It’s been generations since any of us dared approach the Titan.

It had patiently stood watch for all those generations, waiting for the impossible God-Pelican to once again catch a leviathan from the depths of the ocean we all know must lie beneath the star-crowned mountain.

Time and again, the Titan would carry the towering God-Pelican, it’s gargantuan orange catch held firmly in it’s talons, to it’s new roost and thereby to the stars…

But then, long before even my grandmother’s grandmother was hatched, the Second Great Silence began.

The Titan sat loyally before the gates of the Star-topped mountain for an eternity. never wavering in it’s patience, never turning from it’s dut. Until mountains fell and grew all around it. Until all the other animals thought it dead.

We knew though. Though it never breathed, never moved, never shook the pallid monkeys that infested it’s sleeping body loose, we knew it lived.

How could it have died? If it were not a god, how can we have been made in it’s image? Why would we so automatically, so instinctively know that the true way is the way of patience?

Carry your burden with patience and virtue, for your burden is your one true purpose. Your burden is life. That is what I was taught. That is what I believe.

Now the Titan has awakened. Now once more, the Pelican has emerged, a freshly slain leviathan held between its claws. It’s endless orange flanks gleaming in the light of dawn.

I shall approach the Titan as it lumbers towards us. I shall approach it in the way passed to us across the endless generations. Slowly, patiently, carrying my burden with no complaint.

I shall bow my head before it. I shall tell it that it’s never been forgotten. I shall tell it that it’s loved….