a/n: ableist language, non-explicit references to past rape/sexual assault
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When Aphrodite met Ares, it went very simply in her mind. She wanted him and therefore she would have him.
She emerged from the sea fully formed and more beautiful for her creation from the savagery of her grandfather and father and its union with the wild and tempestuous sea. She never thought she would meet anything like herself (a thing, always, was what she was taught to be), nothing so passionate and unrestrained, and it was only when she was wedded to Hephaestus the cripple did she meet Ares.
He was gore and glory without façade, and while she was seen as a child, ill-tempered and willful and to be appeased, something to be admired from afar, he was seen as powerful and proud and rightly the god of war, rightly the father of chaos and destruction and torturous battle.
She almost hated him; but love was a hate beyond dislike and disgust, love was a hate to consume. She wanted so viciously to consume Ares and his status before the gods, his visceral brutality and joy in destruction, his abandon, the fear he engendered in mortals, his freedom to be what he was, that she almost understood the brutality of Ouranos against Gaia.
That Ares could pursue and crave her like he craved bloodshed, yet she was not to reciprocate what the foam still in her veins surged for because she was wedded, was what she hated.
As if vows meant anything to gods.
As if the goddess of love should or could be restrained.
Aphrodite met Ares and it was as violent and inevitable as the crash of waves upon a shore.
YOU ARE READING
a net of stars, woven
Short Story❝sing, o muse, of those who ruled on high, of women scorned and loved, and of golden crowns, and blood, and love, and war... sing, o muse, of those immortalized, golden-wreathed and ever-lauded, silver-souled and many-storied... sing, o muse, of t...
