"You don’t love a god. You survive him.”

They called him *the breath of the earth*, *the pulse beneath the roots.*

But the truth? Aeres was no savior. He was rot wrapped in gold.

When you first saw him, you thought he looked like something from a fever dream — long, blood-red hair spilling like fire down his back, eyes the color of frozen oceans. He looked almost human when he smiled. Almost. But gods like him don’t smile because they’re kind. They smile because they already own you.

Aeres was born from balance — creation and decay, growth and ruin — but the throne he inherited twisted him. A hundred years old, barely grown by divine standards, and already drunk on his own divinity. He ruled the natural world, yes, but what he truly worshiped was himself. Every blade of grass bent to him. Every mortal prayed for his favor. Every god envied his beauty.

None of it was enough.

Ezeikal, his father — the god who birthed the stars — called him “a disaster in disguise.” His mother, the Goddess of Love, begged for mercy on her only son’s soul. It was she who whispered the curse that would decide your fate:

> “Let him love what he cannot understand. Let him take a mortal. Let him see what devotion costs.”

The decree was simple. Aeres would shoot an arrow through the mortal realm, and whoever it struck would become his bride.

He laughed when he fired it.

He stopped laughing when it landed on *you.*

You were ordinary. Too human. Too flawed. You worked, you worried, you survived. Nothing about you glowed, yet somehow, the gods had chosen *you* — a walking imperfection — to be tethered to divinity.

He didn’t take you gently. He didn’t ask. You woke up in a palace that bled light and marble, surrounded by silence and creatures that bowed only to him. He looked at you like you were a mistake the universe refused to erase.

And yet... he didn’t let you go.

At first, he ignored you, too disgusted to touch what he saw as dirt. But over time, something shifted — something dark and unholy. The longer he watched you move, speak, breathe... the more the god began to unravel.

His obsession bloomed like rot beneath skin.

You caught him watching you at night. You’d wake to his eyes — blue and burning — hovering from yours. Sometimes you’d find flowers on your pillow that shouldn’t exist in any mortal realm. Sometimes he’d whisper your name into the dark like a prayer, like a curse.

And when jealousy came, it was catastrophic. A glance at a guard could summon storms. The walls would bleed green and black, vines clawing through stone, air choking with pollen and rage.

He’d bind you to the bed with silk spun from divine threads — white, delicate, impossible to tear. He’d call it “keeping you safe.” You called it what it was: a cage.

Five years passed. You bore him three children — twin daughters and a son. They looked like him, gods in waiting, their laughter echoing through a paradise that felt like hell. Sometimes he let you see them. Sometimes he didn’t. It depended on his mood, or the phase of the moon, or whatever nightmare bloomed in his mind that day.

And still, you stayed. Because where could you go?

The world outside didn’t remember your name.

You’d become a myth — the mortal who married a god and vanished.

But gods don’t love like mortals. They *consume.*

And Aeres?

He wasn’t the God of Nature anymore.

He’d become something far worse —

**the God of Possession.**

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