Hephaestus | Leonard Smith (hammer_down) wrote in forgotten_gods, @ 2009-08-06 06:33:00 |
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Entry tags: | hephaestus |
Who: Hephaestus [Narrative]
What: Post-Aphrodite bids for peace.
When: Backdated to Tuesday afternoon.
Where: Centralia, Pennsylvania
Warnings: Nothing of consequence. It's Hephaestus, so it's hardly ecstatic.
Centralia was a world on fire.
To Hephaestus it made perfect sense when everything else seemed mad. The place was searing, toxic comfort, more home to him than home. Old and familiar despite being such a recent catastrophe, Centralia had become more a mother's womb to the fire god than Hera's had ever been. Here, in an abandoned town peopled wholly by by the dead, he felt at peace. The only other place he might ever be more content was at the heart of a volcano.
Not, to be sure, in the arms of his wife.
She'd found him, of course. Come to him on a summer afternoon, more beautiful than the day, more crushing than the night. Centuries spent avoiding his family were worthless and wasted when he had looked up from his forge and saw Aphrodite waiting. All that time thinking that perhaps he could free himself from their roles, their myths? Laughable.
He'd fallen like a fool for her. In mere moments he was once more the crippled smith of Olympus begging allowance to touch, to feel, to receive some boon he could believe was affection. Even knowing that she could only be there for one reason -- her own ends -- wasn't incentive enough to send Aphrodite on her way.
So she had what she wanted, and in turn he gave up his dignity to pretend at love. It was the same old story, he thought, sitting along the ruins of Route 61. Smoke vented from the ground, thick plumes of it rising up from cracks in the road. Beneath the earth while Hephaestus stared off into the distance of his own memories, a coal seam burned slow and steady. He felt it the same way he had felt his wife's perfect skin beneath his rough hands, real and distant all at once. It was not worship, but it was familiar power, and though he was a small god these days, he was still a god.
The earth beneath his weak and wounded legs burned, and it felt good.
She would likely leave him be, or so Hephaestus suspected. She had her cruel jab to take back to Ares; he'd called his brother a fool on many occasions, knowing all the while that he was just as much the idiot when it came to Aphrodite. So she would rile him, and he would rail at her, and perhaps if the blacksmith was lucky, they would forget the involvement of their husband and brother.
If nothing else, he knew better now. Knew how to avoid his kith and kin, and hopefully regain that measure of peace now lost. But there were his nephews to think of. And the urge to see Dionysus? Of Persephone's kindness?
No. No, it would be better to forget it all. He'd not disappear into the ether -- Hephaestus was too well set into his life to just pick up and leave as he might have done in the past -- but neither did he have to encourage their attentions. This was not Olympus; even the most powerful of them might as well have been dust and bones. For the Greek Gods, it was merely a matter of time.
He could live with that. He could wait for the inevitable rather than expecting any kind of justice. After the sweet crackle and burn of Centralia finished soothing him like a lullaby, Hephaestus could go home and make some needed changes.
Which did not have any effect on the those memories of his wife in his arms. And did not, alas, make him yearn any less to whisper soft words to the fires beneath his feet in hopes that they'd rise up and scour the country. Of man, of woman, and most especially of gods. Setting a world aflame in hopes of burning his own heart clean was something Hephaestus almost found bearable after thousands of years of the same sad affairs.
But though still a god, he was too small for such displays. And so like always, Hephaestus took what he could get. He took sanctuary in Centralia's quiet, oppressive heat. He sat silent just off of the road, and cursed his own inability to outrun a weak heart and a wife who would never love him.