Chapter 19: Salt, Smoke, and Mage
"Gods damn it," Apollo muttered, but under his breath so no one, especially the gods, would hear.
As he pressed his fingers to the skin. A tremor ran up his arm, not the weakness of hunger, but a warning: the aether inside him was low, a candle burned down to its own wax.
He closed his eyes. It was impossible to recall the old rituals, the right order of words, the way the power used to flood him with nothing more than the memory of a sunbeam.
Now, it was effort. Now, it hurt.
He bit his tongue and focused. At first there was only the pulse of his own blood, the oil and salt of Thorin’s sweat.
Then, slowly, something opened: a twin to the wound, but inside Apollo’s head.
A matching rawness, a hunger that called and answered at the same time.
He reached for it, let the trickle of light run down the length of his arm, through his fingers, into the heat of the wound.
Thorin jerked, a low animal sound caught in his throat, but did not wake.
The flesh around the cut tightened, the blackness receded, and the fever’s heat dropped by half, Apollo could feel it, the way a wound feels when the scab finally takes and the pain becomes memory instead of prophecy.
It was done in seconds, but cost years. Apollo staggered, bile in his mouth, the world a rinse of blue-white and then nothing at all.
When he woke, the moon had set. The only light was the slow, pink creep of sunrise, and the pain in his own bones, a debt he’d borrowed from Thorin and now owed to himself.