Spurious Stories
In The Pantheon
I scribe for Hephaestus at inthepantheon.com. Hephaestus is misanthropic and bitter, resentful of his family and their treatment of him. I try to tell the story of Hephaestus learning to forgive others for what he feels they have done to him.
Iron becomes something, a bright searing liquid, then a hard, unyielding block. It becomes a weapon, a support, or a barrier. The others never truly change, never become anything other than what they always were.
The rock radiates heat, and I feel it on my skin, awakening me. It is not like the artificial heat of the mortal furnaces. It is something raw and ancient. The rock in front of me has become a pool of yellow liquid. The mountain is awakening, the volcano welcoming me home.
I have taken some other food as well, for it is not the done thing to simply have a large plate of bacon. It is better to have other food, even if it is to remain uneaten. Choosing only one foodstuff and consuming it to the exclusion of all else makes people uncomfortable. In my thousands of years among the mortals, I have mastered some small points such as this.
I find myself admiring its ingenuity, but there is something else. Something like disappointment. A sadness that the mortals should make such an effort to kill each other. Did we teach them that? Did they learn it in the phalanx while they prayed to the gods?
The mortals understand that everything, ultimately, can be understood. Once that is achieved, any issue simply becomes an engineering problem. If they could understand what was wrong with my leg, if they could divine the source of my pain, then they could perhaps treat it. While the mortals are limited in some ways, those limitations force them to think deeply about problems, and their solutions can often be ingenious.