DAWN UNTIL DUSK ─ APOLLO

prologue.

Prologue.

A calf was born in spring.

Eleni had expected it to mewl, though the sound did not come. The creature lay silent, legs tucked beneath its frail body, carved cleanly into its mother's side as though it were but an extension of her might. There was a serenity to the birth unlike anything the farmer's daughter had ever seen. The mother did not cry for aid, the baby did not wail for tending, and it seemed, that evening, as though the entire world held its breath. Though rarities such as this may only last for so long. When her father's wagon caught the gravel just beyond the field, the cow jolted, and the calf saw her for what she really was: a mortal soul in a familiar body, comforting but not everlasting, tenacious but easily startled. Flawed in a manner which her baby could not comprehend, for it had only seen an evening sky and learned that its mother was no fortress.

"What is it?" Eleni had asked her father, watching his face crinkle like worn leather beneath the waning sun.

He tugged the calf's leg. Still, it did not blunder. "It is a girl."

"Will she live?"

"If the gods see it fit."

But the gods were angry, and the winter was harsh, and King Priam was soon calling upon the farmlands for ransom. His people were withering within their colossal walls, weeping over their frozen jewels, and their rations of wheat could only provide so much relief.  Thus, though Tasos Athanasiou loved the calf, loved the look on his daughter's face as she beheld it, loved the peace that a mother and her child gave him (for such an alignment was absent in his own home), he loved his nation more. He loved to be relied upon, to be trusted and yearned for, to be an emblem of good omens.

So the calf died to preserve this duty, this honor of such esteem. She died to fill hundreds of bodies that would soon rest in a rivulet of scarlet, to swell stomachs and rot within them if she were to last them a year. A reckoning was dawning in the form of a boy no elder than Eleni, no less a victim of circumstance. Death was coming by the hands of a prince, a half-god, a man-made spear.

Tasos would never tell his daughter of his betrayal to her. "The plague took her," he had explained, watching tears well in brown eyes which she batted away. "Do not worry. There will be another."

He would never confess that he had considered pleading, bowing his wrinkled head before the king, clasping his hands, crossing his feet. But this one I love, he thought to cry. This one has brought me great joy!

No. He would never confess.

The gods were angry and thus she died.

The gods were angry and so would his nation.

It is funny—the repetition of life—when one dares to seek it out.