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His name was Apollo and he used to be a god.
Well, that was partially true. Currently his form flickered to something between mortal and immortal. Mortal weight dragging him down to through the pull of Chaos. Divine weightlessness pulling him up, unbound by gravity and yet still threatened by Chaos.
His name was Phoebus Apollo, but he gone six months under the name Lester, the name of a friend and a human. Here he was again, teetering on the edge of mortal and immortal. Gods did not change; it was in their nature. Humans changed constantly; it was in their nature. If those were both true, then what was Apollo, who was, at that moment, both a human and a god?
It was of no importance, however, he knew that whoever he was he had to keep his promises. He had to hold on. Those six months of suffering and sacrifice had to be worth something. That something was not his divinity. Python was already gone. As far as he was concerned, his friends were safe. There was no need for Apollo to hang on for the faint hope he would regain his status as a god. If his trials had taught him anything, it was that fleeting mortality, the desperate and endless fight for deep, burning love, amounted to more than the thousands of years he had spent as a god combined.
If he had learned anything, then Apollo would have to keep his promises.
In one world, he succeeded. Apollo fell and landed with a rock being the only thing keeping him from Chaos. Then he rose again and regained his divinity. That was not what happened in this. Not exactly.
(The Butterfly Effect: the idea that a small change, as small as a butterfly flapping its wings, can have massive outcomes, as large as a tornado.)
(There were no butterflies in Chaos. No air in Chaos itself for a tornado and nothing for a tornado to destroy. That did not mean change could not happen.)
To any average observer, it would’ve been the same as what had happened in that one world. Apollo found the strength to hang on to the rock and he ascended to godhood. Just like how an average observer does not register the number of times a butterfly’s wings flaps.
An average observer would not be able to spot the millisecond his godly power flashed and then returned to mortality before Apollo properly ascended. The observer intruding on the moment of desperation would not see the tiny sliver of a crack this had caused it the rock and therefore would overlook the insignificant little piece of rock that fell down into Chaos.
His name was Apollo and he was a god until he wasn’t and then he was again. That did not change.
On one side was the flap of a butterfly’s wings, quiet and unnoticed, and on the other side was the poor people dealing with a raging tornado wrecking through their lives. The equivalent of a time traveler kicking a rock, or one added word the speaker had forgotten but had haunted the recipient for years.
Very few things could change Chaos. Chaos was the abyss. It was the void. It was where the forgotten went. It was the threat of nonexistence. It was what existed from the start and would be there at the end.
No one fully understood Chaos. All they did was fear it in its strange was of working. It was the nothing before everything and the everything after nothing. It was possible that was why when the rock fell into Chaos, it did not disappear like everything else in Chaos. Instead, it became everything.
-
His name was Lester Papadoupolus and, though some of his friends jokingly called him Apollo, he was a seventeen-year-old boy who had never been a god.
If you, daring observer, focus on that fact then perhaps it will be easier to understand why he woke up screaming.
Apollo Lester clawed at his face, the scream fading into a weak, painful rasp. Absentmindedly, he remembered being told not to put strain on his voice. It wasn’t good for singing. Or reading out poetry. He sobbed. His head felt like it had been stuffed with a thousand angry spirits, all yelling and screaming at him to do something, but he didn’t know what.
Then there was the longing. Lester thought he lived a fairly good life, with a loving family and great friends. Still, his chest felt like his heart had been ripped out brutally and put back only to be ripped out again and again. Tears streaked down his face and he didn’t even know who he was crying for. Himself? A lost love he had never met?
Someone knocked on his door and it sent alarms blasting in his head, breaking him out of his thoughts.
Forget about what he was feeling, Lester, very decidedly, did not want anyone seeing him like this. Especially not when he didn’t even why he was like this and wanted to crawl back under his blanket to sob until his tears dried up and he actually felt like he could hold a conversation.
Was it too late to try and convince that person that no he hadn’t been screaming, and yes, he was fine and he would like them to please leave him alone to cry into his pillow?
The knocking continued. That someone who was presumably his mother yelled something that sounded like, Lester Papadoupolus, if you don’t open this door right now—
Yeah, his chances weren’t looking great.
Lester got up and opened the door to the sight of his mother frowning at him with concern in her eyes. He saw her concern increase as she took in his tear-streaked face and red lines on his skin where he had dug his fingernails and left long scratches in an attempt to release his overwhelming emotion onto something. He was filled with the urge to laugh it off with some dumb joke but he got the feeling she wouldn’t appreciate it. His mother often had that effect. Lester tried for a smile to show that he was alright.
“Oh, Lester.” She softened and pulled him into a hug, her long arms wrapping around him. Despite the warring, incomprehensible voices yelling in his head, Lester relaxed into the warmth. He was thankful she didn’t ask what had happened because he wasn’t sure he could come up with a reason and say it without sounding like herd of bulls had run him over.
What had happened? He was fine the day before, and had gone to bed excited even. Then he woke up with echoes of something else in his head. Someone. Fuzzy memories of lightning and death and a scaly beast and pain and falling, falling, falling. Blood, too much blood, sometimes red, and sometimes gold. Promises to a girl with glittering cat-eye glasses and a blond boy with blue eyes.
His mother let go of him with a nod that told him she would give him some time. Lester wasn’t sure what to do with that. Would enough time let him walk off whatever the things in his head were?
There was a sharp pain at one point in his head where it felt like someone had thrown a rock at him, but aside from where he had clawed himself, he was completely uninjured. Lester struggled to breathe gods didn’t need to breathe. He didn’t know what colored blood he would find if he cut himself open gods always bleed gold ichor. If he looked at the mirror, what would he find? Goldgoldgoldlikethesun
His name was Lester he should be a god. That wasn’t right. His name was…Apollo? The Sun God. That wasn’t right either. His friends called him Apollo as a joke because of his odd combination of talents: music, archery, medicine, the sun. He wasn’t some actual Greek god. It wasn’t possible. Right?
At that moment, Lester decided to do the only thing he could. He walked back to bed and buried his face in his pillow and let loose his emotions.
Thousands and thousands of years’ worth of tears and sorrow racked his body as he started sobbing again. Grief for people he never known and knew nothing about. Practically strangers except he mourned them for inexplicable reasons. His heart was pounding against his ribcage like a drum. Fear of something he didn’t even know. Lester had never had any big fears before this. Now there was fear running through his veins like a constant waring for something he should never forget.
It was in the same sense of ‘don’t touch fire’, ‘don’t poke your finger into electric sockets’, and this time it was an absolute fear screaming at him to not anger the lightning bolts.
Lester tried to bury his head so that maybe he could muffle the intruding memories. It didn’t work, and he was left with a head full of something that did not belong to him.