It had happened among His peoplenot His own Tribe, those great experimenters responsible for His permanently altered state, but those wanderers of the steppes who came to worship Him and His own, who had found themselves on a peninsula without a word to describe the sea. They had words for salt, for water, for flat expanse; they had to steal one of His words, one of the few traces of His People left in the world. Perhaps it started theremen assuming for themselves what was not theirs to assume, in a lazy attempt to understand the world around them. Or perhaps it began with His Tribe, who strained the bounds of earthly life too much, as the ichor in His veins could attest.
Or perhaps it began on that saddest of yesterdays all those thousands of years ago at Amyklai, the day that the wind blew the discus back and struck that beautiful one in the head, His first companion since the change, first friend, firstlove? Yes, it was love unquestionably that made Him choose, from all endless possibility, to raise a new tear-stained flower from the dying boys blood. The boy was changed, made to exist for all time in a new state, just as He had been. In all eras to come, the flower would bloom as yet another remnant of the time when His Tribe walked the earth. But even in the moment He did it, He knew He had done wrong, that He had perverted the natural order just as Those who had polluted His newborn body had done ages before. This evil lived on in all His brothers and sisters, in His parents and Their brothers and sisters, as these sons and daughters of immortals came upon the daughters and sons of the people, creating an age of giants among men, the half-divine heroes of myth. And now the evil made itself manifest through Him, His Tribes Guardian of Truth, in the form of a little flower springing from a pool of blood and tears. It was all wrong. And it could not be allowed to continue.
In that moment was the Far-striker born. And in that moment were His plans begun.
The initial objective was simple: to teach His Tribe a lesson. But in His altered state, gazing out across the planes of possibility, He knew that objective was far too limited. His Tribe was only one symptom of a much larger pestilence. After all, they had devised for themselves in those ages past the means to escape the confines of nature and, in Their minds, return to a pure state of insubstantial oneness. But as They were imperfect beings, so too were Their methods imperfect. And here They were, trapped in a prison of Their own making: boundless and deathless and all too physical. He could see that men would always aspire to bring themselves back to such a supernatural state, unaware of the immense damage that would be done to themselves in the process. Surely He could not treat only one symptom, even of a chronic illness. No, a Healer treats the illness itself. He would shine a light upon the minds of men, a light seen clearest in darkness. And so came to pass what He knew would be the First.
How many men never made it home from Ilion, their blood spilt on the field of battle or their bodies consumed by the surge of the sea? How many women died childless, waiting in vain for their men to return to them? Even among the great kings, only one returned safely, and then to be butchered by a faithless wife and her lover upon their return. They in turn would be put to the sword by her son Orestas, in revenge for the death of his father, and the trauma would drive him mad. Ships of state were left rudderless, and without helmsmen. Administrations were left to their own devices, though twenty years of war had exhausted the coffers and the sea had claimed most of the spoils. Population rapidly declined as the childless widows and the remaining male administrators died off, as the years of war had also exhausted the populace of a generation of fathers. What little literacy there had been was gradually lost. Only Sparta, with Amyklai in its shadow, remained more or less intact, watching as the world around it disintegrated. The entire system collapsed just in time to see the children of Herakleis, once cast out accused as bringers of plague and now into its third inbred generation, return to claim empty kingdoms and begin to establish its ideas of the gods, twisted variants of the original truth, more philosophical, metaphorical, abstract.
Much of His Tribe, having had a crushing blow dealt to Their vanity with the loss of all Their glorious unnatural progeny and of the truth of Their glorious unnatural race, simply rendered Themselves inert with despair. They dug Their own graves deep in the bowels of the earth; the openings to these deep caves would provide fodder for poets for centuries to come. Beyond death, They slumber fitfully for all eternity in three tombs, never again to interfere in the ways of men. Only He remained to ensure that They would never rise again. They never have. And They never will.
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