Time was her enemy. She was intimately acquainted with death, knew its every process and stratagem. She did not fear it. There had been a time when she did not exist, and she knew another such time would arrive. It divided eternity, neatly, into three equal parts.
She knew Titans were subject to senility-she had listened as three of her sisters degenerated into ravings and fantasy, then fell silent forever. But she could not know how her own aging body would play her false. No human suddenly throttled by her own hands could have been more surprised than Gaea when her provincial brains began to resist her will.
Three million years of supremacy had ill-prepared Gaea for the arts of compromise. Perhaps she could have lived in peace with her satellite brains had she been willing to listen to their grievances. On the other hand, two of her regions were insane, and another so darkly malevolent that he might as well have been. For a hundred years the great wheel of Gaea vibrated with the stresses of war. Those epic battles came close to destroying her and resulted in huge loss of life among her peoples, who were as helpless as any Hindu before the Gods of Vedic myth.
No titanic figures strode the curve of Gaea's wheel, throwing thunderbolts and mountains. The Gods in this struggle were the lands themselves. Reason vanished as the ground opened and fires fell from the spokes. Civilizations a hundred thousand years old were swept away without trace, and others fell into savagery.