Gaia. The Olympus Cycle, #6

She was the first thing that was not nothing. Before the gods, before the Titans, before the first mortal drew breath or the first river found the sea - she was the ground. GAIA enters the consciousness of the earth itself: the patient, vast, mineral intelligence that watches everything from below. From her emergence from Chaos to the birth of the Titans, from the deep ache of watching Ouranos press down in fear to the cold satisfaction of giving Cronus the sickle, from the oracle at Delphi that was hers before it was Apollo's to the long geological reckoning with what the humans are doing to her surface - this is the story of the oldest and most fundamental of all beings, told from the inside.
She held Persephone's footsteps. She felt the first axe. She gave the giants their orders and watched them lose and kept making anyway, because the earth does not stop making. She spoke with Themis about the Olympian arrangement of things and found it coherent and insufficient and held both judgments simultaneously, the way earth holds contradictions: permanently, without resolution. GAIA is literary mythology at its deepest - the story of the being who was here before the story began and will be here after the last story is told.
She did not begin. She was revealed. Before the gods claimed their thrones and before the first mortal planted his first field, Gaia was the ground beneath all of it - the patient, mineral intelligence of the earth, holding everything that stood on her, receiving everything that fell. GAIA tells her story from the inside: the making of the Titans, the terrible bargain with Cronus, the oracle at Delphi that was hers before Apollo arrived, and the long slow reckoning with the humans who love her and cannot stop cutting.
Ancient, enduring, and more interior than any myth has previously imagined her, this is the earth as she has always been - waiting to be understood.