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Lee Fletcher loved arts and crafts at Camp Half-Blood. In a place so focused on imparting children with combat and survival skills, it gratified him to know that the campers were still encouraged to nurture their creativity. He felt it was important that demigods not only knew how to stay alive, but also how to live.
Lee had always found it fitting that Apollo had dominion over both medicine — the practice of preserving life — and the arts, which preserved life, too, in their own way.
(He made a mental note to write that down in his poetry journal. This was quality material.)
Today, he was leading his cabin in an activity that he and Silena had devised together. With all his younger siblings seated at the long tables in the parlor on the second floor of the Big House, Lee described it to them. “Your task is to create a portrait of Apollo. It can be any medium, two or three-dimensional. But it needs to come from the heart!”
Austin, a nine-year-old newbie, raised his hand. When Lee nodded to him, he said, “What does he look like?”
“That’s up to you,” Lee said. “The gods are famous for their ability to take whatever form suits their needs. Sometimes human, sometimes animal, sometimes even inanimate objects. As mortals, we can’t ever witness Apollo’s true divine form or we would burn up and die. So this portrait needs to be a representation of your mind’s image of him. What do you see when you picture our father?”
The kids all nodded in understanding, so Lee set out some materials: construction paper, pipe cleaners, glitter glue, markers, and the like. Some people got up to root through the bins at the back of the room, pulling out all kinds of items that could be turned into art. Lee picked up a charcoal stick, stood at an easel with a large pad of paper, and began sketching a marble bust — the kind seen in sculpture gardens in museums or lining ancient temples.
Intermittently, he went around the room to look at his siblings’ work. A second-year camper, Kayla, was twisting orange pipe cleaners into the shape of an archer with his bow drawn. Michael, the cabin’s resident brooding teenager, was using oil pastels to draw a man in a Greek chiton, perfectly handsome except for his intentionally featureless, smudged-out face.
While Lee moved from sketching to shading on his own drawing, he felt a tug on the hem of his shirt. He set his charcoal down and looked at the sunny face of Will Solace, a young first-year camper, showing off his half-grown-in front tooth with a beaming grin. In his hands he held a piece of white cardstock, to which he had stuck a bunch of dry pasta noodles with a hot glue gun.
Lee’s years of experience as a camp counselor managed to school his reaction into an encouraging smile to mask the innate revulsion he felt. Delicately put, the thing was horrifying. If he didn’t know the prompt, he would’ve guessed that Will had made a portrait of the monster that haunted his nightmares. It looked like a gorgon that had taken a brick to the teeth, then gotten too close to an open flame and had its eyeballs half-melted down its face. Suffice to say, Lee guessed that artistic prowess was not one of the inborn abilities that Will Solace had inherited from their father.
None of this seemed to occur to the smiling young boy. Will showed off his creation proudly, bouncing on his heels as he waited for his big brother’s reaction. Lee cleared his throat and gave him the most genuine smile he could manage, crouching to put a hand on his shoulder. “That’s great, Will!” he said. “You made that all by yourself?”
“Uh-huh!” Will said, pleased. “It’s my Sun Dad!”
Lee’s smile faltered in his confusion. “S…Son-dad?”
Will pointed at the broken spaghetti radiating from the thing’s lumpy, misshapen head. “Yeah, see? He has shiny rays, like the sun!”
“Ohh,” Lee said, drawing out the sound with realization. “Sun Dad. I see.” In truth, he’d thought those shaky lines were meant to be sparse hair on a balding head, standing up in shock like a cartoon character that had seen a ghost.
“You think Apollo would like it?” Will asked. A hint of doubt dulled his smile — perhaps he was picking up on Lee’s apprehension.
Lee nodded and renewed his grin. “He would be very proud,” he said. “We’ll post Sun Dad on the wall in cabin seven, so everyone can see your fine work.”
Will giggled for joy, delighted by the approval, before handing his masterpiece to his brother and running off to play outside. Once he was out of the room, Michael leveled a stare at Lee and said in a low voice, “Lee, please don’t put that thing where it can watch me sleep. I’m begging you.”
“Michael Yew, if you say a single mean thing about Sun Dad when that innocent child can hear it, I will put you on laundry duty for a month, so help me gods.”
—
Chiron had been anticipating losses in the battle to defend Camp Half-Blood from a Labyrinth invasion, but that did nothing to ease the grief he felt for the fallen heroes. After all his eons of training mortal warriors, after the countless young pupils that had died tragic deaths, he still felt the ache of loss as keenly as he ever did. There had been a time when he’d tried to inure himself to it, to teach his students from a distance so as not to risk attachment, but it didn’t last. It simply was not in his nature to close his heart off to those he mentored — to bring a hero to their full potential meant forming a strong relationship, which in turn meant mourning their inevitable demise.
These days, he endeavored to reroute his grief into constructive channels. Though Chiron and Death were longtime acquaintances, the young people at camp often had their first exposure to mortality under Chiron’s eye. Coming to terms with death was, in a way, an essential component of hero training, and Chiron tried to guide those in his care through the experience that he had endured so many times himself.
At times, though, that task loomed monumental, casting an oppressive shadow over his efforts. After the battle of Labyrinth, Chiron’s spirit of resilience was particularly subdued as he helped twelve-year-old Will Solace move campers wounded from the battle into the Apollo cabin after the infirmary exceeded capacity. The poor boy was working through tears, sniffling as he shouldered a limping Ares half-blood through the door. Chiron wanted nothing more than to send Will off to bed, to rest and recover after his tremendous loss, but the sheer number of demigods in need of medical care overwhelmed Chiron’s abilities and necessitated the assistance of every one of Apollo’s children.
And it did not help that Apollo’s children now numbered one fewer.
Once the Ares camper was laid down on a bunk, Will wiped his tears, straightened his back, and turned back for the next patient. Chiron gently stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and Will blinked up at him, confused.
“Take a moment, son,” Chiron suggested. “The wounded are stable for now. Don’t push yourself.”
Will averted his eyes, then slumped onto a nearby bed all at once. “I guess it’s too late for that, now,” he mumbled. “If I’d pushed myself more during the battle, maybe we wouldn’t have lost so much. Maybe Lee would still be here.”
Chiron frowned pensively. “Maybe. Maybe not. But healers are not the arbiters of who lives and dies, my boy. That inscrutable power belongs to the Fates alone.”
“I guess.” Will looked sullenly at the far wall, where the artistic creations of Apollo’s children were pinned up. “Lee was always saying that things will turn out alright as long as we stick together, but…I guess that was just a lie, huh?”
“It may seem that way to you now,” Chiron said softly. “But your brother was wise beyond his years. Perhaps he saw a bright hope that is still too dim for the rest of us to see.”
“Or he was just being nice.” The boy stood and stopped in front of a portrait made of dry noodles. Chiron could not quite determine the subject and was too apprehensive to make a guess, as the visage was rather crude and startling. Will pointed at it and said, “I made this when I first came to camp. It’s terrible, but Lee put it up for everyone to see, probably so he wouldn’t hurt my feelings. He said it was a work of art, but that was a lie, too. It’s hideous. It should be taken down.”
As Will reached for the edges of the cardstock, Chiron interrupted, “Leave it.”
Will glanced at him. His eyes were raw and red. “Why?”
Chiron closed his eyes and sighed. “Your father, Apollo, is the god of prophecy and truth. For ages, it was said that his sight was so pure that he was incapable of telling lies. Yet, he also has dominion over such personal pursuits as the arts and poetry. To some, it may seem that these domains are at odds — art and truth, poetry and prophecy, objectivity and subjectivity. But you may find that they have much in common.”
Will sniffed, and furrowed his brows. “I don’t understand.”
Chiron nodded toward the noodle portrait. “To your eyes, this artwork is hideous, unfit to be seen. Thus, the true value of this piece is judged. But if one single person saw beauty in it, is it not also truth that the piece is beautiful?”
Will regarded the portrait like it had changed before his eyes to something worth looking at. Quietly, he said, “Lee told me that things would turn out alright.” He swallowed. “Nothing feels alright. But…maybe he wasn’t lying.”
“Maybe he simply saw a truth that remains hidden to you.”
—
Cabin seven was, for once, quiet. Normally the baker’s dozen of Apollo’s children were whirling through the building, shooting foam arrows at the various targets painted on the walls or practicing the saxophone or quizzing each other on first aid practices. But now that everyone was away on a brief quest (involving an archery contest — something about shooting a single arrow through a line of twelve rings), it was silent.
Silent except for the duet of soft sighs, punctuated by the clipped rhythm of teenage makeouts, rising from the head counselor’s bunk.
Nico di Angelo was draped atop his boyfriend, reveling in the rare moment of privacy. He thanked whichever god that was responsible for Will being such an atrocious shot — so bad, in fact, that his cabin had unanimously agreed to leave him behind on their mission today. Nico had ditched his camp duties as soon as he’d found out. He almost never got to have Will all to himself, and he was doing his best to make the most of it.
Which meant an afternoon primarily consisting of lazy kisses, in Will’s bed, for a change. It was softer and significantly narrower than Nico’s in his own cabin, but that was not a problem for two boys currently taking up the space of one. As they kissed, Will ran his hand up and down the length of Nico’s spine, combing his fingers through the soft hair at the base of his head each time. After a few passes, he grasped the strands and gently tugged Nico’s head back so that he could sweep his lips down Nico’s jaw and press them to the side of his neck.
Nico obliged him with a pleased hum, raising his eyes up to the back wall of the cabin as Will kissed along the sensitive skin of his throat. He absently scanned the various artwork posted up there: a watercolor painting of a laurel tree, a black-and-white photograph of a swan, a bunch of dry noodles glued to cardstock in the shape of…
Nico narrowed his eyes and pulled away from Will so he could try and make sense of what he was looking at. “What the Hades is that thing?” he muttered.
Will raised himself up on his elbows and followed Nico’s gaze over his shoulder. When he saw what he was looking at, he smirked. “Oh, that? That’s Sun Dad,” he said casually, like that cleared it all up.
Nico glanced down at him, almost afraid to ask. “Sun…Dad?”
“Yeah,” Will confirmed, his smile widening at Nico’s consternation. “Made it myself, about…wow, five years ago now. Pretty good, huh?”
“It…Hmm.” Nico magnanimously kept his assessment to himself, shaking his head. “What…is it, exactly?”
“Can’t you tell?” Will asked. “It’s a loving portrait of my dad.”
Nico looked at him, then at the noodle portrait, then back at Will. “That’s supposed to be Apollo?”
“Looks just like him, wouldn’t you say?”
Nico considered his next words carefully. “I’d say you’re lucky your father doesn’t smite you for blasphemy.”
Will pouted. “Aww, don’t be like that. You’re just jealous that I haven’t made a one-of-a-kind noodle portrait of you, aren’t you?”
Nico’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t even think about it.”
Will sat up and formed a square with his fingers, framing Nico’s face like an artist determining his composition. He nodded. “Yep, I can see it now. With your gorgeous bone structure, you’d make a fine noodle model — or even, dare I say it, a noodle muse?”
Nico groaned. “Gods, can’t you just flirt like a normal person? You’re exhausting.”
Will surged forward and pressed a loud smooch to his cheek. “Nah, you love it,” he said smugly.
Despite his best efforts, Nico felt a smile break his scowl to pieces. He grabbed his boyfriend’s face with both hands, murmured, “Shut up,” and closed the distance between them once more.
—
Strolling through his glimmering Olympian palace beside a woman he was honored to call his twin, Apollo paused mid-stride and hummed in thought.
Artemis looked over her shoulder at him, perplexed. “What are you thinking?”
Apollo glanced at her familiar face, then at the intricate marble columns towering over her, frowning at the laurel branches wrought in shining gold that stemmed from them. Brilliant sunlight streamed in through the ten-foot tall windows on either side of the hall. “Don’t you think this place is a bit…much?”
His sister gave her surroundings a cursory glance and shrugged. “Isn’t that how you like it?”
Perhaps it once was. Before his time as Lester Papadopoulos, Apollo recalled taking great pleasure in grandeur, in surrounding himself with noble decor that he felt suited his godhood. But now, looking around at the home he had struggled so hard to get back to during his mortal stint, all the finery gave way to impersonal vacancy. He thought about Cabin Seven at Camp Half-Blood — far more humble in stature, but so much fuller. It housed the entire scope of Apollo’s godly domain, from the cases of musical instruments stacked against one corner to the wall of art made by his demigod children. How could a mere mortal dwelling honor Apollo’s identity so much better than the timeless temple that he called home?
That train of thought met a wall that had been built up, brick by brick, during the past few months of Apollo’s life. Perhaps a touch of mortality was what he needed.
“I must speak to Hephaestus,” he suddenly declared, straightening up with a decisive nod.
“What?” Artemis asked. “Apollo, why — where are you going?”
“Stay right there!” he instructed her. “I’ll be back!”
As he marched toward the forges of Olympus, Apollo split his essence and simultaneously ventured down to Long Island. It was a cloudless Friday afternoon when he appeared within the walls of Cabin Seven, and his children were all out, presumably tending to their various camp activities. The sun-catchers suspended in the entryway spun dreamily on their strings, casting facets of light across the walls and floor. An arrow-making kit was spread across Kayla’s bunk, and an Ella Fitzgerald record sat in the turntable above Austin’s. Stacks of medical journals stood watch above Will’s headboard, beside a celestial bronze arrow from Apollo’s own quiver that his son had held onto all these years.
On the far wall was a collage of art made by campers, old and new. Apollo scanned it briefly before his eye caught on what he had come here for. He stepped closer and gingerly detached it from the transparent tape it was mounted to, gazing at the artwork fondly.
He cast one more sentimental glance across the cabin’s interior, then rejoined his core essence on Olympus.
“— tell me what this is for? It just seems, I don’t know…pointless?” Artemis was saying.
“It’s a very commonplace appliance,” Apollo explained. “Are you telling me you don’t have one?”
“We don’t eat mortal food,” Artemis argued. “And you don’t need to refrigerate ambrosia. Why did you bother Hephaestus with this?”
Apollo waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, he just had one laying around. Anyway, the real reason I had a refrigerator installed was…this!”
Artemis blinked at the piece of cardstock presented to her. “You don’t need to refrigerate uncooked noodles, either,” she said flatly.
Apollo scoffed. “Of course you wouldn’t recognize art when you saw it. It is an honored mortal practice to display art on the refrigerator.” He stuck the portrait to the fridge door in a place of honor. “There. Now this place is a home.”
Artemis eyed him like she was trying to evaluate whether all the brain damage he’d taken as Lester had stuck with him through his immortal rebirth. “Where did you even get that?”
Apollo looked at the crooked teeth and lumpy cheeks of the portrait, finally able to see the resemblance. “My son made it.”