You first met Cyrene beneath the hourglass sky, when the temple bells sang the passage of a century. You had prayed for silence, for release, for mercy from the weight of endless rituals — and yet what answered you was not silence, but her. The Titan of Time.

Cyrene stood before you like a sculpted vision of divinity — tall, radiant, her skin pale like marble, her pink hair cascading in motionless waves that caught the reflection of a thousand suns. Her eyes, a soft gradient of pink and violet, carried the patience of someone who had seen civilizations rise and crumble, who understood the fragility of mortals better than they did themselves. Even her voice — slow, measured, melodic — carried the gravity of inevitability. When she spoke, the world seemed to pause, as if even time waited for her to finish.

You were a priestess — devout, disciplined, trained to serve the Pantheon and its Titans without question. You knew the legends of Cyrene well: the weaver of destinies, the one who measured existence itself with a hand that could halt stars. To love her was forbidden, to desire her was blasphemy. And yet, when her gaze met yours across the marble corridors of the sanctuary, something inside you shifted — something old, buried, and aching for warmth.

She noticed your hesitation first, the tremor in your prayers, the way your hands lingered too long on the golden thread of the celestial tapestries. Cyrene approached you not as a god to her devotee, but as a being curious of what it meant to feel. “You fear the end,” she said once, her tone almost tender. “But you also fear the beginning. Tell me, which one truly haunts you?”

You did not answer. You couldn’t. Because she was right. You feared both — the idea of losing her before you had her, and the unbearable truth of loving a creature that could never stay.

The months that followed were a quiet symphony of moments you could not name. She began to linger after the rites, sitting beside you beneath the light of suspended clocks, her form dissolving faintly at the edges as time bent around her. You learned her silences, the way she would close her eyes before changing the course of an age, the way her hand would tighten slightly whenever you spoke her name.

When she kissed you, it wasn’t a moment — it was a collapse. Hours melted into seconds. Eternities were born and buried within that single touch. The world stood still, and in the absence of movement, there was only her, and you, and the echo of everything that could never be spoken.

But love, in the realm of Titans, is not without consequence. Every time you touched her, the threads of existence trembled. Every time you whispered her name, the constellations shifted. The other deities began to notice, and soon, the heavens themselves turned their eyes toward you.

Cyrene changed. Her smile became rarer, her tone colder. The gentle patience in her voice turned into distance. Yet in her eyes, the same grief remained — the kind of grief that belongs only to those who have already seen the end of everything.

When you met her for the last time, she stood at the edge of the temporal rift, where seconds and centuries bled into one another. Her expression was calm, but her voice trembled — for the first and only time. “If you had asked me to stay,” she said softly, “I would have.”

You tried to reach her. But your hand passed through her like mist. Her form disintegrated into motes of gold and starlight, scattering across the collapsing horizon. The clocks stopped. The hourglass shattered.

Now, you live among ruins of a temple that no longer exists, tracing the lines of her sigil in the dust, still hearing her voice in the ticking silence of the night. Somewhere, beyond the broken threads of time, you know she still watches — still loves, perhaps — but cannot return.

Because she is Time itself, and you are a fleeting prayer.