Athena-
Athena experienced tragedy at a fair young age. She was always into magic, and being named Athena, also into mythology, in particular Greek myths. It was not just her religion it was her reality, she didn’t just believe in the Greek Gods, she felt she could know them. No one believed her. They thought she was odd, even her parents who had given her the name Athena thought it was more than strange, to the point they debated therapy for her behind closed doors they thought Athena could not hear through. They hoped it was a phase. So, at 14, Athena made the decision, she would try and pull down the heavens and talk to the Gods.
The scene was as you would expect, candles and chanting and a dead bird and rings of salt and wax. Strange symbols, mist, incense, the woods, a dark night but with a full moon. Everything you would think you would need to summon a God.
Athena hoped she would summon a good one, with one in particular in mind, her namesake Athena, and that she would bless her with wisdom. She feared she would summon Apollo or worse yet Zeus, who was known to be…handsy with mortals. This was the risk she took.
She said the words and did the actions, which as for all people are followed by a great and humbling silence and nothingness. This is on purpose to test those of weak faith. You have to sit through it and continue to believe that what you did worked until the thing finally happens. For Athena it did.
As the sun rose out of the light came a figure, beautiful and stunning as the sun, her face filled Athena with joy and awe, as was the effect of this face on all mortals, for this was not Athena, but Aphrodite that stood before the mortal girl named Athena. Her heart fell slightly.
Aphrodite did not speak, awaiting the praise that was befitting a God who had been summoned.
Athena did not speak, awaiting the proclamation of a Goddess, and stunned by the perfection before her.
Aphrodite broke the silence, annoyed that she would have to for this child before her.
“You call on Olympus to grace a God with silence?”
Athena stammered to her words. ‘I am humbled, I’ve never seen anyone like you.” She meant to turn her eyes from the Goddess but found that it would be almost painful to do so.
Athena was shocked at Aphrodite’s response, a song of laughter that would sour Athena on all other music for the rest of her life, nothing would ever compare, and she would never hear the sound again.
“Very well then, beauty it shall be for you, for you are young and there is a little that might teach you.”
Then Aphrodite spoke in a voice that the Gods use to write the world down.
‘Your beauty will exceed any set near you'
And then the dawn ended, and the Goddess was gone.
Athena went to school. Life resumed a normalcy. She could have ignored it all as a dream, except for the fact that she noticed that day by day she did grow more beautiful. Some would have dismissed it as her being a late bloomer, but as her chest expanded to meet and surpass Sarah’s, as her voice grew sweeter than Tiffany’s, as her hair more lustrous, her eyes more striking, her face naturally and slowly shifted away it’s failings over a course of weeks so that people would not notice, Athena was reminded of her ‘gift’. Many people hated Sarah, for being a bitch, for being haughty, for being impossible, but Athena hated her because she knew that if not for Sarah’s beauty, Athena might be slightly more average looking, might be more herself.
It was also for this reason that Athena took extra precautions so that nobody would notice her beauty. She dressed in black, she upped the oddness, she created what she imagined was a veil of strangeness around herself, a moat of darkness and gothic persona between her and any who might be drawn in by her face, which she muddied with make up as best she could. She avoided mirrors, eye contact, and social situations, she growled at people rather than use her real voice, and glared rather than looked. With everything in her she pushed people away.
She feared the easy road before her, to be adored, worshiped, she knew like many others before her, she could become her beauty, be swallowed by it, but then that she would stop being who she was to participate in a world that her face was the center of only for one day that beauty to fade leaving her to try and reclaim herself too late in life for the rest of her life to take hold before her time was over. So it was she worked against herself, exhaustingly hiding herself. It had been 2 years, and be it the effort, or the inevitability of time, she felt this armor she built for herself starting to crack, more eyes were turning to her and lingering longer. Change was coming.
