Look, the gods—those arrogant pricks towering over everything—made one colossal fuck-up in their endless strut across creation. They figured immortality meant they could do whatever the hell they wanted, forever.
Forgot the rules that bind even them. Forgot the world keeps spinning, humans keep clawing their way up from the dirt, and belief? That's not some bottomless well you can guzzle from till the end of time. Whn you're a god, your worst nightmare ain't some rival deity swinging a thunderbolt.
Nuh.
It's the slow grind of time itself, eating away at your shine.
This tale? It's the Twilight War—the clusterfuc where pantheons ripped into each other like rabid dogs, where the whole divine tapestry started fraying at the edges.
Egypt's heavy-hitters and Greece's golden boys, mightiest of the mighty, found out the hard way they could tumble jut like the rest. Gods losing the earth. Mortals figaring out how to breathe without kissing divine ass every dawn.
But hell, I'm jumping the gun here. Let me drag you back—way back—to when those bastards still stomped around like they owned the place. The tail end of the golden age, right before it all went to shit. Back to the day some little mortal kid dropped in from... who the fuck knows where.
Back to when he started cuckolding the gods themselves.
Yeah, you heard that right. The Age of Divine Dominion didn't crack because of some pantheon bloodbath. Nope. It shattered 'cause every god worth a damn—Egyptian, Greek, Nors, the whole rotten lot—buried ancient grudges deeper than a dragon's hoard. United against one shared nightmare.
A boy.
Just a scrawny little shit from beyond the edges of the map. He didn't swing swords or call down comets. He crawled into their beds.
Seduced their wives, daughters, sacred bed-warmer consorts. Aphrodite? Went weak-kneed for him. Freya next, then Isis—the queen of all magic, for fuck's sake. Hera ditched Olympus and Zeus's sorry ass for his sheets.
The Morrigan. Bastet. Persephone. Fell one after another, moaning his name while their "immortal" lovers fumed.
Wasn't about him stealing thrones or prophecies. Nah, that wouldn't have glued 'em together.
It was jealousy. Pure, ball-shriveling rage. The humiliation of getting cucked—by a goddamn mortal.
So, they banded up—Ra jawing with Zeus, Odin nursing a grudge next to Osiris—every power-tripping deity from here to the void's edge. All to squash the Boy from Beyond flat.
But this yarn... I can't spin the whole damn thing. The kid's real story—his tricks, his conquests, every goddess's fall and the gods' impotent howling—got scratched into forbidden scrolls. Locked in the book you're clutching right now.
Or... shit, maybe it should have been.
Pete Castellanos stared at the ancient tome splayed across his mahogany desk like it'd personally insulted his grandma, the Tiffany lamp throwing cozy shadows over what should've been the motherlode of forbidden smut. Empty pages. Blank as a politician's promise. Every goddamn one.
"You've gotta be shitting me," he growled, flipping through it like a man possessed, his Rolex flashing under the light like it was trying to signal for help. The leather cover? Real deal—soft, worn, whispering of dusty crypts.
Heavy enough to brain a burglar. Smelled like old secrets and regret, that musty parchment funk hitting his nose just right. Even the title, gold leaf flaking off like dandruff: {The Cucking of Gods: A Forbidden Chronicle}. Authentic as hell.
Three months.
Three fucking months chasing this ghost through dark web rabbit holes, sketchy auction sites run by mouth-breathers, capped off with a shady handoff in Prague from a dealer who looked like he'd eaten one too many pierogis and charged eighty large.
Eighty thousand. Pete hadn't even flinched—trust fund spat out that much in interest while he sipped his morning espresso. Money was for wiping your ass with; the real high was the hunt. The score. Snagging the rarest taboo trash to crown his collection.
"Un-fucking-believable," he muttered, chucking the book aside like it was radioactive roadkill.
Pete was king of the creepy collector's closet—hoarder of the stuff that got burned, banned, or buried. His vault downstairs? Climate-controlled wet dream stuffed with Mesopotamian scrolls on Inanna's holy hooker gigs. Greek pot shards etched with Zeus turning into every farm animal in the county for a quickie.
Medieval grimoires on succubi that'd make a porn director blush, shit museums jerked off to in their dreams but could never touch.
And this— The Cucking of Gods—was supposed to be the holy grail. The nuclear option. A mortal punk who toppled the divine dick-swinging contest not with swords or spells, but by banging goddesses while their hubby-gods blue-balled in impotent fury. Pete had jerked—er, pondered—those tales for nights on end.
Aphrodit ditching her forge-freak husband for some earthboy. Freya ghosting Asgard for mortal meat. Isis, magic-queen supreme, spreading 'em for a human hump. He'd cast himself as that Boy from Beyond, the luckiest sack of hormones to ever walk, doing what immortals couldn't: making goddesses sing his name in satisfied moans.
Blank. Pages. Total scam.
He slumped back, disappointment hitting like bad sushi—sour and churning. Another bust. Another emperor's-new-clothes con job. Should've seen it coming; life's too short for overhyped horseshit.
Out the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city twinkled like a cheap hooker—loud, gaudy, zero mystery. Gods? Dead myths, stories neutered for kids' books. The epic cuck-tale that supposedly booted 'em off the throne? Vanished. Buried.
Or maybe itching for a rewrite.
Pete snaped the book shut, fingers lingering on the battered cover. Maybe it wasn't for reading. Maybe you had to live the damn thing.
"Yeah, right. Rich-boy delusion from getting bent over by a book dealer."
He snatched it up rough, aiming to yeet it into the trash bin by his desk—composure cracking like cheap crystal, anger bubbling up hot.
The corner snagged his palm. Sliced clean.
"Son of a bitch!" Pete yanked back, watching blood bead along the cut like a tiny crime scene. One fat drop plopped right onto the open page.
The book lit up.