To 8Ball3- Ewwwww, that's disgusting. Like, I'm laughing, but that's ewwwwwww XD Zeus too much of a glamon to help (I know there's an accent on the a there, but I don't know how to put it in off of Word :P ) Poor Donny D':
He fought. He squirmed. He pounded on Python's skin with his tiny fist, then wriggled his ukulele back and forth in the wound, hoping to make him so miserable, he would drop him.
Instead, his giant glowing eyes simply watched, calm and satisfied, as his bones developed stress fractures he could hear in his inner ear.
DIEST THOU NOT! The Arrow of Dodona implored. THE TIME HAS COME! Apollo tried to wheeze out a question, but he had too little air in his lungs. THE PROPHECY WHICH PYTHON SPAKE. IF THOU MUST FALL, THEN SO YOU SHALL, BUT FIRST USETH THOU ME. The arrow tilted in his hand, pointing towards Python's face.
Apollo's thought process was muddled, what with his brain exploding and all, but its meaning jabbed into him like a ukulele fret board. I can't. He thought. No.
THOU MUST. The arrow sounded resigned, determined. Apollo thought of how many miles he had travelled with this small sliver of wood and how little credence he had usually given its words. He remembered what it had told him about it being cast out of Dodona- a small, expendable branch from the ancient grove, a piece no-one would miss.
Apollo saw Jason's face. Heliose, Crest, Money Maker, Don, Dakota, all those who had sacrificed themselves to get him here. Now, his last companion was ready to pay the cost for his success- to have him do the one thing it had always told him never to do.
"No." He croaked, possibly the last word he would ever be able to speak.
"What is that?" Python demanded, thinking Apollo had spoken to him. "Does the little rat beg for mercy at the end?" Apollo opened his mouth, unable to answer. The monster's face loomed closer, anxious to saviour his last sweet whimpers.
FARE THEE WELL, FRIEND. The arrow said. APOLLO WILL FALL, BUT APOLLO WILL RISE AGAIN.
With those last words, conveying all the power of its ancient grove, the arrow closed the reptile's prophecy. Python came within range and, with a sob of despair, Apollo plunged the Arrow of Dodona up to its fletching in the reptile's eye.
He roared in agony, lashing his head back and forth. His coils loosened just enough for Apollo to wriggle free. He dropped, landing in a heap at the edge of a wide crevice.
His chest throbbed. Definitely broken ribs. Probably a broken heart. He had far exceeded the maximum recommended mileage for this Lester Papadopoulos body, but he had to keep going for the Arrow of Dodona. He hadeth to keepth goingeth.
He struggled to his feet. Python continued flailing, trying to dislodge the arrow from his eye. As a medical god, Apollo would have told him that flailing would only make the pain worse. Seeing his old Shakespearean missile weapon sticking out of the serpent's head made him sad and furious and defiant. Apollo sensed the arrow's consciousness had gone. He hoped it had returned to the Grove of Dodona and joined the millions of other whispering voices of the trees, but he feared it was simply no more. Its sacrifice had been real, and final.
Anger pumped through him. His mortal body steamed in earnest, bursts of light flashing under his skin. Nearby, he spotted Python's tail thrashing. Unlike the snake that had curled around the leontocephaline, this serpent had a beginning and an end. Behind him yawned the largest of the volcanic crevices. He knew what he had to do.
"PYTHON!" His voice shook the cavern. Stalactites crashed around them. He imagined, somewhere far above them, Greek villagers freezing in their tracks as his voice echoed from the ruins of the holy site, olive trees shuddering and losing their fruit.
The Lord of Delphi had awoken.
Python turned his remaining eye on him.
"You will not live."
"I'm fine with that." Apollo defied. "As long as you die too." He tackled the monster's tail and dragged it towards the chasm.
"What are you doing?" Python raged. "Stop it, you idiot!"
With Python's tail in his arms, Apollo leaped over the side. His plan should not have worked. Given his puny mortal weight, he should have simply hung there like an air freshener from a rear-view mirror. But he was full of righteous fury. He planted his feet against the rock wall and pulled, dragging Python down as he howled and writhed. He tried to whip his tail around and throw Apollo off, but his feet stayed firmly planted against the side of the chasm wall. His strength grew. His body shone with brilliant light. With one final, defiant shout, he pulled his enemy past the point of no return. The bulk of his coils spilled into the crevasse.
The prophecy came true. Apollo fell and Python fell with him.
Hesiod once wrote that a bronze anvil would take nine days to fall from Earth to Tartarus. Apollo suspected he used the word nine as shorthand for I don't know exactly how long, but it would seem like a long, long time.
Hesiod was right.
He and Python tumbled into the depths, flipping over one another, bouncing against walls, spinning from total darkness into the red light of lava veins and back again. Given the amount of damage his poor body took, it seemed likely that Apollo died somewhere along the way. Yet he kept fighting. He had nothing left to wield as a weapon, so he used his fists and his feet, punching the beast's hide, kicking at every claw, wing or nascent head that sprouted from his body.
He was beyond pain, now in the realm of extreme agony is the new feeling great. He torqued himself in mid-air so Python took the brunt of their collisions with the walls. They couldn't escape each other. Whenever they drifted apart, some force brought them back together again.
The air pressure became crushing. Apollo's body still glowed and steamed, the arteries of light now closer to the surface, dividing him into a 3D Apollo jigsaw puzzle.
The crevice walls opened around them and they fell through the cold and gloomy air of Erebos- the realm of Hades. Python tried to sprout wings and fly away, but his pathetic bat appendages couldn't support his weight, especially with Apollo clinging to his back, breaking his wings as soon as they formed.
Python shrieked. "STOP IT!" The Arrow of Dodona still bristled in his ruined eye. His face oozed green blood from a dozen places where Apollo had kicked and punched him. "I- HATE- YOU!" Which just goes to show that even arch-enemies of four thousand years can still find something to agree on.
With a great KA-PHROOOOOM, they hit water. Or not water… more like a roaring current of bone-chillingly cold grey acid.
The River Styx swept them downstream.
The river sapped his memories, his emotions, his will. It prised open the burning cracks in his Lester shell, making him feel raw and unmade like a moulting dragonfly. Even Python wasn't immune. He fought more sluggishly. He flailed and clawed to reach the shore, but Apollo elbowed him in his good eye, then kicked him in the gullet- anything to keep him in the water.
Not that Apollo wanted to drown, but he knew Python would be much more dangerous on solid ground. Also, he did not like the idea of showing up on Hades' doorstep in his present condition. He could expect no warm welcome there.
He clung to Python's face, using the Arrow of Dodona's lifeless shaft like a rudder, steering the monster with tugs of torture. Python wailed and bellowed and thrashed. All around them, the Styx's rapids seemed to laugh at Apollo. You see? You broke a vow. And now I have you.
Apollo held onto his purpose. He remembered Meg's last order: Come back to me, dummy. Her face remained so clear in his mind. She had been abandoned so many times, used so cruelly. He would not be another cause of grief for her. He knew who he was. He was her dummy.
He and Python tumbled through the grey torrent and then, without warning, shot off the edge of a waterfall. Again, they fell, into even deeper oblivion.
All supernatural rivers eventually empty into Tartarus- the realm where primordial terrors dissolve and re-form, where monsters germinate on the continent-size body of Tartarus himself, slumbering in his eternal dream state.
They hurtled through burning air and the spray of the abysmal waterfall as a kaleidoscope of images spun in and out of view: mountains of black bone like Titan scapulae; fleshy landscapes dotted with blisters that popped to release glistening newborn drakons and gorgons; plumes of fire and black smoke spewing upward in darkly festive explosions.
They fell even further, into the Grand Canyon crevasse of this horror world- to the deepest point of the deepest realm of creation. Then they slammed into solid rock.
Did he survive? No. But, by that point, he was no longer Lester. He was not Apollo. He wasn't sure who or what he was.
He rose to his feet, no idea how, and found himself on a blade of obsidian, jutting over an endless churning sea of umber and violet. With a combination of horror and fascination, he realised he was standing on the brink of Chaos.
Below them churned the essence of everything: the great cosmic soup from which all else had spawned, the place where life first began to form. One step off this ledge and he would rejoin that soup. He would be utterly gone. He examined his arms, which seemed to be in the process of disintegration. The flesh burned away like paper, leaving marbled lines of glowing golden light. He looked like one of those transparent anatomy dolls designed to illuminate the circulatory system. In the centre of his chest, subtler violet energy. His soul? His death? Whatever it was, the glow was getting stronger, the purple tint spreading through his form, reaching to the nearness of Chaos, working furiously to unknit the golden lines that held him together.
Python lay beside him, his body also crumbling, his size drastically reduced. He was now only five times longer than Apollo, like a prehistoric crocodile or constrictor, his shape a mixture of the two, his hide still rippling with half-formed heads, wings and claws. Impaled in his blind left eye, the Arrow of Dodona was still perfectly intact, not a bit of fletching out of place.
Python rose to his stubby feet. He stomped and howled. His body was coming apart, turning into chunks of reptile and light. He stumbled towards Apollo, hissing and half-blind. "Destroy you!"
Apollo wanted to tell him to chill out. Chaos was way ahead of him. It was rapidly tearing apart their essences. They no longer had to fight. They could just sit on this obsidian spire and quietly crumble together.
But the monster had other plans. He charged, bit Apollo around the waist and barrelled forward, intent on pushing him into oblivion. Apollo couldn't stop his momentum. He could only shuffle and twist so that when the hit the edge, Python tumbled over first. Apollo clawed desperately at the rock, grabbing the rim as Python's weight almost yanked him in half.
They hung there, suspended over the void by his trembling fingers, Python's maw clamped around his waist. Apollo could feel himself being torn in two, but he couldn't let go. He channelled all his remaining strength into his hands, the way he used to do when he played the lyre or the ukulele, when he needed to express a truth so deep, it could only be communicated in music: the death of Jason Grace, the trials of Apollo, the love and respect he had for his young friend, Meg McCaffrey.
Somehow, he managed to bend one leg. He kneed Python in the chin. The reptile grunted and Apollo kneed him again, harder. Python groaned. He tried to say something, but his mouth was full of Apollo, who struck him once more. The attack was so hard, his lower jaw cracked. He lost his grip and fell.
He had no final words- just a look of half-blind reptilian horror as he plummeted into Chaos and burst into a cloud of purple fizz.
Apollo hung from the ledge, too exhausted to feel relief. This was the end. Pulling himself up was beyond his ability.
Then he heard a voice that confirmed his worst fears.