Quote Originally Posted by Kesey View Post
Nephele is an exact copy of Hera that was fashioned by Zues. She becomes the goddess of duality. Furthermore, she suffers from a complex where she can't be the original.

Or all the times Zues transforms himself into someone else just to sleep with their wives.

Again, making an exact copy of another being is cloning. Lets not mince the definition.
Nephele is a cloud nymph that Zeus fashioned to look like Hera to tempt and trick Ixion. The trick worked, King Ixion raped Nephele, and she rained the Centaurs down onto the slopes of Mount Pelion. She's put to work by Hera watering the stables of Olympus after being married off to a mortal so that the gods don't have to deal with her constant weeping and confusing her for Hera. She's not the goddess of duality though. Some people just attribute it to her because that sounds cool.

A lot of websites use the word clone for this, but she's not actually a clone, but a convincing enough replica. She doesn't have the powers of Hera, skills, thoughts, tendencies, or anything. Her misery is entirely derived from being mistaken for Hera at a glance, and not having an appearance of her own.

Compared with the original conception of Xande, Xande has more to do with Japanese demonology than Greek Mythology. In the original Japanese he is Maō Zande, or you know, Demon Lord Xande. He was taught magic along with his two peers, Doga and Unei. They were all demons and thus naturally immortal. Their mentor, the Sage Noah, gave Doga mastery over all magic, Unei mastery over the World of Dreams, and to Xande he granted mortality. Thus Xande feared to die, and he began siphoning the power of the crystals from within the Crystal Tower, first siphoning the Crystal of Earth's power and then the Crystal of Water's. This caused an imbalance, and the world was first flooded by water from the Crystal of Water no longer keeping the tides in place, and then time froze because no Crystals were giving their power to the land, as the Fire and Wind Crystal were on the floating continent. With time frozen Xande was content because he could still act and live forever, but he feared those not frozen on the Floating Continent might one day throw a wrench in his scheme, so he began to send demons to the Floating Continent.

All along he was actually being controlled by the Cloud of Darkness, who wished to drown the World of Light in darkness, and then usurp control over it and reduce all to the Void. She had already nearly accomplished this in the World of Darkness, having all four Crystals of Darkness bound in her domain, simultaneously imprisoning the Warriors of Darkness. She guards the Crystals with the monsters Cerberus, Echidna, Twin Headed Dragon, and Ahriman. She guards four ribbons with Xande Clones, which have all of his magical power but slightly less vitality. They're more or less puppets, but I wouldn't put the inspiration for them on the tale of Ixion and Nephele.

You can also see that they don't pull exclusively from Greek myths here, since the Ahriman is the Persian equivalent of Angra Mainyu from Zoroastrianism, which predates the Greek Myths by quite a bit. It also smacks of the shared Flood tale that's spread among many religions and mythologies, but specifically calls to the Abrahamic God and the tale of Noah, the last pre-flood Patriarch.