The gods were already arguing by the time Apollo arrived. The marble benches of the amphitheater were set high above the world, close enough to catch the sharp ozone of the upper atmosphere, it rang with their voices, a chorus of accusation and derision.
Above, the sky rippled in impossible colors, aurora dancing to the discordant rhythm of their quarreling.
It was Dionysus who first noticed his approach. "Look who deigns to join us," he called, lips purple from wine and something darker. "The Sun returns to court!"
There was laughter, some genuine, some brittle. Apollo almost smiled. He had always admired Dionysus’ ability to make the unbearable things festive.
’Inspiring as always.’
Hera’s voice was cold as a glacier as it cut through the commotion. "Let us proceed, then. We all have better things to do with eternity."
Zeus sat at the head of the circle, radiating a storm’s worth of disapproval. His beard flickered with blue sparks. His fingers drummed a thunderous rhythm on the arm of his throne. "Phoebus," he intoned, "you stand accused of hubris beyond even your usual boundlessness, and of interfering... once again, in matters sacred to my office."
The gray in his gaze gathered, cold and roiling, promising downpour.
’I really messed up this time, they definitely won’t allow me to get away with it..’
Apollo inclined his head, neither low enough for true humility nor high enough to court outright lightning. The old habits. "I ask only to see the charges unclouded by rhetoric, Father."
Aphrodite, perched a few steps down and smirked. "He means, name the crime, not the punishment." She plucked a feather from her fan of doves, watched it spiral down onto the clouds below.
Hera drew herself upright, the silver of her eyes reflecting the empty aether. "You took the prophecy meant for the Sibyl. You gave it to the mortals without a filter or sign. Unforgivable." She finished her sentence as though slamming a door. "You made them believe they could change the future."
’I made them believe they had a chance to live!’
Every immortal in the circle turned to watch Apollo. The weight of their attention, each gaze weighted with ancient memory and fresh grievance, was heavier than any mortal crown.
Apollo had prepared words, a carefully lacquered defense. But standing in the cold glare of Olympus, he found that the language had curdled in his mouth. "The prophecy was not theirs to keep," he said finally, voice crackling like a sunspot, "but neither was it yours to hoard. I gave them hope in a night that would have swallowed them whole."
"A night which you orchestrated!" Hera’s nails left crescents in the marble as she spoke. "You set the stars against one another. You let the mortals believe they could sway the cosmos and when the sky bled, you claimed surprise!"
Hephaestus snorted, a low dump-bellied sound. "If mortals could sway the cosmos with hope alone, Olympus would’ve fallen long ago."
’Hephaestus is right.’
"Silence, forge-whelp," Ares growled, and the amphitheater’s columns quivered with the violence implied in his tone.
Zeus raised a single finger. The arguments collapsed in a hush so complete Apollo could hear the pulse behind his own temples.
"There is precedent," Zeus said, with the fatal patience of an avalanche. "We have punished gods for less."
’So I will be punished, at last.’
"No one remembers their names," murmured Aphrodite, as if it mattered.
He could see how this was to go. The pattern of their logic, the iron rails of their tradition. The history of Olympus had always been a ledger of wounds and reciprocations.
Still, Apollo would not make it too easy for them. "Is it hubris to believe mortals are equal to our attention?" he asked, but this time the old arrogance was thinned, threadbare. "If so, you are all more guilty than I."
The gods considered. There were echoes of old friendships in some of their faces, but no rescue. Dionysus, instead of speaking, only sipped what remained in his goblet, watching Apollo over the rim with sly, unfathomable eyes.
"Hear your sentence," thundered Zeus, each word anvil-weight. "Stripped of divinity, cast below the clouds, for ten circuits of the sun. You will walk among those you so trust. When your penance is complete, we shall see if the world, or you, has changed."
’Ten circuits of the sun!?’
The amphitheater dissolved. The sky unstitched itself at the seams.
Apollo felt the pull at the base of his skull, an undertow of mortality so sharp it made the world tilt. For a moment, he hovered at the seam of worlds, Olympian above, and what waited below.
Then he fell, drawn down through ragged aurora, through updrafts that howled with every name he had ever been called. Each band of sky scraped him raw, until there was nothing left but the husk of a man, limbs flailing, hair stripped of its gold, eyes scorched to a more common amber.
The landing was not gentle.
He woke in the mud, throat full of every possible thing, ears thrumming with the memory of thunder.
’Could have just put me here.’
It was cold. Not the crisp, invigorating cold of Olympus, but the damp, bone-sapping chill that crept into the marrow and made the skin crawl. Apollo blinked mud from his eyelashes and tried to sit up. His head hammered with each beat of his lessened heart.
He was in a ditch, half-flooded with recent rain, the banks tufted with sickly grass and shattered glass. The world smelled of rotting leaves and tar. Above, the sky was a sullen bruise.
A crow sat watching him from the lip of the gutter, head cocked, as if it had never before seen a god so thoroughly ruined. Apollo bared his teeth at it, feral and toothless, but the bird only hopped closer, curious. Perhaps it recognized him, the way animals sometimes did, even through the thinnest bone mask of humanity.
"Go on, then," he croaked, "take a piece."
He tried to stand and nearly vomited. Everything was hurting, joints, skin, pride. If not for the slick catching of his knees, he might have been satisfied to remain where he was forever, decaying at the bottom of this unremarkable ditch, another failed thing in a world that clearly had no shortage.
But the wind was sharp and unforgiving, and the crow, joined now by two others, began to look at him with something like calculation. He hauled himself upright, or close enough to count, and surveyed his surroundings.
The horizon was a palisade of crumbling tenements, their windows stitched shut with crooked planks and draped in the faded flags of laundry and surrender.
Farther off, the city, or town. Whatever it was supposed to be, proper shivered in the blue chill, its towers rising like broken bones from the fog. He recognized it, after a fashion. Mortals always built their homes the same way, concentric rings of desperation, hope, and eventual decay.
Apollo knew he should have been afraid, but mostly he was cold and hungry. It was very hard to mourn one’s lost omnipotence while shivering in wet trousers.