Apollo Phoebus's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Apollo left the empty amphitheater with his lyre under his arm. He had the door open at last, but half the song refused to come. He needed something rougher than marble and gold could give him. He walked to where his chariot waited outside, its four horses stamping fire into the ground. He climbed aboard and took the reins. The horses lunged upward, dragging the sun behind them. His swan rose beside the rail, golden laurel bright around its neck. Apollo drove them high over the clouds. He wanted the raw wind and the burning height to shake something loose inside him. He balanced the lyre on his knee and played. The strings answered him the way they always did. Every note came out clean and pure. He tried to bend a chord ugly, to crack it the way his voice had cracked in the theater. The lyre refused. It smoothed each flaw before it could sound. His rough grief turned polished and false. Apollo stopped and stared at the instrument. This was the trap. The lyre only made perfect music. Aether would hear the lie in one measure. A perfect tool could not carry a broken heart. He nearly hurled it off the chariot. The swan pushed closer and honked. Apollo watched it beat against a gust and lose a feather. The bird did not sing. It struggled, and the struggle was the sound. Then he understood. The flaw could not live in the notes. It had to live in him. He let go of the reins with one hand. He stopped trying to play a broken song. Instead he let the height frighten him and the wind hurt him. He remembered every lover who had left. He remembered losing Aether the first time. He did not shape the feeling into music. He let the feeling shape his hands. His fingers slipped. He missed strings and caught them late. The lyre made clean notes, but he played them wrong on purpose, in a stumbling order no god would choose. The pure sound and the broken timing crashed together. It was ugly. It was true. The imperfection was in his choices, not the instrument. Apollo played the whole half-song this way. The horses slowed. The swan circled close and listened. When he reached the empty place where the ending should be, the melody kept moving. The rest of the song poured out of him at last, rough and alive. He finished it in the open sky, tears cutting down his face. He lowered the lyre, shaking. He had solved it. The song was whole now, and every crack in it was his own, not the instrument's. He turned the horses back toward Olympus. Aether had asked for a song that cost him something. Apollo finally had it. Now he had to survive playing it to the man's face.