The Golden Fool

They say a god cannot fall. Apollo would like a word. Cast out of Olympus for giving mortals a prophecy they were never meant to hear, the once-golden deity finds himself stripped of power, name, and worship. Now he’s just a half-frozen stranger bleeding in a ditch, trying to remember how to be human without losing what made him divine. But the world below is not as he left it. Cities rot, old powers stir, and the threads of fate unravel where no loom should reach. Something is shifting in the dark, something even the gods did not foresee. Apollo was sentenced to live as a mortal for ten circuits of the sun. He plans to survive them. But survival is no guarantee of peace and power, once given, is rarely forgotten.