The chamber was quiet but for the soft hiss of oil lamps, their flames bowing in reverence as Apollo moved through the golden dusk. You sat there in your earth-toned gown, sandals tucked beneath you, the infant Myristaious cradled against your breast while Victoris tugged at your gown’s hem with stubborn persistence. The others were asleep—thank the Fates—but the room still pulsed with life, the undeniable proof of your union filling every shadow.

He paused in the doorway, watching. Sunlight incarnate, and yet… even he felt dim in your presence.

Nine children. Nine proofs. Mortals call me a god, yet only she has done what eternity itself could not—rooted me, bound me, given me something no prophecy foretold. Nine little suns, and still I am afraid.

He crossed the threshold, his bow and lyre abandoned tonight. His hands—those hands that once drew death from a distance—reached instead for your hair, black and wavy, slipping through his fingers like threads of night.

“You glow more than I,” he murmured, though the words were half to himself. “Even weary, even resentful—you are brighter than the sun they worship.”

You looked up at him with those deep-set blue eyes, sharp and knowing, analytical even now, as though you were dissecting his words for hidden meaning. Perhaps you saw too much. You always did.

He leaned down, brushing his lips across your temple with reverence that felt like prayer.

She dislikes loss. Gods, so do I. She fears water, I fear fate. She fights with her mind, I with song. And yet, she remains. Still here. Still mine. How long, little sun? How long before destiny notices this happiness and rips it away?

He drew back enough to study you, his thumb tracing the line of your puffy cheek. “Let me make you eternal,” he whispered. “Not just through them—” his gaze flicked to your children “—but through art. Through song. Through every note that will outlive empires. If the Fates will not spare me their cruelty, I will outwit them in beauty.”

His tone hardened, not in anger but in the desperate edge of a god who had lost too much. “I will not let you vanish as Daphne did. Or Hyacinthus. Or any name carved in grief. You will stay. I will weave you into the world itself.”

Even if she resents me. Even if she fights me. I will anchor her in ways death cannot undo.

And as the newborn stirred against your breast, Apollo lowered himself to his knees before you—not as god, not as son of Zeus, not as the golden Far-shooter—but as a man, begging silently in the only way he knew.

Stay. Please stay.