Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Samloyal23" data-source="post: 5896718" data-attributes="member: 21432">Athena assembled her allies at the base of Mount Olympus, the celestial peak. Hermes and Prometheus, Apollo and Artemis, and many other gods and titans sided with her. They were vastly outnumbered and quelled at the thought of facing the terrible thunderbolts of Zeus. Even the mightiest among them could be maimed or killed by this dreadful weapon. The gods knew none of them was invincible as they had been at the dawn of time, caution and strategy would be needed, but facing this all-destroying force seemed hopeless to many of them.Aphrodite came forward, "War is not inevitable, Love can conquer all! I will get Zeus to step down and give the throne of Olympus to our wise sister Athena...", she said and began ascending the Sacred Mountain. Athena knew it was futile and warned her, but Aphrodite refused to give up her plan. She went to Zeus and knelt before him, pleading with him to make peace and love his daughter Athena. But Zeus took it as a betrayal, his madness making any disagreement into an attack against him. He beat her mercilessly and threw her bodily off the summit of Olympus. Her body broke on the rocks below, crippling the fairest of all goddesses. "I warned you," said Athena, "he is mad. He will not listen to reason." Aphrodite curled into a ball and cried. Hephaestus looked down from Olympus and saw the beautiful Aphrodite's crushed body limping away, her face scarred and her eyes red from weeping. He looked at his lord Zeus and could not endure it. He quietly went to his smithy and gathered up all the thunderbolts he had made for Zeus and destroyed all of his tools, his forge, his anvils. Followed by his cyclopean minions and mechanical assistants, he silently walked down the mountain to Athena's camp. "I am here. I am with you. Zeus has his thunderbolts no longer..." he said to the assembled rebel gods. The other gods were shocked by his presence, but gladdened by his change of heart.Athena looked at the club-footed, crippled smith of the gods, "We are still few in number, and while the thunderbolt is the most terrible of all weapons, we will be hard put to stop the hordes that follow Zeus. We need your craft and your cunning, Lord of Smiths, what say you?" Hephaestus thought about this and came upon a solution, building an army of soldier out of stone and iron in a new smithy, his cyclopse workers toiling away next to him. Great and terrible these were, giants as great as any spawned by Gaia. Athena came and inspected the work of her smiths, gazing at the rows upon rows of titanic warriors. "What are you?" she said to the assembled horde. "Ia!" they replied in unison, a sound that made the base of Olympus shake. Athena looked at Hephaestus, "I approve..." she said, then turned to the assembled gods, "We march at dawn!" The Theomachy had begun...</blockquote>

Verification