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Apollo opened his eyes.
He didn’t remember falling asleep. He didn’t even do the act so often, outside of falling asleep with his lovers or passing out after celebrating too much. There was simply no need to do it from his pure will.
He, of course, rested. There wasn’t much for a god to do besides his work, that is, riding the Sun carriage across the skies. He attended Olympus’ meetings, he visited his sister and mother, he played around with mortals and guaranteed he was praised and respected by all. But if he needed time, there was nothing stopping him from becoming a hummingbird and trying polen from flowers, releasing his form from his physical body and becoming a beacon of pure light or simply playing the lyre and laying under the Sun, the giant star symbol of all his almightiness and power.
He took a breath to notice that he was falling.
His first instinct was to try to do one of those things, become a bird, become light, travel to elsewhere. Nothing worked.
He frowned deeply and felt the air rapidly passing through his skin and his hair in a somehow more intense way than usual. What in the gods names is happening? he thought with no answer.
He noticed his skin and hair weren’t the only ones breaking the air, he had two extra members growing out of his back. His first thought came from the original humans, the ones who had two heads and two bodies turned away from each other before Zeus’ ire divided them into two. But what really was coming out of his back were wings.
How convenient.
He usually didn’t wear wings on his regular body, or was born with them like Eros, but it would do. He tried using them, remembering how it was when he was a hummingbird or a raven. It required way more effort than it used to. They barely flapped and his back ached, his whole body burnt. This never happened before.
What is happening?, consterned.
Again, no answer.
Then he looked to his side as best as he could with the wind on his face, to notice the wings were a joke. A laugh on his face. Erring and gruesome, wings made out of feathers and wax barely glued together, like if made by a kid who was let freely wondering Heaphestus forge.
Isn’t that kind of what happened, though?
As he felt his skin being burned by his own Sun and melted wax, he understood his sin, and he understood his fate.
He remembered Icarus. Still young, still full of dreams. Beloved by Athena and his father, full of expectations and hope of a promising future, finally free, with no worries. Not even for the dangers he was warned about. Apollo saw Icarus fly carelessly too close to the Sun, and besides the warnings, he saw the boy’s wings made out of wax burn together with all his dreams and promises. Too close, too proud to listen.
He couldn’t even blame him, as the Sun god he also admired the the Sun’s eternal glory and beauty over the world. But the Sun had no mercy, and neither did he. He saw Icarus’s wings burn and fall, but he didn’t interfere, because he also didn’t care. It was one more day in his immortal life in which he saw a mortal make a fatal mistake that only fastened their definitive end: Hades’ realm. The boy was his uncle’s business now.
Apollo didn’t care for Daedalus’ cries and would have actually smitten the man if he had listened to his thoughts cursing him for taking his son away. That’s what mortals always did, blamed the gods for their own mistakes. The Sun would not stop burning for Icarus, and his own hubris was the only reason and deathly flaw that took him to his final breath.
That’s what Apollo was experiencing right now. His hubris taking him to his end. He never thought he would have an end. Immortal beings didn’t spend much time thinking of that possibility.
He could imagine Zeus thunderously laughing in his head “You saw the boy burn and fall to his fate” he would say “it’s your turn now”. Apollo knew it would do nothing to ask for forgiveness, but he still tried, he cried please, he pleaded, don’t leave me to die alone. But it served nothing.
Just like Icarus, Apollo’s pride had taken him too far to come back, and now thinking he could overthrow Zeus and take his throne would be his last regret. He had no doubt his dad wouldn’t hesitate on ending him, in the most pathetic and laughable way he could think.
Now as a mortal, Apollo wouldn’t even disappear like the old gods, but go to Hades and be punished for eternity like the rest of the scum of Gaia’s realm. He was never his father’s favorite, or close to that.
Now he was destined to a pitifull death, like every other mortal he mocked during his years. Without his godhood, his powers, his devotees. His sister. His mother. He thought of them, aimless and desperate, and thought of the last thing he had. He looked at the Sun.
It was, of course, also a part of Zeus’s mockery, to die before what represented all his greathood. But it was also comforting. The Sun was one of the few things Apollo could say he completely knew and respected. He knew exactly whenever it would rise, waking up the world, and go down, telling it to rest. The Sun was part of every being’s life, and had a say in how they commanded it, even the gods. It was there in the begging, and when it is time for it to go away, it will take everything together with it.
So Apollo looked. Right into it. The Sun was there when he was born thousands of years ago and now it is here at his end. And just like Helios was forgotten, Apollo will be as well, and replaced with a new deity, that may have a similar destiny, with the Sun outliving them all.
So Apollo did something he had never done before, and prayed. He truly prayed, not like the shallow offers he did to Zeus to ask for favors or his simple, and sometimes even mockful words to his sister. He prayed to the giant star in the sky that was watching him his whole life, knowing it wouldn’t answer. And then let the words seize in his brain, and his mind, that was usually filled with music and prayers to him, had now space for the sound of the wind alone, so he watched the Sun until his eyes couldn’t take it and that was the last image imprinted on his eyes and mind for whatever time he had left. And then he hit the sea.
Poseidon would also not help his nephew, first because of Zeus’s orders, second because the gods could not truly conceive pain and death like mortals could, just like Apollo couldn’t just a few minutes ago. So he drowned with the weight of his wings. It was too easy for a god, even more so an Olympian, to become blind by their hubris, with no limitations and worries to stop them. But even though Zeus thought he was the most supreme ruler of the world and the gods, he couldn’t rule everything, even something as uneventful as fate. The fates work, and they weave and twist and cut, and there is nothing Zeus can do about it.
So when Apollo wound up on the shore, his skin once warm and golden now terribly burnt and unraveled, his back scarred with a mixture of feathers and wax, his eyes unable to see, his body now awfully human and his soul dangerously mortal, Zeus’s authority was being defied by deities that were above even him, because under the noise of the waves and the birds and the whispery voices of the nature spirits around who observed, you could hardly hear, but the slow heart of the young Sun god was still beating.
Zeus wanting it or not, the Sun would keep rising, day by day, for all his imortal life, and when the time comes and it explodes and takes everything with it, Apollo will be there.