Discord's Apple

Sinon lay for a moment, blinded by stars that flashed in his vision, nauseated because he could feel the bone knitting back together, could feel his throat re-forming. He lay still, swathed in pain. Then he gasped, able to breathe through a newly healed windpipe.

He sat up slowly, dizzily. He touched the back of his head, which was slick with blood. He cursed softly. He should be dead. If only.

“What are you?” The man who claimed to be Prometheus walked a slow circle around him, a pace away. “You’re not a god or a demigod. In fact, you smell mortal. So what are you?”

Sinon was feeling better by the moment. Less broken. Grunting, he picked himself off the floor, regarding with some disgust the blood on his hand. He should have just let the man loot the Sun Palace.

“Apollo’s idea of a joke,” he said.

“You don’t look amused.”

“Do you have any idea what his sense of humor is like?”

The man chuckled. “I do. I’ve known him since he was a child.”

“You’re really Prometheus.” Of course he was, if he could stand there so calmly after tossing a man onto the floor like a sack of grain.

He bowed his head. “And you are—?”

“I—I’m Sinon of Ithaca.” How long had it been since he named himself so? The name didn’t seem to fit anymore.

“Good to meet you, Sinon of Ithaca.”

“Might I ask—what are you doing? Why are you taking his things?”

Prometheus smiled. “If you’d asked so politely in the first place, I would have told you.”

Suppressing a smile of his own, Sinon looked away. He supposed there was a lesson in that.

Prometheus said, “Let’s talk. Is there food here?”

Sinon picked a bowl of apples and figs from the garden, and the two sat on the bench by the pond where Apollo had tricked him with the nereid. As they shared the fruit, Prometheus asked him for his story, and Sinon told him, starting with the night that Troy fell and ending with Zeus asking to pass through the doorway to Olympus.

The last few days made more sense when he spoke of it aloud. He hadn’t wanted to understand before. Now, he was able to ask,

“What’s happened? What did Zeus do?”

Prometheus’s smile thinned sadly. “He destroyed Olympus.”

Sinon winced, unbelieving. Of all the wonders he had seen and heard, this was the least believable. “He what? What about Apollo?”

“Gone. They’re all gone. Zeus brought them all to Olympus—then he destroyed it. And himself.”

“I don’t believe you.” Gone. Might as well say the sun was gone. Or that twilight had come to the Sun Palace.

“You will.”

He felt tears start. He pressed his hand to his eyes to stop them. Why should he cry? Why should he mourn them, for all the grief they’d brought him? He certainly wasn’t mourning Apollo.

Prometheus was wrong. Sinon couldn’t believe him, couldn’t imagine a world without the gods. The gods were the world: the sun, the moon, the oceans, thunder and storms, life and death.

“Why would he do such a thing?” he said, trying to keep his voice from choking.

“After Troy, Zeus felt that the gods had grown too powerful. And too petty. He wanted to return fate to humanity. Let mortals decide their own destinies again.”

“But the gods have always held our destinies in their hands. The gods created men!”

“No. The gods created the stories to secure their own power over men. Now, without their awe to back them, the stories will fade. He came to me with the plan. I’ve always been the one protecting mortals from the likes of them. I thought the solution severe. But I d