💘 An Itch To Scratch
L&W9: Eros has a...slight problem.
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty has been losing hairs. One here. Three there. Always when some divine blowout or other occurs between deities that should be bonded in love: parents and offspring, siblings, spouses. The trends have trickled into the Mortal Realm. So as Above, so they will mimic below.
For centuries, devotees at the Temples of Love have dwindled in favor of other deities throughout the lands. Mortals have begun to favor law over love. They sacrifice more and more to the powers of sea and sky, to war and commerce. Even procreation, intimate touch, and sexual frolic have been usurped by the Olympian dictates of marriage, as presided over by a couple that despise each other as often as they thrash at each other in bed. To top it all, two more Olympian goddesses have recently sworn themselves to eternal virginity.
Aphrodite’s hair loss has been the result—something that should be impossible for a goddess.
Thus has Eros, God of Love, determined to solve his mother’s problem by devising a match of Fated Love between the most unlikely couple: Persephone, Bringer of Blossomtime and Haides, King of the Dead. Not only would this marriage unite Olympos with the Underworld—relations that have long been tenuous, sometimes contentious—but it could also heal the rifts between the most longstanding and hateful of the Olympian enemies who had once been the closest allies: Haides, Demeter, and Zeus.
Alas, both of Kore’s parents have been ignoring Haides’ marriage proposals—until Haides backed Demeter into a corner. She told him to go sit on his bifurcated spear for all eternity, and they both blew their immortal cinder cones.
#GodsBehavingBadly
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series
—Cast of Characters - in case you get overwhelmed with remembering
Also. Nobody calls Persephone by her true name. They call her KORE, “the Maiden,” and it’s pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.” KLYMENOS is one of Haides’ gazillion epitaphs. It means “illustrious” (or depending on who’s grumbling it, “notorious.”)
EROS, GOD OF LOVE, MASTER MATCHMAKER, WINGED BALL OF SCHEMES
⛅️💘⛅️
He could sense the storm ravaging her heart from across Poseidon’s Sea, along with something else that stopped him in mid-flight. Something that smelled a lot like his father’s armpit.
Truth be told, it smelled more like the God of War’s nasty ball sweat, and nobody wanted to know the unfortunate circumstances that had led to the God of Love becoming privy to that knowledge.
The scent was so pungent, the pangs so sharp that Eros cut short his vacation in Egypt. Besides, he had just found himself about to have a scrap with one of those snooty beast-heads who liked to call themselves gods. He could never keep them all straight. He’d been aiming a gold-tipped dart at the eldest Egyptian prince when that jackal-faced fiend had loomed up and spoiled everything, so Eros gave himself the quick out.
I’m not fleeing, he told himself. No, I simply cannot leave her heart in such distress with the God of War’s stench coating the breeze.
He loosed the arrow at that slavering canine snout, taking advantage of the millisecond it took the brute to swat it away. Eros flashed into his cherub form and vanished, leaving nothing but a jeering kiss floating in the air. After zinging wings back to Olympos, he hovered in the central courtyard, panting, surrounded on all sides by the beauty and safety of home.
A high-pitched giggle escaped him. He’d really wanted to see that Egyptian prince struck with blissfully requited love for one of his chariot horses.
Ah well, my healing touch upon anguished hearts is just as important as ensuring that Love is not lacking a sense of humor. Or at least the sweet, sweet sting of the absurd.
Resuming his favored adolescent form, he smoothed down his ruddy-gold curls with a shaky hand. Then he took to leisurely flight and worked to calm his racing heart before arriving at his mother’s temple.
He found her in the brewery, standing once more before the Spying Bowl. She did not touch it. Rather, she stood with her arms wrapped around herself, her white-knuckled hands clutching the sea-foam-and-starlight drape that transformed her figure into a sumptuous banquet of yearning for the eyes. Yet the garment had lost most of its sparkle, and her gaze was cloudy as she chewed the coral-dusted rose oil from her lips.
Her doves and sparrows flitted about her, attempting to offer comfort. It did her no good, so they deferentially departed, leaving it to Eros.
He folded his wings shut and poked the tip of his nose through the scalloped arch of the entryway. “Mother?” he called. When she barely glanced his way, he tiptoed to her side. “What is it? I could feel your distress from—”
He didn’t want to tell her where he’d been, or why. He wasn’t in the mood for a scolding, so his mind raced for a suitable lie.
No need. The Goddess of Love barely noticed his presence. Her breast rose and fell in the quick huff of a sigh. Her eyes remained targeted upon the scene in the oil-filled basin. He floated up to peer over her shoulder and see who she was watching today.
The Lord of the Underworld raged centerstage in his throne room, armor-clad and smoking. Violet-and-green flames shot from his hands to blast the ceiling of his towering fortress, but it was the ear-shattering bellow that caused the greater damage.
“Oh, thunderheads,” Eros whispered.
“No,” Aphrodite returned. “Eruptions. He’s still received no reply from Zeus to his marriage proposal, so he went to Demeter instead. But the way he went about it…at Hekate’s advice, of course.”
Eros answered his mother’s accusatory glower with an eye-batting cringe, for he was the one who had brought the Divine Sorceress into this project.
“Oh, Eros, you can see what Earth Mother’s answer was. Then she destroyed the conduit through which darling Blossomtime has been singing with Klymenos. When his explosion cracked the Underworld’s roof, Mount Thera let out another belch. The quakes leveled two villages, and crumbled a cliff face on Krete. Now he’s back home and…”
Eros’ wince matched his mother’s. “And being a first-rate son-of-a-Titan.”
Aphrodite nodded against the clenched hand she had pressed to her mouth. She had grown paler, duller than he’d ever seen her, and curls had started springing free from her intricate hair-mound. Some of the pearl decorations had fallen out—no doubt from all her scalp-scratching. She would verge into downright frowzy if she wasn’t careful. Her aura had taken on a nauseated twinge of green around the fringes. Eros’ feathers leaned toward a similar hue.
Upon finding it increasingly uncomfortable to remain aloft, he sank down to his mother's side and tucked back his wings to watch the bowl once more. When the Tormentor of Tartaros called Demeter a “moldering, teeth-laden twat,” both the God and Goddess of Love doubled over, groaning.
To them, that kind of hatred struck like an evisceration. To feel such odium battling between immortal souls—especially two who had once loved each other so dearly—it skewered Eros’ heart like a hot poker through the ribcage.
The Tormentor booted a slab of fallen ceiling across the throne room as efficiently as the Egyptian gods knocked over villages with handfuls of water or mud. They called it “bowling.”
The King of the Dead called it something else after summoning Hermes to his lair. “Rearranging the furniture,” he snarled in answer to his nephew’s huge-eyed inquiry.
Hermes bobbed at a wary distance on his winged boots, hiding his room-gawping beneath the wide brim of his hat and a deep bow. He also forwent any hint of his customary snark when he asked, “H-how may I be of service, Uncle?”
The dread king snatched up another slab of rock. He took grave consideration as he seared a message into it with the fire in his glare. Once he’d covered both sides, the top and the bottom, he tossed it at the courier. “Take that to your father.”
Hermes caught it in his lissome arms. The stone, combined with the weight of those words, knocked him back. He nearly dropped it. His boots struggled to keep him aloft, so he levitated the rock, miniaturized it with a tap of his wand, and tucked it in his bottomless pouch. Lips sewn shut, he bowed again and disappeared without his usual fanfare of light. He did, however, vanish so quickly that half the feathers still popped off his boots.
Such a shame. Hermes always wore the loveliest boots.
(Not like Eros was biased toward winged things...)
As the Lord of the Underworld took up pacing back and forth through the open path he had bowled through the debris, Aphrodite turned away from her spying alcove. “I can’t bear anymore,” she groaned. “Oh, why did Hekate advise him to corner Demeter like that? What was she thinking!”
Still a bit queasy, Eros wrapped both arms and wings about her to offer comfort, as well as receive it. He forced himself to keep his embrace and his voice steady as he said, “I don’t know, Mother, but I trust Spellweaver. She knows what she’s doing, just like I always do. That’s why I got her involved. It’ll be all right. You’ll see.”
Aphrodite thrashed her way free of the warm feathers. “No. Demeter looks much the same in her grove. She annihilated five strains of grain, then destroyed her loom when she ran out of patience for weaving. The number of expletives she hurled at the ground were considerably more numerous and scathing than his.”
Eros’ brows flew toward the clouds. “Profanity from the Prude?”
“You’ve no idea. Thank Gaia’s mercy, only rural areas were affected by Demeter’s quakes—the only advantage to how far away she’s chosen to live from us all.” Aphrodite paced the brewery, gnawing her lips, worrying her fingers on the smooth shine of her strung pearls. With every step she took across the lavender carpet, a purplish fog rose up, pungent with the scent as she fought to calm herself.
Eros tucked his lips up inside his teeth, because all of this was precisely the opposite effect he’d been going for when he had envisioned matching Kore with Klymenos. The Master Matchmaker had been so certain that this pairing would send shockwaves of healing and love through the world.
Not rip its stress-fractures into downright chasms.
He had been equally certain that it would help fix his own personal little…problem. He’d been trying to ignore it for several moons. Just as his mother had been losing hairs, Eros had been losing feathers.
He hadn’t dared tell her. He hadn’t told anyone—had hoped he would never have to.
That first feather had fallen out not long after his mother had shown him her lost hairs—around the same time that Athene and Artemis had declared eternal virginity. Eros suspected it was just two goddesses too many spurning the arts of passion and procreation that had tipped the balance out of Love’s favor.
Great-Aunt Hestia had been the first Olympian to do so. Ever since she’d sworn that vow after the Titan War, it was no wonder that a plague of celibacy had seeped into the whole Olympian maternal line, for Hestia was the Goddess of Hearth and Home. She was the beating heart of Olympos, connecting every divine soul to one another with warmth and life, the way bodily vessels flowed with blood or ichor.
But Hestia had refused the bonds of intimate union. Sexual fire. Enraptured mating. With every passing century, she had grown more and more reclusive, and that trend had rippled sideways, down, and up her familial line.
Earth Her Primordial Self hadn’t procreated in ages. The Titan Queen hadn’t borne any more children after Zeus, and nobody had blamed her. Granted, Zeus and Poseidon more than counterbalanced any amount of celibate goddesses with their rampant romping, but so few of those dalliances were with equally powerful deities, and even fewer had been inspired by anything close to love.
Now Great-Aunt Demeter was living out there in the shrubs as though she had taken a vow of celibacy herself. And as for the sixth of the Olympian First Generation…
Well, the Master Matchmaker had been hoping to end the Lord of the Underworld’s loveless, passionless existence just like he’d been hoping to end that for gorgeous, juicy Kore. Once this match caught fire, Eros had hoped it would blast the Temple of Love’s blessings up, down, and sideways through the connecting vessels of their lineage, thus blowing this frigidity and warring nonsense out of everybody’s systems like cleaning out gunked-up pipes.
He just had to get them together!
After performing several ceremonious meditations to glean the swiftest, most efficient way to accomplish that, he’d been so certain of his course of action, so confident that he would have this situation wrapped up before he ever had to admit that he was losing feathers, especially to his mother. Aphrodite had enough on her gilded plates—very little of it palatable, much less tantalizing, as only the fare should be in the Temple of Love.
So he’d craftily stuck that first lost feather back in with sap, honey, and the reflected bounce of light off an iceberg. Direct sunlight had kept the honey too melty to create a proper glue. Instead, he’d repurposed the golden gleam, using it as paint upon that dulled, dead plume.
But now the stuck-on feathers had multiplied to six, and others had begun to itch. Every furious footfall that landed on Klymenos’ stone tiles…every quake that trembled the earth from Demeter’s growling and her own enraged tromping…every curse leveled upon a god by a goddess, and every threat spat from one divine mouth to its immortal recipient. Every subversive act of war from Above to Below, and every rank breeze that blew out of Ares’ temple…
It all set the God of Love’s wings into fevered itching just like it set Aphrodite to jabbing a fingernail against her scalp through her fantastic coiffure.
And then there was that other thing Eros had not told his mother.
While sneaking back home the other morning at dawn after way too late a party with some way too unsavory individuals he did not want to admit to frolicking with, he’d kept to the shadows of Olympos, soaring up to the lower-level delivery entrance that servants used to supply his mother’s temple. As he passed the foundational supports of the vast complex, he’d noticed something more alarming than fallen feathers and hairs.
A crack.
It was just a little one. Hardly anybody else would have noticed. But to a Love God with the wings that provided him such a unique vantage point, that tiny fissure had snagged his attention as clearly as his first fallen feather.
Because the crack spiraled up from the base of one of the colossal pillars that kept the holiest of Love’s holies affixed to Mount Olympos: the Inner Sanctum of Aphrodite. Within that golden-domed building sat the Goddess of Love’s most sacred and powerful altar. The rose quartz one, upon which the sun, moon, and stars all shone through the silver-lined oculus overhead.
That altar was the throbbing core of Lady Love’s entire temple.
Really…of the entirety of Olympos.
If Hestia was its heart, then Aphrodite sparked the heart’s beat.
The Olympian alliance could only be held together by necessity and dutiful obligation for so long. Now without a common enemy to battle the way they had united against the Titans and Gigantes, against Typhoeus, there was only one binding glue that could keep the ruling forces of the Cosmos together, and it certainly wasn’t sunlight and sap.
As Eros flicked a wary glance at his mother—she was once again scratching at her scalp—she noticed his scrutiny, caught herself, scowled, and tore her finger away for the umpteenth time. Heaving a despondent sigh, she gripped the rosewood of the Descrying Bowl, then bent over with her forehead pressed against its ornately carved lip. He couldn’t tell if she was weeping, resting, or praying for another deity’s help.
Her head shook against the bowl. “These are ancient feuds, son. Quarrels that are older than Zeus and his siblings—older than the Titans even. They have so little to do with this request for Kore. They’re aeons in the making, and now they’re all stirred up again and—” She flung herself back up, her face haggard and too pale. “Oh, my boy! What have we done?”
For the first time in his many millennia of existence, Love Primordial had no answer. Bound within the limits of paltry immortal flesh, Eros cursed the way his pulse raced, the dryness of his tongue, the falling sensation in the pit of his stomach—and the fact that it was not a pleasant one.
To fall without wings…
That was something the God of Love never wished to experience, and he didn’t need to bribe the Divine Sorceress for a prescient vision to know in his inconveniently roiling guts. If they couldn’t figure out how to halt these quakes rocking the foundational pillars of those cantankerous First Gen Olympians, it was all going to crumble right off the sides of the Mount.
Up Next: The Bringer of Blossomtime goes head-to-head with the Goddess of Discord in the Temple of War in SUSCEPTIBLE.
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