Chapter 5 – The Tower of Stone

Chapter 5 – The Tower of Stone The Gospel According to Zeus > Once they piled the mountains. Ossa upon Pelion, Pelion upon Olympus, stones groaning against the sky. Giants, swollen with pride, thought to storm my throne. I laughed. For what is a tower of earth against the bolt of heaven? I split their staircase with lightning, I dashed their summit to rubble. The peaks they stacked now lie as scars upon the horizon, monuments to my refusal. But mortals are stubborn mimics. What giants failed, men soon attempted. Bricks instead of mountains, mortar instead of sinew. A tower, they swore, that would scrape my storming floor, a monument to their own ascent. So once again I descended. Not with fire this time, nor thunder — but with a subtler hand. I called to Hermes, fleet-tongued, sly-eyed, and loosed him among the builders. He twisted their words in their throats, spun their syllables into knots, turned command into babble. Stone fell from weary hands, brothers shouted like strangers, and the tower froze mid-reach, a skeleton of ambition. And when the scribes inked the tale, they remembered only my judgment, not the trickster’s tongue that scattered them. They named it Babel — but the ruin was mine, as the ruin had always been. Remember this: whether by thunder or by tongue, it is I who breaks the ladders men build to heaven.