I've always felt a duty to protect my cabin. My siblings. There's a reason most of us in the Apollo cabin don't live very long, why being claimed by Apollo is as good as a death sentence. It's a healer's duty to save as many people as they can. To sacrifice themselves if that's what it comes to. It's a gamble, trading our lives for theirs. These kind of powers suck you dry and kill you slowly from the inside. That's why we lost nearly the whole cabin after the war. Just a few left. I knew that soon enough their time would come too.
But the good—or bad—news is that I'm different from the rest of them. Born of a god only, and yet, with so little power. My powers, however weak they were, couldn't suck me dry like the other healers. I guessed that meant I'd live longer than most of them, even if "longer" only meant a few years. That's assuming a monster or my own impulsiveness didn't get me first—which was more than likely. Watching my older siblings nearly killing themselves with the effort every day killed me.
Yeah, maybe I wasn't meant to be born, because how can two biological men have a biological child? Together? Or...maybe I was. Maybe it was supposed to this way. I was the one who was meant to save everyone else.
Sadly, a lesson I learned much too late is that you just can't save everyone.
Not even a god can do that.
