Chapter 3: The Fire Accepts No Gods
They stood close enough now for Apollo to notice the old sword scar running diagonal across the man’s brow, and the yellowing whorls of tattoos at his throat.
The man’s aura was that of someone forever standing at the edge of firelight, unsure if the world within or without was the more dangerous.
"Come," said the man, as if deciding. "If you mean harm, you’ll do it wet and shivering beside our fire, not skulking in the brush. What’s your name?"
’My name?’
Apollo flinched, for in the celestial tongue names had weight, names bound things, unmade them, or sealed fate in iron. Yet here, among mortals, a name was just a password, a price of passage.
"Apollo," he said, the syllables a foreignness on his tongue he could not quite swallow.
The man’s face betrayed only the faintest tic of surprise, then reset into blankness. "Folk around here favor simple names. I’ll call you Lio for now."
He gestured with the cord. Apollo realized with a small, sick amusement that the offer had never really been to accompany, only to submit or die.
He walked, and the man walked beside him; not the way heroes march into legend, but the hesitant dance of two animals unsure which is predator and which is prey.
The palisade loomed taller as they approached, its gate a crude affair of crossed timbers and scavenged chain.
Three men guarded it, each in varying states of drunken alertness, their eyes skimming over Apollo and finding greater threat in the mud on his boots than the man himself.