Narcissus and Pandora
When Narcissus found the box, he was enchanted. His cousin, Pandora, had promised him that it contained all of his favorite things. If the outside were any indication she hadn’t been lying. It was both delicate and strong — with inlaid jewels connected and surrounded by gold and silver filigrees in mesmerizing paths. The box drew his eyes in. It promised so much. She had told him to only open it tomorrow on his Birthday. “I’m going to open it now!” He announced to himself. “How could she possible expect me to wait?”, he asked the Universe. (Of course she hadn’t expected him to wait…)
The first thing he saw when he opened the lid was his own face beaming back at him. He was so handsome and charismatic. “I am so handsome and charismatic!”, he declared. “I imagine that once having seen me no other man will ever seem so beautiful.” He looked more and more deeply, probing the depths of his own surface, examining every curve and crease. He smiled and frowned, put on an angry face and his most alluring look (the very one he had used to seduce Pandora just last month). He was entirely captivated by his own charm.
Meanwhile, on the bottom of the box a slit opened and the ugliness flowed out — Jealousy, Envy, Rage, Deceit, Arrogance, Cynicism, Pride, Hubris — and flowed into him, unawares. The more he looked into the box, the more perfect and beautiful he thought himself and the darker became the sins that flowed out below.
After an unknown time her heard his cousin, Pandora’s, voice say with mock shock, “Narcissus, I told you not to open it until tomorrow!” When he tore his eyes ways to look at her and make some weak excuse, or perhaps to try his most alluring look once more since looking at himself had made him feel lascivious, he was shocked and then began to scream. Everything he saw was so ugly, base and vile. He felt it sucking the beauty out of him like some greedy, insatiable maw of filth. All of the ugliness enraged him. How could such things dare even share a room with him, share the Universe with him!
Then he turned his gaze towards his cousin. She appeared a hideous pool of black with gnashing teeth and snake hair. He could see a delicate thread of pure loveliness leaving him and entering her. “Give it back!” He yelled. “It’s mine, you hideous witch!” He lunged at her throat forgetting the box in his hands. As it fell towards the marble floor he was captivated once again by its beauty, by his beauty, for an instant only until it shattered to pieces on the stone.
His cousin laughed and laughed, her vengeance complete. She left him a mewling wreck on the floor, desperately trying to assemble the shards of the box and looking into the lifeless pieces for himself.
She left his chamber and the Palace most pleased, but she hadn’t bargained on the consummate opportunism of Hate which found in the husk of Narcissus an ideal medium in which to grow. It invaded every corner of him. It even invaded his seed. Forever after he and his progeny would be ruled by the desire for vengeance over what had been taken from him/them, even though it had never been real.