Pan

A long time ago, but there are still a few alive who remember, there lived a boy named Pan. Pan was a boy just like any other back then, living in the place whose name no one recalls. He dreamed of adventure, excitement and marrying a beautiful princess. But his father was not so well off, so Pan could do little more than go out into the hills every morning, when the night still grips the sky, and play his flute.
And it was wonderful. His father's neighbors, the Fauns, said his playing called forth the Charioteer himself. That, without Pan's playing, the Sun would never come up.
Pan's father would tell him, "Son, you play the loveliest flute below the snow-capped mountains and above the Medic plains. You don't want to do what I do, work all day until the Moon claims the sky, do you?"
Pan would look into his father's sad, hopeful eyes and tell him, "No, Papa, I don't expect I do."
A star would flare in his father's eye, and he would say, "Good, son. Play your flute and study hard." But Pan did not believe this would help. Pan had seen flautists more talented and scholars more scholarly fail to reach their dreams. Why did anyone think he could?
At school, Pan knew the other boys spoke more truly, even if they were very mean.
"Fool," they'd call him, "do you think your playing is anything special?"
"No," Pan would say. "I just do it."
"Well you will work for me," any one of them might say, "just as your father has worked for mine."
Pan would not argue. Instead, he would turn to his books on scrying, or mossy cures. He didn't think they would do him any good, but it was all he could think to do.
And so it continued. The Fauns would say he summoned the Sun, his father would tell him to work hard and the boys would echo his doubt back to him, painful as it was to a Narcissus who couldn't love himself or what he did.
It just so happened that, one day, there was an announcement at school. The Princess's pet moot had disappeared.