Apollo's first breath in the mortal world tasted of blood and pine sap.
He lay half-curled at the rotten foot of a felled tree, skin stung raw by brambles and the relentless drizzle that passed, in this green nowhere, for rain.
The ground was not unlike the underworld's banks, it was clinging, rank, alive with unseen movement, but Apollo had never in memory known a chill to worm so deep into his bones.
'Is this how far I've fallen?'
He tried to rise, but his arms buckled beneath a body suddenly heavier and more susceptible to pain than any he'd carried before.
Each cold-soaked fiber screamed against the motion. Something he suspected was a rib, shifted inside him like an accusation.
He waited for the divine warmth to rise, to cauterize the wound, to burn away the damp. Nothing came. Only the indifferent patter of rain through tapestry-green leaves and the shrill complaint of a jay somewhere overhead.
It was not until this moment that Apollo understood, truly, the completeness of his exile.
'I really have fallen too far now.'
As he forced open his eyes, the world revealed itself in shades of moss and wet bark, with the blue-tinged mist of early morning caught in the latticed arms of ancient trees. The canopy above was thick, the sky only a rumor.
The insects here were more persistent than the furies, gnawing at the exposed skin of his ankles and neck. Beyond the groan of his own breath, Apollo could hear the distant rush of a river and, further still, the bell-like clang of metal.
'The water is close.'
He crawled, each movement a negotiation between pride and agony, until he reached the edge of a shallow depression where cloven footprints pooled with rainwater. Deer, perhaps, or something more spectral.
This forest had the old magic; he could feel that much, a low throb in the marrow, brightening slightly with proximity. Even in disgrace, the world's wonder was not closed to him.
He followed the trail, crawling at first, then staggering upright, his legs carrying him with the fragile stateliness of a ruined monarch.
Apollo's hair, that former golden inheritance, now clung to his brow like the wilted remnants of a laurel.
His hands, accustomed to the weightless perfection of instruments and lyres, were mud-caked, the knuckles already raw.
When he pressed one to his side, warm wetness greeted him. He looked, half-expecting to find the ichor of Olympus glistening honey-bright. Instead, he found only mortal blood, red, mundane as spat wine.
He grieved for it, briefly, in the way a man might grieve for a vanished season. Then the clang of metal sounded again, closer this time and hurried, a rhythm of industry or violence, he could not tell.
'Someone else is here.'
The bracken thinned ahead, and beyond it, the forest floor rose toward a palisade of sharpened logs that ringed a clearing. There, laboring in the mud with axes and crude forge-tools, were mortals.
Apollo hesitated, sudden and unprepared for the magnitude of their ugliness. Not their faces, which were closed and grim as all human faces must be, but their movements, so ugly with purpose, so lacking in grace or music.
They made no song in their labor. Each motion seemed a violence enacted upon the world. Wood struck, metal burned, earth gouged and tamped.
The smallest of them, a boy with more scab than skin, worked the bellows with such desperate regularity that Apollo's own lungs ached in sympathy.
'Should I?'
He hesitated at the fringe, learning his new self by the hush with which the trees permitted him passage.
The aura that once preceded him had diminished to a mere suggestion, a memory in the air of something brighter. None felt his presence. None recoiled in awe or terror. It suited him poorly.
A shouted command drew attention to a rough-hewn hut near the palisade's gate. The boy left his post and sprinted over, vanishing inside.
Apollo watched from his shadowed shelter as a woman emerged a moment later, a bulk of linen and furs, wild hair loose down her back, iron necklace filigreed in the runic style of the northern tribes, dragging the boy by his ear while berating him in a language that skirted the edge of his understanding.
The indignity of mortal squabbling, once a source of Olympian mockery, now stilled Apollo. He felt not the urge to smite, instruct, or seduce, his preferred modes of intervention,but only a thin trickle of envy.
How wondrous to possess a quarrel so clean in its boundaries, to live within walls that needed defending instead of loved ones that required avenging. Even their suffering had contour and purpose.
'Humans, they were always like this–'
A branch snapped from behind. Apollo whirled, slipping in the mud, and met the eyes of another, this one neither beast nor peasant child, but a man grown, broad of shoulder and sharp of gaze.
He wore the piecemeal armor of a survivor with battered cuirass, once-white tunic stained with the same rust that colored his close-cropped beard.
In his left hand, a spear with the look of something passed down through generations. In his right, a length of cord twisted for binding or, if needed, strangling.
They considered one another, Apollo and the man, in the hush that followed. The man's lips tightened, his eyes flicked with the quick tallying of threat, and Apollo realized he must cut a pitiful figure, muddy, bleeding, half-drowned in a god's shame.
Still, the recognition was not all one-sided. Something in the set of Apollo's jaw, the old arrogance unbowed by suffering, gave the man pause.
"Stranger," the man said, in the local patois but with a crispness that bespoke education. "You move poorly for a hunter. Are you lost?"
Apollo gathered the remnants of his dignity and straightened, wincing as his ribs protested. He tried to summon the old music to his voice, but what came was flat and human, frayed by pain.
"Lost, yes. Or exiled—does it matter?" He had meant to sound flippant, but the words carried a gravity that surprised them both.
The man grunted, lowering his spear a fraction. "Not here it doesn't. The forest swallows the proud and the humble with equal appetite." He stepped closer, eyes narrowed, assessing the wounds, the posture, the expensive ruin of Apollo's former divinity.