THE SKY WAS A PREPARATORY SHADE of violet as the sky began to lighten. He sighed and stretched against the bed, turning over fluidly and shuffling back to press against his bedfellow just to find that his side is vacant. Hypnos lingers, pulling the covers higher over his shoulders, wreathed in the smell of Apollo, embraced by the subtle imprint of his body. He doesn’t remember when he began to imprint on the island, when the flowers in the garden stared at him as he walked by and the strange creatures of the wood stopped prowling about the house at night, when he no longer became a stranger here, a visitor. It is his home as much as it is Hypnos’s ; the primordial god was naive to believe that this could ever end. Such simplicity is the nature of his family line. Not at all the same for the Olympians. The lingering tendrils of morning slumber invite him to doze, and he tears them off suddenly, colourful irises opening to take in the pale light of the room. Hypnos bolts up, and the bed creaks beneath him. Apollo’s bow is absent from its place beside the chest of drawers. He thrashes in the bed, fighting his way out, the covers wrapping around his feet. Hypnos goes to the window and pushes the thin linen curtains back, gazes through the gossamer shimmer of Lemnos. The sun presses against the watery eastern horizon.
Hypnos dresses frantically in an olive tunic, cinching it haphazardly at his waist and running a hand through his hair. He takes his spear and runs down the steep wooden stairs, leaving the door ajar as he pushes out of it, sprinting past his garden and down the cobblestone road leading up to the edge of the promontory. The tree branches stretch out of his way, parting as he races through the dew - laden undergrowth. He reaches the small stretch of meadow just before the beach and sees Apollo in the light of the blushing dawn, painting him radiant, a golden corona illuminating his silhouette.
He half flies, half runs down the grassy knoll leading down to the beach. Refuse from the storm litters the stretch of sandy waves rising out of the patient seas. Crates lie broken, long planks splintered and broken among mortal trinkets and smashed produce. The sand, still cool from the night, is slippery beneath his sandals, and it grates between his toes and dusts his ankles like sugar. He stands before Apollo, looking up at him with a living forest in his eyes, contention and adoration, life and death existing there in the woods. Hypnos wasn’t prepared for this, he isn’t prepared.
“You do me a disservice ; I am not helpless, nor am I weak in comparison to your kin ; quite the contrary. I have held my own, and I still do to this day, and I want to come with you.” His eyes soften, past the dedication of his epithet, to a muted tone that betrays his sadness. Hypnos’s knuckles rub across Apollo’s jaw, the light trace of stubble soft against his fingers. “My sun, my stars,” his words are quiet, barely a midnight breeze, barely a distant chirps of a cricket, “you were going to leave without saying goodbye?”
