Year 678 — The Seven Positions
Themis, Neutral Observer Among the Titans
The seven Titan-named immortals had never been unified, but the confrontation between Iapetus and Kronos had forced each of them to clarify their actual position on the fundamental question: should immortals accept worship and the framework of godhood that worship created?
Themis had been watching the process of clarification with the specific attention that someone with her gift for understanding the structure of laws and principles brought to these kinds of divisions. What she was documenting was not simply a disagreement but a fracture in the Titan group itself.
Iapetus had taken the most explicit position: yes, immortals should accept worship. They should be honest about their nature as beings of greater power and greater capacity. Communities that wanted to worship them should be permitted to do so. More than that — the specific framework of worship, properly understood, could be integrated into a system of governance that was more honest than the Covenant's pretense of equality.
Coeus had aligned with Iapetus quickly. She saw in the framework of accepted worship a way to resolve the tension between her understanding of what justice required and her understanding of what communities actually needed. If immortals accepted their difference and communities accepted the difference, then the relationship could be honest. The specific direction that immortals provided could be acknowledged as direction rather than hidden beneath the language of coordination.
Oceanus — wait, that was not one of the original seven. Oceanus had arrived recently, had shown up with the water-based nature and had been absorbed into the Titan group somewhat by accident of timing and ideology proximity. Themis corrected herself. The original seven were: Iapetus, Coeus, Hyperion, Mnemosyne, Themis herself, Crius, and Phoebe.
Hyperion had taken a middle position. He understood Iapetus's argument. He was sympathetic to the desire to be honest about what immortals were. But he was also cautious about the specific consequences of accepting worship. "The framework of worship creates distance," he had argued in one of the Titan meetings. "Once you position yourself as divine, the community that worships you becomes unable to relate to you as a being they can negotiate with. The relationship becomes one-directional. That is a cost that I am not certain is worth paying."
Crius had gone the opposite direction from Hyperion. He had become increasingly convinced that not just acceptance but active cultivation of worship was the right direction. "We are trying to hide what we are," he had argued. "We are trying to be something we are not in order to make mortal communities comfortable with our existence. That is the actual hypocrisy. We should accept our nature, accept the devotion that emerges naturally, and build our governance on the honest framework of that acceptance."
Mnemosyne had maintained her characteristic distance. She was documenting everything, preserving the record of the Titan group's internal division, maintaining the specific objectivity that came from being more interested in the truth of what was happening than in advocating for any particular position.
And Phoebe — Phoebe had been the one most opposed to the entire direction that Iapetus and Crius were taking. "This is what we separated from the Covenant to avoid," she had said, in the meetings where the god-king framework was being discussed. "We separated because we believed the Covenant's approach was insufficient. But this — accepting worship, positioning ourselves as divine, creating the specific hierarchy of beings that this framework requires — this is worse than the Covenant's approach. This is the abandonment of any pretense of genuine relationship with the communities we work with."
Themis found herself in a strange position. She had legal training, historical understanding, the capacity to see how systems worked and what the consequences of different frameworks would be. What she understood, observing the seven Titans, was that the division was not going to be resolved through argument. It was going to be resolved through separation.
By the year 678, it was clear to Themis that the seven immortals who had been called Titan-named were becoming something else: a fractured group with fundamentally different visions of what they wanted their immortal existence to mean.