Goodnight, Ganymede

_{For you who don’t know, Ganymede is Zeus’s cupbearer up in Olympus. Used to be a mortal, abducted then made immortal, blah, blah.}



After nearly an infinity away from home, Ganymede was overcame with longing for his old life and decided to flee Olympus by devising an escape. He caught a raven and plead with it to fly him down from the celestial mountain, but the raven refused. In desperation, Ganymede starved the raven for days and promised it a bountiful meal in exchange of assisting his escape and return him to his homeland. So the raven clutched Ganymede’s wrists with its little feet and the two took flight from Olympus, flying over mountains and what seemed to be an endless landscape for the famished raven. In fatigue it gave up its grip on Ganymede’s hands, plunging the boy to earth and into imminent demise, since he was no longer immortal after crossing the boundaries of Olympus.

Three wandering titans found the dying boy and, wanting to grief Zeus—their adversary—greatly, they intended to make a tasty meal out of him. Merrily they gathered herbs, made a roasting pyre, and went to prepare the body. But as soon as they laid eyes upon their captive, sorrow and woe swelled up from inside them and they were assaulted with pity for the small, broken beauty withering against the ridges of their huge clumsy hands, and when Ganymede finally breathed his last sigh they cried and cried with irrevocable tears until their sight was no more.

Slowly, the raven circled and descended on the corpse to win what it had been promised—a bountiful meal.



<sub>Done through too many a sitting yet not too many hours, making that little tragic story as I go. If you can’t see the details too clearly, you might wanna tweak your monitor’s gamma/brightness up a few notches. Been doing some pieces for White Wolf’s Mage series and wanted to exercise some new things I picked up through hundreds of artistic references. Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to draw a guy.

Hope you guys like.</sub>