"You don't know Adonis? The plant god of spring, son of the king of Cyprus."
"Who is that? The king of Cyprus only has a daughter right now. No son."
Aphrodite seemed genuinely puzzled.
But the impact on Night's end was far greater than hers.
The king of Cyprus had no son, only a daughter?
Did that mean none of it happened yet?
Was Myrrha, who fell under the goddess's curse out of jealousy and was driven to fall in love with her own father, still just a princess living her ordinary life?
Aphrodite seemed to have eyes that saw through people.
She looked at Night with a knowing expression and suddenly said: "Adonis. This name has something to do with me, is it? Did you see something? Child of Prometheus."
That phrasing wasn't meant literally, not that Night was actually Prometheus's son.
It referred to someone who, like the wise Prometheus, seemed to have the ability to foresee the future or carry prophetic sight.
"Let me think. Adonis's birth will somehow be connected to me?
Ah, but the only one in all of Greece who ever truly caught my interest was always you, my dear hero.
If there is such a person as Adonis in this world, then there is only one who could be, and that is you."
Aphrodite said it with complete sincerity.
And she meant it.
She genuinely felt something like love at first sight for this one.
Not desire. Something purer. The closer she got to Night, the more she felt a warmth and deep affection she couldn't explain.
It felt as though it came from herself, as though it was always meant to be there, carrying within it all the love she would one day pour into this child, into what he represented.
Nothing as simple as romantic love between a man and a woman. Something deeper and wider. The love a mother held for a child. The love a lover held for a beloved. The love a dreamer held for the dream. It was the shape of a world she longed for.
This small person standing before her made her vision blur, as though she was looking at something very far ahead.
In such a world, there would be no more filthy male gods chasing after her, no oppression, no tyranny; she could become the most innocent and carefree goddess, bringing peace and freedom.
There was new life there.
Speaking of herself, Aphrodite felt her fate was a deeply unfortunate one.
The origin story used for this world's Aphrodite was that she was born of the great god Zeus and Dione, one of the ocean goddesses of the Dodona system.
Even as a daughter of Zeus, she was not as lucky as Artemis, who received Zeus's blessing of purity and affection early.
Nor was she as formidably capable as Athena, who had both the intellect and the power to defend everything that was hers.
And she was not in the fortunate position of Persephone, who was married to Hades, gloomy as he was, but handsome enough and genuinely protective of his queen, without nearly as many scandals as his two brothers.
As the goddess of beauty, her nature as the living embodiment of beauty drew the covetous gaze of nearly every hero and god in Greece.
First she was coerced by Zeus himself.
That disgusting man, a father moving against his own daughter, and when she refused, he married her off to the ugly fire god Hephaestus, her brother.
Naturally Aphrodite refused to let the ugly smith god, self-obsessed and deluded about both his power and his looks, touch her.
The man didn't just pursue her.
He also had ideas about Athena, with absolutely no self-awareness about either his strength or his appearance.
But after being married to the fire god, the goddess of love who had previously refused Zeus with her life began to generate all manner of scandalous rumors.
What could produce such a dramatic change in a single day?
Was it resignation and giving up?
No.
Only Aphrodite knew how much she had to run around over the years, finding powerful and handsome beings, gods and mortals alike, using her power of beauty to enchant them, then creating mental illusions where they believed they had been intimate with the goddess of love.
Everything others saw, everything mortals and gods witnessed, was only what Aphrodite chose for them to see.
That was the terrifying nature of the concept of beauty.
Even the God king Zeus never suspected anything was wrong.
(So now we're whitewashing her.)
She deliberately fabricated and spread rumors that worked against her own reputation, making everyone believe she was a promiscuous slut.
Even her children were produced by dividing and creating from her own divine power.
All of it was to reduce the attention of powerful gods who had designs on her.
Clearly, Aphrodite succeeded.
Compared to her, the gods now preferred the untouchable, white-moon quality of Artemis, and the brilliant, strong, and radiant Athena.
A public bus naturally attracted less interest than a private one.
Understanding this well, Aphrodite continued to maintain the pretense.
This time was no different.
She put on a show in front of Hermes of being fascinated by the mortal boy below and came rushing down without hesitation.
But the moment she was actually in Night's presence, (the scent of Rome) pulled something genuine and unguarded out of her.
She wanted to be close to this child. For no particular reason.
Simply standing near him felt like ease, like she no longer had to hide, no longer needed to live behind a mask.
And sensing Night's rejection, even the disgust hidden deeper beneath, Aphrodite felt genuinely sad.
Her sensitive nature led her to consider that possibility—
Was it because of the rumors?
But Aphrodite couldn't explain.
All she could do was try to reach him with sincerity.
The way she had with Adonis in the myth, the only one who ever made the goddess feel true longing, who made her panic and even faint in heartbreak when turned away, who sent her rushing into the underworld without hesitation to bring him back after his death.
Where other lovers in Aphrodite's mythology were mentioned in passing,
Only the story of Adonis occupied a significant portion of her myth.
And for Night, though he didn't understand what was happening with this goddess,
But at this moment, he learned that Adonis did not exist, especially when Cupid suddenly said, "There is only one you who could be Adonis."
A vast, invisible yet substantial force of destiny suddenly descended upon him. In that instant, the overwhelming cause and effect nearly crushed his soul.
Damn it!
After feeling the source of that causality, Night was nearly knocked speechless, a crude word detonating in his mind.
Greece, Rome, ancient Babylon, and more.
Among the many mythologies, there are different names and life experiences, but there was only one story that remains eternally unchanged.
A fixed point set into the long river of myth, a legend that was absolutely critical to the flow of things.
Not that it couldn't be changed, but it was a segment as crucial to the order of things as the turning points of human civilizational history.
No matter how different the parallel world, the most important historical moments tended to converge.
Change the direction of one such moment and human history might spiral into something completely different.
Aphrodite in Rome was Venus, goddess of the morning star and of Friday.
When the gods moved from Greece to Rome, almost all of them gained corresponding constellations and days of the week, and took on entirely new images.
It was like transcendence.
Like being reborn.
And speaking of the goddess of the Venus, that legend spread into neighboring regions and gave her new forms in other traditions.
Like the great silver woman of ancient Babylon, also married to a plant god, also forced by the other gods to descend into the underworld to retrieve someone she loved. Ishtar.
The greatest difference between her story and Venus's myth was that one loved the plant god and the other didn't.
Similar figures appeared in the Phoenician goddess Astarte and the Assyrian goddess Barīrītu.
The magnetism of Adonis, child of sin, the one whose beauty was original sin itself, drew the goddess Venus down from the heavens to earth, completing a mission of redemption, giving rise to the clear division of the seasons in the mortal world.
Though every mythological system had its own version of how the seasons came to be, and different gods credited with that change,
Very few of them shared such similar figures with such similar experiences across so many traditions.
And this particular critical and irreplaceable node in the mythological order, if Night had previously never paid much attention to Adonis, had never cared about the romantic myths connecting him to the goddess of love and only had a surface-level awareness of the story,
Now he was genuinely shaken.
Wait. What was happening?
He was now fairly certain Adonis did not exist in this world.
Otherwise one line from the goddess of beauty alone could never cause someone to be recognized and carry a fate this immense.
And not yet understanding what this wave of fate was actually for,
Night thought about how in every mythological world, the plant god ended up with the miserable fate of being shut in the underworld for at least four months of every year.
Night: ...!!
He got played.
He was always the one swindling others, but one day he was swindled himself.
His expression was something to behold.
If he had enough power right now, his only desire was to punch through the skull of the goddess who brought this trouble to his door.
.
.
.