Helios

He saw everything. Every birth and every death and every battle and every act of love and every act of cruelty that occurred in the daylit hours of the world — the god who drove the sun across the sky was the god who witnessed all of it, simultaneously, from the most comprehensive vantage available to any being in the divine or mortal world.

This was both the greatest privilege of his position and its most specific and most personal burden.

Helios is the interior account of the sun god — son of the Titans Hyperion and Theia, brother of Selene and Eos, the divine being whose daily passage across the sky illuminated everything and witnessed everything and could not prevent most of what the witnessing revealed. What it meant to drive the solar chariot every day across the full arc of the world's sky and to see, with complete and simultaneous clarity, everything the light touched. The relationship with his fire-horses, known individually after an extraordinary span of daily work together. The love for his son Phaethon, the promise he should not have made, the watching of the fall he could not prevent. The sacred cattle on Thrinacia, violated by the desperate and hungry, and the appeal to Zeus that followed. The telling of Hephaestus about what the comprehensive light had revealed about Ares and Aphrodite.

He saw everything. He paid for seeing everything. He drove the sun across the sky the next morning anyway.