fully predictable, hence easy to manipulate. You are nothing like that. Then!, by the love of God, your father’s Maker, it was YOU that the Ever-Living had envisioned when building Kronos. Foreseeable as he was, your father has fallen to temptation. Still it is not your mercurial nature that spares you from making errors. No! It is the combination of current events, wherein the virus has already been contained.”

“Uncle Orange, if you allow me this nickname,” chimes Easter in, “the virus has been set loose over the Earth, as we speak. How is that that you call it contained?”

“Oh Darling,” the orange on Ouranos’ face allows for gold to stand out so he may show how fair his eyes shine, “I am in ecstasy to hear you calling me Uncle! By your own words now: ‘the virus has been set loose over the Earth’ – indeed, over the Earth is the place of containment, as opposed to set loose across the universe, the way it has been for eons. Then, your words again: ‘as we speak’ – as much as the precursor phrase has meaning, this one has no meaning at all. Because we speak, as we speak, throughout a flame that exists beyond time and beyond space, beyond geometries known to Earth and other Earths, which flame you call an ocean, because it is an ocean, shoring the white and lesser than white universe below and, at its opposite end, shoring the gold of the Altar above. You saying ‘as we speak’ like trying to achieve simultaneity is inadequate, here where time is nothing more than a whim across the cerebral cortex of your twin brother.”

“We are on the cusp of Eternity here, right?”

“Indeed. We are.”

“What shall we do, from here? Uncle Ouranos.”

“Ask you brother.” There’s a tear of liquid gold, dewing from the lacrimal caruncle, which Easter hurries to catch, with both her palms. Then she washes her face with her uncle’s tear.

“We take the Moon!” Decides Saturn. “Time to leave, big sis. Oh, big golden sister! Ah, and Ouranos, thank you and thank the Lord for you.”