The Cycle of Patricide

The Cycle of Patricide was the repeating doom by which the son of a deity rose to slay his father, while that father, fearing the same fate, turned against his own children. Begun when Cronos overthrew Ouranos, it bound the Greek pantheon down to the day Kratos beat Zeus to death, and its shadow reached even into the Norse realms.

The first breaking of fathers#

The Cycle began with the wiliest of the Titans, Cronos, who at the urging of his mother Gaia overthrew his father Ouranos, the tyrant who had tormented Gaia by preventing her children from leaving her body. Cronos then took his sister Rhea to wife and, fearing he would be overthrown by his own children as his father had been, swallowed each of them at birth. Rhea could not bear another loss, and when Zeus was born she hid him away, giving Cronos a stone wrapped in cloth in his place. Grown to adulthood, Zeus freed his siblings from Cronos and made war upon the Titans in the Titanomachy, defeating them to rule as the gods of Olympus. Yet Zeus came to fear, as his father had, that his own children would one day depose him.

The Olympian doom#

Zeus' fear shaped the fate of mortals and gods alike. Ares plotted to overthrow his father and rule Olympus in his own image, and with the Fury Alecto he conceived Orkos in the hope of creating a warrior strong enough to aid his quest. When Orkos proved a disappointment, Ares sought a mortal he could mould into the perfect weapon, and that warrior became Kratos, whom he saved from death. At the height of his ambition Ares was instead struck down by the very warrior he had raised. Later, fearing Kratos in turn, Zeus believed Deimos, the brother of Kratos, to be the marked warrior destined to end Olympus, and had him taken before realizing his error.

Zeus at last betrayed and tried to murder his own son, draining his power and leaving him to die. Kratos survived, and guided by Gaia he turned his vengeance against the king of the gods. Through the Second Titanomachy he climbed Mount Olympus, cutting down god and Titan alike, until he reached Zeus and beat him to death with his bare fists. With that blow the Cycle repeated itself once more, and the reign of the Olympian gods came to its end.

The Norse echo#

The shadow of the Cycle followed Kratos into the Norse lands. There Odin had imprisoned his own son Tyr out of fear that Tyr would overthrow him and suspicion that he aided the enemies of the Aesir. In Helheim, Kratos was haunted by visions of his killing of Zeus, witnessed by his son Atreus, and he feared the boy learning of his past. After he was forced to kill Baldur to save Freya, Kratos finally told Atreus the truth, insisting that they could avoid the Cycle by learning from their experiences rather than repeating the mistakes of those before them. During Ragnarök the pattern turned to filicide instead, when Odin killed his own son Thor without hesitation for daring to stand against him. As it was warned, the Cycle of Revenge was not so easily broken.