Chapter Text
Long, long ago, on the very edge of human memory, gods walked among mortals.
For better or for worse, immortals could freely live their unending lives right beside those for whom a god's blink was an entire lifespan.
Gods and humans were dangerously fascinated with each other. The divine could spark life and dynasties with a single human dalliance, but no human could know a god in their entirety. To even ask for such a thing was far too insolent for even the most beloved human devotee to survive.
As gods were only looked to for what they could offer, even the most romantic of their kind had never considered their humans as more than lovely pets. After all, who would risk the heartache of being used by those they opened their hearts to when the pain of it could last for centuries? No, it was simpler to treat them as the short term flings they were than to let themselves feel for connections so fleeting.
Humanity was only concerned with what a god's favor meant for their future beloved descendants. They had no room in their hearts to truly fall intimately in love with the divine.
Very few tales from this time survived millennia of conquest, disaster, and diaspora. Most that survived by oral tradition were stories of adventure, or fables meant to scare children into behaving. The core players changed, the settings were long gone, and their temples stood largely abandoned. So many versions of these epics existed, while those that had seen it all firsthand were largely gone.
There was only one tale that broke these conventions. It differed in that it was a cautionary tale to gods and humans alike, and it had remained largely unchanged despite all the years since the events that sparked its birth.