[APHRODITE I]
["OLYMPUS"]
A certain goddess of love and lust was returning from her meeting with her lover! Her appearance was the most beautiful in Olympus. With dark skin and long pink hair, she walked completely naked, with only her heart-shaped curls covering her intimate areas.
Her body was perfect, curvaceous with large and round breasts and buttocks, in perfect shape, to the point that a common mortal couldn't even describe how beautiful the goddess was. Aphrodite was leaving the palace of her lover, Ares, the god of war. She had a smile from ear to ear, pleased with all the actions she had with the god. They had been making love nonstop for two weeks, and the goddess could still feel Ares' penis rubbing against her intimately as if there was no tomorrow. During her walk back to her temple, she saw many nymphs and lesser gods moving back and forth, a common routine for them.
Walking toward her temple and home, she sighed, feeling once again a certain boredom in her mind.
She was the goddess of love, beauty, and sex.
Her job was to make everyone fall in love and have relations, including herself. Being the goddess of love, no one could love more than she could, whether it was pure love or raw, wild love.
However, she still got bored. She would go here, have sex with a mortal, go there, sleep with a god. But things were... dull. Nothing new had happened since their last fight, everything had become boring.
Maybe… she should pay a visit to her husband? Yes! That would work!
"Heffy always has the best gifts!" So Aphrodite headed to her husband Hephaestus' forge.
Ten minutes later, the goddess finally stood before the entrance of Hephaestus' forge. She didn't even bother knocking and just entered. When she stepped in, she was surprised to find the lights off, probably because her husband was asleep.
She went to the wall and turned on the light switch. However, when the room lit up, she was horrified by what she saw. There was ichor everywhere, especially one dried ichor stain where her husband's anvil had been. She felt her heart begin to hurt and started hyperventilating from the fear she felt. Without waiting another second, she began to search for him throughout the room, shouting his name:
"HEFFY! HEPHAESTUS! HEPHAESTUS, MY DEAR!" She rushed around the forge in panic while feeling something she had never felt before toward Hephaestus, fear for his life.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, Hephaestus awoke from an irregular sleep, and with his awakening... he now had a new form that would shake the foundations of the Greek World.
-----
**POV HEPHAESTUS**
Sleep surrounds me like a cataclysmic force, consuming me like a curse. The torment of memories—this should not be—fills me with disgust, yet awakens a sense of nostalgia, an inexplicable paradox. This is what dreams are to me: a chaotic whirlwind that generates perplexity.
How did I become what I am?
Without any apparent purpose and without any significant occupation, my days are filled with nothing but creation and annihilation, as natural to me as breathing.
If I were labeled a soulless machine, I would have no reason to object. If asked to define futility, I would say that my daily existence sums it all up: "futility."
The meaning of life. The role and purpose that the entity known as "I" yearns for. This crucial element that grounds my existence escapes me, and it was recognizing this absence that led me to my current state.
...No, perhaps it's more accurate to say I was brought to this state. "On that day, at that moment" were words of perpetual regret for me. Changes that could have occurred, the "What Ifs" of life.
But... he... felt different...
The hypergiant, awakened from a prolonged sleep, remains prostrated for some time. The remnants of the dream fade into the distance, escaping his reach, despite his formidable computational ability. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot resurrect those indescribable memories, nor can he even discern their faintest contours.
This result, however, does not surprise him.
These memories are a wound in his soul, and his body, devoted to truth, wanders through the Stellar Conglomerate Annihilation, a lost and disturbed god. An entity born in the stars, bound by its own logic, arose precisely because it had forgotten that logic, making any interaction between the two impossible.
"...What... am I?"
On any previous occasion, the being once known as "Hephaestus" would have panicked and roared in fury and anguish. But now? He cannot see any logic in this factor.
What changed in him?
His entire concept.
Hephaestus was once a hideous and crippled god. Despised by all, including his family and wife.
What was Hephaestus now?
He was enormous... no, that's an understatement.
The god designated "Hephaestus" was now an indescribably, almost comically massive star, challenging the limits of human perception.
Just his sight alone overwhelms the capabilities of the eye.
In addition to his colossal scale, he is merely a living entity. The stars encircle him, for ordinary beings, this is nothing but a cataclysm of cosmic proportions—a gluttonous hypergiant announcing the annihilation of any form of extraterrestrial life.
This was Hephaestus' new form.
A Workshop of Annihilation, nothing more than a Stellar Conglomerate of Annihilation.