The Perils of Unrequited Love

PROLOGUE

illa cantat; nos tacemus; quando ver venit meum?

She sings; we are silent; when will my springtime come?

---Pervigilium Veneris

In the beginning, Anteros was the god of requited love and avenger of those who scorned love. Not many people knew Anteros. Most people knew his more famous brother Eros, the winged god of lust and passionate love, who was always up and about, causing mischiefs.

Anteros was not fond of his job. Nobody liked to be an underdog. His entire existence was for Eros as love needed to be reciprocated to grow.

He took his job with laziness and that was the main reason why not many people knew the love that was unconditional and everlasting.

After a couple of centuries, anteros had gotten way too lazy to do his job and quit it altogether. The result? Absolute chaos. Without love returned, love could not grow. Lovers soon grew out of love. Promises were broken. Humans confused Lust for love as they no longer saw the difference. Those with unrequited love preyed, but miracles stopped happening. Scholars started seeing love with hostility. Love was no longer a precious gift from one human to another; Love was regarded as an affliction to be avoided.

Too many broken hearts drove so much madness in mortals and immortals, alike. In the end, mortal and immortal's complaints reached his mother, Aphrodite.

Mortal parents grounded their children. Immortal mother, Aphrodite, striped her youngest of his bow and arrows and placed a curse upon him. Until he learned his lesson, he was going to live as a mortal.

The devil was in the details.

For the past 2500 years and more, Anteros was forced to live as a female mortal. As if being a mortal without any godly power wasn't enough punishment.

No matter how many lives he lived, he would look the same: A stunningly beautiful blue-eyed, blonde woman with a tiny birthmark shaped like a full bloom rose right above her heart. The mark of aphrodite was left with him to remind him of his punishment.

In total, he had already lived 217 lives.

For the first 200 lives, he posed as a matchmaker and tried to help mortals find true love to appease the wrath of the goddess. He worked more than he had ever done as a god, yet the curse was still there.

In his 65th, 198th th, 199th lives, he had even gotten married with his suitors to fulfill their needs.

Yet, returning love by sacrificing himself was still not enough to amend for his sins. Human lives were fragile. In some lives, he died in his childhood. In all lives, he died in his youth, painful gruesome deaths brought by a series of romantic misfortunes of some sorts. As if the gods wanted him to pay for those hundred thousand broken hearts.

By his 200th life, he had given up guessing what aphrodite wanted. No more match making. No more punishing people who scorned love. Those attempts often backfired anyway. He focused on living well, enjoying various mortal pursuits. However, he often felt weary and empty, as if something was missing from his heart.

He spent the next 17 lives trying to fill the void in it.

And this story began with his or her, by this point, 218th life.