Hephaestus

Son of Hera, rejected by Hera, Hephaestus mans his great forge, turning out wonders without equal day and night. His great strength cannot hide his pocked and scarred face, nor his withered legs — and it was for these reasons that his mother hurled him from the heights of Olympus. For his vengeance, he crafted for her a fine throne that bound her tightly the moment she sat upon it — and it was only through the intervention of Dionysus (and a copious amount of wine) that he relented and freed her. Wed to unfaithful Aphrodite more as a joke than anything, he endured her flagrant dalliances until she lay with his brother, Ares — whence he wove a net and trapped her astraddle Ares. Vindictive? Oh yes. Brilliant? Even more so.

Vulcan to the Romans, here too he was the patron of smiths and metalworkers, of the fires of the forge, but he was also attributed the terrible and unfathomable flames of volcanic eruptions, and the destructive as well as the constructive elements of fire itself. The Vulcanalia, an annual harvest festival, began to propitiate him to withhold wildfires that might ruin an entire region’s crop.

Onward marches the work of mortalkind, and over it all Hephaestus watches. Though mortals cannot yet match his automata, they scratch ever closer, bit by bit. Circuitry and programming, so recently of mortal make, Hephaestus has claimed for his own as well — where once he crafted silver clockwork owls, he now forges mosquitos of steel that whisper stolen secrets in his ear. The modern day gives him leave to move around much more than he did before — no more do his wheelchairs provoke awe, even if they operate from very different principles and with very different capacities than those mortals make use of. Some people don’t even stare anymore, and this Hephaestus is not accustomed to.