Eros headed home through the streets of New Bedlam. It was the cleanest city in the Cosmos on the outside to disguise the flaws just under the surface. Like a corpse at the viewing, all wires and makeup. Under the streets were veins of sewers, rank with putrid blood and discarded bones from the nightclubs and luxury apartment buildings.
Eros could feel the bloodlust pouring out of every doorway he passed, and he buttoned up his peacoat and quickened his pace. The desiderium of the city both tempted and disgusted him. Desire was his true nature.
It was once true, and perhaps still was, that he had been feared by all the gods. The things he could drive them to do- anything. The horrors he could make them yearn for. The disgraced fools he could crumple all of them, any of them, into with the power of Desire. The sheer possibility of his power had created an anxiety that had spread like a contagion. Nevermind his sense of propriety. Nevermind his innocent love for his fellows. The Fates had decided. They had downgraded him.
Instead of a Primordial god born of Chaos, he became the son of Love and War, as an Erotes. They had fashioned a new position for him as an agent of Desire, rather than its very essence, rather than its very own personification.
At the time, at the height of Olympus, he had been eager to be a part of his family again and desperate to quell their phobias of him. Naively pining for their trust and acceptance to return, he had quickly and earnestly agreed to the degradation, without thinking of the consequences. His own desire had bested him, which the Fates knew would happen. They knew everything. And, for what he had done in the Mortalworld, they degraded him again, trapping him in the Netherworlds after spending thousands of years amongst mortals. He was with his own kind once again, and he hated them as much as they hated him. He found humans much more tolerable.
He stepped into his flat, the enormous windows overlooking New Bedlam. The design was sharp, sleek, and clean, and he took great care to keep it minimal and colorless. He had become afraid of his own nature. The Fates had instilled irrational fears about him inside his own pantheon, and the fears had even crept into his own being. A fear that if he had done more, the Fates would have destroyed him somehow. He shouldn’t have gone to the Mortalworld on that ridiculous crusade, because in his rebellion, he did as he had always done, nothing. Everything he could have been was at arm’s length, and he had left it all alone.
As he stood in front of the windows and gazed out at the Netherworlds’s purple night sky, dripping with falling stars and glitter, he assured himself those fears were real.
He’d pity himself if he saw any use to it, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t change anything.
His desires would always get the better of him, as they do anyone. Though, being the perfect archetype of desire itself, they got to him most of all. Eros knew better than anyone that passions always have a way of biting you in the ass.
He had wished for Psyche to love him for who he was as a man, not as a godly essence, and she had betrayed him. She had gazed upon his godly form, which no mortal could bear witness to without falling maddeningly in love. Though he had saved her from the jealous hands of his mother, and they had been happy for a time, she was not in love with him any longer. She had been transfixed by the force of his ensnaring power, the power the other gods feared. This led to fights and sleepless nights, and her reminding him quite often that it was he who started this whole mess by accidentally pricking himself, instead of her, with an arrow of Desire. And after many fables and songs were written about their pure, immortal love… they divorced.
During his first year in the Netherworlds, he had lived with five boyfriends, all of whom he had used for money and companionship, and all of whom kicked him out onto the streets on his ass. When he was finally able to save up enough demonics, around δ14,000 for his flat, he swore off men for good.
He knew this was the end of the line. There was nothing beyond this horizon, and he must be resigned to this Amor Fati.
Eros took off his coat and tossed it to the back of the sofa. With dexterous fingers, he removed his cufflinks on the way to his home bar. He left the two anatomical heart cufflinks on the black marble countertop, and rolled up his sleeves before pouring himself a scotch, and making his way back to the sofa to drink and smoke himself into a stupor.
Desire turned into despair so quickly. He wondered how Strife was getting on with her punishment. Her and Charon, and several other gods and goddesses, had been dealt worse punishments than he. With Eros, Fate’s best course of action had always been to lull him off into lotus dreams and deep self-loathing. Strife, though, was probably subject to whatever soup of the day Tartarus was serving.
Tartarus was a god, himself… itself. The Netherworlds was partly an aspect of the Underworld, The Dream World, The Subconscious, but Tartarus was the coal engine that fueled it all. It was a distinct, desolate abyss, somewhere even further down the roots of the World Tree than the Underworld itself. Perhaps, where the roots of the tree trailed off.
It had been an endless amount of aeons since Eros had last seen his brother, Tartarus. He wouldn’t know what Tartarus looked like, let alone where it might be, or what fresh hell it was concocting and subjecting its inhabitants to.
Perhaps, even Tartarus wasn’t fond of the role Fate had stuck it with. Maybe, even Tartarus was condemned to its own hell of being Hell.
Laying on his sofa in a drunken and dreamy state, his hand lofting a cigarette just before his lips, Eros recalled Loki’s words. The universe is a cruel mistress… but you know that better than anyone right now…
Eros rolled his eyes and snorted at a Loki who wasn’t there.
“Plenty have it worse than I,” he said to the scarred-lipped trickster god in his imagination.
Says the humility of a lesson well learned.
Eros snuffed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table and sat up drunkenly on the sofa.
Wise up.
Eros scoffed. He took a last sip of his scotch, and made for bed.
