Cronus rose to power by overthrowing his own father Uranus, and he cannot forget the manner of it. Gaia and the dying sky both warn him: he too is fated to be brought down by his own child, as he brought down his.

So the king of the Titans turns his rule into a defense against his children. As each is born to his sister-wife Rhea, he swallows it whole: five gods vanish into their father's body, and the cosmos holds its breath under a tyrant ruled by fear.

Grown to strength and armed with cunning, Zeus returns. With the help of Metis, wise daughter of Ocean, he gives Cronus a potion that forces him to vomit up everything he swallowed: first the stone, then the five swallowed gods, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon, disgorged full-grown and furious.

Now there are six of them, and they have a grievance measured in lifetimes spent in their father's belly. Zeus has his siblings and his cause. The war for the cosmos can begin.

The defeated Titans are chained in Tartarus behind bronze gates, guarded by the hundred-handers who once shared their prison. Atlas, who led the Titan war effort, is singled out for a special sentence: to stand at the world's western edge and hold up the sky forever.

The victors divide the cosmos by lot. Zeus takes the sky, Poseidon the sea, Hades the underworld, and the earth remains common ground. From fear and overthrow and ten years of war, a lasting order finally emerges, the reign of the Olympians, which no further war will topple.