I do not Own Greek Mythology

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As I work in my workshop, I have a lot of time to think. I often contemplate my life. And as I wait for a rod of iron to heat, I come to a stunning realization.

I hate my life.

It is a fact I will never admit.

I may be a god, I may be an Olympian, but that is only through trickery.

When I was born, my own mother cast me from the top of Olympus. I had not even lived a day, and my mother decided that I was too ugly to be loved. I had already been judged.

When I hit the earth I was saved by the oceanid Thetis. I loved her as a mother, but I am not her son. Her son, the great Achilles, is dead. And try as I might, I can not comfort her. But why should I be able to, I am not her son. With Achilles death I lost the only mother I've known, a mother that was never mine.

Even with Thetis' intervention, I did not escape my fall unscathed. My left leg is ruined, cursed to be forever encased in one of the elegant braces I've made for it. The slightest jarring of it still causes me pain. And yet others wonder why I stand or sit as long as possible without moving. My own shop is laid out so that I rarely need to move, or if I do, it is not far. They wonder why I keep a cot in my shop, a cot that I occupy far more often than the bed in my home not even fifty feet away.

My throne, my place as an Olympian, nothing more than a bribe to free my birth mother from the throne I created. The throne that trapped her in revenge for her rejection of me when she talks to her other children, and the illegitimate children of my unfaithful father regularly. How much must she hate me that she would rather spend time with my father's bastards than her own son, especially when her treatment and hatred of my father's children born not of her womb is well known?

My marriage to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, is a joke. It is no secret that she has never loved me, but to rub her affairs in my face like it is my fault we are married when it was Zeus that commanded it hurts more than I admit. And yet my petitions for divorce are not granted, not by my mother, goddess of marriage, not by my father, King of Olympus. My brother, my wife's most common conquest, even brags to me about their escapades when he comes asking for repairs to his armor. Not even my attempts to humiliate my wife and her lovers discourage the affairs.

What do I have? My craft? Building tools and treasures for ungrateful pricks that barely tolerate me? Hardly getting a chance to work on my own projects due to the demands that I finish theirs?

Don't get me wrong, I love what I do, it's who I do it for that irks me.

I have come to hate my position, my duty on Olympus.

I wish I had someone to talk to, but the only gods and goddess that are remotely kind to me do not spend much, if any, time on Olympus. And to visit them would aggravate my leg to much to be worthwhile.

I take the rod of iron out of the forge, placing it on the anvil as I pick up my hammer.

Who wants to listen to an ugly, crippled, bitter god anyway?

And the hammer falls.

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