As Phoebe’s song rose up and spread throughout the ether, she swung her weapon carved out a chunk of Coeus’s left flank. The gushing blood and particles of light interwove, and before I knew it, the wound was gone. At the same time, Coeus drove his curved blade down hard to cleave off one of Phoebe’s shoulders, dyeing her pure white wedding dress a deep shade of crimson for only a split second before both her dress and her body were restored to their former glory. All throughout this crossing of blades, neither duelist made any attempt to dodge or block their opponent’s crushing blows. Narain suggested that the reason for this was simple: they could simply regenerate. Why plug your ears in the middle of a conversation?
“You want to know why humans always try to use words and other forms of expression if at all possible?” he said. “It’s because those are the only safe modes of communication we have. Sure, we can express more powerful and intense emotions through the use of violence, but once you reach the point of doing irreparable harm to someone, it doesn’t really matter whether you’ve gotten your point across, now, does it?”
Narain paused and simply watched the carnage play out for a moment.
“But Titans can restore themselves in the blink of an eye. So why not make use of that ability to broaden their range of experiences, and their understanding of one another? Because for them, a gaping wound is just another means of conveying information that’s unpleasant but still enriching to one another—like a plate of spicy food or a heartbreaking story might be to us. You can see it in the way they’re now going back and forth like it doesn’t even faze them.”
I fixed my gaze on the battle between two Titans once more. Narain was right—they were now singing without interruption as they continued their duel. Though at first, they’d cried out in pain so immense that it shook the seas like a horrible storm, now they were just chipping, cutting, and slashing away at one another without ever ceasing in their song, even momentarily.
They’d gotten used to the pain—these crashing waves of intense stimuli one after the other, none of which a human could bear for more than a single second without their body shutting down completely. And now they were progressing beyond that point, toward an even deeper form of communion. With their songs and weapons combined, they were no doubt transmitting even more complex information to one another, and in a higher volume than before. An overwhelmingly unfathomable amount of data, which they were both using every sensory receptor in their colossal bodies to experience and share. Their weapons did not even resemble the original polearm and curved sword anymore; they were now being reconstructed and reshaped with each successive cut into more elaborate shapes designed to cut deeper, so that they could constantly deal a fresh new type of pain to the other party. Their songs developed added layers of harmony and discord as well, growing louder and denser such that they spread out across the earth like an expanding, three-dimensional dome of palpable sound that replaced the atmosphere itself.
They baptized the world in their blood, and in their song. Unto the earth they gave their violence and their art in equal measure. They were giving themselves over to one another completely, laying into each other with the entireties of their respective beings. And then at last, I understood exactly what I was seeing. This was no tragic opera, nor some sort of dancing duel to the death.
This was intercourse.
This dialogue taking place just twenty kilometers away between two massive Titans, each filled to the brim with passion and rage, was no different from the legends of the ancient gods. Of loves so deep, they could only be shared in the form of pain. The giving by means of taking away. Specifically, I was reminded of the story of Aphrodite, a goddess born from the severed genitals of Uranus. And when I gazed in that light upon this most intimate form of communion taking place between Phoebe and Coeus, it finally hit me.
We were, at this very moment, witness to mythology in the making.
And there was no telling what providence, what new age, might be born unto the earth in the wake of their union.
Suddenly, a flash of blinding white. A ray of light shot forth from Coeus and crossed over Phoebe’s lower body. As she then began to teeter forward, I looked down to where the beam had just drawn its path, and saw that both her legs had been hewn crosswise just below the knees. Phoebe reached out both arms to brace her fall as her entire legless torso fell forward into the ocean. She immediately began attempting to regenerate her legs, but before she could get very far, another beam of light carved her left arm off, shoulder and all, and she fell even further, face-down into the sea.
“What is that?!”
I cast my gaze back over to Coeus; his entire right forearm had been restructured into the shape of a telescope. This was the newest “word” he had come up with over the course of their dialogue: a jaw-droppingly powerful weapon, capable of emitting a destructive beam of light. The newest flavor of pain he wished to share with her.
Coeus now stood towering over the kneeling Phoebe, waiting for her to regenerate so they could begin again. Phoebe, not wanting to disappoint, worked as quickly as she could to reconstruct her severed limbs. But a single glance was all it took to see that there was now a massive power imbalance between the two Titans, and that one’s song resounded far more powerfully and triumphantly than the other’s. The tides were shifting, and Coeus was proving himself a much faster learner, as well as the superior wordsmith when it came to this bizarre form of language.
“Well, looks like Phoebe was right on the money. She predicted this would happen from the day she first devised this meet-up,” Narain said coldly as he watched her struggle from afar. I turned to face him, looking for some additional elaboration. “She knew a third generation Titan like herself would be too ‘human’ to keep up with a first-gen like Coeus. He’s pure, much closer to a Titan’s essential form. Phoebe makes up for this somewhat by making more effective use of logic and technology, but in terms of raw power she comes up woefully short.”
I recalled what Phoebe had told me herself—about how the earliest Titans were akin to children, and the more recent Titans closer to adults, but that she believed children wielded far more power and potential than their seniors.
“But why?” I asked. “Why make the newer models so sorely lacking? Wouldn’t the network always be seeking to only improve upon itself with each successive member?”
“Yes, and it did,” said Narain. “That is, if you consider that its primary purpose was to make itself more useful to humanity. As the generations piled on, they gradually adapted themselves to resemble humans more and more, limiting their own unique capabilities in the process so that they could be as close to us as possible. And so yes, Phoebe requested this meeting, knowing full well that she would lose.”
“Why would she do that?”
“To educate him,” Narain said, with his usual business-like expression. “To teach Coeus that not even she, the most intelligent Titan in the world, could hold a candle to him. And that if not even another Titan could do so, then not a single person in the entire world could ever prove his equal.”