People like to pretend that there’s only one Cupid. One neat, cherub-shaped mascot with tiny wings and a heart-tipped arrow. That is the modern cartoon, the sanitised version. This is the version that feels safe on chocolate boxes, whatever that means...

If you go back far enough, you will find him like a shadow cast across cultures at once, each one twisting the outline differently, as if the storytellers could sense something slippery sitting behind the idea of desire itself.

Somewhere in Greece, around fires that have long gone cold, they whispered of Eros, the primordial force. He was a being born from Chaos, older than the gods, who eventually claimed him as their own. He wasn’t "love" in the romantic sense. He was the very concept of compulsion. He was the cosmic push that made souls ache, and destinies collide even when logic begged them not to. They said he carried neither bow nor quiver in those first tales, only presence, and that was enough to topple gods.

Later, poets softened him. They reduced him to the son of Aphrodite, a mischievous archer flying invisibly through battlefields and marketplace, nudging hearts toward disaster. This version used golden arrows that ignited sudden, overwhelming desire. His lead arrows did the opposite, curdling affection into rejection. A single mistake of his could turn empires into ash. You would always see a playful little grin on his face, the same trickster spirits had on when they burned crops "for fun."

Later, the Romans gave him the name Cupid, and things changed again. They kept the bow, arrows, and the wings, but wrapped him in a quieter, more domestic role; yet his magic and divinity stayed unsettling. It was something they couldn’t change. He was a god who could twist human instinct at will. He could make kings wander barefoot across continents or make sworn enemies fall into each other’s arms without explanation. Even with all that, the Romans couldn’t cage him.

There is a stranger one from my findings. It is half-remembered in fringe cults and esoteric texts. This one, scholars side-eye, but refuse to erase it. In that telling, Cupid wasn’t a god of love. He was a god of claiming, a being who didn’t merely spark affection but devoured it. Worshippers and fanatics described him as a figure who wore desire like a cloak and drank longing like wine. Some said he could see the shape of your perfect beloved before even you could, and then force the meeting no matter the cost... All for fun. Others said he could claim any heart he struck, keeping pieces of those souls tethered to him across lifetimes.

Even his appearance changed from tale to tale. Sometimes he is a radiant youth with star-bright eyes. In some, he’s a shadow with wings too many to count. Sometimes he appears as a child, because nothing is more terrifying than an innocent face with unimaginable power tucked behind it. He even appeared as just a presence in some, neither male nor female, young or old. He was just there...

Modern storytellers parade him around like a harmless mascot, but the older myths still hum beneath the surface, reminding anyone who listens closely:

Cupid isn’t a matchmaker. He is the architect of longing itself, sometimes a guide, and sometimes a tormentor. You can dress him in gold, paint his arrows pink, give him chubby cheeks and a smile... but desire, real desire, the kind that reshapes worlds, was never gentle or cute. The myths always knew it. People just forgot, or maybe they wanted to.

Anyway, this is just my research on a mythical character I found interesting. Feel free to judge me, but I would be dead and gone then... HAHA!

Silas closed the book he’d read more than a hundred times, and exhaled. In this time and age, finding a book was like finding a needle in a haystack. This wasn’t because books were extinct. No. But books were now a commodity that only the wealthy had the privilege to own, not a poor guy like him.

How did he get this book? It was a mystery he’d been trying to solve since he was 12. He would be 18 in two weeks, and still couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten the book, or rather, how the book had gotten to him. The book was old, likely from the year of 2020. The current year was 2050, three decades in, and the pages of the book felt almost fragile enough to tear apart if someone breathed wrong. Strange how something so mundane, a paperback with a cheesy cover, could survive while entire cities didn’t.

Back then, the world still believed in normal things: traffic jams, mortgage payments, blue skies that didn’t flicker, and the occasional political scandal people pretended to be shocked about. All the little rituals of a civilization that assumed tomorrow would politely show up on time... But tomorrow changed its habits sometime around 2038.

It started with the weather acting as if it were having mood swings. Storms formed in minutes only to disperse as quickly as they’d formed. Even the air felt too heavy to breathe. People swore they heard whispers in the wind, as if someone was murmuring right in their ears. But as humans, we are good at ignoring anything that doesn’t concern us. But it was far from over...

It continued with the animals. Birds started migrating in circles, and dogs refused to go outside after sunset. Herds of cattle faced the same direction as though they were waiting for something... Scientists scrambled for an explanation that didn’t sound supernatural, typical of non-believers, but each press conference became more awkward than the last. This was even stranger than the conspiracy theories surrounding aliens.

By 2041, the first rift opened. It wasn’t as dramatic as shown in shows or depicted in stories. It happened as just a thin, vertical slash above a quiet fishing village, glowing like moonlight trapped in glass. Someone touched it out of curiosity and got swallowed, never to return. The governments tried to cordon it off, but more slashes appeared anyway. Some stayed in one place, and others wandered. One even drifted through a shopping mall, swallowing half the electronics section along with everything there before blinking out like a star.

Creatures followed. They were tiny things, barely bigger than cats. But before the government could find a solution to them, bigger ones appeared: things with eyes that reflected thoughts instead of light. They made veterans freeze.

But everything had a good and a bad side. Despite all this, people benefited massively, and that was the Awakening. People collapsed on sidewalks only to wake up with abilities scraped from myths, stories, and nightmares. Humanity, as always, tried to adapt. They patched old laws to fit new realities, built hunter guilds, and transformed abandoned malls into makeshift outposts. They finally found a name for what was happening... The Apocalypse.

Well, it wasn’t the apocalypse... Not yet. This was just the prelude to it. 2050 sat on the edge of that prelude, balancing between what humanity used to be and whatever it was becoming. Skyscrapers still stood, cafes still opened, and schools pretended to function. But every person who walked the streets knew the truth...

They weren’t safe, not even for a moment. The apocalypse could happen anytime.