A to Z Challenge: D is for Damon

This year, I'm participating in the insane awesome A to Z blogging challenge, which entails posting EVERY SINGLE DAY during the month of April, except for Sundays. Each day's theme corresponds to a different day of the alphabet: 26 days, 26 posts. I'll be blogging each day this month on some aspect of my current work in progress (WIP).

D is for Damon 

Damon is the second soul, or character, in my Ancient Greek lifetime, and he also happens to be Apollo's love interest (and for those who are curious, homosexual male relationships - usually between an older and a younger man - were actually very common in Ancient Greece; Apollo himself had a large number of male lovers.)

Damon isn't the sort of guy you'd expect a god - much less the god of music, medicine, truth, and light, among other things - to fall in love with: he's a shepherd, living in near-isolation for most of  the year with his father in a tiny hut on a remote mountain, and he spends his days tending their flock of sheep. As a result, he's poor, uneducated, and naive...but he's also determined. Add that to the beauty he grows into as he reaches the edges of manhood, and you have an excellent recipe for disrupting Apollo's self-imposed celibacy.

Here's a little snippet about Damon:

Damon was only seven years old, a dark-eyed slip of a boy with knees like bruised fruit, and hollow cheeks only a mother could love, when he decided he would one day become Apollo’s favorite consort. The fact that he had no mother to love the confusion of limbs and scrapes that were his mortal frame did not deter him; nor did the fact that the god had foresworn all mortal lovers since the untimely deaths of his most recent seventeen in a row, the last of which had died in the god’s arms, cross-eyed and bloodied, after being struck in the head by a rebounding discus. As a result of this unfortunate series of violent and sudden losses, Apollo was so consumed by grief that not even the most smooth-skinned, well-endowed lads and maidens of the realm could shift his resolved celibacy. Damon, however, was a determined child; he’d found very early on in his quiet life that achieving a goal was simply a matter of doing it. 

He lived with his father in a tiny cottage, barely more than a hut, on an isolated hilltop hours outside the nearest village, tending his father’s sheep and dreaming of the gods who lived high on the remote, misted blue peak that loomed at the very edge of his vision...