💘 Contriving
6LS4: The God of Love pitches a super-duper amazing scheme--his greatest one yet, you'll see!
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
Eros, Love Primordial, no longer wishes to merely toy with little gods. He decides that it would be ever-so-fun to be one and experience the wonders of fleshly pleasure. After enticing the Goddess of Love to mate with the God of War, he incarnates—now with wings! The first target he shoots with his tiny bow-and-arrows: Persephone, Bringer of Blossomtime. But nobody calls her that. They call her Kore, “the Maiden,” a status her mother is determined that she keep until a suitable husband can be found.
Because—shhh!—Demeter has a secret terror. She refuses to let her only child fall prey to the ominous prophesy delivered at her birth. Cue spooky music: That Kore will become a bride through violence and fall into eternal night. So Earth Mother works tirelessly to find the love-match that can break this prophesy.
But the Bringer of Blossomtime has ideas of her own. She already knows who she is fated to marry, and she is ready to bloom. More than ready. And willing. And curious. And hungry. And…
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series
Also. Kore is pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.”
EROS, GOD OF LOVE, LORD OF LUST, WINGED BALL OF MISCHIEF
⛅️💘⛅️
“Whatcha doin’?” he asked, eternally amused with the countenance of juvenile impishness.
“Contriving,” she tossed back. Her heart finger traced infinities through the rose oil that filled the broad basin before her.
As Eros peeped over his mother’s shoulder, the reflection of his dark eyes came to dominate the surface of the oil, overpowering the visions that rippled therein. He flashed a derelict grin. “Can I help—?”
“No,” she shot off before the words could fully flit from his mouth. A smile crept across her lips, betraying her own amusement as she nudged him away with an elbow.
He sniggered, unfurling the immensity of his wingspan. The golden magnitude dominated half of his mother’s aromatic brewery and dwarfed the sunlight captured inside her floating lamps. He took to the air, treating her luxuriant coiffure to a sound bat.
“Confound it, boy,” Aphrodite grumbled, yet she had to scrunch up her face to keep from laughing.
Eros chuckled, folded his arms over his petal-smooth chest, and crossed his feet at the ankles. This evening, he had chosen to emanate magnolia and almond, with a zing of his favorite scent, seconds-before-rain. Ozone always made him horny. (What didn’t? He was, after all, as much the Lord of Lust as the God of Love.)
He had also donned his favorite visage, the quintessence of adolescent masculinity: lithe, limber, and flawlessly naked but for the quiver of arrows that floated between his wings. He caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the starlight-infused silver of the overhead dome. He wasn’t quite certain how he had managed to look more magnificent than usual, but he did.
His wings brightened. Bodies were ever so delightful!
(Except when they were confounding.)
He simply couldn’t comprehend why everyone didn’t enjoy them this way. After the thrones of power had moved up here to Olympos following the defeat of the Titans, some of the more prudish elements had begun to grumble about deities going around in their natural forms. But Eros was far more ancient than the Olympians, in spite of his recent incarnation a mere eight centuries ago. His mother was older, too. Aphrodite only used clothing to augment beauty, rather than enshroud it, so she eschewed the recent trends and allowed Eros to do as he pleased.
Which he did.
Constantly.
With zeal.
Not that she could have stopped him, had they disagreed. Love Primordial would never allow mere gods to foil his fun, whether or not he constrained himself in a fleshly vessel alongside them.
He silently winged his way behind his mother to chuckle over her shoulder again. “Well, then?” he asked. “Who are we spying on today?”
Aphrodite remained focused on the bowl. “Descrying. And we are not.”
“Spying. Of course we are. Who is it?”
“No one that should concern you.”
His eyes reflected in the rose oil again. His grin broadened.
“Son, do you mind?” The Goddess of Beauty and Love gripped the carved rosewood pedestal upon which the Descrying Bowl perched in its sacred alcove. She leaned farther over it to block his view with her decadent curves. “This is a delicate matter, not one of your lascivious pranks. Things of this nature require sincere devotions and serious concentration.”
“Oh, I’m always serious, especially about lascivious pranks. You have no idea the devotions and concentra—” With a hard blink, he wrinkled his nose at the sight of who his mother was watching. “Ugh! What’s Apollo doing in Demeter's grove?"
Aphrodite sighed again and surrendered the view. "Sneaking."
"Who's he trying to sneak up on?"
“Kore, of course. Demeter just gave him permission to woo her.”
“Bleckh! ” Eros’ wings took on a green tinge. “Apollo wouldn’t know how to properly woo the likes of Blossomtime if I shot him with every gold-tipped arrow in my arsenal and loaned him my wings.”
“Well, perhaps you should consider that, because he’s about to make a mess of it. That girl needs to be out from under her mother’s shadow and into the light of love as quickly as possible, lest we lose yet another of our eligible maidens to this virginity nonsense.”
“I couldn’t agree more, mother. And she’s ready.”
“More than ready. She’s been exploring sexual rapture, in spite of her mother’s attempts to thwart her.”
Eros leered. And to thwart me. He plucked out a feather and combed through his ruddy-gold locks with its shaft. “I’ve seen her explorations—heh. Oh, have I seen. But Apollo’s not the one to awaken her. Kore is the most eligible treat on the wooing shelf.”
The Goddess of Love fixed her son with a sly grin. “Erotarion, are you jealous?”
“Hah!” He tossed the feather back into his wing carriage and crossed his arms again. “About the only thing I envy Apollo is his singing voice, but trust me. Even that’s not going to help him pluck Blossoms.”
“Well, someone had better. Both of her phallus-hating sisters are trying to sink their claws into her.”
“Pffft. Athene and Artemis are a lost cause.”
The Armored Maiden Athene and that tip-toeing, wood-slinking, arrow-shooting Artemis had recently sworn vows of chastity—chastity! For such succulent beauties? Pure outrage. Now they bristled and brandished their weapons every time Eros so much as fluttered past, and they only paid homage at the Temples of Love for the Rites of Philia to celebrate their friendship, or for the Feast of Storge to honor their parents.
Eros rolled his eyes. “What an utter waste of my time and talents. And yours, too, mother.”
“Don’t remind me.” Lady Love balled fists beneath her girdle, a sash in ever-shifting, mother-of-pearl hues, divinely enchanted to draw all attention to the swells of her body above it and below. Her sunshine-and-seafoam gown was of the traditional corseted style, close-fitting and bare-breasted, which only added to the effect. So did the silvery-gold tattoos she’d painted, mandala-style, to emanate from her nipples.
Unfortunately, her ire dulled the shine off her outfit, her milky skin, and her tower of golden curls. An angry surf crashed through her gaze. “Do you know, that snooty pair snubbed me? Me! Publicly. I offered them my customary blessing as they arrived for the full moon feast, but they thrust their little noses in the air, linked arms, and sauntered off to cackle by themselves, refusing to so much as acknowledge my presence the entire night. I cannot allow them to begin tainting Kore the way they have with Hera’s girls. Shall we lose an entire generation of goddesses who refuse to mate and procreate? Do you know what this is doing to me? Do you!”
The concussive impact of her voice made all the doves and sparrows twittering around the room flee through every window.
A thud struck Eros’ heart. He snapped his gaze onto his mother more sharply than when he aimed his arrows. “What is this doing to you?”
Aphrodite blinked hard, then met his eyes. Her cheeks flushed before she whirled away from him.
“Mother?” He traversed the space between them faster than flight, transpiring in front of her to grasp her shoulders. His wings curved forward, part shield, nearly an embrace. “What’s happened? Tell me.”
“No.” Her bottom lip quivered and she couldn’t meet his gaze. Before he could argue, she wrenched herself from his grip. “It’s easier if I just show you.”
He glided after her, watching as she pulled down a coral-encrusted box from a corner shelf. She clutched it close before bringing it to him. At last, she lifted the lid to show him what lay coiled within: five long hairs the color of dried hay.
His brows furrowed as he sifted through the collection of blondes who had offended his mother. It was a lengthy list. “Are…are you making a cursing potion?”
“No!” she cried, shoving the box closer to him. “Don’t you use the damned, divine eyes that your prick-of-a-father gave you?”
Eros’ damned, divine eyes flew open. He had never heard her speak ill of his sire that way. “I—Mama…” He squinted harder, peering into the heart of the filaments. When their nature came clear, he gasped. His wings practically buffeted the hairs from the box as he shot backwards. “Thunder on Olympos!”
The lid slammed shut. She returned the box to the shelf. She did not, however, turn back around to face him.
Carefully, gently, he floated over her shoulder again. His voice barely caressed her ear. “Then…then you didn’t pluck them out yourself?”
“Of course not!” she snapped, whirling around to receive a clump of feathers in the face. She swatted and snuffled herself free, then retreated to the Descrying Bowl. Her knuckles turned white with the ferocity of her grip on the basin.
“When did this happen?” Eros asked.
“It’s been happening for a few moons now. A hair here. A hair there. Then three this morning amidst Zeus and Hera’s latest blowout.”
“What was that about?”
“I’ve no idea. There are certain places even my Descrying Bowl cannot pierce. Whatever it was…” Aphrodite’s trembling hand reached up toward her mound of curls, but didn’t quite touch it. The tresses upon her head gave off a subtle radiance like late afternoon sunlight. The hairs in that box should have glowed the same, but then again, they should have been tucked safely up with the rest.
A goddess, after all, did not shed hairs.
Eros’ mind ran calculations of every major event that could have affected the currents of Love over the past moons. “Athene and Artemis swore themselves to celibacy a few moons ago.”
“Yes. They did.” Aphrodite’s eyes blazed like sunlight-on-sea as she growled, “Curse your spear-thrusting, war-lusting father. This is all his doing. He simply must have his strife and his gluttonous conflicts. He’s turned those maidens against me, I just know it! And now it’s spreading like a frigid, prickly plague. Demeter only put in the briefest appearance at my Fertility Festival this morning, and she left Kore behind, locking her away in the Protected Grove with the Chastity Twins for company.”
“Sacrilege!” Alongside the slowly spiraling column of jars, bottles and tiny amphorae, he performed backflips in the air as he snarled, “Demeter can suck it. May the Harvest Mistress choke on her father’s shriveled old cock for all time. She’s turned into the most shriveled old husk herself, but Kore? Um…good midnight-at-noon? She’s a fertility goddess!”
“They both are.” Aphrodite resumed her search in the bowl, tracing infinities through the rose oil again, faster and faster. Her curls dangled above the ever-shifting scenes in the oil as she shook her head. “I’ve been searching all evening. Woodlands, seascapes, skyscapes, caves. One of these locales must be capable of producing an appropriate mate for an Olympian-caliber maiden. I must find him, before it’s too late and I lose all my glorious hair and my wits along the way! Oh, Eros, can’t you feel it? Creeping in like some fanged, tentacled sea-monster, spreading the cold, dark deep like squirted ink.”
“I have felt it,” Eros grumbled.
And for more than a few moons. More like centuries.
Devotees at the Temples of Love had dwindled in favor of other deities throughout all the lands. Mortals had begun to favor law over love. They sacrificed more and more to the powers of sea and sky, to war and commerce. Even procreation, intimate touch, and sexual frolic had been usurped by the Olympian dictates of marriage, as presided over a couple that despised each other as often as they thrashed at each other in bed.
Aphrodite’s hair loss was the result.
There were other disturbing signs. Other consequences to this siphoning away of worship and power. The currents here on Olympos were rank with it, and therefore, the mortal realm. So as Above, so they would mimic below. Athene, one of the rising stars of divine veneration, rivaled even the greatest gods in certain cities. Now that she had declared herself an eternal virgin…
The Goddess of Love glowered. “Even familial bonds are worn threadbare. Parents betray their offspring; children disrespect their forebears. And sibling loyalty?”
“What’s that?” Eros sneered.
“Precisely. My son, if we don’t correct this course, Love’s imbalance will become irreparable. The very bindings of the Universe will—”
“Oh, mother, truly? Bindings-blindings. You underestimate me. Just leave this to me, along with the almighty cosmic bindings.”
She flashed a look of terse warning over her shoulder. “Do not jest about that.”
Eros rolled his eyes. “Have you forgotten how much more ancient I am than you are? My whispers wooed Gaia the Very Earth into Becoming. I enticed the first rut of procreation. I—”
“I have not forgotten, my cherub.” Aphrodite buried her attention in her bowl once more. “But you have not even possessed hands for a millenium. Your power is one of undeniable, cosmic magnitude, whereas this venture requires deft machination and careful contriving. One must know precisely when to add the right ingredient into the potion—”
A golden droplet fell into the basin, disrupting the surface of the rose oil.
With a piqued noise, she looked up.
Eros grinned at her from where he had floated in to hover over her head once more. Silently. Stealthily. He flashed a self-satisfied smirk and waggled his heart finger at her. He had pricked it with a thorn from the multihued roses that framed the alcove so he could squeeze his golden ichor from the wound into her Descrying Bowl.
“Eros!” she chastised.
“I’m telling you, I know exactly what to do about all this.” He gave his pectorals several alternating flexes.
“Stop that. You look like your father.”
He mustered up his most innocent, beguiling smile. “But you adore my father.”
“I do,” she growled. “Glorious, contentious, contemptible wretch that he is. And your veneer of innocence isn’t any more convincing. You may be as fair and golden as I am, but you have Ares’ dark eyes and they are all mischief.”
“Hah. I think I inherited a double dose of that.”
Her mouth opened to refute, but then slid into the smirk he had also gotten from her. (Well, one of the many.) She shrugged and turned back to the bowl. “Go practice your archery on some lonely nymph. I have work to do, and it does not require your nosey nose or your rogue ichor.”
“I disagree. If you’d just listen, I have the answer to your all your woes.”
“I’m sure you think you do.”
He set his jaw with a hard huff through his nostrils. “I’ve foreseen it.”
“Psssh. You are not Apollo.”
“Pffft. Thank my perfectly sculpted buttocks!”
“That’s my buttocks you’ve inherited, now off with you.”
When she attempted to shoo him away from the bowl, he transformed into a little fluttering cherub, the countenance certain to exasperate her like no other. He zigged, zagged, and slipped into the alcove to let two more drops of his glowing life-fluid fall into the oil.
“Confound it, boy!”
The surface rippled once more and then darkened. Eros’ heart swelled in triumph as the floral sweetness of the room gave way to the scent of decomposing roses, moist and tangy. The sharper sting of smoke followed, and then ash, earth, blood, mud, riverbank, rotting flesh—
Aphrodite cried out and flinched back.
Although neither of them had ever graced the Underworld with so much as a pearlescent toenail, the stench of that realm was unmistakable. So, too, the eerie hum that vibrated the bowl and set all the tiny amphorae to quivering.
Eros let out a hungry chuckle. That’s it. That’s the song I need.
Within the oil, the mist-enshrouded walls of a palatial fortress shimmered into view. Atop them, a dark figure paced.
“Oh, falling heavens!” Aphrodite swatted the surface, destroying the vision. Upon spying the putrefaction creeping through the rose droplets on her hand, she vaporized the slick sheen. Her spine quaked with revulsion. When she rounded on Eros, her glare could have rivaled a gorgon’s. “Why would you taint my temple with the sight of Klymenos?” Through her perfect teeth, she spat the moniker in place of uttering the King of the Dead’s true name—something Eros had only ever witnessed two individuals brave enough to do.
One of them was the Bringer of Blossomtime. The other…
Well, as King of Olympos, Grandpapa Zeus could risk it. Everybody else used a multitude of nicknames to stave off the curses that trailed in the wake of speaking that dreaded name. To do so was said to bring ill fortune, or for mortals, a hastening of their demise.
Eros wouldn’t even let himself think the name. Although Death could not touch him, he reviled ill fortune. Such an annoying gnat, mucking up his schemes. He couldn’t think of many who enjoyed it. Hence why the ruler of the Underworld had been dubbed “He of Many Names.”
And He was precisely who the God of Love needed in order to ensure success in his grandest scheme yet. Eros had only been plotting it for three-quarters of a millennium. It simply required patience, the correct timing, and deft machination, just as his mother had said.
His mirthful giggle deepened into a belly-laugh as he expanded back into his sylph-like adolescent self. He tugged Aphrodite back to the bowl. “Trust me,” he said. “This is exactly what you’ve been looking for.”
With a huff, she crossed her arms, slumped into a hip, and snapped her face away.
Eros beckoned the vision again. “Come now,” he coaxed, tickling her shoulder with a wing. “Just one little peek.”
She deigned a slit-eyed glance at the bowl.
The gloomy halls returned and ushered them into a throne room. The lone figure had taken up pacing inside. He was immense, armored, and cloaked in night, draped with all the riches of the earth: silver and gold encircling his wrists and waist; an amethyst medallion the size of his substantial palm swinging from the gold chain about his neck; a ruby ring the size of his thumbnail, another in emerald, and a third in sapphire. Atop his helmet perched a horned, thorned headdress, a towering monstrosity that made him appear even more daunting as he stalked back and forth before his throne. The thing was set with every jewel known to man and three known only to the gods.
The King of the Dead cut an impressive figure, no one could deny that. His old epithet, Klymenos, meant “illustrious” or “famous”, and had once been bestowed as an honorific. Now when anyone called him that, it was growled or sneered. He was famous, all right, but not for anything complimentary.
Eros salivated at such wondrous prey. Getting through that armor of diamond-encrusted adamantine to shoot the big fiend straight in the heart?
Delectable.
Aphrodite, on the other hand, cast an aura of protection against evil at the mere sight of the Chthonic King. All the lamps intensified their glow, desperate to counteract the Underworld’s seeping murk. They, along with the amphorae and potion jars, could not stop shuddering.
Neither could the God and Goddess of Love.
Eros let it happen, fascinated by the sensation. It truly was unnerving, almost like an itch in the back teeth or a feather combed the wrong way.
“Light of Olympos,” Aphrodite groaned.
“Nope,” Eros said. “That’s all the creepy, spine-quaking light of un-life.”
Her glare snapped onto him. “And you wish to doom one of our eligible maidens to…that?”
“Oh, yes. With all my boundless, omnipotent, omniscient heart.” Eros crossed both his ankles and arms once more, bobbing in the air with a satisfied smirk born of both his parents’ mischief. “Would you like to see what happened to the King of the Dead moments before Apollo began bungling Blossoms?”
Lady Love flinched back. “Blossoms? You don’t mean to—oh, Eros, no! No-no-no-no. You can’t mean…”
The God of Love winked and double-flexed his pecs, then waved his hand across the oil. The image of the throne room shimmered into a misty lake. As the dread king waded out into it, his stately, daunting accoutrements vanished, replaced by a simple, pleated hip-wrap.
Aphrodite drew in an audible breath to witness it. “Ohhh…” she murmured, pushing a dangling curl behind her ear. Her fingertips lingered upon her cheek. “Oh, I had forgotten.”
“What? How impressive he is? How beautiful?”
“Yes,” she whispered, transfixed upon the sight.
“Of course he is. He’s an Olympian.”
Her breast swelled with a long inhalation, which she let ease silently through her suddenly engorged lips. “That he is.”
Eros resumed his comfy floating position. “Just watch.”
UP NEXT:
THE RIVERS OF PAIN & FIRE - In which we are treated to a very rare sight: the Unseen One, the Commander of Multitudes, Host of Many, He of Many Names…Klymenos, King of the Dead in a quite personal moment.
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