The Tyrant's Tomb

I remembered the day we had sat together on a beach, the Mediterranean
stretching out before us like a sheet of blue glass. Behind us, on the hillside
where the Sibyl had her cave, olive trees baked and cicadas droned in the
summer heat of Southern Italy. In the distance, Mount Vesuvius rose, hazy
and purple.
Conjuring an image of the Sibyl herself was more difficult—not the
hunched and grizzled old woman from Tarquin’s throne room, but the
beautiful young woman she’d been on that beach, centuries before, when
Cumae was still a Greek colony.
I had loved everything about her—the way her hair caught the sunlight,
the mischievous gleam in her eyes, the easy way she smiled. She didn’t seem
to care that I was a god, despite having given up everything to be my Oracle:
her family, her future, even her name. Once pledged to me, she was known
simply as the Sibyl, the voice of Apollo.
But that wasn’t enough for me. I was smitten. I convinced myself it was
love—the one true romance that would wash away all my past missteps. I
wanted the Sibyl to be my partner throughout eternity. As the afternoon went
on, I coaxed and pleaded.
“You could be so much more than my priestess,” I urged her. “Marry
me!”
She laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“I am! Ask for anything in return, and it’s yours.”
She twisted a strand of her auburn locks. “All I’ve ever wanted is to be
the Sibyl, to guide the people of this land to a better future. You’ve already
given me that. So, ha-ha. The joke’s on you.”
“But—but you’ve only got one lifetime!” I said. “If you were immortal,
you could guide humans to a better future forever, at my side!”
She looked at me askance. “Apollo, please. You’d be tired of me by the
end of the week.”
“Never!”
“So, you’re saying”—she scooped up two heaping handfuls of sand—“if
I wished for as many years of life as there are grains of this sand, you would
grant me that.”
“It is done!” I pronounced. Instantly, I felt a portion of my own power
flowing into her life force. “And now, my love—”
“Whoa, whoa!” She scattered the sand, clambering to her feet and
backing away as if I were suddenly radioactive. “That was a hypothetical,