You are his Long Lost Daughter...|| Dark! Ancient Mythological Figures x Daughter Reader
The Mythological Figures: Horus 'Egyptian Mythology' Apollo 'Greek Mythology' Gilgamesh 'Mesopotamian Mythology'
You have lived a blessed life, despite being the daughter of an average merchant.
Ever since you were a child, something about you drew people in. Neighbors, relatives, and even strangers would visit your home and shower you with expensive gifts, during festivals, during holidays, and sometimes for no occasion at all.
Even celebrations that had no tradition of gift-giving somehow became reasons for people to bring you lavish presents.
Your parents always explained it the same way: you simply had a strange, radiant aura about you, something warm and magnetic that made people want to be near you and be generous toward you. You never questioned it. It was just your life.
This blessed existence continued into young adulthood, when suitors began to flock to your door. Not just any suitors, the finest and most distinguished men sought your hand in marriage.
But one stood above them all, the prince of Egypt himself, the son of the pharaoh. He had spotted you in the market one day and declared that you would make the perfect wife for him.
But your charmed life is about to unravel, because you are about to discover the true reason everyone has always adored you.
It happens during the festival of Horus known as The Beautiful Reunion.
You are not particularly religious, but you have always enjoyed the celebration for its lively activities and vibrant atmosphere. You attend with your family and friends, but you grow tired early and decide to return home alone, ahead of the others.
What you do not expect is to be watched.
Horus himself has been observing you throughout the festival, and he follows you home.
When you arrive, he reveals himself and tells you the truth, that you are his daughter.
Years ago, his mother, Isis, entrusted you as an infant to the merchant family you have always believed to be your own. It was done to keep you safe, to hide you among mortals.
You are not the child of an average merchant. You never were.
You have his divine blood, and now he has come to claim you back.
"Come with me," he said. "Let me take you where you belong."
You refuse, as you love your current life to leave to a whole different realm with him.
But Horus only smiled, patient, calm, without a trace of anger.
"Then do as you wish, my child."
Within weeks, everything collapsed.
Your mother stopped looking at you, and your father snapped at you like a stranger. Your best friend shut the door in your face. Neighbors who once adored you crossed the street to avoid you.
Then a royal messenger delivered a scroll. The prince had withdrawn his proposal. He was marrying someone else.
The blessed aura was gone.
The invisible warmth that made the world love you had been stripped away, and without it, no one wanted you.
Late at night, you went to the temple of Horus. The halls were empty. You collapsed before his golden statue and wept.
"I know you can hear me!" you screamed. "My family hates me! My friends look at me like I am nothing! The prince is gone!"
"You did this. You took everything from me."
The torches flared gold. The shadows stretched into vast wings. And then he was there, stepping out of the light, calm, patient, as though he had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Everyone has abandoned me," you wept. "I have nothing."
"What kind of love was it?" he asked gently. "Did they love you for your heart? Or for the divine light I placed inside you?"
You opened your mouth to argue. The words would not come, knowing the answer.
"Every gift. Every kindness. Every suitor. The prince himself. None of it was for you. Take away the divine light, and what remains?"
He gestured towards your crumpled, tear-streaked form.
"A girl abandoned by everyone who claimed to love her. Not because she changed, but because the spell was lifted."
"Then I was never loved at all," you whispered.
"That is not true." Horus crouched before you and wiped a tear from your cheek. "I loved you before you drew your first breath. I am the only one who has ever loved you without the aura, because I am the one who made it. I see past it. I see you."
You understood then, with horrible clarity, that this was always going to happen. The choice he gave you was never a real choice. It was a courtesy, a head start before the fall.
"I will go with you," you announced with a hollow and defeated voice
"Just please, do not leave me alone."
Horus smiled and opened his arms.
"Come here, my sweet child."
You fell into him. His arms close around you like sunlight, warm and overwhelming. You sobbed against his chest while his hand stroked your hair.
You believed him when he said you would never be alone again. And you knew he was the reason you had been alone in the first place.
But he was your father at the end of the day.
"Let us go home,"Â he invites, before holding you up in his arms, his wings appearing on his back before flying in the dead of the night into the sky.
His father's punishment for killing the Cyclopes could only be described as cruelly unfair.
After all, Apollo had slain them in vengeance for Zeus striking down his beloved son, Asclepius. For this act, the god of music was stripped of his divinity and forced to live as a mortal, serving as a shepherd under King Admetus for nine years.
But Zeus had planned far more than mere punishment.
You, the adopted daughter of Admetus, was in truth Apollo's long-lost daughter.
It began when Apollo and Hera quarreled one day. In the heat of the argument, Apollo cruelly mocked Hera for being an inadequate wife, claiming that was why Zeus constantly sought the beds of other women. The insult struck deep.
Furious, Hera stole you away when you were only a year old. She stripped you of your divine aura, severing the sacred link between you and your father, and transformed you into a mortal. She then placed you in the care of Admetus, refusing to reveal your location to anyone.
However, Zeus had known where you were from the very beginning.
The King of the Deities informed Apollo that if he ever revealed himself as your father, or if you discovered the truth on your own during the nine years of his servitude, you would die.
Meanwhile with you when Apollo was announced as a sheepherder by your father, you immediately frowned upon him with bitterness.
You were fourteen when your best friend, Corinna, fell ill.
It started with a cough. Then fever. Then blood on her lips every time she tried to speak. The physicians said nothing could be done. So you ran to the temple. You knelt on cold stone until your knees bruised. You burned every offering you had. You begged.
'Apollo, healer of plagues, I am no one, but she is everything to me. Please, save her.'
You prayed for seven days. On the eighth, Corinna died in your arms.
After that, you never knelt again.
So when the fallen god appeared in your father's house, dressed in rough wool, smelling of earth and sweat, you felt something hot and bitter rise inside your chest.
You gave him the worst tasks. The ones no one wanted.
"The ditch behind the eastern pasture is clogged again," you told him one morning, not looking up from your bread. "Clear it before midday."
He studied you for a moment. "It rained all night. The mud will be waist-deep."
"Then I suggest you start now."
He went without another word.
You made him carry water when the well was at its lowest.
You sent him to mend fences in the heat of noon while other workers rested in the shade.
When he sang in the evenings, that voice, impossibly beautiful, the kind of voice that made the maidens fawn for him, you slammed your door shut.
"You treat him too harshly," Admetus said one evening, discussing your bad treatment of Apollo.
"He's a servant, Father. I treat him as one."
Admetus looked at you with something heavy in his eyes. Something he couldn't say.
He had learned the truth months ago, Hermes when he visited Apollo had whispered it to him 'The shepherd is her father. Guard your tongue, or she dies.'
"He is a man now," Admetus said carefully. "And even men deserve kindness."
"Kindness." You laughed, and it sounded nothing like joy.
"Did he show kindness when people begged him for help? When girls knelt in his temples and wept until they had nothing left?"
"You don't understandâ"
"I understand perfectly. He is arrogant and evil."
You walked away, and Admetus closed his eyes, trapped between a truth that would kill you and a silence that was killing him.
On the last morning, Apollo stood in the courtyard with his bag over his shoulder. Light had returned to his skin. The divine glow that had been taken was creeping back, slow and golden, like dawn filling a dark room.
You watched from the doorway, arms crossed, waiting for him to leave.
But Admetus stepped forward. His face was pale. His hands trembled.
"Come here, child," he said to you.
You frowned. "What is it, father?"
He took your hands. Kissed them. And then he turned you toward the shepherd, no, not a shepherd but towards the redeemed god, and stepped back.
"She belongs with you," Admetus confesses "She always did."
The ground tilted beneath you. "Father, what are you talking about?"
Apollo set down his bag. He looked at you, and for the first time in nine years, you saw something in his expression that you couldn't name. Something raw and open and terribly human for a god.
"He is not your father," Apollo said quietly. "I am."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing you had ever heard.
"Your name was taken. Your divinity was stripped. You were hidden from me as punishment, not mine, but yours, for a sin you never committed." His voice was steady, but his jaw was tight.
"I have known since the day I arrived. I could not tell you. If I did, you would die."
You looked at Admetus, the man who raised you, and he nodded gently, and confirmed his words.
"Why should I believe you?" you said, turning back to Apollo. Your voice shook. "You never answered me. I prayed to you. I knelt in your temple for seven days and begged you to save someone I loved, and you did nothing."
Apollo was quiet for a long moment.
Then he said, "I heard you."
"Every word. Every night. I heard you, and I wanted to answer." He paused. "But the Fates had already cut her thread. Even I cannot undo what they have severed. No god can."
He had not heard you. Apollo had not been listening.
The truth was simpler and uglier: Apollo, like most gods, rarely listened to mortal prayers. They were noise, endless, repetitive, beneath him. Corinna had died, and he hadn't noticed, because he hadn't cared.
But standing here now, watching his daughter's red eyes and trembling hands, he chose the kinder story.
And you, surprisingly believed him because despite being cruel to him, Apollo has been nothing but kind to you through those nine years, he even stayed by your bed side when you caught a disease.
"Nine years," you said, your voice breaking as you took a tentative step toward him. "You let me treat you like a dog. You let me hate you."
"I would have stayed a thousand years in the mud if it meant you lived to see the sun," he replied, as he reached out, his hand hovering uncertainly in the air between you, waiting for your permission.
The last of your resistance collapsed. You didn't just step forward; you fell into him, your fingers gripping the rough fabric of his tunic.
The divine heat of him was overwhelming, a summer's day pressed against your skin, and for the first time in your life, the long-lost void in your chest felt filled.
"I'm sorry," you sobbed into his chest. "Father, I'm so sorry."
Apollo wrapped his arms around you, pulling you close as the golden light flared, finally claiming him fully. But even as the god returned, he held you with the tenderness of the shepherd who had watched over you.
"There is nothing to forgive, my daughter," Apollo comforts you, light appearing behind both of you.
You are his daughter, yes, but you are not lost. You simply decided to leave when you had finally had enough of his abusive, tyrannical regime.
We must consider that you were not just a daughter to Gilgamesh; you were everything to him: the friend, the sister, and the mother.
You were his friend because you grew up alongside him, born when he was only fourteen. You were his sister because you guarded his secrets and defended him against anyone who dared to criticize him.
And you were his mother because you possessed a nurturing nature, providing the comfort a mother gives her child. You were the only person who ever saw him cry or witnessed him at his weakest point.
But everything has its limits. Once your father became the King of Uruk, he abused his power and oppressed his people through forced labor and the right to sleep with brides on their wedding nights.
He was remarkably childish, possessing no empathy for his subjects, whom he viewed as inferior beings. Anyone who opposed him faced execution.
No matter how often you advised him to be kinder and cease his cruelty, he never listened.
The final straw came during an argument, in a fit of rage, he locked you in the dungeons, threatening to execute you if you did not renounce your views.
Gilgamesh never truly intended to kill you, he only wanted to pressure you into obedience.
However, that single action cost him everything. Your handmaidens helped you escape, and since that day, the King of Uruk has never seen you again.
Yet he ended up finding you.
The temple of Ishtar was quiet in the early hours of dawn, incense curling through golden light, when you felt it: a shift beneath the stillness, like pressure before a storm.
Then his voice came, and every careful thing you had built around yourself cracked at its foundation.
Gilgamesh stood at the threshold. Different, not weaker, never that, but carrying something you had never seen in him before. Beside him stood Enkidu, powerful and unhurried, with eyes that held none of the cruelty you remembered from Uruk's court.
"You shouldn't be here," you said.
"After how many years?" Your voice did not rise, but it cut. "After chaining me like a criminal?"
The words fell into the silence between you. Once impossible. Now fragile, uncertain.
Enkidu stepped forward. "He speaks the truth. I have seen it myself. He is not the man he was."
You studied him carefully. "And who are you to speak for a king?"
"A friend," he replied. "The first he has ever had."
Your gaze moved back to Gilgamesh. Something in your chest pulled painfully. "So he finally learned what it means to stand beside someone instead of above them."
Good. That's good for him to know how frightened you were alone in the dungeons wondering what you had done wrong.
"You left," he stated, quieter now. "Without a word."
"You locked me in a dungeon."
His expression broke, just for a moment. "I thought if I pushed you, you would stay. You always stayed."
"Because I believed you could be better." You stepped back, placing distance between you. "I was wrong."
"He has changed," Enkidu said. "I swear it on my life."
"I don't doubt that," you replied. "But change does not erase what was done. I have a life here now. I serve Ishtar. I have peace."
At the goddess's name, something darkened in Gilgamesh's face.
"Do not," you warned. "She gave me sanctuary when you took everything from me."
He exhaled slowly, and when he spoke again his voice was stripped of ceremony. "Come home."
"I am not your king right now. I am just the man who lost you."
"Then act like it," you state with a bittersweet tone, "and leave."
"I will take you." He declared bluntly.
You barely had time to draw breath before his hand closed around your wrist.
"I will not lose you again."
The temple trembled. Priestesses cried out as soldiers appeared at the gate behind him, and rage broke open in your chest like something that had been sealed too long.
"You have not changed at all."
"I have." His grip did not loosen. "But I will not watch you waste your life in a temple."
The words landed hard, but he did not release you, and despite everything, despite every promise you had made to yourself at the threshold of this place, he took you by throwing you over his shoulder as if you weighted nothing.
The skies above Uruk darkened unnaturally when you arrived home after days.
You felt the goddess's fury before you understood it, a pressure behind the eyes, a cold that had nothing to do with weather. Ishtar did not forgive. You had known that when you entered her service. You simply had not imagined Gilgamesh would be foolish enough to give her cause.
He had rejected her. That wound she had nursed in private.
But he had also stolen her favorite priestess from her own altar is unforgivable.
The sky split open, and the Bull of Heaven descended.
Its roar shattered the air. The earth cracked beneath its hooves, crops withering in the sweep of its breath, whole sections of the city folding inward as it came. Screams filled the streets below.
"This is your fault," you said.
"I know." Gilgamesh stepped in front of you, a weapon already drawn, and there was no arrogance in it, only resolve. "Stay back."
"You cannot fight divine wrath like a common enemy."
He looked at you, and for the first time in all the years you had known him, there was no performance in his face. No pride assembled for an audience. Only the thing underneath, stripped bare.
"I will protect my city," he said. "And I will protect you.
Then he charged, and Enkidu went with him, and the battle that followed was chaos given shape.
The Bull struck the earth hard enough to split it. Men were thrown aside like grain before wind. But Gilgamesh did not retreat. He moved with a precision you had never seen in him, sharper and more focused, as though something had finally been burned away and left only the essential thing.
Enkidu matched him without words. They moved as one intention.
Gilgamesh drove his blade in deep.
The Bull thrashed, bellowed, and shook the very air. Then Enkidu seized its horns, holding the enormous weight of it in place for one cracked-open moment.
The Beast of Heaven collapsed onto the stones of Uruk and did not rise.
Above, the sky still burned with Ishtar's fury, colder now and patient. The accounting was not finished. You knew that better than anyone.
"You fool," you said, your hands trembling as you reached him. "Do you understand what comes next?"
He looked at you, exhausted, bloodied, and alive. "I saved my city."
"And made an enemy of a goddess."
"Yes." He reached for you, and this time his touch was hesitant. Not a command. A question. "Will you leave?"
You looked at him. At the man who had been your world and broken it. At the king standing in the wreckage of what his pride had built, asking for the first time instead of taking.
"I don't know," you said honestly.
For once, he let that be enough.
Because he knows you like he knows his own name, he knows the sentence 'I don't know.' actually meant you forgave him.
