"How can you look at me like that?
Dear Griffith,
I admire and cherish you so deeply.
Why won't you spare even a glance for me or speak to me properly?"
Having long since abandoned the innocent persona, Aphrodite pleaded with an expression of aggrieved vulnerability.
The words were humble, but her expression was anything but.
There wasn't the slightest hint of humiliation in it.
If anything, she looked excited, eyes burning with a hot and intent light locked on the young man, unwilling to look away.
The more he resisted, the more she liked it.
It was even more stimulating.
The urge to conquer this man grew stronger.
When Night heard what Aphrodite said, he understood what she was after.
In short, she liked his looks and wanted to sleep with him.
This goddess of love, having taken on a human form, seemed to genuinely forget her own divine identity and pleaded with him like this.
If it were any other hero who found out the most beautiful goddess in all of Greece was willing to lower herself this far to sleep with him, he would have been too excited to keep his composure and would have already thrown himself at her.
But Night found the situation distasteful.
Was he really going to be treated the same way as Adonis?
He simply didn't have any desire for Aphrodite.
No matter how beautiful she was, someone who might sleep with anyone, she was just like a female version of Zeus. Although she didn't rape more than half of the people she slept with, like a certain God-king, but she was still someone he could not associate with.
Not wanting to keep entangling with this goddess,
And worried she might lash out in anger if pushed further, Night decided it was better to name it openly and use his status as Artemis's devotee to protect himself.
.....
So, he said loudly, "How long are you going to keep up the disguise? Honored goddess of love and beauty!
I don't know what it is about me that you find worth pursuing.
But I am not your beloved Adonis.
Please take a good look, my goddess. As a devotee of the moon goddess Artemis,
My heart is already filled entirely with my own goddess.
There is no room for any other divine being."
....
He simply declined Aphrodite's intentions.
When she heard Night mention the moon goddess and his status as her devotee, Venus paused for a while.
She hadn't noticed before, and the pull of Rome's land blessing had been drawing and distracting her the entire time.
Now that she paid careful attention, she immediately sensed the blessing of Artemis and even Apollo's blessing on top of that.
?!!
He carried the favor of two gods simultaneously?
If she counted herself, that would make three.
Though she had been exposed, Aphrodite didn't seem particularly bothered.
She dropped the disguise outright and returned to her true form, the elegant and beautifully sensuous Greek gown with its long slit opening.
The goddess Aphrodite appeared in an instant, bearing and presence transformed into something noble, graceful, and irresistibly alluring.
The moment her divine beauty was revealed, the authority of beauty activated instinctively, and Night almost lost any resistance at all.
He sank instantly, his awareness slipping toward an abyss.
Then the blessings of the moon goddess and the sun god flared simultaneously, the combined divine power burning through him and clearing out the entrapping authority of beauty.
Night snapped awake and stepped back.
Even the songs of the sirens couldn't pull him under, yet just now he had no resistance whatsoever, dropping completely into the maddening beauty of the goddess of beauty herself, a beauty that transcended anything worldly and seemed to reach the very apex of what existence could be.
Confronting the physical embodiment of the concept of beauty, he was without question instantly overwhelmed.
Feeling the weight of that suffocating, all-encompassing force, he was covered in cold sweat down his back.
This was dangerous.
This was what a god was.
Noticing his reaction, Aphrodite pulled back a little of her divine authority and asked with genuine curiosity.
"How did you figure out who I was? And who is Adonis?"
When she asked about the name Adonis, Night felt a flash of surprise inside.
She didn't know Adonis?
That was the figure the goddess of love cared for most deeply, someone who felt more like a true feeling than the casual encounters with her other lovers.
A Greek man of legendary beauty.
Speaking of beautiful existences.
The two most recognized beauties in Greece were Helen and Aphrodite, one the most beautiful mortal woman and the other the most beautiful goddess.
But there was no ranking for men.
There were many legends of beautiful men.
Narcissus, whose looks were so extraordinary that he couldn't have a relationship with himself and grew so enamored with his own reflection in a pool that he pined away and died from it, and the gods turned him into a flower.
And Anchises, the man whose face alone won a night with the goddess of love and produced the hero Aeneas.
But none of these men had a beauty that reached the level of something supernatural.
In Greece there was one man who embodied the idea that if beauty itself was a sin, then he was guilty without excuse.
He was Adonis, child of sin.
The daughter of the king of Cyprus, Myrrha, was so extraordinarily beautiful that even the goddesses felt threatened by her, and she drew the jealousy of the goddess of beauty.
Unlike Helen, who had Zeus as a father and some protection from that, Myrrha had no such backing and was cursed by the goddess.
(Though it should be noted that Helen fared poorly under Aphrodite's games too, just without being cursed to her face.)
Under the curse, Myrrha fell in love with her own father and sought out his bed in secret under cover of night.
When her father discovered the truth of who his lover was, fury drove him to want to kill her.
But Myrrha was already pregnant.
In the end, she fled in a panicked state and was transformed into a myrrh tree by the gods.
Adonis was born from that tree.
Born of the goddess's spite, a product of a mother's incestuous union with her father.
His very origin was a symbol of sin.
But in the end that sin came back to touch the goddess of love herself.
In the future, she fell in love with this child, and when he was killed by a wild boar, it was said to be the moon goddess's revenge for the earlier death of her follower Hippolytus, that Artemis killed the one Aphrodite loved in return.
The goddess of love went to the underworld to beg for him back, though there were rumors that even the queen of the underworld, Persephone, also fell for Adonis.
Driven to obsession by that supernatural beauty.
Even Persephone, the dignified and composed queen of the underworld, could not resist that bewitching beauty.
She was not the type of person who would have an affair based on appearance, otherwise she wouldn't have married someone like Hades.
Which said a great deal about just how extraordinary Adonis's beauty was, carrying something of original sin within it.
Even Aphrodite, afraid others would discover this child's beauty while she was away, hid him in a chest and left him with Persephone for safekeeping.
It was during that time that Persephone was captivated, which was why she later refused to return the dead Adonis.
Because of that legend, Adonis as a god of vegetation was negotiated into a cycle, spending four months each year on the surface with Aphrodite and four months in the underworld with Persephone.
This was said to be the reason for the change between spring and winter.
Of course this part of the myth overlapped with the myths about Demeter, the earth mother goddess.
Some versions recorded it as Persephone returning to the surface to visit her mother each year, and Demeter's joy at seeing her daughter causing the earth to bloom into spring.
When her daughter left again, the earth mother's grief turned the world cold and brought winter.
But regardless of the version, the importance of Adonis to the goddess of love needed no further elaboration.
The number of days Aphrodite spent at her legitimate husband's side in a year was probably less than she spent with Adonis.
And yet this Aphrodite had no idea who Adonis was?
If Night remembered correctly, the events of Adonis's story should have happened very close to this era.
Helen herself even appeared in a version of the myth, helping Aphrodite retrieve Adonis.
Did the story of Adonis simply not happen?
No. Wait.
He had just told the goddess not to treat him as Adonis, not to play out some love-at-first-sight scenario.
'Wait a moment. Adonis is actually myself'?
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)