Prometheus's Gift XXI - The Sanctuary

    185 BCE.  A grassy slope high upon Mount Olympus.
    Eros and Prometheus sat against a lonesome cedar, its grandeur stunted by the thin air, drinking retsina and looking to the cloudless sky.  A perfect zephyr marked the perfect day, a day fit only for a god (or mortal).  Across a great and deep chasm and atop an unclimbable peak, the Golden Temples of the gods, a city unto itself, shrouded in the white mists of mortal mystery.  Below, majestic Greece sprawled over unspoilt lands rolling under rivers and over farmland and off into the still clean Mediterranean Sea...  To the south they could see Athens and Her Acropolis, a stone carved wonder of the ancient world yet to crumble under Her own weight.
    The world as they knew it lay naked before them that day.
    Eros, then the man yet emitting a pretty, androgynous aura, lifted the flagon to her mouth.  She watched Prometheus, then the bearded brute, as he scratched his neck and adjusted his chiton again and again and again.  He was feastful on the eyes, she knew, then as always.  Times were friendlier, in a way, but different.  Alas, different.  They both adopted a tedious masque of mundane maleness and the sleight, artificial baritone that came with it.  They knew of each other but they kept their silence, save for when in private or indulged in drink.  By this time they had discussed their issues many, many times over many, many wines.  She slowly gulped retsina, watching Prometheus, who was still fidgeting.  Her best friend's demeanour had changed in a way she couldn't ignore: he was silent.  Not a word, this was the first time she had seen him so.  She knew why.  And it all compelled her to speak:
    "Our sanctuary is tainted with your mood, dear friend.  You have said well-nigh nothing all afternoon.  Something is amiss.  Something bothers you."
    Prometheus looked around then drank.  After a moment he ceded and nodded to himself.  "A feeling has descended upon me over these last weeks, Eros.  I feel it as a dull malaise.  Like a wisp of fog hiding in a mist.  A sense that something awaits, that something is coming for us."
    "The Eyes Of The Future speaking to you again-?"
    "Yes.  They said to prepare for change.  Change of the most profound kind.  Beyond our ken, beyond our imagination.  I don't know when or what, only that the mortals will be at the centre of it all."  He looked up then raised his flagon:
    Apollo, blond locked and perfect, soared lofty welkin, commanding his four flaming steeds who fought every rein in every direction in untiring bids at freedom... 
    Prometheus remembered the vision, composed of riddles and enigmas and nothing, like they all were.  But still, there was something there, something he hadn't seen or felt before.  Something more.
    "They said even the sun god, mighty Apollo himself, would one day be usurped by something bigger and more powerful.  By something older and hotter, larger than Greece Herself.  Something of such magnitude our numbers cannot yet cope.  And it will never be displaced so long as the mortals live.  Ever."
    Nonsense, he thought.  Complete gibberish.  What could possibly be stronger than they?  But... in a way it was as exciting as it was terrifying.
    Prometheus fidgeted and drank.
    Eros watched Apollo, for the moment able to lay aside their recent quarrels, allowing herself to muse how godly he be.  She felt it too, between mortal furs and upon an orated podium.  A lonesome teenager scraping a stick across silent sands, unriddling the secrets of the circle...  Yet another, wandering a trail, alone and in his own world, pondering the poetics of the conic section...  The heliocentric solar system.  Perfect Numbers and The Golden Ratio.  More...  Imagination.  Innovation.  Invention.  Ideas molding nature to their own ends in ways she couldn't dream.  Ideas no god could fathom.  Then, a zephyr zipped the grass, Olympus didn't feel so lofty, the temples none so golden.  She drank then sighed.
    "Wondrous, aren't they, our favourites?  They cannot sit idle and let the likes of us chose their way, can they?"
    Prometheus smiled then nodded.
    She allowed a moment.  Then:  "Do you wonder what it is like to be mortal?"
    He raised two eyebrows but kept his composure.
    "Their lives are short, to us a few breaths.  But the things they do, the things they have done."  She raised her flagon and drank, deep, spilling retsina down her chin.  Done, she held raised her hand.  "This."  She shook the nearly empty pouch, liquid splattered. "This!  The wine it houses and what it does to us.  We can only indulge because of them.  Every tool we use, every morsel we eat, every sensation we feel.  These are all their creations, not ours, dear friend."  She looked to Athens then to the peaks of Olympus.  She breathed deep.  "We both have temples, we both have followers.  Temples...  Glorious temples yet we have nothing we can call our own."
    Prometheus drank and remained silent.
    "And what they feel," she went on.  "Oh Prometheus, what they feel!  The sensations!  I have been there, between the furs during the act of bonding...  True bonding!  The feeling and the sensations!  It cannot be described, dear friend.  I am the goddess of love yet I am lost!  Such a brief feeling when they allowed it to me, but it was..."  She faltered.  She drank.
    Silence came, a zephyr blew.  She composed then went on:
    "I know now that you have been right all these centuries, dear friend.  They are beyond us, they are reaching for so much more.  I feel it, like you, I have known this for decades.  They have a gift, one that has instilled a heated desire in me to be one of them.  Have you not wondered, what it is like to be mortal-?"
    "Yes," he said without hesitating.  They drank deep and as an image.  Then:  "Yes I have.  Ever since I watched them fumble with fire.  They tried and they tried yet they failed.  Yet they tried and tried again.  When fire came they tried something else.  And again. I knew then they didn't need me."  He frowned, fumbling his thoughts.  "I think..."
    He looked to Apollo, who was looking back.  Drunk, again, things were once again falling into riddles, everything was making less sense with each gulp.  The Sanctuary had done its deed once again.
    "Enough, good friend," Eros said, her words now oblong.  Her voice had fallen up into her natural range.  She plonked the back of her head against the tree.  "Wonderful day, no?"
    "Yes," Prometheus said, voice now properly nelly.  He gulped.  "It is."
    Eros and Prometheus toasted, loose and sloppy and spilling retsina everywhere.  They giggled and blew kisses to Apollo just for fun (and the fact that he was damned HOT).  Apollo looked down and noted the two silly figures, two gods of colour he knew well...  Eros and Prometheus held up their flagons, batting their eyes and whistling...  Apollo smiled and lifted a hand to wave back...
    The flaming steeds bolted in every direction, Apollo scrambled to regain control...  He struggled with the reins as he cursed his shortsightedness...
    Done.  There was no turning back.
    Eros and Prometheus proceeded to get good and drunk, despite having important tasks early next day...