Information

Pantheon has a minion!

Saga the Epic Muse

Pantheon
Legacy Name: Pantheon

The

Graveyard Telenine
Owner:

Tribe

Age: 12 years, 6 months, 1 week

Born: October 8th, 2011

Adopted: 1 year, 6 months, 3 weeks ago

Adopted: September 25th, 2022

This pet has been nominated for the Pet Spotlight!

Statistics

Level: 265
Strength: 662
Defense: 662
Speed: 658
Health: 663
HP: 652/663
Intelligence: 348
Books Read: 336
Food Eaten: 0
Job: Hotel Chain Owner

CREDITS

profile template (c)

helix (get it)
template edited by

Tribe,

spacemage,

Gyarbear
story by

Tribe
Background courtesy of Unsplash user Erika (erikahg)
Adopted from

Cyroris on 9/25/2022

This means war

The last gods standing will always be of war: those who see empires rise and fall, those who revel in the heat of battle, those who know violence all too well.

It is the peaceful and unwarring of the pantheons who come to pass, who drift into the etheric past.

War-like gods are ill-suited to grieve, to move beyond the implications of loss and carnage as it touches their deific life course.

---

The wisest of them, Athena, went mad long ago. The Promachos herself: she who fights on the front lines... she, once so mighty, embittered and broken by the changing landscapes of battle, by the loss of her familiar Olympian brethren. Her sisters-in-arms--Artemis, Hestia, even fair sweet Persephone--have long passed into the beyond, memories suspended in mythos.

She was measured and temperate in her warmaking, conscious of its great cost, its human consequence. Few would go as far as to call her kind, but she was certainly gentler than most deities epitomizing war. None know when the clouding of her judgment began: this slow, inward collapse of a grand warrior. Some suspect long ago, in her godly prime during the Grecian age--when few would have questioned her taciturn decisions. Others whisper it came long after, that she could not quell the ethical dilemma of what war became. A few tactless tongues sneer and remark that her woman's constitution and conscience are ill-suited for the battlefield--

But they did not know her: the level-headed tactician, the patroness of craft and skill, she who hones her spears on the bones of giants.

They did not know her at her mightiest.

They do not know to fear.

Lone, she wanders the Parthenon, amidst bittersweet reminisces during her endless, wretched stroll. Rarely, she sits on the temple steps, the once-mighty Aegis in her lap; she traces the shapes of the Gorgon Medusa's visage--perhaps in remembrance, perhaps in regret.

Some say that they have happened upon her: a woman whose face seems to flicker between ages--sometimes young, sometimes old--with stormy eyes and an oft accusatory stature. A steely demeanor, bristling like barbed wire: a goddess unpacified, left with only remnants of what was.

Can you bear to meet her grey gaze--

Can you bear the fog of war?

---

Bellona, she who stirs the dust of battle: fiery battle maiden, grand war matron of the Romans, a fierce duelist well-met on fields of imperial conquest.

She knows the carnage well. Her enemies fear her name, rue her wrath. They know her dangerous battle frenzy; they know how her bloodthirst is nary slaked.

Few know victory as she does. She has guided the hands of famed praetors, whispered battle plans to their listening ears. She knows the rush of their overpowering battalions, the charge of their skilled cavalry and charioteers.

Yet, the age of her empire is long over. The laurel in her hand wilts and crumbles, ashes in her wake. Her youth exhausted, she marches forward slumped over the remains of her once-mighty Rome, the defeat is still bitter on her tongue. She cannot unite them under her banner, bring forth armies with the call of her war horn.

Her fire burns low.

---

Mars holds his head in his hands, overwhelmed and confused.

The line blurs between him and Ares; where does one end, the other begin?

Are they separate entities, or rather one and the same?

He lacks the cunning to differentiate them; he yowls his agonized frustration to the skies, seeds new conflicts with his pained tears. He cannot brutishly force his way out of this inward conflict, this loss of self. His martial prowess means nothing here.

Where is Venus--or is it Aphrodite?--to soothe him? Where are they to salve his sores and whisper sweet nothings to take away from whatever pains trouble him?

He rocks on his heels, lost in this ever-encircling confusion.

A pitiful wretch.

---

Tyr awaits the end of the world, melancholy and troubled. Though many of his war-like Norse brethren have survived the ages, they wander, near-estranged, seeking solace in distraction. They all remember the light fading from Balder's eyes, haunted by the ordeal that followed.

He knows his play-tussles with Fenrir are few and numbered.

The Wolf trusts him now.

It is a trust not meant to last.

He rubs his left arm, a kind of phantom pain flitting in the periphery; not one he knows now, but perhaps one that forebodes.

He knows the beast is dangerous, one of Loki's brood: the ghastly daughter, the great Northern wolf, the winding World Serpent. Ragnarok awaits at the edge of eternity: not a matter of if, but rather when. Odin's prophecies make that much clear.

The brood will revenge themselves, glut themselves on chaos of the endtimes.

And a new world will begin, cleansed and anew.

Mayhaps Balder will arise with it; it has been too long since the Norsemen knew his sprightly laugh.

Mayhap it will heal this festering weal of solitude, this burden of carrying on.

---

Kali yearns to dance, to give herself over to the madness of the revel. There is joy in the movement, such blind freedom in the rhythm.

She is but a fragment of Mahadevi, an aspect of the great She.

A She no greater than the advancing void, which preyed on her prosperous goodness, her maternal maintenance of harmony, her attunement to the universal energies.

Durga has long passed into the beyond to join Parvati; a loss that struck at Kali's heart, one that proved isolating and haunting.

This world--it takes too much. It takes from humanity, whose mortal lives bring end to enduring consequence, and yet it has the nerve to take from the gods--the immortals that know these burdens neverending.

Kali brims with power, commands force in her primary directive: to destroy all evils.

She knows the danger of giving into dance; she near brought this world to its end with a previous revel.

Yet she questions: what is the point of this restraint, when there is so little left? What is a world without its gods when mortal proves himself too shortsighted for compassion? What is redeemable in the mortal man, the frail human and his human failings?

Tell me. She beseeches the great unknown, which has claimed so much of her greater self. Tell me why I must withhold this joy of dance.

On her lips is an unspoken dare. Tell me, tell me that this universe that takes is not evil.

---

What war is now--

... was something never meant to be.

These gods--

These personifications of war: its glory, its gore, its deep-cut treachery against the fellow man.

They know they stand alone in the coming dark, this twilight of the gods.

And a new War walks among them, a callous personhood of bloodlust and greed incarnate; one birthed from gunfire and incendiaries, atrocity and spite.

A vainglorious War for a vainglorious, waning world.