Eris

**Eris**, also called **Discordia**, is the Goddess of Discord from Greco-Roman mythology. She is a daughter of Nyx and Erebus, and was one of her father's highest-ranked lieutenants within the Alliance of Hell.

## Overview

**Eris** is the Greek goddess of strife and discord. Her Roman equivalent is **Discordia**, which means the same. Eris's Greek opposite is Harmonia, whose Roman counterpart is Concordia. Homer equated her with the war-goddess Enyo, whose Roman counterpart is Bellona.

She had no temples in ancient Greece and functions essentially as a personification, as which she appears in Homer and many later works.

## Appearance

Eris is a beautiful woman with a voluptuous figure, with long and wavy black hair framing her heart-shaped face and bluish-purple eyes under thick eyelashes. Located on her back is a large pair of vulture-like wings, with the feather tips colored red with actual human blood.

She radiates a dark and chaotic aura that makes her appears more "devilish" than the devils themselves.

## Personality

Eris is a cruel and merciless goddess who enjoys spreading chaos across the world. Once, she was simply a mischievous girl who loved to pull pranks on others to create innocent laughs, but as time went on, she became more sadistic and destructive and not caring about the devastating consequences of her actions.

She doesn't care about the world and the people around her, including her siblings and her children, and only sees them as toys for her to play around with. She has no disregard for the rules of both Mount Olympus and of the Mansion of Night, with even accounts of her breaching the ancient laws, as she believed that a goddess such as her doesn't need to care about them.

According to Hypnos, at her core, she is nothing more than an extremely spoiled brat who thinks the entire world is her playground and everything would be served to her on a silver platter, even stating that the combined ego of the Twelve Olympians wouldn't match even a quarter of her own.

Because of her spoiled nature, she is prone to violent outbursts everytime things don't go her way or she feels like she is being disrespected by the slightest of actions. On rare occasions when she doesn't throw a temper tantrum, she can be extremely spiteful and devious, perhaps even more than usual, resulting in devastating events of mass chaos and destruction.

She also despises the fact she is only a minor goddess within the Greco-Roman Pantheon, believing that as the daughter of Nyx, one of the first Protogenoi, she deserves a rank that is *at least* on-par with the Twelve Olympians. Whenever she is reminded of her role, she will immediately become enraged and let out violent outbursts.

Despite all of this, Eris does understand that her powers are not on-par with the Twelve Olympians and knows not to make rash decisions that would cause her to be antagonized by them, especially after she was exiled from Mount Olympus after her actions had caused the Trojan War. However, all of this caution was thrown to the winds once she got empowered by one of Ophis' snakes as she publicly revealed her true opinion to all of them, as well as accidentally exposed the Alliance of Hell's existence.

## History

### Early Years

Eris is among the the many gods created by Nyx and Erebus. Like other chthonic gods, she also swore an oath of servitude to Hades and the Olympian dynasty during the Titanomachy, and after the Olympians won the war, she moved to Mount Olympus to live among the Olympian gods.

### Aëdon and Polytekhnos

Aëdon and Polytekhnos were a couple of artists living in Colophon who were madly in love with each other, so much so that they boasted that their love was greater than Zeus and Hera's - Something all gods knew was true but none dared to say a word fearing Hera's wrath.

Furious, Hera sent Eris upon them to cause troubles within their marriage. One day, Polytekhnos was making a chair while Aëdon a piece of embroidery, they had together a game to see which one between them would finish their work first, with a female slave as the prize. Unsurprisingly, a piece of embroidery was finished faster than an actual wooden chair, and Polytekhnos became furious at his wife's victory.

He went to Aëdon's father, Pandareus, and pretended that his wife wished to see her sister Chelidonis and took her back with him. On the way back home, he beaten and raped her, dressed her in slave's attire, commanded her to silence, and gave her to his wife as the promised prize.

After some time, Chelidonis was able to reveal the truth to her sister and the two conspired against Polytekhnos for revenge. They murdered Polytekhnos' son Itylus and served him up as a meal to his father before escaping back to their father's house.

When Polytekhnos found out, he rushed to Pandareus's place in pursuit of his wife, only to be captured by his brother-in-law and be bound, smeared with honey, and left exposed to the insects until he died. Despite all of this, however, Aëdon still loved her husband and soon died because of a broken heart.

Afterward, Zeus - for some unknown reasons, perhaps pity, perhaps annoyance - transformed all of them into birds: Polytekhnos into a woodpecker, Aëdon into a nightingale, Chelidonis into a swallow, Pandareus into a sea-eagle, and the brother of Aëdon into a whoop.

### Heracles' Fable

When Heracles was making his way through a narrow pass after finishing a labour for Eurystheus, he saw an apple lying on the ground and tried to smash it with his club. After having been struck by the club, the apple swelled up to twice its size, and when Heracles tried to strike it again, even harder than before, it expanded to such a size that it blocked the pass entirely.

As he let go of his club and stood amazed, Athena appeared and threw the giant apple into the sea. She then explained to Heracles that this was all a trick created by Eris and Amechania, and if he had left it alone, it would stay small but when he tried to strike it, it swelled and grew large. Despite the story's possible lesson about knowing when to avoid unnecessary conflict, Eris said that its true lesson was to "not hit random apple you found on the sidewalks."

### Judgement of Paris

During the wedding of Thetis and Peleus, Eris wasn't invited as Peleus feared her presence could be a bad omen to his future marriage, knowing her involvement in the tragedy of Aëdon and Polytekhnos. While other gods understood his decision, Eris did not and considered this to be a disrespect toward her authority as a god.

During the wedding party on Mount Pelion, she snuck into the dining hall and threw a golden apple into the middle of the banquet, engraved with the words "To the fairest one". While normally, this would be seen as a gift to the bride, Thalassa rejected the gift, secretly infuriated Eris even more, and presented it as the prize for a beauty contest between the goddesses in the room. After a while of infighting, only three goddesses were able to claim worthy of the golden apple: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite.

They asked Zeus to judge which of them was the fairest, and eventually he, reluctant to favor any claim himself, declared that Paris, the missing Trojan prince, would judge their cases, for he had recently shown his exemplary fairness in a contest in which Ares in bull form had bested Paris's own prize bull, and the shepherd-prince had unhesitatingly awarded the prize to the god.

With Hermes as their guide, the three candidates met Paris on Mount Ida. While Paris inspected them, each attempted with her powers to bribe him; Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Anatolia, Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, and Aphrodite offered the world's most beautiful woman - Helen of Sparta, wife of the Achaean king Menelaus. Paris accepted Aphrodite's gift and awarded the apple to her, receiving Helen as well as the enmity of the Achaeans and especially of Hera and Athena.

### The Trojan War

During the Trojan War, which was indirectly caused because of her trickery, Eris rode into the battlefield on the side of the Trojans, alongside Ares and the Makhai, spreading bloodshed and carnage among the warriors. According to Homer and the "Iliad", it was because of this war that she became known as the "Lady of Sorrows".

However, consequences did come for Eris this time, as when it was revealed that she was the one who caused the Trojan War and the death of the majority of the gods' demigod children, she was banished from Mount Olympus indefinitely. Zeus himself even came before her and warned her that, if he or any Olympian ever saw her there again, she would be thrown into Tartarus immediately.

## Equipment

**Golden Apples**: Eris possessed dozens of golden apples that were imbued with the essence of strife and discord. While they had no offensive purposes, they possessed powerful hypnotic power and could control the minds of any human, monster, and even weak-minded gods. During the Battle of Leviathan's Bay, she used a golden apple to hypnotize Hypnos into making all the devil inhabitants of the bay fall asleep, believing that if she did so, no one would be able to discover her attack.

## Trivia

* Her name "Eris" literally means "Strife".
* Eris' attributes include the Golden Apple of Discord, the hissing snake, burning torches, the poniard, and African Blackwood.
* Eris was the former lover of both Kerry Wendell Thornley and Malaclypse the Younger, who most likely created Discordianism as a gift for her by increasing her number of mortal devotees.
* The word "Discord" derives from Discordia, which is the name Romans used to call her.
	+ Eris, the second-largest dwarf planet in the Solar System, is named after her.
	+ Eris, a genus of spiders, is named after her.
* In Greek mythology, Eris is sometimes said to be the daughter of Zeus and Hera, mistakenly identified as Enyo.