Meet and re-meet. Who: Apollo [phaebus] & Asteria [esteris] What: Apollo returns home to find a strange woman occupying one of Delos' shores. Hilarity ensues? When: ... A really long time ago. Currently unknown, though approximately half a year after Asteria regained a human form. Where: Island of Delos. Warnings: Asteria's convoluted brand of not-quite-crazy. Maybe some slight sexual forwardness? Tame, at best.
Counting the days would have been foolish. When she'd finally remembered how to count, Asteria had taken up the habit of marking the days in the sand, and then doing it over and over again after the tide had washed them away. The count had been inaccurate from the start, but it was lost completely when she passed out for an indeterminable amount of time and awoke to a clean, unmarked shore. From that point, she'd make random guesses at the day in her head, then spend several hours reasoning out why that guess might be right.
Today, she mused, could have been day thirty-eight. It likely was not, since she had already been sitting on the shore for so very long, but there was a possibility that Cronus was weaving time into an incomprehensible bundle of string, where days and nights felt longer than they were. They already blurred together; bright, intense light of day to the cold embrace of night she saw everything as an brown-orange-blue-black blur, from the sand to the water to the sun to the sky to the moon. The cycle was endless. And thus, it was entirely possible that she'd only been sitting on the island for thirty-eight days. Despite the fact that it had been in the spring when she'd first touched land, and now the days had grown shorter and chill was setting in.
The sun was brighter than usual. It was always bright on Delos--a gift [though sometimes curse] of Apollon--but it wasn't as intense these days as it had been some days previous, and today it was shining like it might on the longest day of the year. Her frock was modest and light, but Asteria was still warm, so she tiptoed forth over the sand and rock until she felt the water on her feet, then proceeded to slip in up to the waist.
She bathed while clothed, having sense not to open herself up to any unwanted attentions, then withdrew from the water, not bothering to linger. For understandable reasons, Asteria tired of water easily. The ends of her skirt were pulled up to avoid the brush and sand as she carried herself to a place with more rock and less sand, where she might warm herself in the sun and dry her wet body.