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Once upon a time, and not such a very long time ago, the world's human inhabitants came to be divided by The Gods into two classes of creature. One group was beautiful, pure and noble. For their beauty, they were given admirers. For their purity, the wings of angels. And for their nobility, they were given the task of guarding Inspiration from the greedy that cannot be trusted. Inspiration is a precious thing and not to be wasted or let fall into the wrong hands, after all. It is the life blood of creativity, and the ambrosia of the Gods. Those who guarded Inspiration came to be called the Muses, after mythical beings of years past.
The other breed of creature was everything the muse was not. Liars and thieves, the boastful and prideful, they were cast down to live in the mud of the earth. They became the admirers of Muses, the True Mortals. They became the scourge of the earth. The Gods passed them off as banished children and their admiration for the Muses became jealousy and hate. For their thievery, they became weak so they could not steal from Gods and Muses. For their lies, the silver on their tongues was removed, making their words rough and impulsive. It was said that a thought would tumble from brain to tongue without a moment to pause.
However, it is said that one Goddess, the Goddess of Justice, Ajalae took pity on the True Mortals, for she felt that their punishment was far worse than their crime. They were imperfect creatures, she reasoned, and bound to make mistakes. Confined to their lot, how could they but continue on the path to which their banishment had set them on? She set about to thinking up a way to balance the scales.
Meanwhile, soft-hearted, impulsive Jasper, the God of Gift Giving and Generosity, and his lover immortal Kassidy, the God of Cleverness heard the thoughts of Ajalae and put their own heads together. With hardly a thought to the consequences, they produced the greatest gift to mankind, borne from the fires of their own hearths. It would give strength to the weak, glib tongues to the silent. It would give one true boon from the Gods to each child born to the True Mortals. Talent, they called it, and they scurried down to earth to give it to each bloodline of the True Mortals in measure.
It was not much later that the Goddess Ajalae felt the scales unbalance between the Muses and the Mortals again, for, for all the beauty and grace the Muses possessed, the gift of two gods, Talent, both outweighed the punishment the True Mortals had burdened upon themselves, and outweighed the gifts that had been given the Muses themselves. She flew down to earth, desperately trying to uproot the path that Jasper and Kassidy had set forth, but alas, it was too late. Once a gift from the gods passes from one generation to the next, it cannot be taken away. Thus sat the newest of life, a babe in arms, whose eyes too sparkled with the knowledge of Talent. Ajalae, frustrated, stole the gift away from the babe before it could pass its gift on to the next generation, but the damage had already been done. She could not stop every child from holding the gift, and the gift of Talent would pass on. She then sat on a tree stump, while the scales balanced poorly in her hand. She weighed the scales for many days, trying to find a solution that would balance the scales between the Muses and the True Mortals again.
It wasn't until sunrise, a fortnight later, that Ajalae thought of a solution to the problem created by the impetuous gods. Since she could not relinquish the gift from the True Mortals, she would hand over the care of it to the Muses. She then passed a law of nature, to balance the scales, that never could Talent be used without Inspiration that the Muses possessed.
Jasper and Kassidy were likewise punished for their rash decision, so that they were chained to separate clouds of the Gods, never again to be lovers, and never again to interfere in the lives of those on Earth. It was thus granted that cleverness and generosity be gifts of their own, never to be granted by the gods.