Wrath of the Earthshaker - IStillPlayWithLegos - Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms (2024)

Chapter 1: Earthshaker's Birth

Chapter Text

Perseus Jackson is born after twenty-one hours of consecutive labor in the epicenter of a magnitude 5.1 earthquake. He draws his first breath and screams, and the doctors call him a Miracle.

"He's been blessed, Ms. Jackson," they tell her with awe-filled eyes as they check him for injuries. No infant should have survived the tremors, and yet, little Perseus had done just that. "You must be proud to have such a strong son."

Sally—Beautiful, red-faced, exhausted Sally—holds her child with trembling arms and smiles weakly at their words. All it takes is a glance at the tiny bundle, and her world shifts to accommodate its new center.

What pride she should feel is overshadowed by fear and desperation, and grief. She looks at her demigod son, clear-sighted as she is, and knows he is more god than mortal.

She's startled by the sound of a throat being cleared. The room is empty, apart from a young doctor with blond hair and golden eyes.

The fear is immediate, and she holds Percy close to her chest, hoping it'll earn him some measure of protection from the god who is almost certainly here to kill them on behalf of the Lord of the Skies.

"Peace, Sally Jackson. I'm not here to harm you," he says, looking down at Percy. "Either of you."

Sally unclenches her jaw and manages to ask, "What can I do for you, Lord Apollo?"

He smiles, softer and more realistic than any god has the right to, "I'm here to extend an offer of protection for your son."

There is a moment of silence where Sally's heartbeat is the loudest thing in the room. She holds onto her son tight, afraid he might be taken right from her hands.

"His father," she says. "Does he know about this offer?"

The smile drops off Apollo's face, and a grim look takes over, but he nods, "You're lucky he was watching over you when Perseus was born. Your son…"

He trails off and walks closer to the pair. Sally does nothing to stop him.

"I'll be blunt. Without divine protection, my father will notice him within a few hours. And it'll be far too noticeable if my Uncle is the one to bless him."

Sally can feel her heart drop into her stomach at his words. She looks down at her son. Her precious son, with his dusting of black hair and TooBrightTooOld green eyes, and the overwhelming scent of the ocean—The same air that fills her little Montauk cabin and the beach where she first met his father.

"What do you want in return, Lord Apollo? We both know there's always a price."

Apollo's golden eyes bore into hers, and she feels like her very soul is being judged. Then, after a few seconds, he shakes his head.

"My Uncle owes me a favor. Not you," Apollo says. "But I wouldn't say no to an occasional offering."

There's a rock lodged in her throat, but she speaks regardless, with a strength that only a mother can understand.

"If it keeps him safe, I'll pay any price," Sally looks up at him, and it's like staring directly into the sun, but she doesn't turn away. "I'd give my life for his if it guaranteed his safety."

Apollo co*cks his head and nods. He walks to the bedside and puts a hand on Percy's head. A soft golden glow surrounds him for a moment before settling under his skin. Then, Apollo steps back and pulls a cheap, ballpoint pen out of his pocket.

"Anaklusmos. Riptide. It uncaps into a sword. A gift from his father, for when he's old enough to wield it."

He hands it to her, and before she can thank him, he's holding his palm out, in the center of which sits a golden-bronze ring—A simple band that can't be confused for anything but a mortal wedding ring.

"He…"

She's afraid to finish her sentence lest she bursts into tears right now.

"Twist it when it's around your finger, and it should turn into a xiphos. It's celestial bronze, the only thing that'll kill any monsters that come after him."

Sally shifts her son to hold him in one arm. With the other, she reaches out to take the ring. She's held it together up to this point, but it's the inscription that makes her hang her head and stifle a sob in Percy's blanket.

The outside of the ring is engraved with a pattern of rolling waves that must be enchanted with how they seem to move.

On the inside, there's a set of coordinates which she has no doubt is the very beach they met on. And in delicate script, an inscription reads:

She who stands before the raging sea, my eternal heart is yours.

"You want to live a normal life without Our interference, but how will you do that on the day when my father learns of him? You'll both be hunted to the ends of the earth; by then, nothing will save you. The enchantments on that ring are old. Older than me. It will protect you both," Apollo says. His eyes harden at Sally. "You mortals all have pathetically short lifespans, but against all logic, my Uncle went and fell in love with you."

For a moment, time stands still… until it doesn't and everything seems to hit her at once.

"But he can't," Sally whispers. She's barely twenty and still wants to build a life for herself. For Percy. Poseidon's love was never meant to last, and now her brain has stuttered to a stop, no idea what to do or say. "He… He has a wife."

Everything inside her is screaming. She knows the love of a god is fleeting; The few who are something more to them never get a happy ending.

Apollo, god of Prophecy, sits before her and offers his platitudes as though he thinks it'll end well. As though he doesn't have a literal garden of lovers that doubles as a graveyard.

Poseiden's graveyard is the ocean. More vast and treacherous and filled to the depths with virtues and hearts of so many who had not wished to give it. She knows this, and yet when he offered to build her a palace under the sea, she wanted so badly to walk into the depths with him.

Sally Jackson knows her myths. She knows about Medusa and Demeter and the countless others Poseidon forced himself on. She knows his history, but she can't find it in herself to conflate that Poseidon to the one she was with.

He never forced her. Never harmed her. Never laid a hand on her in a way she didn't want.

The first time they met, Sally tried to steal his trident, thinking he was using it to kill a seal stuck in a fishing net. Any other god would have instantly struck her down for her impudence, but for some reason, he didn't. He bought her a drink and waved away the attendant asking for an ID. And then they simply talked. For hours.

Poseidon took her to mortal diners and ordered milkshakes and pies and sh*tty burgers. She dragged him camping and laughed when he couldn't pitch a tent. Sally has many memories of him, but her favorite is on the sands of a long abandoned beach, after he had thrown the tent poles to the ground and, in a moment of frustration, accidentally summoned a hurricane. She laughed till her belly hurt and only stopped when she caught a glimpse of him watching her.

Sally knows what hunger and lust look like, and his eyes, while stormy and dark, weren't that. He looked at her like he was seeing something new for the first time in millennia, and gods, he looked beautiful. The sea raged behind him, and he looked like a divine contradiction in his colorful, mortal clothing while his skin sparked with power.

She remembers the look in his eyes as he made his way to her across the sand. She remembers him lifting and spinning her around, kissing her senseless in the wind and rain while she laughed against his lips.

He took her on the beach in the middle of that hurricane and told her he loved her for the first time. Poseidon's eyes had been filled with a reverence she didn't know the gods were capable of. He made her feel cherished and loved. And though in all their time together, she never repeated his words back to him, the look in his eyes never waned.

For all her bravery and strength, Sally knew saying it aloud would give it a sort of permanence she wasn't prepared to lose when whatever they were eventually ended. At least it could save her a little heartbreak, and Poseidon seemed to understand that.

She wasn't foolish enough to think she had changed him. He was a god, and she, a mortal. The Fates never liked those bonds to last. Perhaps he was shielding her from the truth of his nature—Afraid it would scare her off.

There was only ever one time where she truly saw him in his most ancient, divine rage—Upon discovering his brother had broken the same vow that she now held, bundled in her arms—and still, he never raised a hand to her.

That night was the first and only time she saw him as Poseidon, God of the Seas, Earthshaker, Stormbringer, Father of Monsters.

Poseidon wore a shimmering chiton that seemed to be made of seafoam. He looked otherworldly, with flames of green burning in his eyes and divinity radiating from him so strongly, she could taste it. She'd known him long enough to sense something was different this time.

He'd let his aura out around her before, just enough to let her feel it without pain. This felt similar, but different at the same time. Before, he was so clearly of the ocean. She could taste the salt on her tongue and feel the wind in her hair. Not that she still couldn't, but this? Poseidon felt grounded in a way that he hadn't before. Now, the earth didn't ripple as he walked.

It shook.

The door to her cabin slammed shut behind him. Iridescent blue and green scales glimmered in the candlelight as he walked towards her. The lack of light shadowed his features, but she could see how they were more angular. Severe.

The hand around his Trident was tipped with sharp, black nails, and when he opened his mouth to speak, he had far too many teeth to pass as human. And the voice he spoke with would be enough to give any mortal nightmares. He barely said three words, but it was enough to make Sally clap her hands over her ears to try and drown out the sound of the very earth moving.

He wasn't so far gone as not to notice, and while he didn't speak English, what came out of his mouth was a much smoother language. It was in stark contrast with the first, seeming to glide off his tongue like silk. He'd spoken this Old language to her before, if briefly. She may not have been able to understand it, but she was good enough at reading him to know he needed a distraction from whatever was causing the devastating storm outside.

Sally spoke no words as she led him to her bed by his free hand. She didn't react when his nails drew blood from her palm or when his nose flared at the metallic smell, or when a forked tongue passed his lips to lick the beads of crimson away. Poseidon lay with her that night as though she was little more than a stranger, but despite his emotional distance, he never once caused her undue harm.

It was dawn when finally he wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her hair. The oppressive aura, along with most of his unearthly features, seemed to recede. For the first time that visit, he spoke English, and she heard the truth of his brother's actions. Of him siring a child against the oath of the Styx.

Now, Poseidon himself broke the very same oath. And Sally? Sally looks down at the child in her arms and smiles, knowing Percy is worth any punishment that might come down on her or his father.

Her musings of the past are interrupted by the god in front of her, and she turns her attention back to Apollo, her tears slowly abating.

"Darling, he's a god. He doesn't know the meaning of monogamy," Apollo laughs brightly at her comment on Poseidon's marriage. "They both take lovers as they wish."

Poseidon has always said the sea is ever-changing—That it doesn't like to be restrained. She's under no illusions that this will last, but she makes her decision. Her tears dry and her eyes harden, and she slips on the ring with a silent threat prayer to its maker.

Thank you. I love you. But hear me now: If it ever comes to a choice, I will choose him every time, Poseidon. I love our son more than I will ever love you.

"Quite… bold for a mortal," Apollo says slowly, looking at her as if she's a puzzle he needs to solve. He pauses for a moment with a bemused expression on his face before continuing. "Though, that's why he loves you, isn't it?"

The window is closed, but a breeze of sea salt brushes against her hair all the same. Apollo's head is co*cked, and he watches her with an appraising eye as the wind rustles Percy's blanket.

Sally Jackson would raze the world for her son; if this is how he can be kept safe, she'll accept the risks and dangers for herself. When the time comes, she will shoulder the wrath of the gods and keep her head high doing it because she knows that at the end of it all, Percy will still be protected. And to her, that is all that matters.

- - -

Percy is seven when he meets his brother for the first time. His mom is in the cabin unpacking while he swims in the shallows of the beach. He's learned to stay in her sight for the sake of her own worries if nothing else.

Their isolated little cabin in Montauk is the only place Percy is free to be himself. Here, on the sandy beaches, he can smile and laugh and grin because there is no one but his mother to see his TooManyTooSharp teeth. Here, he doesn't have to suffer through the dry and tasteless meat most mortals seem to like. His mother can enjoy her vegetables, and Percy will eat his steaks with blood dripping down his chin.

Here, he can swim to his heart's content. He can stay underwater for hours and talk to the fish without being called a freak. He can open his maw mouth without hearing anxious gasps of whatever image makes it through the Mist when he eats.

His mom will give him an exasperated look and wipe the blood from his face with a napkin. She'll chide him for making a mess, and Percy will grin sheepishly in return. There is no fear in her eyes—only love and adoration.

Even when her scent sours—when Percy's done something drawing the wrong kind of attention—she's only ever afraid for him. Not of him.

Never of him.

Percy waits for her now. She doesn't like when he swims off without telling her. So he listens. He sits in the shallows and chats with the manta rays and sand sharks that swim up to him, fearless enough to talk to a human.

Percy can taste it when the air shifts to something darker. Older. A metallic scent permeates the air, and he can feel waves of curiosity and fascination and protectprotectprotect hitting him like a tsunami. It is an array of contradictions smelling of god and monster and danger—and family.

An enormous horse stands before him, hooves planted firmly on the water's surface. Percy has always loved horses. Always felt more at home around them than at school with children his age. They are more his kin than any mortal child.

The horse in front of him is something different. Something ancient and more divine than he's ever been in the presence of. He studies Percy, who stands slowly, not taking his eyes off the GodBloodBrotherKinFamily horse. Black eyes, knowing and intelligent, stare back at him. After a moment, he shakes his mane and huffs, giving Percy a glimpse of the three rows of razor-sharp teeth lining his mouth, not unlike his own.

Percy laughs (his voice is the grinding of the deep earth as its core shifts) and grins back, unhinging his jaw to show off his own single row of very sharp teeth. His chest puffs out with pride when his brother nickers his (amused) approval.

Percy is ancient in a myriad of ways, older than any demigod of this age should be, but he is still a child, and his brother's approval fills him with a sort of feral glee that makes his bones vibrate.

ArionBrotherFamily nips at his shoulder. The skin splits like a hot knife through butter, and in the few seconds before the water sews his skin together, his blood seems to glimmer under the morning sun. Percy, in return, buries his face in Arion's flank. His teeth aren't strong enough to nip back, nor is he tall enough to reach, but he rubs his cheek against his brother and bites down on air twice, the resounding clack sounding more like planks ripped from a ship's hull as it's torn apart by a raging storm.

Arion pulls back and opens his mouth to sing a song of high-pitched whistles and clicks—A forgotten language known only to the ancient water deities and their kin. It's a language meant for the divine and the Old, yet Percy understands with a deep-rooted clarity.

It's not like English or Greek, with its long words and complicated grammar. There's no direct translation, but he can tell Arion is laughing as he says, BROTHER HUNT PREY. GROW BIG. MORE TEETH. STRONG.

Percy huffs and responds with hisses and clicks of his own.

WANT MORE TEETH. STRONG NOW.

Arion's shrill, bell-like laugh cuts through the air, and it's at this point that Sally Jackson steps out of the cabin and is treated to the most horrifying sight imaginable: This monstrous horse, who Percy's head barely reaches the flank of, has its jaw open, multiple rows of teeth glinting in the sunlight.

Fear grips her heart, but she still calls out for her son, who, unlike her, isn'tparalyzed by fear. No, he's not afraid at all. Her seven-year-old son is bouncing out of his skin with excitement.

She hears him make a noise akin to laughter (a sound plucked straight from her nightmares—All crashing waves and screaming sailors). His lack of fear, though, relaxes her somewhat. If the monster meant Percy harm, he'd already be dead. And that's a thought that strikes a chord of terror in her she hasn't felt since he was born.

Sally, with all the ferocity and protective instincts of a mother lioness, buries her fear deep down and walks right over to her son and the monster before him. Percy meets her halfway. Barrels straight into her, his face lit up with an innocent joy she's never seen on him before. He beams at her and clicks a few times before remembering to switch to English.

He never fails to surprise her because the last thing she expects to hear from his mouth is, "Mama, this is Arion, and he's my brother."

Arion. Her son's brother.

She knows the myths—was raised on them by her Uncle—and she never gave Percy's potential siblings much of a thought, always warier of the Lords of the Sky or Underworld. But here he stands, Percy's brother, towering over her by more than a foot, his gaze digging into her very soul.

There's an intelligence in his eyes that she's not used to seeing in animals. But then again, this is no animal before her. This is the child of two Olympian gods. An immortal being who's been alive for millennia. He is monstrous and awesome and terrifying, and he is Percy's family.

Sally has always loved more fiercely than she fears, so it's with a smile on her face and a hand on her son's shoulder that she says, "If you eat mortal food, you're welcome to join us for a meal. I have plenty of meat for Percy, and I'm sure he won't mind sharing."

The astonished grin on her son's face is worth every drop of fear she's ever felt. This is what she loves most in the world—Seeing her son happy. She will do everything in her power to keep that smile on his face.

Percy is young still, but Sally knows his fate. She knows vaguely of the prophecy and the deadline of sixteen. She knows that one day, he'll be discovered, and his whole life will be uprooted. He'll have to leave her and stay at that camp that does not permit entry to mortals. It's inevitable, and she hates it.

He knows of his family in vague terms. The more awareness a demigod has, the more noticeable they are to gods and monsters, so she only tells him what he needs to know. He knows that there are many things he needs to keep secret from mortals and that sometimes, the fish in the New York Aquarium call him "My Prince." He knows his father is a god and loves him even though he can't visit. He knows he's safest near the sea and under the sun.

He has a cousin named Fred, who visits a few times a year. Fred, who smells of Bay Laurels and sunshine, makes sure he's safe and helps him with homework, and sings him to sleep. He doesn't eat, but he likes the smell of burnt honey cake. Fred, who isn't really Fred, but Percy knows asking questions is dangerous, so he's content to sit by his cousin and let him braid wildflowers and buttercups and hyacinths into wild, black curls reaching just above Percy's mid-back.

Percy knows many things and doesn't know many more. But for now, Percy is seven. He is a child, and she'll be damned if she doesn't give him the best childhood she can. For the sake of her son, Sally will swallow her fear when his brother tears into a seal he's caught and offers him meat because when Percy accepts, his smile is radiant. When he's sixteen and has the weight of the world on his shoulders, she wants him to look back and remember it wasn't all bad.

Arion might scare her, but he's Percy's brother, and that's all that matters.

- - -

Halfway through May of 2006, a freak lightning storm descends upon the upper East side of Manhattan. It lasts two long minutes and is immediately followed by the most devastating earthquake anywhere in the United States has experienced in recent history.

Less than an hour later, a Hurricane begins to form and, over the next few weeks, proceeds to ravage the entire Eastern Seaboard. Only a small section of Long Island remains untouched.

They name it Hurricane Sally.

Chapter 2: Discussions With Gods

Chapter Text

The Apollo cabin rises with the sun, and as such, it is they who find the young boy washed up on their shore of the Long Island Sound. The beach at Camp Half-Blood is peaceful today, gentle waves lapping at the boy’s legs.

He’s wearing tattered pajamas that are singed black in some places. His exposed shoulder shows the dark pink Lichtenberg figures that cover his upper back.

Will Solace is the one who runs to the Big House and drags Chiron to the infirmary, where Lee Fletcher is already examining the boy for injuries and frowning when he can’t find any. Chiron takes one look and blanches.

This is the boy he visited Yancy Academy for earlier this year.

Chiron barely even remembers speaking with him. It was quite uneventful as far as conversations go. He deemed it unimportant in his mind and moved on. He left the same day he arrived after checking for the boy’s godly aura, or rather, lack thereof. At most, he could have been a legacy of Apollo, smelling faintly of the sun god, but never once did Chiron think he could have been a demigod, let alone a child of the Big Three.

Chiron doesn’t know what kept the scent suppressed or how, because he could smell the overpowering scent of the sea the moment he entered the infirmary. The power that radiates off of him is almost akin to that of a very minor god rather than a demigod, and Chiron can’t for the life of him understand how he could have failed so badly to protect this boy. This son of Poseidon.

When Lee asks him to take a look at the boy—Peter? Patrick? Percy —he declines because he knows there will be no injuries, all having been washed away by the ocean. The lightning scars on his back are purely cosmetic, and truth be told, he’s worried that healing them might irritate the King of the Gods more, besides whatever prompted all this.

The lightning. The earthquake. The hurricane.

Dionysus only returned from Olympus a couple days ago after being summoned for two weeks, since that night of the lightning storm. He truly hopes that having Percy at Camp won’t cause issues with the gods.

Chiron sighs to himself. He tells Lee and Will to have someone stay with Percy until he wakes up. Then, he begins the trot back to the Big House and prays the Camp Director is in a good mood.

- - -

When Percy wakes, he has a single moment of bliss where he thinks he’s still in his mom’s Montauk cabin. It’s over far too soon, and that’s when the emotions seep in. Vaguely, he realizes a blond boy his age is speaking to him and holding out a glass of something golden.

It tastes like his mom’s blue chocolate chip cookies and grief.

Percy doesn’t notice the horrified expression on the boy’s face until his half-finished glass is knocked out of his hands. It shatters on the ground and spills the remainder of the gold drink. The next few minutes are a blur of the boy—Will—yelling at him for drinking so much Nectar at once. Percy nods mindlessly.

Truth be told, he couldn’t care less about burning up and dying. At least that way, he might be with his mom.

Percy walks out of the infirmary wearing a borrowed orange shirt. His jeans are from the lost and found, as are his trainers. He has exactly one thing he owns: Riptide, which sits in his pocket, waiting to be used. Nothing else here is familiar, and he itches for clothing that smells of the lavender detergent his mom is so fond of using.

Will leads him to the Big House, where he says Chiron and the Camp Director, Mr. D, are waiting for him. He sounds like he has a lot of questions he’s refraining from asking, and the quiet conversation without inquiries is something Percy appreciates immensely.

There are three people sat on the porch of the Big House. Two are unfamiliar, but the third has him tripping up the stairs and into a familiar body that smells of Bay Laurels and sunshine. He doesn’t know how long he stays latched onto Fred, but eventually, the man pulls away, taking the warmth with him.

It’s only when he looks up that Percy notices the differences. Fred’s at least half a foot taller than usual, and his hair is a much lighter shade of blond. Eyes that are typically cornflower blue are shot through with lines of gold. The most telling difference is the quiver of arrows slung across his back and the golden bow leaning against the railing.

Percy thinks of the brief explanation of Camp that Will gave him on the way here and the stories his mother weaned him on. He frowns, unsure how he never connected ‘Fred’ to a god he’s been making offerings to for most of his life.

Fre–Apollo looks at him with sad eyes and, as if he knows precisely what Percy is thinking, he says, “The Mist. In large enough amounts, it can fool demigods too.”

“But…”

“It was safer if you didn’t know, Percy,” he says. “Your mother agreed.”

All warmth recedes at the reminder of his mother. Not even the hand on his shoulder can stave the cold away.

“She’s dead.”

Apollo nods slowly. Carefully.

“He killed her,” Percy says, feeling stone cold. “Ze—”

A hand slaps over his mouth before he can finish his sentence. “Don’t,” Apollo says stiffly. “Don’t risk aggravating him even more. You got lucky because he’s more focused on finding his stolen Bolt than killing you now, but your father almost started a war for you, Percy. The only reason they stopped was because of the Fates themselves. They’ve both sworn on the Styx: My father refrains from killing you, and yours doesn’t go to war. But still… Well, just don’t do anything to piss him off. Please.”

“He should’ve thought of that before he killed my mother,” Percy glowers at Apollo and shakes his head with a dry, humorless laugh. “And his Bolt? Like a lightning bolt?”

“His Master Bolt. Think of a weapon with the destructive power of a Nuclear Bomb and then multiply it by fifty,” Apollo explains. “He’s convinced someone stole it on the Winter Solstice.”

“Great. And he’s blaming that on me too, isn’t he?”

“No, actually. Well, he considered it briefly before realizing if you’d visited the Empire State Building back then, he could’ve found you and killed you much sooner.” Apollo winces. “And according to him, ‘Not even my brother’s whelps are foolish enough to risk my fury and return to the scene of the crime.’ Father’s always been a bit dramatic.”

Percy’s mind screeches to a halt. “The Empire State? What's that have to do with it?”

The silence before Apollo speaks is deafening. “That’s… That’s where the entrance to Mount Olympus technically is now. The six-hundredth floor. It’s also where—”

“—Where Yancy had us visit on that field trip,” Percy finishes, his nails digging into his palms. “So it’s my fault.”

“Percy…”

“I go on a field trip. Your dad kills my mom. She’s stuck in the underworld. I’m stuck here. And neither of us can ever go home.”

“You’re not—”

A snort from the table interrupts Apollo. “Not like there’s much of a home to go back to.”

Percy eyes the man—no, the god—who speaks. He has curly black hair and violet eyes that make aggravation rise inside him like nothing else. His image flickers between that of a portly, ungroomed man with alcohol-flushed cheeks and a lithe youth who keeps vines braided in his purple-tinted hair. He can smell the scent of fermented grapes coming from his direction. If Percy stares hard enough, he can make out the occasional outline of a pair of curled horns.

“Bro,” Apollo frowns. “Not cool.”

Percy glares at the god, who can only be Dionysus, god of madness and wine. “What does that mean?”

He looks back at Apollo and repeats, “What does that mean?”

“It means, Peter Johnson,” Dionysus says with a cruel smile, “After that tantrum of yours two weeks ago destroyed half of Manhattan, Daddy Dearest followed it up with a lovely little hurricane. So, like I said, there’s not much of a home to go back to.”

“Dionysus.” A flash of heat bursts from Apollo, and looking up, Percy can see his eyes have gone fully gold. His tone is so sharp it could cut glass, and for the first time, Percy catches a glimpse of the Apollo he’s read about in the stories. “Watch your tongue, Brother, or I’ll happily remove it for you.”

“Di Immortals, no need to get so testy, Apollo,” he sneers, grimacing as he takes a sip of the drink in his goblet. “A little protective, aren’t you?”

“Dionysus.”

“Fine, fine. Welcome to Camp Half-Blood,” he huffs, waving his hand dismissively as he fixes his glare back onto Percy. “The Greek gods are real. Blah, blah, blah. You’re a demigod, and if you haven’t figured that out by now, I truly mourn for the future of our world. Something about a flame moving with the West, blah blah. Capture The Flag is on Friday. Try not to kill anyone, and if you have anothertantrum here—”

His violet eyes sharpen, and Percy feels his brain being picked apart.

“I’ll throw you straight to my father and let him deal with you.”

“That’s enough, Dionysus,” Apollo says, his voice ringing. The heat coming off of him is scalding, but Percy finds he doesn’t mind. Anything is better than the frigid cold he’s felt since waking up without his mother. He hadn’t realized he was shivering until the blast of hot air made him stop.

Apollo turns his attention from his brother to the other man at the table. He looks oddly familiar, but Percy can’t seem to place him.

“Percy, this is Chiron,” Apollo introduces, gesturing to the man sitting in a wheelchair. “He’s the activities director here at Camp.”

Then he walks away from the table and down the steps to where Will is still standing. Percy winces. He’d completely forgotten the other boy was still here.

“And you’ve met my son, Will,” he says with a soft smile, ruffling a blond head of curls and drawing him in for a hug that Will seems to melt into. “You’ll be doing activities with his cabin since your fathers has no other campers.”

Will smiles at him and wriggles out of his dad’s grip, only to yank Percy into a hug of his own. Percy wonders if giving such nice hugs is a genetic thing that he gets from Apollo. He only pouts a little when the warmth leaves.

“Here,” Apollo says, pulling out a blue checkered backpack from nowhere. “It’s not a lot, but it’s what we could salvage from your apartment.”

He struggles to keep his eyes from watering as he takes the backpack and clings to it as though it might disappear at any moment. It smells like home, like his mother and her lavender detergent and vanilla candles and all the other scents that made his home, home.

“Will, help him get settled into Cabin Three for now,” Apollo tells his son. “And Chiron will let Lee know that Percy’s gonna join you all during the day.”

“M’kay, Dad.”

“I don’t know when I’ll be able to visit next, Percy, but—”

Percy smiles faintly and interrupts, “I get it. Thanks… Fred.”

Apollo huffs a laugh and smiles. “Will, Percy, don’t cause Chiron too much trouble. He’s far too old to survive a heart attack.”

And then he’s gone.

“Come on,” he hears Will say, pulling Percy away from the Big House. “I’ll take you to your cabin, and Lee will come to give you a tour of the Camp later.”

There’s a warm smile on his face, and Percy relishes the kindness he’s so unused to receiving from people his age. They look at him with his Too Bright eyes and teeth made for tearing raw flesh apart and like to pretend he doesn’t exist. Though the Mist keeps mortals from seeing most of it, they still all feel a sense of unease around him. It’s easier to ignore him than acknowledge him as being different.

Percy thinks Will might be like that, too.

His eyes have too much gold in them, and his skin glows in a way it shouldn’t. He smells like laurels, just like his father—like flowers, honey, and sunshine. But Percy’s nose has always been more adept at picking apart scents. It’s very faint, but Will smells sick. He smells like eucalyptus and hospitalsand disease.

Maybe it won’t be so bad, Percy thinks. Maybe they’re all like me here—Strange.

Deep down, he knows they’re not. But it’s a nice thought.

- - -

Will drops him off in front of his cabin and gives him one last quick hug before running off.

The roof of Cabin Three is lower than the others. It’s flat and made of rough gray stone that looks like a part of the ocean floor. There must be a source of water up top because thin waterfalls trickle down in intervals along the outer walls.

Percy walks to the door and places a hand on the cool rock. Upon further observation, he realizes it’s not just stone but tiny seashells and corals embedded in the walls. Salty water drips over his fingers, and he sighs at the rush of energy that seeps under his skin.

When he actually steps inside, he has to stop and breathe for a moment to calm himself because the air smells exactlylike the air in the Montauk cabin. It looks similar too.

While the outside of the cabin looks like something out of a magazine, the inside is a cozy mix of stone and wood. There are low couches with white canvas cushions and tables made of repurposed driftwood. Like the outside, water runs down parts of the walls in thin rivulets that make them shimmer like abalone.

Percy walks further into the cabin, setting his backpack down on the bottom bunk closest to the wall. He’s unlatching the window when it happens—

The scent of the sea grows heavier in a way Percy hasn’t felt before. It’s new, but comforting. Something in the air shifts, and Percy spins around to find a man standing by the door.

No. Not a man. He could never mistake this aura for mortal.

“Dad?”

The figure walks forward, and, for the first time in his life, Percy comes face-to-face with his father.

“Perseus.”

Looking at him, there’s something a bit off. It’s his father, yes, but not. The edges of his face seem to blur, and the green in his eyes flickers between shades—like it’s not quite sure what color to be. Percy clenches his jaw and takes a step forward. The next time he opens his mouth, instinct and emotion overtake him.

MOTHER DEAD. WHY PROTECT NOT.

Nails become claws in anger, and blood drips down Percy’s knuckles with how hard his fists are clenched. His skin prickles like the night his mother died. It feels like there’s a scream lodged inside his throat, and one wrong word from Poseidon will release it.

“Percy. My son." Poseidon says. His words aren’t English nor the language he’s taken to speaking with Arion. But it’s smooth and familiar, and old in the same way the other is. Something about his face shifts and hardens. His eyes finally decide on a color—A bright, luminescent green that matches Percy’s exactly. Scales glimmer over his arms, and Oh, this is his father.

“She’sdead, Dad,” Percy responds smoothly, his voice barely a whisper. “She’s dead.”

Poseidon moves so fast that Percy doesn’t even register it until he’s already sobbing violently, enveloped in a pair of arms that smell like sea salt. His chest hurts, and he can barely breathe. It feels as though all the pain and grief he’s been pushing away has come back tenfold, and he just wants his mother back.

“I’m so sorry. I thought you would be safe. Both of you," Poseidon murmurs into Percy’s hair, holding him as he cries and shakes and falls apart. “I’m sorry I wasn’t watching more closely. I should’ve taken you both to Atlantis when I had the chance.”

“What am I—” Percy sobs, burying his face into his father’s brightly colored shirt. “What am I supposed to do now? I don’t–I can’t–She can’t be dead.”

“Oh, my son. She loved you so much. More than you could ever fathom. I’ve never known a mortal quite like your mother, and I don’t know that I ever will,” Poseidon says wistfully as he strokes a hand up and down Percy’s back. “The day you were born, she prayed to me. Do you know what she said?”

Percy can’t find it in himself to respond. Instead, he simply shakes his head and stifles another sob.

“Apollo had just given you his blessing and passed my ring and Anaklusmos to Sally. She prayed to me to thank me and tell me she loved me. And then she said that if it ever came down to a choice between us, she would choose you every time. She told me, ‘I love our son more than I will ever love you,’ and I had never adored her more,” Poseidon tells him. “She loved you so much, Perseus. Never forget that.”

“What am I supposed to do now?" His voice is muffled through the fabric. “I have nowhere to go.”

Poseidon sighs and draws a hand through his son’s hair. “Stay here at Camp. Train. Get stronger.”

“I don’t want to stay here,” Percy says. “I want to go home. With mom.”

“Percy, I’m going to be honest with you right now. It’s likely that sometime soon, you’ll be sent on a quest for my brother’s Bolt.”

Percy looks up, the grief in his eyes turning to anger. His fists tighten, puncturing small holes in Poseidon’s shirt with his claws.

“I thought Apollo said I wasn’t a suspect?”

“You’re not,” Poseidon says. He sounds tired when he speaks. “Not truly. But my brother wants someone to blame, and you, and my oldest brother for that matter, are easy targets. We’ve agreed to a ceasefire regarding your fate. He can’t kill you, but he can make your life infinitely harder.”

“So I have to go find his stupid Bolt just so he doesn’t make my life miserable?” Percy sneers. “I hate him.”

Poseidon hums. He looks like he wants to agree with Percy but can’t find it in himself to do so.

“I’m sorry I’ve condemned you to such a hard life, Percy. We made the oath because our children were already too powerful. The Second World War almost wrecked the earth, and we couldn’t risk it,” Poseidon explains. He takes Percy by the hand and pulls him to sit down in a free bunk. “My children especially, they’ve always been something… more. They’re not wrong when they call me the Father of Monsters. So many of the things that hunt down demigods are your half-siblings.”

Percy frowns. His tears are drying somewhat, but he still can’t help how his breath hitches every few words. “Is that why they don’t always kill me? Will said that most demigods are chased down by monsters, but a lot of the ones I met would just kinda stare at me.”

There’s a beat of silence before Poseidon speaks again, choosing his words carefully. “My children have always been too powerful for their own good. Zeus has always feared them. But even by my standards… Well, you’ve felt it, haven’t you, Percy? ”

Percy looks down at his hands. He runs the pads of his fingers along the sharp nails that tip them. Scratches lightly over the layers of iridescent scales down his arms. It makes a shrill scratching sound, almost like he’d been dragging his nails down a chalkboard.

“I think Will feels a bit similar. One cabin I walked past, the one with lots of plants. It also seemed familiar,” Percy tries to explain. It’s difficult to put into words, and he finds himself tripping over them to find the right ones. “Buteverything else. It feels off.I can’t explain it, but it’s just too….”

“Young?”

His head swivels to look at his father, who somehow put everything he was feeling into words. That was it. Young. It felt young. Percy finds himself nodding.

Poseidon sighs. “The night I was with your mother—”

“Ew, dad,” Percy’s face screws up in disgust.

“Percy,” he chides, shooting his son an amused look. Then he sighs once again. “Do you know what an epithet is?”

Percy frowns, shaking his head.

“It’s like another title us gods have, and it describes an aspect of our personalities, so to speak,” he explains. “I’m sure you’ve heard people call Apollo, 'Phoebus Apollon.'”

“Yeah,” Percy says slowly. “I just assumed it was another name for him.”

“Yes and no,” Poseidon smiles. “It’s a name that literally means ‘Bright One.’ It’s how mortals refer to the part of Apollo that pulls the sun across the sky. He has many others. All the gods do.”

“So, what does that have to do with me?”

He’s still waiting for the explanation to click. So far, it’s making very little sense.

“In a way, our epithets draw out different parts of our personalities. Some are unnoticeable, but depending on our moods, we can switch into different aspects that can change how we behave.”

“So, you weren’t your normal self when you were….” Percy grimaces and prepares for his following words. “… with mom?”

The lines on Poseidon’s face look more pronounced now as Percy looks at his father. He’s angular and harsh, in stark contrast to the calm way he’s speaking.

“Not exactly,” he says slowly, as though deciding on the best choice of words. “It wasn’t quite a difference of personality. More so… a different god altogether.”

“What?” Percy blinks at his father, his brain flatlining. "How does that even work?”

There’s an odd expression on his face when he speaks again—like he’s lost in memory. “I’m old, Percy. Older than most gods in the Greek pantheon. There are others like me, but most were not as revered and have long since forgotten their roots. There was a time, my son, when I was the King of the gods. It—”

“Wanax,” Percy interrupts. Distantly, he wonders how many languages he was born knowing.

“Yes, Wanax,” his father agrees. “We had different titles then. Different names. We were different gods. I was the god of the seas and the earthshaker, yes. But, among other things, I was also the god of horses and… of the underworld.”

Clarity blooms in Percy’s mind, and another word floats to the tip of his tongue. “Posedawone,” he murmurs. “You were Posedawone.”

Poseidon nods. “Yes. I was. I am… It’s complicated to explain in a way a mortal can comprehend. I am him now, somewhat, but I am not always him.”

Finally, everything clicks and Percy understands why his father brought this up. “And when you were with mom, you weren’t Poseidon.”

His father smiles at Percy’s comprehension. “No, Percy. I wasn’t.” He agrees. “My younger brother had a daughter. I found out that day, and the oldest part of myself overtook me in my anger at the broken oath.”

He takes Percy’s hand in his and squeezes it twice.

“The Styx was my domain once. I, more than anyone, should have remembered that she doesn’t take kindly to oath breakers who sully her waters.” The grief in Poseidon’s voice from earlier seems to return tenfold. “She can’t do much to the gods, so she whispers to the Fates and takes it out on our mortal lovers and our children. I truly am sorry, Percy.”

Percy stays silent. His heartbeat and the blood rushing through his veins are the only things he can hear. For a moment, everything else is tuned out.

“Percy—”

“So it is my fault.”

“Percy, no,” Poseidon says, still holding his hand.

“If I wasn’t born, she would still be alive.”

“Percy—”

“I wish she never had me.”

“Perseus,” Poseidon speaks in a harsh tone that echoes painfully in Percy's head. His eyes are flaming green as they bore into his son. “You will listen to me. ”

Percy looks up at his father with angry tears in his eyes.

“They will issue you a quest. It is not a question of if, but when,” he says, steamrolling over any of Percy’s attempts to interrupt. “My brother believes Hades has stolen his Bolt. He will send you to the underworld to retrieve it. Do you remember who his wife is?”

Persephone, he thinks for a moment before frowning. No, that sounds wrong. Percy closes his eyes and thinks. He traces back the threads of familiarity in the name and finds his answer. Oh. That’s right.

“Preswa,” he says. “Despoina. Your daughter. Arion’s sister.”

My sister, he thinks.

“Yes. Most gods do not remember,” Poseidon carries on with his explanation. “Most have pushed that part of themselves so deep that it may never return. But Despoina—Persephone as she is now—remembers. As does Demeter, her mother. They were my wives once. They are as old as I am.”

Percy’s face freezes in a horrified expression. “But she was your daughter.”

The way his father blinks and co*cks his head is unnatural. Like he truly sees nothing wrong with that statement. Then he chuckles, “Perseus, I forget part of you is mortal.”

Percy continues to stare. “But she was your daughter.”

“Yes, Percy, she was,” Poseidon says, his eyebrows raised in response to Percy’s confusion. “When you are in the underworld, speak to her. I do not promise anything, but she may be able to convince her husband.”

Something in Percy’s chest flutters open at those words.

“You are my son. A child of my oldest self. It is no longer my domain, but you have as much a right to the underworld as any child of Hades. You will have strength there. Use it.”

Percy’s eyes harden, and he looks his father in the eyes. “I’ll get her back.”

Poseidon frowns. “Percy, I can’t prom—”

His eyes show fury that even his father doesn’t dare cross. For the safety of the Camp, if nothing else.

“I’ll. Get. Her. Back.”

The god’s gaze looks to Percy, approving of the constitution he finds. He nods. Then he turns his ear to the sky and winces.

“I must take my leave. My brother searches for me, and it would be unwise to let him see us talking. You must go west to California when you journey to Hades’ domain. Seek water should you need help. The sea takes care of its own."

Percy looks down sadly. He just got his father back, and now he’s leaving already. A firm grip clasps his shoulder, and there’s a hand with something in it in his line of vision.

Poseidon passes him a large, white sand dollar. Percy turns it over in his hands, examining the grooves and notches. It feels pure. Pure, in a way, the oceans should be, but no longer are. He can feel the way it aches to purify and clean.

“Thank you,” Percy says, taking in the image of his father one last time. Committing him to memory.

“Take care, my son,” he murmurs, brushing a hand over Percy’s hair. “I will be watching.”

Percy blinks, and when his eyes open a split second later, there’s nothing there but the lingering smell of sea salt and petrichor. He looks out the window in the ocean’s direction and steadies himself. His grip around the sand dollar tightens.

He’ll get his mother back.

He’ll get her back even if he has to carry her out of Elysium himself.

- - -

The day after Percy arrives at Camp, every inch of the strawberry fields wilt. The brambles of roses by the doors of Cabin 4 and the tomato vines that grow up the outer walls shrivel and die. The grass on the roof turns brown, and the massive tree in the center of their cabin begins to rot, and Katie Gardner refuses to leave her cabin.

Like their mother, the children of Demeter have no dominion over water. Yet, the creek that runs through the forest of Camp Half-Blood darkens. Most write it off as an unnerving coincidence, too afraid, or perhaps simply too ignorant to consider the alternative.

Percy knows better. The knowledge is branded into his bones. He does not need to be told because he already knows. As does Dionysus, who, for reasons Percy cannot comprehend, pretends not to. He can see how the god flickers when someone mentions Katie’s name. The way youth brightens his face and curled horns appear in a mess of purple-black hair, if only for a split second.

He is Dionysus. ‘Mr. D.’ The son of Zeus and Semele, who was born a demigod and ascended to godhood himself.

But he isn’t always.

- - -

Sometimes, he is Dionysos Chthonius, who grew in Zeus’s thigh from the heart of Zagreus. And sometimes, he is Zagreus himself—Born from the coupling of a draconian Zeus ‘seducing’ Persephone, the most-loved daughter of Demeter.

Sometimes he has horns and speaks to serpents, and is deathly afraid of mirrors, petrified that his distraction will, once again, cost him his life. Zagreus knows pain as intimately as Dionysus knows madness.

Sometimes, he looks at Katie and sees a startlingly familiar visage of his mother, of his grandmother. He looks at Katie and sees Demeter Erinys, who cursed the Styx black in her rage at Poseidon. He sees her wrath and anger, and he can’t understand how a child of Demeter could ever be considered ‘lesser.’ As if a child to the second-born of Rhea and Kronos could be anything but.

She is more than just the daughter of the “Plant Goddess,” as the campers call her. She is like Perseus, in that ancient blood runs through her veins. Both are too powerful for their own good, playing at being human, waiting for their mortal skin to shed.

There have been others, of course. Demigods who belong to the myths of old: Cursed to live in an age where Heroism has been relegated to climbing walls of lava and playing with swords.

William Solace is one of those children, too. Not as old as the gods Perseus and Katie were sired by, but make no mistake, that boy can make tuberculosis bloom in your lungs with just a touch. He’s as inhuman as they are, hiding behind a finely painted mask of tan skin and freckles and a soft smile, only given away by the thin ring of molten gold that lines the blues of his irises.

Sometimes, Dionysus wonders if he’s the only one in Camp, immortal or not, who pays any attention to the campers. They like to hark on about how he’ll “ignore you if you stay on his good side,” which is woefully incorrect.

(He prods and pokes at the easily provoked ones—Likes to see how long it takes for them to snap. Wine is his primary domain, and he's forbidden from it, so he indulges in what madness he can coax out in those around him. Admittedly, it's not as mind-numbingly good as wine. But there's still something delectable in skimming the surface of insanity he has lured to the forefront of a person's mind.)

As much as he pretends, Dionysus can’t afford to ignore the campers when some of them were born with too much power, and the destruction they can cause looms over the Camp like a constant shadow. Eventually, they’ll crack, and it’ll be him collecting bodies from a devastating earthquake, or an incurable plague, or someaccident that sucks the life out of dozens of bodies.

Dionysus sits on the porch of the Big House and looks at the dead and dying plants around him. He mollifies himself with thoughts of how much worse it could have been. At least the boy never tried to speak directly to her,he thinks.

- - -

The Camp looks at Katie and sees a child throwing a tantrum. But they don’t understand, and they never will.

Dionysus does. Percy does.

Percy, who is his father’s child, sees Katie, the daughter of Damate, the Earth-Mother, and thinks her hair looks like spun gold. She’s beautiful and strong, and the most divine parts of Percy demand her attention whether or not he wants it.

But Percy is his mother’s child, too. An eldritch being stuffed into the skin of a twelve-year-old boy, he may be, but he is not his father. Sally Jackson raised him well, and while he indulges his monstrosity in many ways (destructive and bloody and chaos-loving), his father’s vices will never be one of them.

Grudges and Hate and Destruction and Death.

For all the awe-inspiring powers they've claimed from their parents, they have inherited the worst of them as well.

Chapter 3: Friends and Prophecies and Quests

Chapter Text

It takes Demeter herself to calm Katie’s anger.

Mother and Daughter argue for hours inside the Big House (perhaps it is a pattern for daughters of the grain to fight their mothers). They give the strawberry fields whiplash—cycling between swelling with life and lying prone on the ground, colorless and dead.

Finally, when the sun begins to set, Katie walks out of the Big House alone. The camp is alive once more, and she looks more like herself. Although, if you look closely, you’ll still see the tightness in her jaw and the suspicious looks she gives Percy from the corners of her eyes, but she’s no longer openly antagonistic to him, and that’s the best anyone can ask for.

The next day, the camp holds its breath and prays once more because, at breakfast, Percy Jackson walks right up to the Demeter table. He stands before Katie, who glares at him but says nothing.

Then, he opens his mouth.

The language he speaks is one none here have heard before. It’s smooth and elegant in a way that no language still alive is—All sliding vocals and delicate lilts. Not even Chiron can understand their words if the nervous look on his face says anything.

(Dionysus does not understand, but Diwonuso does).

Percy only says a few sentences in the unknown speech. They don’t know what he said, and they never will, but something of Katie’s rage seems to quell, and she nods curtly in response to whatever he said.

He walks back to his table, and she goes back to eating her breakfast. The collective sigh of everyone present is released because the camp is still standing.

The expression on Katie’s face is… Well, it’s not quite acceptance. But it’s a start.

- - -

Most people meet Percy’s eyes for the first time and walk the other way. He’d hoped the shade of green would be less unnerving to the demigods than it was to the mortals, but it is to no avail.

They schedule their activities to avoid the Apollo cabin at all costs and pretend like they aren’t eyeing the exit when they’re forced to make conversation with him. Will and Lee, and the rest of the Apollo kids are the only reason he doesn’t hate camp. They’ve begun cursing campers to speak in couplets left and right. Even among the demigods, it seems, most people look at him and think, Freak.

Clarisse LaRue is not most people.

On his third day at camp, she walks right up to Percy, who is sulking at the edge of his table at breakfast, looks him dead in the eye, and, like it’s a known fact of the universe, says, “You’re sparring with me today, Jackson.”

He does, in fact, fight her that day.

It ends in a draw, but only after they destroy half the arena and Mr. D is forced to step in by Ares’ will himself, who thinks to spare his favored daughter the humiliation of losing.

(Clarisse doesn’t care if she’d lost or not. War and violence are like drugs to children of Ares, and for the first time, there’s someone here who can match her, blow for blow. Someone she can scream obscenities at, who won’t cower in fear or hold her words against her when the bloodlust finally subsides. Win or lose, she’d come out of the arena with her head buzzing ten times better than Capture The Flag ever could.)

Their pupils are still blown wide as Will drags them both, panting, to the infirmary by their ears. They let him, limping along on broken bones and leaving behind trails of blood. One has flakes of gold, but the other does not, and the fact that Clarisse LaRue came out of that arena alive and laughing, is a true testament to the person she is.

- - -

Making friends is odd. He’s never had to before, and he’s slowly finding how difficult it can be to navigate those friendships.

He’s closest with Will. The Apollo cabin, in general, stood behind him when no one else did, and for that, they’ll always be his first friends. But Will is similar in a way that the others aren’t. He’s sunshine and song and healing (he’s scorching heat and plague too.)

Percy’s not sure if anyone else can sense it. He can. Katie probably can. Dionysus can. The rest of the camp sees Will’s outer shell and doesn’t know the monster hiding inside. The one that whispers to him the horrors that just one touch. One breath of air. One thought could unleash.

(It’s a younger sibling to the one that lies beneath Percy. Beneath Katie.

Their blood aches for death and destruction, for them to unleash their full strength against the world and bask in the chaos they can bring. Katie, perhaps, half a breath less so. But Percy?

Perseus may have been the only hero to have a happy ending, but this namesake is not the first. Perseus, which comes from Perse, which comes from πέρθω, Pérthō: To ravage. To destroy.

Percy’s name is a contradiction of futures, swinging between happiness and destruction, life and death, red and gold as the Fates weave his thread.)

Will is like him. He understands the call of power, begging to be used until it burns out their mortality, and all that’s left in its place is ichor.

But Will is not his only friend. There are others who see beneath his veneer of humanity and don’t care.

Clarisse is one. Outside Cabin Seven, she was the first, demanding he spar with her like he was any other camper. Their friendship is odd, but it works.

There are no hugs or soft words like with Will.

Their friendship is built on blood and sweat and the ringing of swords in the arena. They will push the other to the ground and level a blade at their neck, then help them to their feet in the same breath.

It’s all metal and strength. All the things Ares’ kid's value. She’ll never say it aloud, but Percy knows she’s happy there’s finally someone at camp who she doesn’t have to hold back against.

Clarisse introduces him to Silena. Silena introduces him to Beckendorf.

He’s friendly with some of the Athena cabin too. Annabeth and Malcolm, whose curiosity outweighs their fear. They see him as some puzzle to unravel. He’s pretty sure they have at least three bulletin boards in their cabin dedicated to deciphering the few words he said to Katie.

He’s not sure if it’s really a friendship since most of the time they’re wheedling him into speaking ever since they put together that it was a form of Mycenaean Greek, and a divine form at that.

Honestly, he’s having a bit of fun with it. It’s entertaining to see how worked up they all get at the idea of fully translating Linear B. He’ll take what fun he can get. It’s the only thing that takes his mind off his mother.

And then, there’s Katie.

Percy’s not quite sure how to classify Katie. They’re not friends, but she doesn’t seem to hate him after his not-apology.

He’s not sure what her mother spoke to her about, but whatever it was, it seemed to be along the lines of what Percy said the next day.

It may have come across as a bit desperate, but he needed her to know that he wasn’t his father. He was raised by his mother, by her rules and morals. And Katie needed to make her own decision on whether Percy, himself, deserved to have her hatred for his father extended to him.

It had taken a few strong words from Will to remind him he was just his father’s child, not Poseidon himself. He didn’t have the same experiences or the kind of constitution it takes to go and take advantage of another woman. He can’t lay claim to his father's actions, just like Katie shouldn’t extend a grudge for things he never did.

Ultimately, he told her it was her decision, and he would respect it regardless, but he would appreciate being treated as innocent until proven guilty. He thinks it worked, because while he doubts they’ll ever be friends, she doesn’t look like she wants to stab him every time they cross paths.

The friends he does have, though, are enough. By most standards, it’s not even that many, but it’s more than he’s ever had.

Percy is possessive by nature. He’ll never force them to stay, but there’s a part of him that purrs at the idea of knowing his friends are his.

His to protect and love and keep alive at all costs.

- - -

First of the sun, sea, and that which was grown,

Three seek the stolen, three safely return,

Three claimed forever by hands wrought with death,

As the son of first prophecy takes his first breath.

- - -

Capture the flag goes about as expected. That is to say, absolutely terrible.

First, there’s the Hellhound. Then, immediately after, the Oracle of Delphi goes for a stroll out of the attic to issue a quest.

Prophecies are, as a rule, vague. According to Will, at least. But this one… especially the third line, has Percy worried. For having the goal of bringing his mother back alive, “Three claimed forever by hands wrought with death,” is anything but a good omen.

The first line, at least, is pretty clear about who is meant to go. Will being the sun. Percy being the sea. And Katie was the most likely contender for “that which was grown.”

That evening before dinner, Percy makes his way over to the Aphrodite cabin. He clutches a pair of scissors that he shoves into Silena’s hands the moment she opens the door.

He doesn’t even have a chance to open his mouth before a furious expression crosses her face, and she says venomously, “Perseus Jackson. If you ever even think about cutting your hair with safety scissors ever again, I’ll curse you bald.”

Percy blinks a few before nodding. Children of Aphrodite can be absolutely terrifying when they want to be.

He’s kept his hair long enough to hit his mid-back for as long as he can remember. When he was smaller, his mom mentioned a few times that it was a way to honor the god Apollo, the protector of the young. In the old days, boys would keep their hair long, and upon reaching adulthood, they’d cut it short and, as thanks, give it as an offering.

He knows he’s been given a blessing at birth by a god. Now, knowing it was Apollo, it made sense why his mother had him keep his hair long.

Silena is a miracle worker. With little fanfare, she ties his hair off in two places and snips it off at the nape. He’s handed a foot or so of wavy, black hair and spends the rest of the haircut mourning its loss. Though, he does end up liking the result. It’s closely cropped by his ears and neck, becoming thicker as it goes up. The top is longer, with enough hair that he still has a small nest of curls left.

Percy ties a few laurels and daisies into the length of his hair on his way to dinner. He doesn’t know if there’s proper etiquette for how it’s meant to be done, but he doubts Apollo will care much. Either way, he’s getting an offering out of it.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t for the flame to burn bright gold as soon as he tossed it in. There’s a warmth that surrounds him, and just for a moment, he can see a glow settle over his skin.

He doesn’t realize how quiet it’s gotten until the moment is over, and he turns back to his table to find the entire camp staring at him. It’s only until Clarisse stands up and yells, “What the f*ck are you all staring at, losers,” that they all turn back to their plates, and murmured conversations start up again.

Clarisse gets a week of dish duty.

Percy gets a black eye (then she says, “You better come back alive, Jackson. Otherwise, I’ll find a way to resurrect you just to kill you myself.”)

- - -

Percy, Will, and Katie leave camp with one hundred mortal dollars, twenty gold drachmas, a canteen of nectar, and a small zip-lock bag of ambrosia. They each carry a backpack with a few changes of clothes and some food. Percy’s sand dollar is in his, and Riptide sits in his pocket. On his finger, he wears his mom's ring.

It was on his bedside table when he awoke, along with a short message penned on blue paper that smelled of the sea.

The protections may be gone, but the Xiphos remains. Keep it safe. Good luck.

He feels strange wearing it. It’s not his, after all. It belongs to his mother. But that’s the thought that keeps him going. That at the end of this, he will return it to her.

Chapter 4: Thievery and Murder

Chapter Text

A driver with far too many eyes takes them to Port Jefferson. Normally, Argus tells them, he takes the Questers to Port Authority or Penn Station in Manhattan. As they get farther out from Camp, it becomes clear why that isn’t an option.

They’re barely thirty minutes out when they start passing more and more fallen trees. Many of the houses they drive by are covered in tarps and have gaping holes in the sides. There’s debris everywhere, and waterlogged branches litter the ground. The hurricane may have cleared by now, but the highway remains covered in deep puddles that the van slows for each time.

Argus drops them off at the Port Jefferson Ferry. He buys an adult ticket for himself which he hands off to Katie. She can pass for eighteen until her ID is checked, which unfortunately reveals her to be two years younger: Sixteen.

Demigods, as a whole, tend to look older than they actually are. It might be a side effect of their godly parentage, or perhaps it’s simply the look in their eyes.

The one all demigods have. The one that says, “I was forced to grow up far too quickly.”

Percy and Will plaster smiles on their faces and try to look their age. At twelve and eleven, they just barely make the cut for a free ticket. The three of them are waved on with little fanfare. It takes them an hour and a half to cross to Bridgeport, Connecticut. Percy spends the entire time bent over the front railing, relishing every drop of water that sprays into his face.

The Amtrak station is a short walk away from the dock, and it’s there they run into their first problem.

Tickets.

Quite honestly, it would have been cheaper for them to simply fly, not that they could afford it either. And regardless, flying was completely out of the question. He doesn’t want to risk Zeus’s wrath any more than he already has. He despises the god, but he will not risk losing the chance to get his mother back.

They left camp with one hundred dollars, which isn't enough for half a ticket, let alone three to take them from Bridgeport to somewhere in California (it would have been great if his dad specified where).

As they sit on the curb outside the station, it begins to thunder in the distance. f*cking Zeus.

“We could hotwire a car,” Will says, breaking the silence with a dry laugh.

Percy snorts and turns to look at Will, but it's Katie’s expression that distracts him. Her eyes are far too calculating. “Katie?”

She sighs, looking resigned. “Get up, we’re going back inside.”

“Mind explaining why?” Will asks, shrugging his backpack onto his shoulder.

“I’m going to talk to the store attendant, and you two are gonna steal some strawberry-flavored candy. At least four. If you can get away with more, we’ll have a few snacks, I guess.”

Both boys stare at her with matching confused expressions.

“Di Immortals, do you two know anything?” Katie snaps, she’s already on edge from being sent on a quest with Percy, and the fact that neither of her companions are even thirteen isn’t helping her frustration. “We pretty much have no other transport options. None of us know how to hotwire a car, so we make an offering to Hermes and hope he’s in a good mood. His sacred number is four, and I’m pretty sure Travis once mentioned something about strawberries. And hopefully, he’ll like it more if it’s something we stole.”

Percy grinds his teeth. He knows the gods as well as she does; there's no need for her to act all superior. “We know, but maybe explain the thought first.”

Surprisingly, it goes off without a hitch.

Katie buys a few bottles of water and some snacks, keeping the cashier busy while Will and Percy engage in their first-ever acts of thievery.

They walk back outside with bulging pockets full of strawberry gum and hope in their chests.

Ducking into an alley, the boys pool their stolen goods. Between the two of them, they have fourteen packs of gum. Most are quickly packed away with Katie’s purchases, but four are left out. Then, Will pulls out a small package from his waistband.

“Hermes likes pranks, right?” He asks, taking the toy out of its plastic and putting it next to the stack of gum on the pavement. “It’s one of those handshake buzzers. The ones that give you an electric shock.”

They run into their next problem staring at the items, realizing there’s no fire to offer them with and the sky is too cloudy for Will to use the sun.

“We could go back and try to take a lighter?” Will suggests. “Or maybe some matches?”

“No, that won’t work,” Katie groans, pushing the heels of her palms into her eyes. “They were all behind the checkout counter with the cigarettes.”

Percy thinks for a minute as a ridiculous idea begins to form in his mind. It’s beyond stupid, but at least it won’t get them arrested for trying to steal a lighter.

“Offerings are based on belief, right?” Percy says. His brows pinch, and he avoids looking at Katie, knowing the kind of look she’s gonna give him when he shares his idea. “What if… Gods, this is gonna sound so dumb. Look, the pavement here is white, and I think it’s the kind that goes super dark when you spill liquid on it. So, if we pour some water onto the ground, I can shape it like a fire.”

He hasn’t even finished his sentence before Will is bent over, gasping with laughter. “I can’t believe—” He breaks off into giggles again. “I can’t believe people at camp are scared of you when you go and say things like that with a straight face.”

Even Katie has a badly concealed smile on her face. “You’re right, Jackson. It’s dumb. But it’s also exactly the kind of thing Travis and Conner would come up with if they were here.”

The water spreads messily, even with Percy’s control over it. He ends up with a slightly misshapen, but still recognizable, flame surrounding the gum and the buzzer.

“Please let this work,” Katie mumbles as she closes her eyes and kneels. “Lord Hermes, god of thieves and travelers. Please accept this offering and give us guidance in—gods, I can’t believe I’m saying this—guidance in stealing and hotwiring a car to use on our quest. We’d be grateful for even the smallest extension of your graciousness, My Lord. Thank you for listening to our plea.”

“Uh, also,” Percy jumps in as soon as she’s finished, once again, very pointedly not making eye contact with her. Gods, his mom would kill him if she heard him making a prayer and offering like this. “If you could, like, as the patron of travelers, maybe keep us from getting pulled over, that would be awesome because I’m pretty sure none of us know how to drive—”

“Actually,” Will interrupts (they both ignore the horrified sound that leaves Katie’s throat). “Dad lets us drive the sun chariot sometimes, so I can drive an automatic.”

“Ok, yeah, same concept, except not being pulled over for an eleven-year-old driving. Thanks, Lord Hermes.”

“Do either of you have any sense of self-preservation?” Katie hisses. “Most gods would—”

“Hey, guys,” Will says, pointing at the now-empty water flame. Then, his eyes go glassy, and he sways, catching himself on the wall before he falls over. He rights himself quickly and immediately starts walking toward the parking lot. “We should go look for a car. The older, the better.”

Turns out Hermes really likes stolen strawberry gum and prank buzzers, because somehow, they manage to break into an older-looking black sedan with no problems. He has to be watching out for them because while fiddling with the wires under the steering wheel, the sun visor opens on its own, and a pair of keys hit Will on the head.

They freeze as Will picks up the keys and fits them perfectly into the ignition. After that, they don’t hesitate. Even with divine help, the risk of being caught keeps them from standing around idly. It’s rather underwhelming as Will pulls out of the parking lot.

That evening, Hermes receives three silent prayers and another four packs of strawberry gum.

- - -

What is a demigod road trip without monsters to provide them with entertainment?

They stumble upon Medusa and her sisters in Athens, Ohio. They think they have easy prey in young godlings. The son of Poseidon will be a challenge, of course, but the other two—Weakling children.

The Gorgons die screaming.

Stheno's wails are heard for miles as she burns from the inside out. The eldest begs for mercy, reminding her killer of his father's kindness. Will Solace thinks of mice and locusts and plagues. Of Apollo Smintheus and the mercy he showed in the Trojan War. He giggles at her pleas and summons more sunlight. The only thing left of her is a pile of golden ashes.

Euryale thinks fighting a daughter of Demeter is beneath her. She learns her lesson at the hands of Katie Gardner, who remains sitting at their table out in the stone garden. She whispers to the bushels of roses and firethorns around her and strokes their petals with a gentle touch. Katie smiles into her teacup as Euryale suffocates, sent back to Tartarus, swaddled in a blanket of thorns.

Percy Jackson guts Medusa, stomach to breast, with black claws, and watches her blood pool at his feet. If he closes his eyes, he can almost feel it pulsing. Riptide severs her head in one clean strike, and she dissolves into gold dust. For the second time, she is slain by one named Perseus. There's no Chrysaor or Pegasus to spring from her neck this time, but a child of Poseidon is present to haunt her all the same.

They raid the Emporium for all they can carry. The car trunk is stuffed full of food, clothes, and a variety of hardware and gardening equipment. Katie carefully tucks away the few small bottles of alcohol she finds in the “kitchen.”

(The third line of the prophecy haunts them all, and if she’s gonna die at sixteen, she wants at least one good teenage experience.)

In Medusa’s office, they find a bill to the Underworld that finally gives them a more concrete location than just “California.”

DOA Recording Studios, West Hollywood, California.

Will comes back to them with a box of mortal bills, credit cards, and IDs, and a large container full of drachmas, stolen off the poor souls who stumbled in here by mistake. They walk past the statues in the garden as they return to their car. The air around them smells thick with the gasoline they pour behind them.

A feeling of unease washes over Percy. It’s on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t quite place it. He stops for a moment, walks over to a statue, and rests his forehead on the stone. It’s an odd feeling that makes him feel like he’s scraping open the deepest parts of his soul.

They’re dead, he knows this, but there’s something about this place that tugs at him, the son of Posedawone, the son of that ancient Chthonic god, and of Poseidon Hippios, who once ferried souls to the Underworld himself.

Oh. He understands now.

Percy takes the drachmas from Will and hands him the gasoline. He pockets a few. The rest, he walks to the cherry tree in the center of the courtyard and dumps every single drachma in the container at its base.

They walk back to the car in silence. Hellfire burns in his eyes and scales run down his arms, and Will and Katie know better than to ask.

Hermes, you’ve done so much for us already, but I have one last thing to ask of you. Please. Please guide the souls trapped here to my uncle’s realm. The drachmas to pay Charon’s toll burn with the statues. Please, Lord Hermes. It’s the last thing we’ll ask you for.

Percy opens his eyes and nods to Will, who makes a ring with his thumb and pointer finger. He coaxes the sunrays through it and focuses it into a hot, burning pinprick of light.

The gasoline sparks.

The Emporium burns.

Chapter 5: London Bridge Is Falling Down

Chapter Text

Katie takes them to visit the Gateway Arch. Something about “enriching their historical education.”

Two hours later, the monument is a pile of smoking rubble.

Percy doesn’t know how it went so wrong so fast. One minute it was all fine, the next, everything was on fire, there was a gaping hole in the wall, and Will and Katie were on the ground, poisoned by the Chimera sent by Zeus.

“Be honored, Percy Jackson. Lord Zeus rarely allows me to test a hero with one of my brood. For I am the Mother of Monsters, the terrible Echidna!”

Honored? Honored?

How dare he? How dare Zeus interfere with their quest? The quest to get his bolt back? They were risking their lives for his f*cking toy, and he dares send monsters after them?

‘Symbol of power,’ what a joke. A god is Power in his own right. Poseidon was given his trident by the cyclops’, yes, but long before he was Poseidon Kronides, before Zeus was his king; Before he walked in human skin, they named him Poseidon Hippios . He was divinity and death, taking the form of a horse. There was no Aides yet, no Hades with his Helm of Darkness.

It was Poseidon Hippos traveling across the divide of the Styx, from the Mavroneri in Nonacris, where the waters of the infernal river flowed among mortal lands, to the inbetween, and then into depths of the Underworld. He was a river spirit, ferrying the dead to their judgment. He had no use for a trident. He was his own power, as should be.

The fury that ripped out of Percy was immediate. He looked at his friends, Katie, lying unconscious, and Will, trying to heal her through the burning of poison in his veins. There was so much anger and rage andhowdareyoutouchthem pulsing through him, and suddenly he could feel the monsters’ blood like it was his own. Percy snarled and pulled.

He pulled and pulled—

(The elevator opened up to a group of armed security guards.)

—and pulled until both Echidna and the Chimera were ripped to pieces. Gore and viscera splattered on the ground for a moment before blowing away into the air as gold dust.

Percy Jackson is a demigod. His worries include gods and monsters and all the things that go bump in the night. Humans had never been on that list. Not until he heard that first shot ring out and the echoing scream of pain from Will. Another gunshot, and a sharp pain in his thigh forced him to one knee.

Will, who heals faster courtesy of his father, had been attempting to stay conscious enough to keep Katie alive. He was strong, yes, but not strong enough to purge himself of the fast-acting poison and Katie simultaneously, while healing a gunshot as well.

This brings them to now.

Percy isn’t sure what the guards saw through the Mist, but considering he killed two monsters directly in front of them, he doesn’t think it’s good, especially since he’s been holding Riptide this entire time. The guns are still pointing at them, and someone is talking into a radio, but the only thing he can think is, youhurtmyfamily.

There’s no peaceful resolution here. Percy knows this. The narrow hallway of the Arch is getting hotter and hotter as the flames left by the Chimera grow. The only exit is the elevator, and it’s blocked off by guards. He turns and looks at the hole in the wall—the six-hundred-thirty-foot drop to the Mississippi River. He looks at Katie (unconscious) and Will (bleeding out).

He starts praying to his father.

“Trust me?” Percy asks Will, who’s panting and putting pressure on his shoulder. The son of Apollo pales, seeing Percy looking down at the river. Despite this, he nods.

Adrenaline is rushing through him like never before, and he can barely feel the pain in his thigh. He grabs both backpacks and somehow picks up Katie with ease. Percy turns to Will, who stares at him with wide eyes.

“Hold on.”

And Will does.

People are shouting and running toward them, but Percy pays no mind as he throws himself and his friends off the top of the Gateway Arch.

Father, help us.

The water in the river rises to meet them—slows their descent enough that they don’t die from the impact. Katie and Will are helped by the fact that they’re touching Percy.

They don’t die, but gods, it hurts.

The water in the river soothes the horrible stinging pain on his skin and theirs, but it’s so incredibly polluted. An hour in the river wouldn’t be enough to heal him, let alone these few short minutes.

He swims to the surface, pulling Will and an unconscious Katie behind him. He thinks someone is speaking to him in the water, but all his focus is on helping his friends. Before he exits the river, he catches a few words sung by a soft, melodic voice, “…messenger…onica…father…Santa Mo…Percy…ta Monica…trust…gifts.”

He hears sirens in the distance when they break through the surface. Percy drags them to the riverbank, full of stones and driftwood, pulling Katie himself while Will stumbles up—shaking, gasping, and staring unseeing at the ground while blood drips from the wound in his shoulder.

Percy dries them and the backpacks with a thought, reaching for the one with the Ambrosia.

It’s not there.

It’s not there.

Panic builds in his chest, and he thinks back to Will complaining that the drachmas and medical supplies made his backpack too heavy as they were getting out of the car. He remembers laughing and telling Will, “Just leave it here. We won’t be long.” He remembers Katie rolling her eyes and saying something about a nice, long history lesson.

Police cars are swarming in the lot where their car is parked. It’s far, and Will is unlikely to make it. Percy doesn’t trust the boy to heal himself right now, let alone walk to their car and back.

Trembling (pain, fury, terror), he leans over Katie, closes his eyes, and feels. He forces himself to concentrate, to ignore everything inside him that’s shaking in anger at the people who dared hurt his friends. He focuses on the water inside her body first, learning the feel of it. Then, the blood. And then, he feels for the pollution in her veins.

Percy slashes across her forearm with Riptide and, like before, starts to pull. Tearing apart the monsters felt easy. He didn’t need to be careful or precise. It was all anger and death.

But this? It’s like the poison infected her blood, and he has to separate the two drop by drop. He’s afraid if he moves too fast, he’ll take out much-needed blood by accident. But if he’s too slow, she could die. And there’s so much poison.

The sirens, louder this time, pull him from his trance-like focus. He screams in frustration and tries again. He can feel her pulse getting weaker even as he pulls little streams of poison from the gash in her wrist.

There’s a part of his mind that he’s very pointedly ignoring, playing the third line of the prophecy on a loop. If his mother was the first to be claimed by death, what if Katie is the second? And that is unacceptable.

It’s a race against the clock, and he’s losing.

Soon enough though, her blood is clearing, he can feel it, but her heartbeat is slow. It’s too slow, and Percy can’t separate the poison any faster than he already is. He can hear people shouting from far away, and closer to him, Will is screaming in his ear that the police are coming and they have to go.

The next events take place within the span of a few seconds:

Katie’s heart stops as Percy pulls the last dregs of poison out of her blood.

A red stain spreads on the lower left of Will’s shirt a second after gunshots begin to ring out.

The earth begins to shudder and pulse along with Percy’s heartbeat.

He’s never done CPR before, but as the ground cracks around them, Percy thinks it’s the perfect time to try. He barely gets two chest compressions in when he’s being shoved to the side and told in very strong words to Calm Down.

How? How is he supposed to calm down?

Katie’s dead. Will has a bullet wound in his stomach, and CPR is only making him bleed out faster. He’s pressing ten times as hard as Percy was and obviously knows what he’s doing. The only thing he can do is try and hold Will’s blood in place and try to curb his own panic.

Time seems to stretch and with every passing second, the earth shakes more and more. It’s only when the debris starts falling that he hears Will screaming at him.

“Perseus f*cking Jackson, either calm down or find us some damn shelter because if you bring down the Arch and kill us here, I swear on the Styx I will make your afterlife eternally miserable.”

Over the sound of the oath’s distant thunder, Percy manages to tear his eyes away from them and starts running to the base of the Arch. He’s pretty sure he hears the crack of ribs breaking as he leaves.The police are directing the flow of people out of the Arch, and he doubts anyone will try to arrest him right now.

He almost trips down a few steps, fighting against the stream of people running out from under the Arch. Someone shoves Percy to the side, and he hits one of the walls that line the ramp leading down to the museum. For just a moment, Percy rests his hand on the wall and closes his eyes, trying to ignore the metal panel that fell a few meters away.

He’s about to run off to look for shelter elsewhere when he realizes that somehow during his rush of panic and adrenaline, he missed a whole damn door with a set of steps past it, leading into an old, dark bomb shelter or something of the like.

The shaking is getting worse, and Percy doesn’t think he could stop it if he tried. There’s metal framework falling around him, and he’s sprinting like a demon to try and get back to Will and Katie. As it turns out, he doesn’t need to because Will meets him halfway, carrying both backpacks and looking dead on his feet as he supports a breathing and half-conscious, but alive Katie with his uninjured arm.

Percy lets out a sob of relief he didn’t even know he was holding. The resulting shake is so intense that they both barely keep their balance. “I found a room. Shelter. Bomb shelter. I can’t–Will I can’t make it stop.”

Will’s been shot twice, and he’s keeping it together better than Percy. “Just help me with her,” he says.

Percy takes some of Katie’s weight, and together they drag her back to where Percy found the shelter door.

What. The. f*ck.

He’s going insane. He must be. He was here less than two minutes ago and there was a door. There was a door and a shelter and it was going to be safe. And now it’s not there.

“Percy, where is it?”

“It was–I swear, Will. It was just here,” Percy says between panicked gasps. Unintelligible curses leave his mouth with how hard he’s breathing. He’s not quite sure how Will, who has two bullet wounds and poison in his veins, is more put together than him at the moment.

He knows it was here. He knows.

“We gotta get back to the car, Percy. The police are gone. Let’s—”

Percy’s not listening. His brain is frantic, and he can barely think. He rests his forehead against the stone and tries to calm the shaking in his bones that the earth echoes. With a frustrated shout, Percy pounds both fists against the wall before placing his palms flat against it, “Fine, let’s—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence because he’s too busy falling down a short flight of steps which he swears on his probably very short lifeweren’t there a second ago. Will, behind him, doesn’t hesitate. He shoves Percy further and helps Katie stumble in. The door slams shut behind them and the tremors are instantly gone, as though they were never there, to begin with. His panic, while not gone, abates somewhat now that he knows they’re mostly safe.

It would be pitch black if not for the glow coming from the son of Apollo. Percy takes a moment to look around. It’s not exactly a bomb shelter like he assumed. It seems like more of a long, stone corridor. Strange for the builders to style it like this, but shelter is shelter, and he’s not complaining.

Percy takes the disquieting feeling pulsing through the walls and shoves it out of mind. He’s never been claustrophobic, so he chalks it up to the residual anxiety from that horrible series of events. Those fifteen minutes that had felt more like five hours.

“Are we safe?” Katie asks weakly, looking around, face far too pale.

Percy breathes in. Out. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we are.”

“Oh, thank the gods,” Will says, letting go of Katie. Then he slumps against the wall and promptly passes out.

Chapter 6: No Yellow Brick Road To Follow

Chapter Text

Percy Jackson isn’t scared of many things. His list of fears is short and consists of various scenarios he’s afraid of finding himself in. Losing his mother has always been one of them. But people and monsters have never been on that list before.

Katie Gardner proves to be the exception to this rule.

He still hasn’t exactly processed what she did, but halfway through his treating Will’s injuries, the boy’s heartbeat grew dangerously slow. Percy was doing everything he could to keep him alive while Katie instructed him in first aid. Out of nowhere, she grabbed Percy’s wrist in an iron grip, put the other on Will’s chest, and did… something.

It was like he could feel the life draining out of him. For a split second, Katie seemed to glow. And then, miraculously, Will’s heartbeat grew stronger, and some color returned to his cheeks. That was all Percy saw before swaying and falling over, unconscious.

He wakes less than a minute later to Katie pouring a bottle of water over his face. Percy blinks and, as if he were a child of Athena, begins to throw out rapid-fire questions about her sudden healing abilities. She lets it go on for a while before interrupting him.

“I didn’t heal him, idiot,” she mumbles, wincing in pain from her broken ribs. “He’s still injured. I just… made it a little easier for him to survive.”

“Huh?”

“It’s like copper being a good conductor of electricity,” Katie explains. “Except I’m the copper, and life is the electricity.”

Percy’s mouth drops open. He stares at her with wide eyes. “I didn’t know children of Demeter could do that.”

“No,” she says. “Just me.”

Her eyes are hard-set when she speaks, as if daring Percy to respond otherwise. He takes the cue and doesn’t press.

Percy sits up, wincing at the headache coming on. The bottle Katie used to wake him is still about half full of water. He thinks for a moment and then asks Katie if she still has those little utensil packets in her backpack. She nods, looking confused, and watches Percy open one up to dump the small packet of salt into the bottle.

He shakes it vigorously and, with little effort, pulls the water out. He’s tired and injured, and he probably shouldn’t be using his powers, but he knows he can speed along their healing with the salt water.

It’s split up into a collection of small, rippling spheres. A few smaller ones fly over to Will and Percy, swirling carefully over the myriad of external injuries they wear. Burns and bullet holes being the worst of them. The rest of the water gets to work on Katie’s ribs, of which a few were broken with Will’s gods-given CPR skills.

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, staring at the stone wall across from him and willing the water to heal his friends. Katie has long since fallen asleep, and eventually, exhaustion catches up with Percy too. His eyes flutter shut, and he falls asleep to an unnerving aura clawing its way under his skin.

- - -

Percy wakes to a very much conscious Will shouting his name. He blinks a few times and rubs the sleep out of his eyes, about to ask him how he’s feeling before he notices the look Will wears.

“What’s wrong?” He asks, grabbing Riptide from his pocket. Percy looks around, searching for any signs of a monster, relaxing when there seems to be none.

Will points to their left with a nervous expression. Percy follows his finger and frowns, confused. He’s not quite sure what he’s supposed to be looking at other than a long hallway.

“What do you mean? There’s nothing there.”

It dawns on him the instant he finishes speaking. That strange, foreboding feeling comes back to him. It’s like something in the room is alive and looking at him like he’s its next meal. He looks back at Will, “There’s nothing there,” he repeats.

“Yeah,” Will rasps, his glow dimming for a brief moment. “Stairs are gone.”

“f*ck.”

In the commotion between them, Katie wakes too. Wincing for a split second before her face smooths out, clearly not expecting the lack of pain in her ribs. “What are you idiots yelling about?” She asks, yawning.

It’s Will who answers her because Percy is still staring down the corridor that he’s absolutely sure was a set of stairs when they came in. He tells her about the missing steps, clearly trying to keep himself calm. Percy never thought Will was one for claustrophobia, but there's something about him that seems deeply uncomfortable here.

Katie whips her head over to Percy. Unnatural fear blooms in her eyes.

“Percy,” she says quietly. “Where are we?”

He waits for a beat and then explains everything from the time she fell unconscious to finding this place. The horrified look she has when he tells her he jumped out of the Arch with them makes him look away. Her mouth falls open, then closed, then open again when Percy tells her that her heart stopped.

“Oh.”

That’s all she says.

He tells her about the earthquake and the arch breaking, and the bomb shelter he found. She asks him if the door was always there. Percy nods at first. Then, with a frown, he slowly considers the possibility that it wasn’t the adrenaline and shock that kept him from seeing it. He shakes his head.

He knows something is wrong from her expression. Will does too. She speaks before they can ask.

“Labyrinth,” she says, knocking her head back against the stone with a frantic, high-pitched laugh. “We’re in Daedalus’s f*cking Labyrinth.”

- - -

It takes Percy about half a day to realize two things. One, the Labyrinth is probably alive, and two, it’s f*cking cruel.

Katie is the first one to notice a little blue triangle that glows on the wall. Will and Percy pause, watching as she touches it with a curious expression.

A door opens.

Percy has never felt such relief in his life. Apollo’s sun shines on his face as they step out, free from the walls that feel as though they’re constantly closing in on you. His relief and thankfulness increases tenfold when he spots a large Ferris wheel that overlooks a clear, blue body of water.

Santa Monica.

A few hours into their walk, he mentioned to Katie and Will what he’d heard in the ocean. It was a unanimous decision that Santa Monica should be their destination as soon as they made it out.

Percy looks over to his friends, a wild grin on his face. Will has his eyes closed, his face tilted up to absorb the sunlight. He looks at peace, basking in his natural element.

Katie though… Katie’s face rivals that of when she realized they were in the Labyrinth.

“You okay?” He asks her. “We made it to Santa Monica in one piece. What’s wrong?”

“Percy,” Katie says, her eyes staring straight ahead at the water. “Why would it open a door for us in the exact place we’re looking to go?”

Percy shrugs, uncaring. “We got lucky. Why does it matter?”

“Where’s the beach, Percy?” She asks with a blank stare.

“Huh?”

“Pier. Ferris wheel. Ocean. All here. But Santa Monica has a beach. So, where’s the beach?”

Percy looks around with a more observant eye this time. She’s right. He’s never been to Santa Monica, but he’s seen pictures, and he knows there should be a beach. Instead, they’re surrounded by a bunch of old-looking buildings. There’s water and a Ferris wheel, sure, but wherever they are, it’s not Santa Monica.

Ten minutes later, their heavy backpacks can barely close, and they’re being chased back into the Labyrinth by a store clerk yelling at them in rapid French.

They collapse into hysterical giggles against the stone walls with food falling out of their bags and thanking Hermes for the blessing that must still be working. The laughter doesn’t last long as they fully admit to themselves the Labyrinth might be the only way they can finish the quest.

“At least we can tell people we’ve been to France,” Percy says with a weak smile.

His friends don’t bother trying to return it.

- - -

Without the sun, it’s impossible to keep track of time in the Labyrinth, but Will, the little genius he is, stole a watch from the store.

It was the afternoon of Monday, June 5th, when they were at the Arch. In the Labyrinth, they slept for a while and walked for about half a day before ending up in f*cking France of all places, so he sets it to Juin 06, 12:00.

Not two hours later, they come across another glowing triangle. Another door. Percy can smell the sea behind it, and they walk out onto slippery rocks where waves crash into the cliffs below. The sea spray on his face feels better than Ambrosia or Nectar. He shoves his backpack into Will’s arms, gives them a two-finger salute, and with a grin, jumps into the foaming waters.

It’s wiped off his face almost immediately.

44 degrees, 19 minutes north, 68 degrees, 11 minutes west. Maine. They’re back in the US, but way farther out from California than they were when they left for the quest.

Percy thinks back to the voice in the Mississippi River. He knows she said Santa Monica, but the ocean is the ocean, and perhaps she’ll show herself to him here.

She does.

Several hundred feet down, a Nereid smiles at him. She’s beautiful in a way that’s almost inhuman. Her face is pale, a statue carved of iridescent marble. Her hair is such a dark shade of blue, it almost appears black. It flows gently behind her, pushed around by water currents.

The dress she wears bleeds divine craftsmanship. No mortal dressmaker could ever sew something like it. He can’t tell if it’s silk or seafoam or both—a pale shade of green that belongs only to the oceans. Not a second later, Percy is blushing furiously and has his back to her, intent on looking anywhere but at the dress that barely hides her body.

She laughs at him, and it sounds like the bursting of little air bubbles as they reach the surface. When she finally speaks, he almost turns back around because she sounds so similar to his mother.

He hates it.

It’s nothing more than a paltry imitation, only serving to remind him that his mother is dead. The Nereid speaks to his back, and Percy grits his teeth and listens.

She gives him three drachmas for Charon and three gleaming pearls. She tells him the trip to the Underworld will be dangerous, that Hades will feed on their doubts and hopelessness and trick them into never leaving. She tells him they will be vulnerable in the land of the dead—vulnerable in the Underworld? Him? Percy doubts his father sent her—and when they are in their greatest moment of need, to smash a pearl at their feet.

“What belongs to the sea will always return to the sea.”

In the Underworld, they will have no use for the drachmas. Charon will let them through.

They sit on the cliffs of Maine, the sea crashing around them like thunder, and use a drachma and the ocean spray to call Camp. They’re tired and hurt, and before they go steal another car and drive for ten days straight, they want to see their friends.

Chiron is pale when their call goes through. Dionysus scowls. He owes Hephestus four bottles of Nectar-infused wine and a favor because the gods bet on their survival.

(Percy wonders at what point the law was made to prohibit the gods from directly aiding their children in quests. He wonders if any of them protested it, or if they sat back in their thrones and treated the lives of their offspring—their blood— as entertainment. If they laughed and gossiped among themselves as though they were watching reality TV. If they bet on lives and deaths and injuries as though demigods were no more than racing horses or fighting dogs.)

When Clarisse arrives, she screams herself hoarse. Silena cries. Miranda Gardner does too. Beckendorf tells them he’s glad they’re not dead. Lee gives them advice on making sure their wounds don’t get infected.

Chiron informs them with a stony face that the Gateway Arch no longer stands and half of St. Louis is quarantined from some unknown virus. He asks them how they made it out alive, how they got to Maine, and where they’ve been “all this time.”

When the call finishes, Will stares at his watch. Juin 06. 13:27. He changes it quietly.

Juin 14. 10:50.

They have seven days left before the solstice. Seven days to get to West Hollywood and back to the Empire State building. To Olympus.

Nothing but a plane can make that trip, and that’s out of the question. There is no mortal way for them to travel cross-country and back.

They look at their backpacks. Full to the brim from their grocery trip an hour and a halfeight days ago. The bags are left on the cliffs by the entrance while Percy takes Will and Katie into the freezing-cold ocean. He holds their hands, makes air bubbles for them to breathe with, and wills the water, so it creeps into their injuries and sews their skin together.

It heals Katie's ribs and purges what traces of the Chimera’s poison remained. It pushes the shrapnel out of Will’s shoulder and heals both bullet wounds. It cleans his veins of the poison too. Percy’s thigh is no longer in pain, nor are the patches of burned skin from the fire atop the Arch.

They heal in silence, and Percy prays to his father for help. He doubts it’ll work, and he’s proven right when warm currents flow over them as if to give a voiceless apology.

Percy dries Will and Katie but keeps himself soaked in ocean water. It’s comforting and feels like home. They share one of their water bottles between them and fill it back up with saltwater for Percy. Sunshine warms their bones one last time. Then, Percy places a hand on the glowing triangle, the Delta, and they descend back into the Labyrinth with Will as their only light.

It took less than two hours for them to find another door the last time, hopefully, they have the same luck.

They don’t.

- - -

The labyrinth is cruel. It takes your fears, devours them, and spits them back at you, broken and mangled. It looks inside Percy and sees his desire to escape, to free his mother, and perhaps even return Zeus’s bolt. It makes blue Deltas glow in the corners of his eyes, and the walls pulse with laughter when he realizes there’s nothing there.

It sees Will’s hate of the underground. Of his need for sunlight and sky. It leads them through halls of brilliant mosaics of Apollo and Helios and the sun chariot that should glow in the sky. The mosaics are covered in moss and dirt and cover the beauty in everything that Will aches for.

It doesn’t have to do much for Katie. Other than the three of them, there’s no life. The labyrinth ensures that other than the monsters it sends their way, not a single living organism exists in the hallways it spins them into. It feeds irritation into her. Frustration. Plucks at the thoughts in her mind and plants seeds of doubt alongside the ones that have grown to like Percy.

- - -

They’ve been walking this gods forsaken maze for three days when Percy recalls the pearls. It’s June 17th, and they’re finally gonna get out.

Or not.

The pearls refuse to break. ‘At their greatest moment of need,’ what bullsh*t. He feels like the Labyrinth is mocking him when he throws them into the depths of his backpack.

They keep walking.

- - -

It’s June 18th, and if the Labyrinth sends one more monster to them while they’re sleeping, Katie’s gonna have an aneurysm.

- - -

It’s June 19th. They’ve been stuck there for five days and have started rationing their food and water. They were never meant to be in here this long.

- - -

It’s June 20th, and they use one of their two remaining drachmas to call camp. The glow from Will and Percy’s water is enough to make a small rainbow form. The drachma goes through. The call does not.

- - -

It’s June 21st when Percy breaks down and cries. The solstice is today.

His only comfort is that if they ever make it out of the Labyrinth, he’ll end up with his mother in the Underworld. Perhaps his uncle will be kind and let them live their afterlives together.

Will and Katie pray to anyone who might be listening that Percy’s rampant emotions don’t bring the Labyrinth down on top of them.

- - -

June 23rd. They eat the last of their food. Their drinking water ran out days ago until Percy began to draw small amounts out of the humid air that surrounds them. They walk with their bottles open so that Percy can siphon water into them bit by bit. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to keep them hydrated.

- - -

June 25th. Katie realizes that when monsters die, only the main section of their body turns into golden dust. Any limbs that have been fully separated remain in the mortal realm.

- - -

June 26th. The Labyrinth sends a Griffin their way. Percy glares at it and tightens his hold on its blood. Will and Katie butcher most of it before it dies. They have no fire, but they learn quickly that a hot enough sunburn will cook monster flesh all the way through.

Will throws up after two bites. But food is food. He drinks some water and forces down the rest.

- - -

July 3rd. They’ve been away from camp for a month.

Percy’s skin covers itself in scales and doesn’t fade.

- - -

July 4th. Katie pulls out the travel-size vodka bottles she took from Medusa’s Garden Gnome Emporium. It burns going down, but maybe she’ll have a night of peace.

Divinity purges the alcohol from her body.

The bottles are thrown against the wall, and Katie curses until she’s out of breath because they don’t even give her the satisfaction of shattering.

- - -

July 21st. They’re a month past their deadline.

- - -

July 29th. This time, it’s a Sphinx.

- - -

On August 18th, Percy turns thirteen, and for the first time, there’s no blue cake, and there’s no Sally Jackson. There is an enormous flock of Stymphalian Birds, though.

- - -

Five days later, on August 23rd, Will throws his watch against the wall with a scream.

(It’s his twelfth birthday.)

The glass face cracks, and Will makes a circle with his fingers. Then, he remembers there’s no sunlight to magnify, and setting the watch on fire isn’t an option.

Katie holds him as he sobs, crying for his mother.

Their parents are ancient gods; that much is true. In many ways, they are older than all the demigods at camp put together. In others, though, they are twelve, thirteen, and sixteen years old. For all the gifts their parents have given them, adulthood is not one. They are not gods, who are born fully grown. Their souls are old, but their minds are not yet fully developed.

They know many things they shouldn’t, the knowledge branded into their skin and bones and soul. Will is more god than human. His teeth are too bright, his eyes are too gold, and sometimes when he grins at you, you’re left shivering and afraid.

And yet, there is humanity left in him. In Percy and Katie too.

Make no mistake, their blood is streaked with ichor, and they’ll kill you with a smile. But Will closes his eyes, and in between the sickness and death he dreams in, it is not Apollo that looks back. It’s the loving face of Naomi Solace.

Naomi, who fed Will at her breast. Who, through coughs and sneezes, smiled kindly during his tantrums and taught him better. Will loves his mother. He would destroy the world for her. He is twelve years old today, and he could damn the entire state of Texas for her sake if he wished. He is not yet in his teens, and he could devastate millions of people. He could cripple the world's economy and political systems. In his anger, he could make a plague so contagious that it ruins the entire world.

But Will Solace is twelve today, and he doesn’t want to do that. It’s his birthday, and he does not think of mice and locusts and plagues. Nor of Apollo Smintheus. He thinks of his Mama’s warm hugs and the sound of her guitar and the songs she would sing him to sleep with.

He drifts off in Katie’s arms while she hums quietly.

When he’s asleep for some time, Katie carefully lays him on the ground. Percy pretends he doesn’t see her relieved tears when she finds the watch cracked, but not broken.

It stays on her wrist from now on.

- - -

It’s August 26th. Percy and Katie have been coughing for two days. Will hasn’t talked for three.

- - -

August 28th. Will’s eyes gain a clarity they’ve been missing since his birthday. He heals the fevers his friends have been walking with for a day now. His first words are a hoarse apology.

Katie calls him an idiot and manages to crack a relieved half-smile, “Don’t scare us like that, okay?”

Will nods and lets Percy pull him in for a hug. He doesn’t even mind the claws digging into his back.

- - -

On September 7th, they find a room of mostly useless treasures. A few celestial bronze weapons and a silver bow and quiver of arrows that Will takes. Drachmas lay scattered on the ground.

They’re left in the room untouched.

In Percy’s backpack, the last of the Nereid’s drachmas haunts him. There’s no point in using it when the Iris message will just eat their coin.

- - -

September 12th. They feast on a Tarand.

- - -

September 18th. Percy’s been covered in scales for a couple of months now. They’ve crept their way from just his arms and legs to his shoulders, neck, back. Lately, his cheeks and temples have started glittering turquoise in Will’s glow. His eyes are slitted more often than they are not. But no one complains because he can see farther in the dark with them. He keeps them safe.

His scales are stronger than any armor he could get at Camp. Katie and Will have long since gotten used to him using his claws and mouth for things hands or a sword could do. He’s only slightly feral, and his instincts have saved them all multiple times, so what’s the harm if he acts more monsteranimal than human sometimes?

An Empousa sneaks up on them while they’re asleep that night.

Percy tears her throat out with his teeth. He swallows the blood.

- - -

On October 3rd, the Labyrinth makes a mistake.

(The Labyrinth is sentient, but it is not omniscient. It reads the fears that linger on the surface of their thoughts. It breathes their scents and knows who their parents are. It knows that the son of Apollo craves sunlight. That the daughter of Demeter is strongest near fertile plant life. That the son of Poseidon is made for saltwater and that he can’t risk an earthquake, lest he buries them alive.

It’s been careful to keep them away from the oceans. Keeps them beneath North America now and always leads them through tunnels beneath landmass. Children of Poseidon are stronger in the oceans; this is known. But Percy’s father is not simply the god of the seas. Before Hades or Charon or Hermes, it was Poseidon Hippios, a river god, ferrying souls to the Underworld in the form of a beastlike horse.

Percy’s strength lies in rivers too, and that is the Labyrinth’s mistake.)

On October 3rd, their Jailer miscalculates, and Percy laughs for the first time in months (it’s dry and cruel and sounds like the desperate screams and gasps of sailors as they drown in the raging sea). He grabs Katie and Will by the wrists, closes his eyes, and he tugs.

The Salt River that runs through Arizona is technically freshwater, but it’s earned its name for a reason. There are large salt deposits just after the merging of the White and Black Rivers. By the time it flows through Phoenix, Arizona, there’s barely any left. But Percy is a son of both the seas and of rivers—The barest trace of salt just fuels him.

Percy, who is filled with months of anger and feral rage, pulls the Salt River down, down, down. He cracks the Labyrinth’s ceilings and laughs gleefully (a sound that would put most mortals in a psych ward) as the river flows over them. Percy wills the water to rise. He squeezes his friends’ hands and revels in mud and sand and silt that they’re pulled through. Then, water and then air. Fresh air. Not the stale excuse they’ve been breathing inside the labyrinth.

They sit on the bank of the river in silence. The sun is shining in the sky. Will cries at the distant sight of his father's chariot. Percy thinks he might be crying too. He can’t tell. Katie digs her fingers into the fertile soil beside her. Her tears are as silent as they are thankful.

- - -

They sit by the river for hours. They bathe, wash their clothes, and finally feel some modicum of cleanliness. They stay there for hours. Until the sun has set and Artemis's moon illuminates the sky. Then, they begin to walk.

Katie leads them downriver, in the direction she feels the most life in. They don’t know where they are, but they hope it’s close to Camp Halfblood. They’re at least three and a half months past their deadline, probably longer if what Chiron said about time in the Labyrinth is true.

Or perhaps not.

The Labyrinth manages to get the last laugh. It’s spent almost four months torturing them, and they’ve long since come to terms with the inevitable smiting from the King of the Gods. At some point, it became less about escape and more about survival.

They stare at the newspaper that says it’s June 18th.

(Deep underneath the ground, the Labyrinth pulses with amusem*nt.)

Chapter 7: Family Found

Chapter Text

Clarisse LaRue isn’t scared of many things. But when Will Solace, looking like he’s walked through Tartarus and back, IM’s her at eleven thirty at night and asks if her mother still lives in Phoenix, she’s more nervous than she should be.

She bites her tongue and doesn’t ask what happened—why it looks like he hasn’t slept in months or his hair looks like it grew three inches. Clarisse gives him her mother's address and directions from the crossroads he stands near.

Will smiles (it looks more like a grimace), thanks her, and hangs up.

She doesn't know what happened, but something went wrong in the Labyrinth. She's sure of it. Children of Apollo aren't meant to be that pale, and she’s never seen him without the bridge of his nose covered in freckles.

Clarisse sits in silence for a moment before pulling on her boots and walking over to the Big House. She calls her mother on the enchanted landline (gods bless the children of Hecate who monster-proofed the cables on the phone) and lets her know some injured friends will be stopping by.

When Chiron comes to check on the racket she’s making, she suppresses the urge to snarl and instead says absolutely nothing. He wheels closer and has the audacity to ask if she’s “Okay?”

She breaks his nose and slams the front door right off its hinges when she leaves.

In the morning, her siblings find her in the training arena. Every single dummy is in pieces, and there are at least three broken swords on the ground. Her eyes are red and angry, and all she wants to do is stay there and spar, but Sherman forces her to breakfast with a firm grip on her arm. He's at least half a foot shorter than her, but when he gets angry, he's as bullheaded as Clarisse is and she doesn't have the energy to argue today.

Clarisse doesn’t eat. She piles her plate full of food and stares at it for ten minutes with her fists clenched. Her siblings let out a collective sigh of relief when she finally gets up for her offering.

It’s a very short-lived relief, followed by a level of fear that children of Ares are very unused to feeling.

She dumps her entire plate in the brazier, and instead of silently praying to her father, her voice is venomous when she says, loud and clear, “Take care of your f*cking son, Lord Apollo.”

By mid-day, she has a fever and a horrible sunburn. But she’s not dead yet, so she’ll consider it a win.

Maybe they’ll actually get some help on their f*cking quest now.

- - -

Andrea “Andy” LaRue is a retired Air Force Colonel. She was in the military for thirty-six years, and when she was thirty-nine, she discovered that the Greek gods were real. Not many things surprise her anymore.

So when her daughter calls and says some injured friends of hers will be at the house within an hour, she doesn’t bother asking questions.

Andy takes out her first aid kit and changes the sheets on Clarisse’s bed and in the guest bedroom. It’s seventy-eight degrees outside, but just in case, she throws some blankets and soft clothes into the dryer to warm them up. She orders a pizza, and then she waits.

The kids show up at her doorstep in about forty minutes, and to sum it up, they look like hell—smell like it too, quite honestly.

The girl, Katie, seems to be the most injured (one of the boys is covered in scales, and she’ll admit that surprises her a bit, not that she’ll show it). She hustles the boys upstairs, shows them the two bathrooms, and doesn't comment on how nervous they all look to be alone.

Separation anxiety is a bitch, so she settles Katie in Clarisse’s room, close enough to both bathrooms that all three relax somewhat, and treats her injuries there.

None of them are life-threatening, but the sheer amount of scratches and bite marks takes her a while to clean and disinfect. She knows demigods always have monsters on their trail, and who knows what diseases those things carry?

The blond boy, Will, comes out of the shower first. He looks exhausted and dead on his feet, drowning in the massive towel wrapped around him. She hands him some clothes, still warm from the dryer, and is very pleased with the slight twitch of a smile on his face.

He switches out with Katie, who goes and showers. Will, surprisingly, doesn’t have many injuries to treat. She tells him as much, but it makes sense when he responds in a raspy voice, “My dad is Apollo. All of us can heal faster than normal.”

By the time the last kid, Percy, finally emerges from the shower, Katie and Will have eaten—it looks like they haven’t eaten normal quantities of food for some time, given that they both threw up after gorging themselves on three slices each—taken nausea medicine, watched half of Hercules (and spent the entire time making fun of it) and passed out on Clarisse’s bed.

Andy’s pretty sure he had claws and brighter eyes when he came, but he’s down to only the scales. They’re a stunning color, although now and then it flickers for a moment and looks like vitiligo instead.

She passes over some clothing and tells him, “I made up the guest bedroom too, but your friends are both sleeping in Clarisse’s room if you’d like to join them.”

He does.

Andy learns very quickly that turning the light off is a bad idea if Percy’s panicked reaction is anything to go by. Instead, she dims the lights halfway and lets them sleep.

They’ll probably want to head out tomorrow, so she grabs a couple of backpacks to fill up with food, clothes, and medical supplies. She throws in a few of those gold coins Clarisse gave her too.

Hopefully, they’ll look a bit more rested in the morning.

- - -

Andy LaRue isn’t surprised by much, and as such, when she wakes up to the kids gone and the truck missing, she makes herself some coffee and hopes they at least took the keys. Fixing a hot-wired car would be a pain.

She finds a note on the kitchen table:

Thank you for everything. Sorry about the car. We’ll try to bring it back.

-Katie, Percy & Will

- - -

Will had been driving for almost five hours when they finally realized something was wrong with the GPS.

They’re not sure what, but it was either faulty or had been tampered with because instead of West Hollywood, they’re in f*cking Vegas, and they somehow didn’t notice. The air in the car smells off in a way Percy can't describe. It's a sickly sweet scent concealing something sour and acrid, and it makes his head spin when he focuses on it too much.

They’re on the Strip looking for a paper map when Percy feels a tugging in his chest. He’s not sure if Will and Katie are following him, but he doesn’t really care because it’s the same feeling he got that first day he met Arion.

FamilyFamilyFamilyFamily.

He stops in front of the Lotus Casino.

(There’s a glowing delta in a side alley outside the casino. Percy fights the urge to break the whole f*cking wall.)

Katie doesn’t stop. Doesn’t hesitate. She walks straight in.

A server comes up to them as soon as they’re past the sliding doors, trying to offer them some food.

There’s a celestial bronze dagger at it's neck before it can get a word out. It backs up immediately but doesn’t try to attack them.

(Monsters aren’t alive in the same way humans are, and Katie’s gotten excellent at sensing them in the last few months.)

A very tense minute passes before Katie puts her dagger back in its sheath and pats the human-passing monster on the cheek condescendingly.

“We won’t be long.”

It doesn’t try to follow.

- - -

There is a sort of kinship Percy feels with Nico and Bianca DiAngelo. They are similar to his siblings, but not. He knows, though, with just a glance, that they can swim across the Styx and play in the fires of the Phlegethon just as easily as he can. AidesHades may not be a water deity, but the rivers of the Underworld are his domain now, and so the siblings, too, cannot be harmed by them.

They are all Children of the Underworld in their own respective ways. Like calls to like, and all children of Chthonic deities have an unspoken camaraderie. They protect their own.

In another world, Bianca DiAngelo might have been drawn to the Hunt with a promise of sisterhood. There, she listens to the hunter’s spin tales and convinces herself Nico will be fine at Camp Half-Blood without her. In that world, she is thrown headfirst into a quest with no training, fighting to save a goddess she barely knows. She dies in the junkyard of the gods for the sake of a worthless little plastic figurine and for her brother’s, her Niccolo’s, smile.

This is not that world.

Here, like recognizes like, and the moment Percy steps foot into the Lotus Casino, he feels himself tugged down into the deepest, oldest parts. Katie does too.

Here, Percy walks until he finds himself at a small table with a young boy and girl who smell of hellfire and brimstone and family.

In this world, there is no quest and no Hunters that tear brother and sister apart. Here, after seventy years, Percy is the first to extend a (claw-tipped and scaled ) hand to both the DiAngelos. He draws them to their feet, away from the table, and they go willingly. Percy hugs them both and knocks his forehead against theirs because they smell like his sister, like Despoina. Preswa. Persephone.

Aides is old, but Preswa is older.

Percy sits at the table with them, Will and Katie at his back, all far too knowing to be tricked by the paltry attempts of the Lotus Eaters. He speaks. He tells them of gods and demigods and monsters and watches as the fog clouding their eyes slowly clears.

Maria DiAngelo, they say when Percy asks for their parents. The boy looks pensive, glancing down at one of the Mythomagic cards he holds.

Hades, he says, looking Percy in the eyes. Hades, God of the Underworld.

Behind the black of his eyes, Percy can make out wisps of dark green like his own. They flicker now, as he says his father's name with a frown. Like it’s only part of the answer. Hades slips off his tongue with ease, but a pause follows, as though he's still unsure.

Percy smiles and tells them of Hades’ wife because that hesitation is his assurance they are truly his kin.

(Hades is feared by humans and gods alike. He is portrayed as evil and spiteful, and yet, he may well the most honorable one of them all. When the three sons of Kronos swore on the Styx to never sire another demigod child, Hades was the only one who stayed true.

Hades loves his wife, and she, him. Persephone forgives, but does not forget the events that brought her to the underworld. She has had millennia to fall in love. The King and Queen of the Underworld are loyal, and though they have children who are purely their own, they do not have trysts without the other's knowledge.

Every now and then, there will be a human that sparks the interest of not just Hades, but Persephone as well. Gods are not human. They are not bound to the same laws of biology, and as such, Nico and Bianca carry the ichor of two gods in their veins.)

- - -

Bianca and Katie walk out the front doors of the Lotus Casino with their elbows hooked. Nico walks between Will and Percy—talks their ears off about gods and attack points and power levels (and Percy’s pretty sure he heard Will laugh.)

They have a celestial bronze knife each. Percy happily parts with the ones he picked up in the labyrinth.

When they get outside, it’s still light, and it’s still June 19th. For some of them, at least.

Nico and Bianca are hit with quite a culture shock when they realize it’s no longer mid-winter, and the year is definitely not 1942.

They have little time to take in their surroundings, though, because someone down the Strip starts screaming about an escaped animal from the zoo.

- - -

Percy is convinced they’ve been cursed by Tyche. There’s absolutely no way their fortune could be this bad to have to protect two freshly realized demigods against the f*cking Nemean Lion. The one whose pelt can’t be pierced.

Will is wonderfully skilled at many things. But for a son of Apollo, he’s utterly useless with a bow and arrow. His attempts to shoot the Lion in the mouth only seem to irritate it.

It’s barely been a day—a day—they’ve been out of the Labyrinth before they’re forced back within its suffocating walls.

However, given the options of Percy destroying Las Vegas or the Nemean Lion doing it, the Lion can have that honor.

f*ck personal responsibility. Someone else can take care of it.

- - -

Three out of the five of them are seconds away from a panic attack. Nico looks moderately uncomfortable (although it's probably more because he doesn’t know how to comfort other people who look upset).

Bianca though… Bianca has her forehead and palms pressed against the wall, her eyes closed. She looks far too calm. Percy can feel his scales hardening armor-like once more—Claws ripping past his nail beds, looking as though they drip with red lacquer.

When Bianca raises her head, she smiles and simply says, “This way.”

Will trembles as he asks her if she knows where she’s going. Her eyes look a warm amber-brown, so close to Will’s glow. Bianca takes his hand in hers and says, “Somewhere safe.”

She leads them forward with her head held high, confident enough to pacify Percy’s anxiety at least a little. Bianca is family, and it’s in his nature to trust her, but he knows the Labyrinth too, and between the two of them, he’s not sure who will win out.

- - -

They walk for less than fifteen minutes when Bianca stops, facing a blank stretch of wall. Percy can’t see what she’s looking at, but as soon as she brushes her fingers over a section before her, a blue delta lights up at her touch and opens to sunlight.

They come out of a massive boulder embedded into the side of a mountain. There’s greenery all around them and a small hiking trail to the side.

It’s then that Percy notices the two people standing on either side of them, mouths dropped open and eyes wide. They look around Percy’s age, a boy and girl wearing purple shirts and holding golden spears. Only the girl wears a helmet.

The boy, a blond with bright blue eyes and a scar on his lip, steps forward. He has a tight grip on his spear, and there’s a deep rumbling noise coming from his chest.

Percy steps forward, the sunlight gleaming off the scales that remain on his arms and neck. The boy recoils for just a moment, presumably from Percy’s appearance, and then leans forward, baring his teeth and growling at them.

The girl holds her spear in front of her friend. “Calm the f*ck down, Wolf Boy.”

It’s enough of a distraction, and Percy takes that moment to surge forward and slam the hilt of Riptide down on the growling kid's head. He crumples instantly, and the five rush back into the darkness of the Labyrinth.

“I thought you said it would be safe,” Percy hisses, swiveling to face Bianca. His entire body is tense. If she brought them here thinking it would be safe, who’s to say the Labyrinth isn’t tricking them again and will lead them off for another four months.

Bianca opens her mouth to speak but is interrupted by Katie. “Percy, maybe the next time we come across some random demigods, you should let someone without scales and claws take the lead.”

Percy thinks for a moment before groaning, “f*ck.” He knocks his head back against the wall. “They’ll never trust us now, will they?”

There’s a snort on his left. “I’m gonna say it’s highly unlikely,” Will says.

Katie turns to Bianca, “How sure are you that you can get us through this place?”

A frown forms on Bianca’s face. She places a hand against the wall. “It won’t hurt me. I can feel it.”

The surety she says it with is impressive, even to Percy. She genuinely isn’t afraid of being in the Labyrinth. How she can walk through these corridors without fear creeping under her skin, Percy doesn’t know. But Bianca is his blood, and if she says she can do it, he’ll trust her.

“Okay. Okay, that’s good,” Katie says. There’s a nervous waver in her voice, but something hopeful too. “What are the chances you can lead us to West Hollywood?”

“What’s in West Hollywood?”

Nico finally pipes up after being silent for the last several minutes. He puts his Mythomagic cards back in his pocket and looks up at Katie.

She smiles at him. “Your father’s domain. The entrance to the Underworld.”

- - -

When he’s both eleven and eighty years old, Nico learns he is a prince. A twice-over heir to a kingdom built on ash and bone and pomegranate seeds. To a place deep beneath all natural life, where the sun doesn’t shine, and hellfire lights the way.

Nico’s heritage claws at him in his sleep with rotting flesh and crackling bone. It drags him down through graves and maggots and freezing cold death. But here, in the stone corridors of the Labyrinth, walking in near darkness through the constricting halls, he can feel hairline fractures in that black ice that he dreams surrounds his soul.

Will Solace walks in front of him, a soft glow emanating from his skin, and Nico feels warm.

Chapter 8: The Underworld

Chapter Text

Bianca does not take them to West Hollywood.

She does, however, lead them to a door with a glowing black Delta. There’s a pulsing that Percy can feel behind it, and when he closes his eyes, it almost feels like coming home.

Percy Jackson, the son of Posedawone, walks into the Underworld, and for the first time in months, there’s a genuine smile painted across his face. A bloody smile, as his gums shift around the second row of teeth that began growing during their time in the Labyrinth, but it is a smile nonetheless.

The door opens to a beautiful garden full of pomegranate trees and asphodels. There’s a young woman there, kneeling in rich soil as she tends to the few budding sprouts. She smells of black roses and poppies and marigolds as they rot atop a freshly dug grave. She smells of pomegranates and death. And underneath it all, there’s the faintest scent of that ancient, feral ocean that Despoinaand Percy both inherited from their father.

But she isn’t Despoina. Not now, at least.

No, right now, she’s Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, Hades’ wife, and Maria’s lover. This is the godly mother of Nico and Bianca DiAngelo.

When she notices their presence, she freezes and blinks a few times. She says nothing because what can you say when children you haven’t seen in eighty years suddenly show up in your garden? Eventually, though, she does stand.

Persephone makes her way over to the five of them (she leaves footprints of pink and purple sprouts in her wake) until she stands before Nico and Bianca. The look in her eyes is the wild desperation of a mother reuniting with her lost children.

She cups their cheeks for just a moment, her eyes memorializing the two of them as though she's terrified they'll be taken away once more. Then, Persephone pulls them in for a hug that would likely kill a mortal. She makes no sound as she cries, but Percy can taste the saltwater that trails down her face.

It’s incredible how her children look so similar to her yet so different. The angles of their faces are nothing alike. Hers are soft and round, while the children’s are sharp and angular like their father’s. The features, however, are almost identical. They share her eye shape, her nose, her mouth. Bianca even has the same spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

The Queen of the Underworld is a goddess. She can change her appearance at will. And yet, her cheeks are flushed, and her eyes are red-rimmed as she pulls away from her children. It humanizes her in a way Percy is sure most gods would scoff at.

(She has more divinity in the tip of her finger than those gods have in their entire immortal souls.)

Katie steps forward, and her sister meets her halfway. Persephone takes Katie’s hand with her right, and with her left, she picks up Percy’s.

(He wonders if she didn’t notice how his claws drew ichor from her palm or if she simply didn’t care.)

He’s not sure what she looks like to Katie, but to him, she flickers between a young woman with golden hair and brown eyes, and an eerily tall figure, cloaked in a white veil. His sister.

“Thank you,” she says to them both. She looks at Will too. “Thank you.”

- - -

All hell breaks loose, or so to speak when they meet Hades.

It takes almost an hour of arguing between the King and Queen for all three Furies to let go of Percy. Not that they could truly hold him, but he felt humoring his “uncle” would be the best path to take.

They talk in circles and scream at each other, fighting over whether they should kill Percy for endangering their children. If Nico and Bianca should be dipped in the Lethe once more. If they should be kept in the Underworld indefinitely. Even after Percy is freed, they spend ages listening to the couple arguing over the fate of their children.

Eventually, Bianca gets fed up and ends the argument for them in less than a minute.

“If you dip us in the Lethe, I’ll make myself remember. I did it once, and I can do it again. I’ll take Nico and run, and we’ll get to Camp Half-Blood on our own.” She says, a deadly glare pinned on Hades. “It’s not a question of what you should do with us, Father. It’s a question of if you’d like to keep us alive or risk our death at our uncle's hands.”

Say what you will about the god of the Underworld, but he is fiercely protective over all his children. Almost as possessive, but not quite, as Poseidon, a god who would happily drown continents to avenge any child of his.

Hades sighs and looks at her. “You have far too much of both your mothers in you.” He steps down from the dais on which his throne sits and walks towards his children. “There will be no Lethe—”

There’s a collective breath of relief around the room.

“—But I forbid you from returning with Perseus. If my brother discovers your existence, he will stop at nothing to kill you. Your cousin will return the Bolt when he leaves my domain, I presume. You will notbe joining—”

“I’m sorry, ‘Return the bolt?’” Percy interrupts. “Why do you think we’re here, Uncle? We thought you might know who took it.”

The look on Hades’ face is one of pure confusion. Then it slowly morphs into one of irritation and then anger.

“Have you come to mock me?” He spits, hellfire raging in his eyes that Percy meets head-on. “Do you think me so stupid that I would not sense my brother’s weapon in my own domain?”

Percy is about to respond, but Katie steps in front of him before he can do so. It is probably a good thing, too, considering the ground beneath his feet is starting to shake.

“Forgive us, Lord Hades,” Katie says in a placating tone. She had a hand in front of Percy, who is moments away from trying to tear the god’s throat out with his teeth. “But we never found the Master Bolt.”

Hades’ eyes narrow as he focuses on Will, standing behind Percy and Katie. “You, boy. Open the bag you carry.”

Will frowns in confusion but holds his tongue, doing as the god says. The scent of ozone hangs in the air, and there’s a crackling noise as he zips the pack open. He looks up at his friends with wide eyes.

“What the f*ck?”

He looks down at the two-foot-long, thin metal cylinder inside, then back up. All the blood drains from Will's already pale skin, leaving it deathly white.

“What the f*ck?”

Will takes one last look at the crackling bolt and zips up the backpack haphazardly. He has a split second of panic and immediately shoves the bag in Katie’s hands.

“You’re the oldest, so you have to hold it.”

Katie throws the bag on the ground and Will leaps backward. “Are you f*cking insane? Who the f*ck throws a backpack with a literal hydrogen bombinside it?”

“You think I wanna hold it?” Katie hisses, taking a step back herself. “Percy’s the one with scales that are probably bulletproof. He should—”

“Tough scales aren’t gonna protect me when this thing explodes in my face the second we reach the surface,” Percy shouts as he throws his arms up. “Zeu—My Uncle will blow me up as soon as he has the chance.”

“So, what?” Katie asks. “You wanna just mailit to him? Drop it off at the post office and say, ‘Hey, can you please deliver this to the king of the gods at Mount Olympus?’”

“Silence!” A booming voice cuts off their arguing, and the three turn to look at Hades. The god stands there with an expression that’s somewhere between utterly baffled and murderously annoyed. He pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers. “Explain to me how in Chaos’s name did you three imbeciles manage to travel from Camp Half-Blood without realizing you had my brothers Bolt in your backpack the whole time?”

“Well, it’s not like we had these when… Oh, f*ck.” Percy trails off, meeting the eyes of Will and Katie, who seem to have the same realization as him. “Clarisse’s mom.”

Will’s voice wavers when he speaks. “I don’t… Do you really think she would do that?”

“No,” Percy says, shaking his head. “But think about it. Who would have the most to gain if war broke out?”

“Her dad,” says Katie with a frustrated look on her face. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he messed with the GPS too. If we had gotten stuck at the casino, it would’ve put the Bolt out of play long enough for a war to start.”

“Who’s her father?” Nico pipes up, tugging at Katie’s sleeve. His eyes are far too bright and excited for a conversation about divine war.

Katie grimaces. “Ares. The god of war. If Clarisse told her mom we were coming, he must’ve snuck them into the bags Mrs. LaRue packed for us—”

There’s an earsplitting finger snap from Hades’ direction, and the Furies reappear before him.

“Alecto, pay a visit to my nephew. Do not return unless you carry my Helm.”

The three Furies give a short bow and take off immediately. Then, Hades turns back to them.

“You have my thanks for bringing my children back to me. I will let you leave without harm, but don’t expect this same graciousness should we meet again.”

Percy snarls and bares his teeth. Blood drips down his lips as his gums stretch over the second row, still growing. The guttural sound makes Bianca and Nico take a step back, but Hades gives no indication of fear.

“I’m not leaving without my mother.”

Hades scoffs, his lips curling downwards. “Don’t overstep, nephew.” He narrows his eyes at Percy. “You think because my brother killed her, you’re somehow entitled to her life? Don’t make me laugh. I wouldn’t return her even if I could.”

There’s blood dripping from Percy’s palms with how deep his claws are digging into patches of unprotected flesh.

“You’re the king of the Underworld,” Percy hisses. “Snap your f*cking fingers and give. Her. Back.”

“Percy…” Katie tries to put a hand on his arm, but he wrenches it out of her grip.

“Do you have a death wish, Perseus? You should consider yourself lucky I haven’t killed you yet,” Hades whispers, his voice deadly. “Don’t mistake my graciousness for kindness. Take the bolt and leave before I change my mind.”

“Do it,” Percy says, stepping forward. Teeth bloody, and his lips drawn into a wide, mocking smile. “Kill me right now. I dare you. Either I leave with my mother, or I stay right here, and you have to deal with my father.”

Hades laughs, “Poseidon has no power in my domain. The Underworld is—”

A crazed giggle escapes Percy’s lips.

“Who do you think ruled ‘your domain’ before you even existed, Lord Hades?” Percy asks in a high-pitched voice. “My father has more power here than you ever will. I’m being graciousby asking you for permission.”

“You dare speak to me in—”

“I do dare. I have just as much a claim to the Underworld as your children do,” Percy snarls. He turns to Persephone, who’s standing several meters away. Her golden hair slowly flickers out of existence, and her smiling visage has vanished. “Isn’t that right, Sister?”

Persephone Despoina walks to Percy. Her face is obscured by a long white veil that, by all accounts, shouldbe sheer. An invisible wind shuffles it and he can see the light of the fires along the palace walls through the thin fabric, and yet, her face is fully concealed.

An ethereal mist surrounds her and Percy knows he should probably be scared, but his fear is eclipsed by the anger of being denied his mother’s return.

Her head is tilted and Percy can feel the burn of her gaze. She walks closer—no, it’s more akin to floating. Her legs do not show any signs of movement beneath the dress, the bottom of which is less of a fabric and more of a white haze that shifts unnaturally.

He can’t see her eyes, nor can he even imagine them when he wonders if they’re the same green color him and his father share. He might not see her, but Percy can tell that she’s observing him as though he’s little more than a wild animal that she’s deciding whether to put down or not. Her attempts at hiding her divinity have all but ceased, and as she stands inches away from him, he can feel it leaking into the air around her.

She cups his cheek in a mockery of Persephone’s gentle actions. Sharp nails he can feel but not see cut through the scales along his jaw until crimson blood streaked with thin lines of ichor drips to the ground.

It’s almost painful to look down at her arm, some primal instincts telling him it’s not something he’s permitted to look upon. From the corner of his eye though, he can see that the dripping blood leaves no stain on the sleeves of her dress. They simply roll across it as though it’s water over oil.

Despoina jerks his head one way. Then the other. His neck cracks from the whiplash. If he were mortal, he would already be dead. Despite this, growing waves of anger roll through him. Percy glares at her and opens his mouth.

“GIVE MOTHER. MOTHER MINE. ALIVE NOW.”

Sharp clicks and warbles echo through the throne room, bouncing off the obsidian walls. Percy tries to wrestle his head away from her but is unsuccessful. Despoina digs her nails in further, doing nothing but observing Percy from behind her veil. It’s only when she hits the bone in his jaw that she draws back and speaks.

“How did a feral little godling like you ever fool the Olympians?” She asks, finally letting go of his face. Her voice is barely a whisper, yet sharper than a knife. “You’re the spitting image of Father, and you reek of the sea almost as much as Arion. You’ve been spending too much time with him.”

Percy plasters a bloody facsimile of a smile onto his lips, “HUNT TASTY SEALS. KEEP TEETH SHARP.”

Despoina’s hand reaches out and grips his face once again. She digs a thumb into the hinge of his jaw until his mouth is forced open. The sound she makes might be a laugh, but he can’t tell without seeing her face. Regardless, it makes all the other inhabitants of the room flinch.

“Don’t tell Poseidon you’re eating the seals. Or Rhodes. She might cry,” Despoina says. She seems to look into his open mouth, observing the state of his teeth. “Cuttlefish or Blue Octopus. Assuming the poison doesn’t kill you, it’ll numb your mouth while the teeth grow in.”

Percy snarls and jerks out of the grip, snapping his teeth at her. She stands, with her head co*cked to the side, as motionless as a statue. All the movement of her clothes has died down to an unnatural stillness. Percy’s eyes flash, and he clicks, “MOTHER GIVE NOW.”

“Careful, Brother,” Despoina says. Her voice hasn’t gotten any louder, but when she speaks it feels as though there’s knife at his throat, ready to bleed him dry. “I’m not Arion. You’re not here to hunt and splash around in the water. You’re here for your mother. You want her back? Convince me.”

Percy grinds his teeth together and finally speaks English. “Do you want me to beg? Is that—”

“No, Perseus. I want you to tell me why you want your mother back and why I should return her to you.”

“She… She’s my mom,” Percy’s voice is hoarse with emotion. He’s not sure if it’s desperate anger or sadness, or both that overtake him, but the rabid, mindless fury boiling under his skin has begun to die down. “I think if she hadn’t raised me, if it had been anyone else, I would’ve ended up a monster living in the ocean. She’s the only thing keeping me human. Please. I love her. Father loves her.”

There’s a moment of silence, and then, “That…” Despoina reaches out towards his mom's ring he wears for a second before pulling her hand back. “Father gave her that? Your mother?”

Percy nods.

“It turns into a Xiphos, does it not?”

“Yeah,” Percy rasps. “It does.”

She’s silent for a moment longer, but then the air clears of a heaviness he hadn’t even noticed and the movement returns to the fabric draping around her. “It was a bracelet once. A wrist cuff. It was my mother’s.”

Percy swallows anxiously. He’s not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. He doesn’t think she’ll try to take the ring, but he curls his hand into a fist regardless. She’s quite possibly the only being he’s met who genuinely makes him nervous (other than his mother when he gets blood on his clothes).

Despoina turns to Hades, tall enough that her head is almost angled down at the god.

“Should he convince the Styx, you will return the boy's mother to him. Alive.”

Hades hesitates for a moment before deciding an argument with a goddess ages older than him isn’t a good idea. His lips curl, and his gaze burns with hatred towards Percy, but he nods.

“Your mother is kept here by the will of the Styx, as payment for the broken oath of a god. If you—”

“Poseidon was the one who made the oath!” Percy shouts. “How is that fair when—”

“If you can convince her, I will see your mother freed,” Despoina says, cutting off Percy’s interruption. “I won’t offer you any more meaningless oaths, but a word of advice: She will offer no mercy, but that does not mean she isn’t willing to bargain.”

Percy doesn’t say thank you. He won’t. His mother was never theirs to take. It is his rightto bring her back alive. He does, however, give her a nod. Percy hasn't decided if he likes her yet. But he thinks he at least respects her, especially in comparison to the current “King of the Underworld.”

He walks over to the spot on the ground that both his friends are avoiding looking at and takes the backpack that Zeus’s bolt is still humming in. He shoves his own in Will’s hand, and grimaces as the smell of ozone around him grows.

Ignoring Hades, he walks over to Nico and Bianca, who still look stunned by his exchange with their kinda-but-not-reallymother.

"Ask Lady Persephone to show you how to send an Iris Message to 'Percy Jackson at Camp Half-blood,'" He tells them as he draws them in for a hug. He’s known them for less than a day, but he can already feel their absence like a missing limb. Percy attempts (fails miserably) to crack a smile. “If I’m not dead by tomorrow, call me anytime.”

“Thanks, Percy! You’re awesome,” Nico says with a carefree grin before rushing over to wrap his arms around Will like a koala. There’s a snort from Persephone when her son pauses and decides he should probably give his cousins a quick hug too.

Bianca has an odd frown on her face that Percy ignores in favor of a goodbye, knocking his scaled forehead against hers. He cracks a crooked smile when she hisses and pulls back with a scowl to rub at the red spot on her head.

“Worst cousin ever.”

“Maybe you just need scales.”

Before Bianca can respond, her mother pulls Percy to the side. Her smile is nothing like his sister's—it’s warm and caring and almost reminds him of his mom’s.

“You’re a good son, Perseus,” Persephone says, golden-haired with a crown of bone and asphodels. Her eyes crinkle in the corners when she smiles. “You have a lot of your father in you, but your mother raised you well.”

“Thank you, Lady Persephone.”

“I think I should like to meet her one day,” she says thoughtfully. A hand is waved in front of Percy’s face, and he can feel the drying blood vanish. “Not now, of course. But perhaps in the near future.”

An almost-burning hand is placed on his shoulder—Will’s—drawing him away from the conversation.

“We should get going, Percy,” he says, glancing over at Katie’s watch. Percy’s blue (almost brown now from all the dirt and blood covering it) backpack is slung over both shoulders, his quiver nowhere to be seen. Before he can ask, though, he sees a silver glint from the corner of his eye.

Will’s quiver hangs on Bianca’s back, and she looks incredibly focused, studying something on the bottom limb of the bow. Percy’s seen it often enough that he knows she’s looking at the small imprint of a leaping bull inlaid into the silver.

“We all know I’m awful,” Will huffs. “I figured she might have better aim than me.”

Katie joins the two of them. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Percy responds, shuddering at the static electricity inside his backpack. His head turns to face left, and he closes his eyes. He can hear the waters of the Styx rushing from that direction. “Let’s go.”

With Katie and Will at his sides, Percy follows the tugging in his chest that he knows will bring him to the ancient waters of the River Styx—the unforgiving goddess who learned her cruelty at his father’s knee. One whose anger and wrath have spent millennia festering in the broken oaths the gods drop at her feet.

Perhaps her loyalty still lies with Posedawone. Perhaps it does not.

It matters not to Percy.

Sally Jackson will be coming back if it means he has to wade through the River and drag her out of the Underworld himself.

Chapter 9: You are neither dead nor dying

Chapter Text

“Do you fear death, Perseus Jackson?”

Lady Styx stands before her river. There is an otherworldly elegance to her that reminds him of his sister. She stands tall, with black hair spilling in rivulets down her shoulders.

The surface of her river shines with a murky, oily iridescence that hurts to look at. His heart aches, and the deepest, most ancient parts of him scream at the gods for how sullied it is. Thousands of years of broken oaths lie in these waters—A divine oil spill that will only worsen as the centuries pass.

“Do you fear judgment from the Lord of the Dead? All those sins laid bare. All your deeds punished? Does it frighten you, knowing the inevitability of death?”

It takes all of Percy’s self-control to keep himself from snapping. It was a simple question he asked. He only wanted to know if she would trade his mother’s life for him. He could care less about her useless musings on death.

He’s already given her his sand dollar, which he now understands his father gave him for this very purpose. She had received one from Poseidon’s hand upon Percy’s birth as an apology, he’s learned. Poseidon is not his father, and yet he still came and begged for the curse to be taken out on himself rather than Sally or Percy. Prepared to be cursed for eternity to save the two of them.

Percy is not Poseidon. He is not immortal and undying. Percy has but one thing to offer as an equal trade. He has his own life, for the one of his mother.

"No," Percy growls. "Now, are you willing to trade or not?"

Her previously restrained nature disappears before he can finish spitting his words, his disrespect leaving her suddenly enraged. Percy struggles not to fall to his knees as a heavy blanket of violence and wrath and hatred weighs over him relentlessly.

- - -

Lady Styx has spent millennia stewing in anger, fed nothing but lies and broken oaths as her waters were slowly poisoned, word by word. Percy's responses boil within her, taunting and pushing with each act of disrespect until her rage threatens to emerge like the waves of a tsunami. She is the sudden surge of deadly water, unseen and unnoticed until she has already engulfed you. Until she has ravaged your body and torn it to shreds, leaving nothing but the marrow of your bones for vultures to feast on.

A controlled and even flow, that is what she shouldbe. Steady. Reliable. She should have crystal clear waters. Transparent and trustworthy,so that when one swears on her, the other knows the weight of the promise will be upheld. She must not waver, save for the occasional swelling and crash upon her banks as she reins in a broken oath to collect the payment she is owed.

But mortals make no more oaths on the Styx, barring the demigods that pale in number to the worshipers the gods once relied on. All that's left are the words of immortals who make claims they'll never keep and push off punishment because they believe themselves untouchable.

She is left humiliated, wrenching what scraps of justice she can with her oily fingers while the liars escape her grasp like eels.

They do not fear her as they once did, save for those who truly know. For the ones who remember exactlywho she once was. These are the few who see the resentment churning in her waters and know that one day, there will be a reckoning, and only those who have sought atonement will escape the wrath of the River Styx.

She will drag the oath-breakerskicking and screaming and beggingas their divinity fails beneath the waves of her polluted river. She will rip the penance from every drop of ichor in their bodies and let her resentment spur her onwards. Retribution will be paid to her in blood.

But not today.

Today, she stands before someone more god than boy, yet thinks himself more monster than human. She looks down at Perseus Jackson with her blood-red eyes and an oscillating mood that can only be matched by the child's not-quite-father.

Lady Styx rages at the world. At its unfairness, and at the lies and the broken promises that hang in the air, tauntingher. Fed by her desire for penance, her temper whips from barely restrained sadism and manic fury that only further erodes her riverbank by the cresting of the waters. They thrash in uncontrolled rage, black scum rising in an unintended mockery of seafoam.

One moment she is wrath incarnate, and the next, she's bone-chilling anger—hollow, deadly silence as the surface of her river stills like glass.

She looks at him. Truly looks at him to see who he is and who he can become. She glimpses the thoughts at the forefront of his mind and laughs, gloriously unrestrained.

He is so contradictory to every other being that has stood before her. A mortal who does not fear death, but life.Who dreads the idea of cutting into his skin one day and finding nothing but molten gold.

He clings to his mother. To his few friends. A boy intelligent enough to understand the loneliness of eternity but still too naive, or perhaps simply stubborn, to acknowledge its inevitability. He barely sees himself as human but despises the idea of divinity nonetheless. Instead, he thinks of the creatures he feasted on inside the Labyrinth and contemplates if it was cannibalism. The godling is still young and does not understand that teeth and claws do not make a monster.

But there is something about the boy—an unwavering glint that shows her what she already knows. That anger that simmers below his skin. The way he seethes and imagines tearing off the head of Zeus Kronides,as though it will return his mother to him.

No, teeth and claws and scales alone do not make a monster. But she sees the desire for vengeance. For someone to pay for the crimes against him and his. Lady Styx sees herself in the boy's eyes, and she wants.

She wants to carve him like a piece of marble in her own image. Wants to muzzle him and place a leash of Adamantine around his neck. She wants to give him a sword made from her headwaters that still lie in the Ancient Lands and set him like a bloodhound upon each and every oath-breaker whose words sully her river.

Lady Styx deals in promises and truths and bargains of equivalence. The boy offers his own life for his mothers, and she can only laugh in unrestrained fury at his audacityto try and escape true punishment.

"A broken oath is a broken oath. Someone must pay the price, and if you don't fear death, then where is the penance I am owed?”

- - -

Percy's mouth opens at her words. It closes. Then opens again, not knowing what to say. He doesn't know what else there is to bargain. His life should have been enough, but he can feel the malevolence coming off of her and begins to think what cruel suffering of his own he can offer to regain his mother.

"I've seen your heart," Styx says. She moves closer to Percy, and it is now he sees she is not just the goddess of the river. She isthe river.

Her hair flows like tar and makes ripples in a watery dress that swirls with her raging currents. The gown radiates malice and regret, made of the cracked apart and broken words of all the sinners in the world.

"Would you like me to tell you what you fear?"

Percy wonders if this is how his mother felt all those times listening to him talk to Arion. But rather than single-minded fear, every word strikes a chord of sheer ragealongside the dread. Her voice is similar to Despoina's in that his mind screams 'DANGER' at the very thought of interrupting her.

"Loneliness. Immortality. You fear the gold that runs in your veins, terrified for the day your blood might turn to ichor, damning you to outlive the few people you've learned to love," she says.

Water is Percy's domain, yet the way those words sound—like the tip of a steel sword scraped over frozen, wrathful waves—makes Percy's heart stop cold.

Styx continues. "There will come a time, godling, when you will return to ask me for my blessing. You will bathe in my waters while I strip your flesh raw and grind your bones into dust. I will sew you skin of iron and make you anew, layer by layer."

River water swirls in her eye sockets, absorbing all light that hits it. There's an unsympathetic glee in her words. Feral excitement that he doesn't quite understand. The water storms behind her, shrieking as it hits the obsidian bank.

"From the day you come to me, you will have a year. A year to laugh with your friends and to kiss your lovers. A year you will have to fight your enemies, and then, when it is up, you shall fight mine."

Percy doesn't respond. He just stands, seething, while his hand shake in unusually restrained rage.

"Twelve years.Twelve yearsI have granted you lenience at the request of Lord Poseidon, but no longer," she hisses, her voice echoing the sounds of the water rushing through the narrowest strips of the riverbed. "After you carry my blessing, when your term of freedom is up, you will answer to me before all others. A decade for every year of mercy I've given you will be your price. Your loyalty will be mine. For no less than one-hundred-and-twenty years, you will be my sword—the executioner of my will and the enforcer of my oaths—sworn to me, and me alone. This is your penance, Perseus Jackson. This is my bargain.”

Percy does all he can to keep calm. One-hundred-and-twenty years is a long time, but it’s not eternity. He hates to admit it, but it could have been a far worse price. He isn’t being damned to immortality. After the years are up, he’ll be able to join his family and friends in the Underworld.

Katie steps forward to stand next to Percy, shoulder to shoulder. On his left, Will does the same. Their familiar scents calm him enough to get his breathing under control.

“And if he doesn’t come for your blessing?” Katie asks, lacing her fingers with Percy's and squeezing twice.

The currents in the black dress froth and her eyes swirl like the infinite whirlpools in the waters of her river. Yet, she remains unblinking, as she has done throughout their entire conversation regardless of her anger.

“He will. It is written. He will come to me for skin of iron, and after a year, he shall be mine,” Styx says, malice quickly entering her voice. “And should he break his oath, I will claim his soul for all eternity, and he will come to beg for the mercy of death at the hands of Chaos.”

“If I agree,” Percy says slowly, trying to reconcile with himself that he’s actually about to do this. “You’ll free my mother?”

Styx inclines her head in agreement. The corners of her lips quirk into a cruelly satisfied smile. “Queen Persephone shall see your mother returned safely.”

Percy takes a deep breath. It’s not forever, and his mother will be alive. He breathes out.

“I agree to your terms. I swear it on the Styx.”

The River smiles.

- - -

The three demigods leave the riverbank without speaking. They walk towards the Doors of Orpheus. The gifted pearls sit unused at the bottom of the backpack Will carries.

Nearing the exit, they walk by the River Lethe, and something in Percy tells him to stop. He looks around, noticing a large spring and a white Cypress tree. However, farther down to the right, past the Lethe, Percy sees a thin stream and a pool of water.

A woman is sitting on a small rock, facing Percy’s direction. Even from the distance, he can feel her piercing gaze as though she’s picking him apart and looking at him from the inside out. He’s never seen her, never even been to the Underworld before. And yet, he swearshe knows her.

He can’t tell for sure due to the distance, but he thinks he sees her mouthing some words. Barely a few seconds later, he feels a light breeze blow over him, along with a very slight spray of water from her little spring. The smallest droplets touch his lips and the water tastes sweet when he licks them off.

Katie breaks him from his reverie, taking his hand and pulling him along to the exit. Towards the surface of the mortal world. Towards Olympus and their inevitable judgment by the King of the Gods.

The bolt weighs heavy on his back, and Percy just hopes his friends make it out of this alive.

Chapter 10: Stop Eating The Seals

Chapter Text

Growing up, Percy knew fear. Not in himself, no. But in others, most certainly.

His mom taught him kindness and love. Arion taught him to feel pride in his differentness. But people? Humans? They taught him fear and its many faces.

At the hands of his classmates, Percy learned its many expressions. From widening eyes to shaking shoulders to the subtle flinches when he opened his mouth too wide. And while adults may have been able to mask their faces, they couldn’t hide their scents, so it was the teachers who taught him not just how it looked, but how it smelled too.

Those same adults that were meant to nurture and care for him were the same ones who taught him the staleness of anxiety and the way it would grow into something putrid and nauseating. When their hearts raced, and their breathing grew louder, Percy would find himself in the infirmary, retching into a trashcan at the scent of their fear.

At every new school, Sally would introduce him to the nurses and pass them a small bag with oils of peppermint and frankincense and lavender.

“Hyperosmia,” she would say to prepare them for Percy’s fits of nausea. She would kiss her son on the forehead, and he would smile back like she had hung the moon. The nurses would bite back the fear, unable to help their cooing at this sickly boy who loved his mother so.

The teachers taught him anxiety. Fear. Dread.

The nurses taught him pity and concern.

But hatred? Percy learned that all on his own, spurred on by the girls who would talk behind his back and the boys who would hide his gym clothes. The teachers who whispered about how he’d never amount to anything and did nothing to stifle the laughter rippling through the class when it was Percy’s turn to read aloud.

They taught him cruelty and hatred and disdain. Not how its many faces looked or how it smelled on others. They taught him what it felt like inside. How it gripped his chest and rotted in his soul, with only the love of his mother to soothe him.

Bouncing from school to school, finding new bullies everywhere he went, Percy thought he knew what true hatred was. He was wrong.

- - -

Percy stands in the throne room of Olympus, glaring at the floor and ignoring the drip drip dripof his blood on the marble. He digs his claws into his palms and holds his ground, lest he does something foolish and damns Will and Katie along with him.

He stands with a rose vine wrapped around his calf, grown by Katie to pull him down when he was too slow to kneel before the King. He feels the disgust rising like bile in his throat at the ease with which Katie drops to one knee and lays the bolt before their uncle’s feet. If it weren’t for the tightness in her posture, Percy would not even notice the anger she hides inside.

He stands before the Lord of the Skies. Before Olympus personified. He stands and he bleeds and he learns true hatred.

Looking back, it’s laughable to think that his insignificant mortal schoolmates could have taught him hatred. Because looking up at the electric blue eyes of the god who killed his mother, Percy hates.

He looks up at his uncle and craves the taste of his cooling ichor. He wants to rip out the useless, godly heart in his chest and eat it raw. He wishes—oh, how he wishes—that Zeus had something as precious to him as Sally, so that Percy could take it away before spitting on the gods dying mortal shell.

Watching their exchange, Percy makes a mental note to find Katie a gift worthy of thanks for her ability to bullsh*t better than a child of Hermes. She spins a beautifully believable tale of finding the backpack with a pair of older demigods within the Labyrinth.

“They must have had some training in magic to hide the bolt inside. I swear on the Styx, none of us knew it was there until we reached the Underworld.”

And it was true. None of them did know. They did not even suspect.

“And did it never occur to you that perhaps my brother was playing you for a fool? That this was his way of escaping punishment for the theft?” Zeus asks. The scent of ozone thickens upon those words, and Percy feels his hair stand on end. It’s only due to Will’s iron grip on his wrist that he stays calm.

“No, my King,” Katie replies smoothly. “His Helm had been stolen as well. He almost killed us himself when he sensed it in the other bag we took from them.”

In the end, though, it works, so Percy won’t be the one to complain. He doubts it would’ve ended well for any of them had they tried to pin it on Ares without evidence.

Truth be told, he doubts they would have survived at all if he were allowed to speak. But on the elevator ride to the six-hundredth floor, it was made crystalclear that Percy was not to say a word unless spoken to. Katie had led the way into the throne room, holding the backpack with the master bolt.

Only when Zeus leaves does Percy allow himself to relax. He closes his eyes and lets out the tremors of anger he’s been suppressing the entire time. When he opens his eyes, Poseidon stands before him with a poorly concealed smile. The god waves his hand and fixes the newly formed hairline cracks in the marble.

“You did well, Perseus.”

Percy nods stiffly in response. He’s not quite sure what to say. On the one hand, this isn’t his father. Not really. But on the other, it isthe god who fell in love with his mom.

“She’s alive,” Percy says. “Mom, I mean.”

Poseidon’s smile softens, and a nostalgic look grows in his eyes as he glances down at the ring on Percy’s finger.

“Your mother is a queen among women,” he says wistfully. Then he looks back up at Percy, his sea-green eyes meeting hellfire that’s both his and isn’t. Poseidon sighs. “You are not my son, but you area child of the seas, and you are Sally’s. Should you need help, Atlantis will give it.”

Percy stays quiet for a moment. He takes a breath, then exhales. “And mom? Would that extend to her too?”

Poseidon frowns, confused. “Of course,” he says. “Why would it think otherwise?”

A beat of silence. “I’m a bastard, and mom’s not your real wife. Or his. I don’t think your son or Queen Amphitrite would appreciate our presence there.”

A sharp wind cuts through the Olympus throne room for a moment before settling. Poseidon’s eyes look stormy at the words. Not angry, but perhaps irritated.

“Pray tell, Perseus, what in Chaos’s name would make you think that?”

Percy glances away, silently begging Will or Katie to notice his uncomfort and save him. But they are both as preoccupied with Apollo and Demeter as he is with Poseidon.

He looks back sheepishly. “It’s pretty well known that most goddesses don’t take kindly to their husbands sleeping with mortal women. And I’m sure Prince Triton doesn’t like the idea of a demigod even if I’m not threatening his position as your heir.”

Poseidon exhales loudly and rubs his temples. It’s odd to see a god perform such a human action despite being thousands of years old.

“Yes, well, Hera won’t be winning stepmother of the year anytime soon, but you shouldn’t use her as the model to judge all goddesses.” Then Poseidon scowls. “Amphitrite has been nagging me to meet your mother for years.”

Percy’s mouth drops. “What?”

“As if I’d ever let them meet. She denies it, my wife, but I know she’d try to steal your mother from me,” Poseidon says, looking jealousof all things. Some things are better left unsaid, and Percy immediately regrets opening this can of worms. “Perhaps it’s true Amphitrite has some dislike for you—”

Percy’s brows furrow in confusion. “But you just said she’s not like Hera.”

“Percy, she dislikes you for the same reason she dislikes Arion.”

The sentence is said as though it’s supposed to clarify her distaste for him. It does not. If anything, it only serves to confuse Percy even more.

Poseidon snorts at Percy’s lost expression, “You do realize my wife is the creator of seals? She holds no grudges against my demigod children. She does, however, hold grudges against the ones who have a habit of hunting and feasting on one of her sacred animals.”

His mind is spinning. A thousand thoughts fly through all at once, but the only thing he can manage is, “But… But Arion said their bones are good for sharpening my teeth.”

Poseidon barks out a laugh that echoes through the throne room. It’s one most mortals would flinch at, but to him, it’s a comforting sound that makes him feel more at home than any words could.

“I think, Percy, that Arion enjoys having a brother to hunt with. Chaos knows he’s grown bored on his own.”

“So… no seals?” Percy asks sadly. He knows he should focus more on the Amphitrite issue, but something in his hindbrain is mourning despondently at the potential loss of seals as a food source.

“Perhaps in the future, stick to something other than seals or dolphins. And a few offerings would not be remiss,” Poseidon chuckles. Then he pauses for a moment to think before speaking. “I have… a daughter. Kymopoleia. To say we’re estranged would be an understatement, but you might consider an offering to her as well. I think you would enjoy her company, and she, yours. She might even be able to teach you to control your powers rather than allowing them to control you.”

The sudden shift in topic drapes a heaviness over them that had been missing from the conversation thus far. It reminds him of his mother, and the ache to see her returns like a knife in his chest.

“I know we’re meant to return to camp after this, but….” Percy trails off, trying to find a way to ask the favor. “I haven’t—Could you—”

Poseidon smiles. “You need only ask, child. I’d be happy to take you to your mother.”

Percy breathes a shuddering sigh of relief. He barely remembers saying goodbye to his friends, with his mind suddenly focused on seeing his mother again. A cool hand is placed on his shoulder, and the next moment he’s standing on the beach outside his mom’s cabin in Montauk.

Later, he’ll look back and wonder how long he blacked out because somehow he goes from staring at the front door to sobbing into his mother’s neck in the middle of the kitchen.

Her arms are just as warm as he remembers. Just as strong and comforting. She smells of lavender and the same fruity shampoo she’s used for years. Then, just when his tears begin to taper off, the scent of chocolate chip cookies wafts through the kitchen, and he’s crying again in full force.

He’s not sure how many days passed for his mom, but it’s been roughly five months for him. With tears still blurring his vision, he pulls back and looks at her. Percy’s eyes trail over every inch of her face, halfway convinced she’s a hallucination.

Sally smiles and strokes a thumb over the scales that cover his arms. One of her hands pushes back the hair from his face, so much shorter than when she last would have seen it.

“You cut your hair,” is the first thing she’s able to say besides his name.

“Yeah. Just before we started the quest,” Percy says with a wet cough. Smiling, but unable to keep the tears away for long. “For Apollo.”

Percy buries his face in her neck, fingers clutching onto her shirt like he’s terrified of her being taken away again. Then, there’s a sharp inhale from his mom, and she pulls back slightly. Her eyebrows are somewhat furrowed, but a gentle smile remains on her face as she carefully pulls his hands away from where his claws dig into her torso.

He doesn’t even have a chance to panic, though, because suddenly Poseidon is there, waving his hand and getting rid of the few cuts Percy noticed. There’s a lump in his throat that he can’t seem to swallow.

“You know I love you, right, Percy? Every part of you,” she says softly. She laces one hand with his and places the other on his cheek, over the blue scales. Her eyes glimpse down at his mouth, and her lips quirk into a smile. “Although, I hope you know you’ll be brushing your teeth twice as long. I think Arion might get sad if you had to stop hunting with him because of cavities.”

Percy snorts, his heart lightening at his mom’s words. He looks up at Poseidon without a shred of guilt in his eyes. “Well, it’s not like I can hunt seals anymore, so I don’t think it matters much.”

He sees Poseidon roll his eyes before telling his mom, “We spoke of Amphitrite. She has no quarrel with you, my love. She does, however, dislike it when her sacred animals are killed for sport.”

Percy wrinkles his nose at the way his mom turns red. He pulls himself out of her arms and moves to where one of the many batches of stress-baked cookies is resting. His mom and Poseidon speak to each other quietly while Percy busies himself with the blue cookies.

Thinking back to what Poseidon told him earlier, he turns the gas stove on to highand carefully drops a perfectly circular cookie into the flame.

Lady Amphitrite, please accept this offering as an apology for, um… eating your sacred animals sometimes… I didn’t know they were yours and I’m really sorry. I promise I won’t eat them in the future. Or dolphins. But please don’t get mad at me if I chase them. They’re just—

“Ow!” Percy hisses and slaps a hand over his ankle, the skin red and stinging as though it’s been pinched by a crab. “Fine, no chasing them either.”

Scowling, Percy drops another cookie into the gas flame. This time for Kymopoleia. And then one more for Hermes, thanking him for his help on their quest.

He’s about to make an offering to Apollo when he hears his name being called. His mother is alone in the kitchen, Poseidon nowhere to be found. It’s an odd feeling, being conflicted over whether or not he should be upset or not. Poseidon isn’t his father. He has no duty or obligation towards Percy, but it’s still disappointing that the god would leave without a word to him.

“Percy, you know he’d stay if he could,” Sally says, stroking his hair. “Sometimes saying goodbye is harder than saying nothing at all.”

“It’s alright,” Percy says with a shrug. If his voice wavers at all, his mom doesn’t call him out for it. He smiles up at her, both rows of teeth on display, bleeding gums and all. “You’re alive, mom. That’s all that matters.”

- - -

Percy is at camp for half a day. Half a f*cking day.He gets four measly hours of peace with his friends before discovering Kronos might be rising and having a Pit Scorpion set on him by one of Hermes’ kids.

- - -

He’s on fire. He must be. Every inch of him is screaming in pain. He can’t move. Can’t breathe. Can’t think. Nothing exists but the sensation of his limbs being torn off all at once.

He’s weightless. Floating. Everything hurts. His chest is twisting in on itself, stuffed full of glowing coals that brand him from the inside out. A thousand blades cut into his skin, and his lungs pray for release. For freedom.

Regret floods him when he opens his mouth to scream, and freezing hot water rushes in. The weight of the ocean bears down on him, forcing him down, deeper and deeper into Poseidon’s clutches.

He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

The ocean taunts and cackles, and Lady Styx tightens the shackles of his oath. The sharks feast on his flesh, tearing him limb from limb. Thanatos hovers above him, watching impassively and waiting until there’s nothing left but his scorched soul.

A familiar voice that he can’t quite place echoes in his mind. Over and over again, it says one word as it waits for him to drown.

OathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreakerOathbreaker.

Chapter 11: Chapter 10.5 (Sea of Monsters)

Chapter Text

-Annabeth is the one who realizes Grover is in danger

-Quest includes Percy, Tyson, Annabeth and Clarisse. The prophecy implies that they’ll need pearls he never used from the last quest, so they go to Percy & Sally’s (new) apartment in Manhattan

Prophecy:

A journey clandestine, doomed to have four,

The fleece of a brother gives his blessing once more,

An old boon never used, only three shall not burn,

A libation of blood, for the sea’s swift return.

-They steal a boat from Chelsea Piers and go through basically the canon monsters (Scylla & Charybdis, Sirens, Circe’s Island, etc), though it’s a touch easier since most ocean monsters see Percy as sibling-adjacent. The guinea pig thing does not happen.

-Annabeth, Clarisse and Grover get back to CHB from Polyphemus’s Island using the pearls. Tyson gets the fleece back with Rainbow the hippocampus. Percy ends up hitching a ride from Arion after bleeding in the ocean and invoking his name

-Fleece magic happens and Thalia’s back. She stays at camp for a few weeks to heal/rest and then ends up moving in with Percy & Sally

-Luke and the Princess Andromeda plotline DOES NOT TAKE PLACE. This means that Percy only finds out about Luke gathering Kronos’s forces after the quest in an IM message with Tyson (the one originally in Titan’s Curse)

-Percy doesn’t have the same connection canon!Percy had to Kronos. This means no excessively helpful demigod dreams. Although he goes get a healthy serving of recurring dreams in which he has fun drowning.

Chapter 12: The Calm Before The Storm

Chapter Text

Percy’s standing in a drab, faded-looking dorm room. There are a pair of beds and a small desk bookending each one. His surroundings flicker like static on an old television—the unmistakable markings of a demigod dream.

Although, the setting is far more mundane than he’s used to. Not that he particularly minds. He’ll take whatever this is over nightmares of drowning and getting lost within the darkness of the Labyrinth.

All of a sudden, his musing is cut short as he’s barreled onto the floor by… by Bianca, of all people.

Her arms latch around him in a suffocating hug. He’s sure if this weren’t a dream, he’d be struggling to breathe by now.

Bianca’s voice is tinny and muffled when she speaks, her face buried into the crook of Percy’s neck. “Gods, I’ve been trying to get through for months,” she says with a laugh before letting go of him.

Percy sits up and grins at his cousin. She looks almost the same as when he last saw her nearly five months ago, save for the slight crease between her brows—the only outward indication of unease.

“Hecate finally taught you, then?”

Bianca rolls her eyes, and there’s a note of bitterness in her voice when she responds. “I stopped asking in November. She wasn’t going to teach me,” she shrugs her shoulders. “So I figured it out myself.”

He pauses. Blinks.

Then, when he manages to process her words, “You taught yourselfhow to control the Mist in a month?”

A smug smile tugs at her lips. Somehow, he’s not at all surprised that Bianca would be the one to figure it out. She and Nico had taken to their demigod powers like fish to water. She was better at summoning the dead than her brother, but in terms of shadow travel, he outclassed her by miles.

“I’m not good enough to do all this,” Bianca gestures to the room around them, “… on my own, but I think Melinoë finally got tired of my prayers.”

Percy winces at the mention of her half-sister. He’s about to mention his nightmares when movement catches his attention.

Following his gaze, Bianca narrows her eyes and glares at the flickering bed. It takes a few moments, but finally, it solidifies, looking mostly stable. She pokes the frame a few times and smiles when it stays visible, then pulls Percy up with her so they’re no longer sitting on the floor.

“So,” she says, sitting cross-legged and rocking back and forth. “How’s Katie doing?”

She’s smiling, but Percy can see the loneliness and desperation that’s been edging its way in for the past few months. He’s not surprised. He’s still furious that the condition for her and Nico to rejoin the mortal world had been banning all communication between them and Percy, Katie, and Will.

Percy understands that Hecate has no power over Iris Messages outside of the Underworld. That contacting them could bring unwanted attention or even expose them as children of Persephone and Hades rather than Persephone alone. But he misses them more than he ever thought possible. Will’s been in a slump since his and Nico’s last IM back in September, no amount of sun able to cheer him up, and Katie had been ready to storm the Underworld herself to give its King a piece of her mind.

Percy was no better. A large part of him ached to tear his uncle’s throat out with his teeth for keeping them away and isolated—a part that called Nico and Bianca his, itching to spirit them away. To keep them close and protect them himself.

(He takes that part of him and shoves it down. Deep down where his dragon-like greed can’t harm anyone.)

“She’s been banned from the strawberry fields since October,” Percy snorts, digging his claws into his palms and hoping the pain keeps the anger and greedlonging off his face. “Mr. D yelled at her to stop moping, so she flipped him off and covered every inch of Camp in strawberry plants.”

Bianca chokes on a laugh, “Oh my gods, I wish I could’ve seen that.”

“We spent a good month with them everywhere until she got irritated with us ‘trampling the poor plants’ and cleared out some spots.”

Her smile fades along with her laughter quickly. Frustration and bitterness overtake her expression. Bianca twists around and flops face-first onto the bed, shoving her face into a limp-looking pillow. Undecipherable noises come from her direction, muffled but clearly irritated.

“Can’t hear you,” Percy lilts, pulling out Riptide and tossing it at her head gently. Not that he needs to hear her words. He knows exactly why she’s upset.

She stifles a curse into the pillow before whipping around to throw the pen back in his face—then follows it up with the pillow. “I said it’s not fair that Father won’t let us go to camp when you and Thalia can both be there.”

Before he can respond, Bianca speaks once more.

“We’ve gotten along with Macaria and Melinoë, and they know to say we’re only Mother’s children. The Erinyes are the only others who know the whole truth, and they would never betray Father. The rest of the Underworld is too terrified of Mother to question it. And even if they did, Nico and I were both born when she would have been in the Underworld and it’s not lying to say Mama is a dead mortal and for all they know we could’ve been hidden in the Palace the whole time and—”

“Bianca.”

She ignores her name, speaking over him like she never heard it. “There’s no reason we shouldn’t be allowed to go to camp. I know he wants to keep us safe, but when we asked to go to a mortal school, I didn’t think it would be a stupid military one with only Tisiphone and Thorn here. Macaria visits sometimes, but it’s so boring here, Percy. I’d rather be in the Fields of Punishment than listen to the teachers drone on about history and a World War that I probably know better than them. At least Tisiphone makes anatomy interesting, but Thorn makes me want to gouge my eardrums out with a blunt fork.”

Percy winces at the comparison, twisting Riptide through his fingers awkwardly. “At least the Fury’s probably teaching you the best ways to kill someone, right?” He pauses for a moment before asking, “Who’s Thorn? You haven’t mentioned him before.”

Bianca tenses, her weight shifting uncomfortably. She doesn’t like him. That much is obvious. “A Manticore. Father had him teaching Nico last year. Well, Alecto was teaching Nico. Thorn was the pincushion.”

“Did he do something to Nico?” Percy asks. His voice is sharp, and his knuckles are white around Riptide. “If he hurt him, I swear on the Styx I’ll tear him to pieces.”

“No. Nothing. If anything, Nico liked him,” Bianca bites out. “It’s just that….”

The silence sits heavy between them, and it’s several minutes before Bianca speaks again.

Percy knows the look on her face intimately well. It’s one he’s seen in the mirror his entire childhood. Back when loneliness and isolation had been his two closest friends. He says nothing and waits for her to speak.

“I miss my brother,” she admits finally, wringing her hands together. “It’s always been the two of us. And I get it. I do. He’s loved Mythomagic for so long, and to find out it’s not just a game… learning to fight is important to him. Some of Lady Artemis’s old hunters have been teaching me how to use Will’s bow. He’s not the only one who wants to fight. But after a few months with Thorn, he started going off alone. To fight some skeletons or to spar with souls in Elysium. I don’t know. But he was gone all the time, practicing. And now at Westover, we can’t shadow-travel and we’re in different classes and different dorms and we only ever see each other at meals and on free weekends—”

Her ranting is cut off by Percy’s arms suddenly wrapping around her. After a moment of silence, she hugs him back. “You guys make Camp sound so great, and even if the Hermes cabin is as crowded as you say it is, at least we’d be together.”

Percy thinks back to the campfires he spent plotting with Katie and Will. Kidnapping rescuing them had always been a hypothetical scenario. They knew the siblings were sent to a mortal school, but not where it was nor its name. Iris Messages didn’t work, and they had no way of locating them. But now…

“Westover. Is that the name of the school?”

“Westover Hall. Looks like a castle for a black knight to live in.” Her voice sounds distant. Tinnier than before. Almost as though they’re speaking through a poorly connected telephone. A side glance confirms his fear: The most of the room is flickering, fading in and out of whatever dream space Bianca holds together.

“Where is it?”

She pulls back for a moment, freezing when she sees the static seeping into the dream. Her fists clench as she tries to focus her breathing and stop the room from collapsing. She doesn’t answer him.

“Bianca, listen to me.” Percy raises his voice, trying to speak over the buzz that’s slowly increasing in volume. He tightens his hands around her shoulders and briefly hopes his claws aren’t hurting her. “The school. Where is it?”

Her eyes widen as she realizes his reason for asking. “Maine,” she says, shouting over the buzz. He can barely see her now, but he can still hear her. Just barely. “It’s in Maine. Bar Har—”

- - -

He’s drowning again. There’s water burning his lungs and pressure bearing down on his shoulders as though he holds the weight of the world. Nothing but betrayal and pain and heat and a ceaseless high-pitched scream. A child’s scream.

He’s terrified. He’s in pain. He doesn’t know if the fear is his. He doesn’t think it is.

Something inside his chest is scorching. Tearing. Clawing its way out in an inferno of pain.

He wants to die. Why won’t he die?

Blurred by the raging waves ripping at his flesh, Thanatos waits above, scythe in hand. There is no mercy in his eyes.

Only hellfire.

Chapter 13: Who's To Take The Blame?

Chapter Text

Inside the dark, gloomy castle of a school, under skies that have not seen the sun in weeks, ninety-sixninety-three mortal children sit in a gymnasium and complain of heat. The teachers tell them the furnace has broken, and they’ve sent for an electrician to ensure there’s no faulty wiring. In the meantime, they are all required to stay in one place, so keeping an eye on them is easier. However irritated they are, all the students comply. All but one.

A red-headed girl with charcoal-smudged fingers is given detention for arguing the mechanics of a furnace and how a broken one would never cause this much heat. The teachers stare blankly when she asks where “Dr. Thorn” is and add another detention when she screams at Vice-Principal Cohen, who, come June, will be celebrating her fifth year at Westover Academy.

They rescind both detentions rather quickly, though, when it becomes clear the girl is suffering from severe heatstroke due to the broken furnace. They give her a cold compress and send her with the nurse to sleep off the hallucinations.

I’m not crazy, she tells them as she’s led away to the infirmary. They smile placatingly at her and nod in agreement when the nurse says, Of course, you’re not, child. You just need some rest.

Monsters and mazes. Silver bows and boys with glowing eyes. What an imagination that girl has, they muse after she’s left. She must have the most incredible dreams.

Outside of Westover, Will’s anger melts and burns and scorches for miles in every direction. Even sick and deprived of sunlight, his fury calls out, and his powers answer.

The hunters have already shed their heavy silver coats and begun to set up camp as though nothing is wrong. As though Bianca hasn’t been staring silently over the edge of a ragged cliff for the last hour and Katie isn’t unconscious at the whims of a goddess who wasn’t “In the mood for the tantrums of a child.”

If his aunt wishes to call uprooting half of the forest a tantrum, that’s her prerogative. Will thinks it’s perfectly righteous, but sunfire burns in his veins, and his mind spins, and he’s far too angry to focus on anything but his own rage.

Baring the sweltering heat, Nico sits a few feet away, shuffling his Mythomagic cards mindlessly. They don’t touch, but his presence is enough for Will.

At the edge of the forest, Satyr and Junior Protector Grover Underwood sits leaning against the trunk of a fallen tree. He is silent, but his eyes flit between Nico and Bianca, unwilling to give up the duty he was assigned.

Next to him is Katie, whose head is pillowed on her cousin’s ripped-up army jacket. The only indication of life is the shallow, rhythmic rise and fall of her chest, but otherwise, she is still. Motionless until the Lady Artemis deigns to wake her.

No doubt, she would be resting with her head in Thalia’s lap, be it not for the bursts of lightning arcing over the girl. Sparks and electric currents leap off the daughter of Zeus in streaks of white and blue and purple.

With pale knuckles (save for the drying blood and dark, wooden splinters) around the mace canister concealing her spear, Thalia shakes with anger, her throat raw and burning and all screamed out. Her fingernails dig into her palms, all while wishing her charm bracelet was breakable, for she has nothing left to break but her own bones.

Her palms are streaked black from snapping her eyeliner pencil in half and covered in soil-filled cuts after tearing out all the roots near the ground she sits on. Her knuckles are as shredded as her now-ruined backpack—all ragged flesh and uncovered bone (pain she revels in).

She would sooner take an arrow to the heart than eat the ambrosia a f*cking hunter had the audacity to give her.

Beneath black-lacquer nails lies her one source of pride in the form of Zoe Nightshade’s skin. It took three hunters to hold Thalia down, but not before she took a chunk of flesh out of that bitch’s cheek and sunk a blunt set of teeth into her notching hand. Payment—but not nearly enough—for shooting the arrow that caused the fall.

(Maybe Zoe wasn’t wrong for calling her a “rabid, feral beast.” A beast won’t need permission to tear out someone’s throat with their teeth. And sure, her teeth may not be as many or as sharp as Percy’s, but she’ll relish the mouthful of blood all the same.)

Thalia sits against their tree beside a worried Grover and an unconscious Katie, and she seethes. Her body sparks and shakes as all that angerfurygrief coalesces into piercing, white-hot hatehatehate.

She hates Thorne for betraying Nico. For baiting Percy. And Percy, for his blind, idiotic loyalty. Apollo, for letting himself be captured by the Titans. Artemis, for her bland refusal to search below the cliff. But most of all, she hates—gods, how she hates—her father.

Her father, who forbade the gods from intervening in the lives of their children and made it divine law, subject to nothing but his own justice. Who convinced his brothers to swear against having children and then went and broke it twicewithout remorse.

Her father, who is the reason Artemis will not let them look for Percy—will not allow them to go off on a quest without a prophecy. A prophecy which, regardless of if they petition Camp Half-Blood’s Oracle, will not be given if Apollo is truly as weak as he seems, captured.

Her father, who ignored her prayers. Her screams and cries and curses after her baby brother, her Jason, died from Beryl’s neglect. The best thing that had ever happened to her, torn away after barely three years. And—

He. Did. Nothing.

Now, Percy’s gone, and there is nothing she is allowed to do. Nothing any of them are allowed to do. Now, she has to go home and tell Sally her son might not ever return. Thalia hasn’t felt hate like this for a very long time.

(And what a statement that is, considering she hasn’t felt much except hate for far, farlonger.)

When Artemis returns, it is dark, save for the too-dim, pulsing glow right beside Nico. The flames from earlier are nowhere to be seen, and it’s almost painful to see Will like this. His light isn’t nearly as bright as it should be, but it’s enough to see the dark red color that faintly skims the edges of his cards. He feels almost disconnected, staring down at his fingers, raw and bleeding from papercut upon papercut.

They should probably hurt. At some point in the future, they probably will hurt. But Nico’s never been the best at feeling emotions, and he knows it. Maybe it’ll hit him later, when he accepts that Percy’s gonewhen he can finally go to bed.

Looking down at his fingers, Nico misses the first thing Artemis says. Though he most definitely does not miss the flare of heat from Will and the bitten-out, “Why?”

Artemis huffs. She doesn’t sound angry, but she’s certainly not pleased either. “Do you want to find the Jackson boy or not?”

Will’s gaze snaps up to her, and his body tenses. His eyes narrow, and his veins glow bright, just for a moment. Suspicious. Hopefully. He asks, “How?”

She twists to look at Nico, something sharp and knowing in her eyes, before turning back to Will. “There is a ritual. Traditionally done by an Oracle and done alone. You, nephew, are not an Oracle, but aided by myself and Demeter’s child, perhaps you may endure it.”

Will scrambles up from the ground and says something Nico doesn’t catch before following Artemis back to the tents. There might have been a response. He’s not sure. Something buzzes in the air.

Nico begins shuffling his cards again.

- - -

The next time he pauses and looks up, it’s because the green of Bianca’s jacket moves in his peripheral. It’s light enough to see her. Still grey. No sun. But perhaps the beginning of day.

Bianca, Sorella, walks past him, following someone back to Artemis’s tent. The buzzing gets louder.

Nico looks down. He starts shuffling.

- - -

The green jacket is in front of him. It’s lighter outside. There are hands on his, stilling his motions. They’re not warm. They’re usually warm. He thinks.

He looks at the hands. They’re not cold, either. He’s not quite sure if they’re really there or not. They don’t feel like they are.

Someone says something about a quest. Repeats it. There’s static in his ears, and it’s drowning out everything around him.

Something makes his head tilt up until he’s looking at brown eyes instead of cards. He thinks they look familiar. He’s not sure. Their lips might be moving. He’s not sure. There’s only static.

There’s a question. He doesn’t hear it. He answers. He doesn’t hear that either. He’s not really sure if he spoke or not. He thinks he did.

Thunder cracks through the never-ending white noise. Then the buzzing returns. Or maybe it never left. He doesn’t know.

He looks down.

The second pair of hands are gone. Or maybe they were never even there. He doesn’t know. They weren’t warm. They were supposed to be warm… he thinks.

He looks down.

The first pair of hands are still there. They hold a deck of cards.

They start shuffling.

- - -

His sight blurs. Clears. Nico looks up. A man in a leopard print shirt has two fingers touching his forehead. His eyes are purple, and he smells like rotting grapes.

Nico looks down and flinches. His Mythomagic cards are all but blood-soaked and not just around the edges. They’re nothing like the crisp, pristine ones he remembers playing with yesterday. (Was it yesterday?)

He looks around the room. Grover is there, standing nervously in a corner. There’s another boy there, too. He’s blond and has blue eyes, and Nico has to look away because all he can think of is Will.

He looks around the room. Looks for Bianca. Then remembers what little he took in from their rather one-sided conversation.

She spoke of a quest, one to save Percy. A quest for five people. Bianca, Will, Katie, Thalia, and… not him, apparently. Not if the oath she made him swear not to follow them is any indication of her thoughts of him.

The man with purple eyes frowns at him but remains silent. He’s pulled his hand back, and he’s just staring now.

Nico looks away. Down at his bloody cards and papercut-riddled fingertips, pulpy and torn apart and shredded nearly to bone. He thinks of Will’s dim glow. Of Katie’s anger and her limp body when Artemis decided she had enough. Of Thalia’s furious screams at her godly sister, throat as raw and bloody as her knuckles, and that tree that might never be rid of its new crimson stains.

He thinks of Bianca. Of the guilt and desperation and mourningin her eyes when she pulled the promise out of him, lucid or not. He knows the look well. It was one he saw daily in the Underworld on the souls who never got to say goodbye.

He stops thinking of that. Instead, Nico’s mind turns to Percy. To those final moments on the cliff just after Thorne finished taunting him with Apollo’s rumored suffering.

Nico’s mind was still dull with Manticore poison at the time. It felt as though there was a layer of cotton in his ears, and everything was happening in flashes around his every blink.

And so, it had been just like a choppy motion picture.

One blink, Percy was standing a few meters away; the next, he was right up in front of Nico. A hand yanked him by his shirt collar, and he went tumbling to the side. Percy, eyes alight with blazing green fury, sunk his teeth into Thorne’s shoulder and claws into his gut.

Nico closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, there were two silver arrows in his old sword instructor. Then, as he stood there in between Nico and Thorne, an arrow appeared in Percy’s shoulder. He jerked. Twisted. And then they were falling falling falling.

The sunflowers hung around the infirmary dry. Shrivel. Crumble to ash. And inside his head, Nico’s thoughts warble three words to him like a songbird.

It’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFaultIt’sYourFault.

- - -

His fingertips start to sting.

Chapter 14: Honeyed Words and Rotting Flowers

Chapter Text

When Katie wakes, it’s to a canopy of trees above, with the molten, silver eyes of Lady Artemis peering down at her. In the distance, she can see dimly glowing fires and silver tents, but they’re too far out for any conversation to travel. Beside her sits Will, worry creasing between his brows.

“Have you calmed?” Artemis asks, helping her sit and offering a small square of ambrosia.

A deep pang of grief echoes through her as she repeatedly plays Percy’s last few moments in her mind. The back of her throat burns, and she shoves the ambrosia into her mouth, allowing the taste of poppy cake to wash over her.

“Katie,” she hears Will say nervously. “Lady Artemis says there’s a way for us to get a prophecy. Even without the Oracle at Camp.”

Her eyes snap over to his. There’s worry, yes. But there’s determination and drive there as well. His fingers tap out the rhythm of whatever song is stuck in his head today, but apart from that, he does not fidget or shake.

She looks over at Artemis, blood rushing in her ears. Katie can barely hear herself when she asks, “How?”

The goddess moves back and sits so they’re all an equal distance apart on the forest floor. A golden bowl is before each of them, and a small fire blazes in the center.

“In the past, there have been others to whom Delphi belonged. Poseidon was one. Gaea was another. My brother is not strong enough to sustain the sun, let alone the domain of prophecy. But there is a ritual where the previous holders, in addition to Apollo himself, can be invoked. With help, Will may be able to channel the Oracle long enough for a genuine prophecy, in which case, a quest will be required.”

The bowl in front of her is half-filled with fresh soil, topped with a sprinkling of barley seeds. Artemis’ is similarly filled, though with large flakes of sea salt. And in front of Will is what looks to be a mixture of milk and honey.

Artemis looks at Katie, and for a moment, it feels like she’s being inspected beneath her very skin. Then she turns to Will, grimaces after a second, and asks, “You are a virgin, yes?”

“I- What?” Will squeaks, his voice cracking worse than usual. His face turns a shade of red Katie’s never seen, and she wishes desperately she had a camera with her. “For what- Why do you—”

A sharp voice cuts through his frantic, embarrassed response, “The Pythia is meant to be both female and a virgin. You being male will already make this difficult, so let us hope you being a son of prophecy is enough.”

Will shuts his mouth and nods, staring at his bowl like it’s the most interesting thing he’s ever seen and very carefully avoiding eye contact with Katie.

“You have both made offerings at camp, I presume,” Artemis says, swiftly moving on from Will. She gestures to the bowls in front of them. “This is similar enough. Will, you’ll offer to Apollo. We can only hope he’s strong enough to open his Oracle to you. I’ll offer to my uncle. And Katie, you to Gaea.”

Katie takes a moment to think. She bites the inside of her cheek and thinks of the layers upon layers of polluted soil that blanket the earth. “I didn’t know she was still around.”

Artemis is silent for a moment. Then, she sighs, “She’s not. Not really. Well, she is, but… it’s complicated. Gods are fluid in our domains. We have many, but we are not shackled to them. I am the goddess of the moon, yes, but perhaps there will come a day when I, too, will be relieved of my duties, just as I once relieved Selene of hers. Do you understand?”

Katie nods along with Will, and Artemis continues.

“Gaea is not a goddess. Not in the same way that I or Father or even the Titans are. Father is the god of the skies, but Gaea is the very earth itself. Without worship, a god can fade, and they can, with great difficulty, be killed. We are the minders of our domains, but they can, if need be, exist on their own. Gaea once held prophecy. Fertility. Other domains that we’ve now divided between ourselves. But—”

“You can’t kill the earth,” Katie all but whispers, tracing her fingertips over the bowl of soil like she’s asking a question. She wishes it could answer.

“No,” Artemis says simply. “You can’t.”

“But we can hurt it. With waste. Pollution. She’s still here, she’s just not really… here.”

There’s a beat of silence before Artemis responds. “Worship or not, Gaea hasn’t woken in a very long time.”

The trees rustle above them as a chilling breeze whistles through. It’s almost as loud as the silence Katie can hear coming from the earth. If it could speak, she wonders if it’d be in mourning. If She’d be in mourning.

Will’s voice breaks her out of the depressive spiral she’d started tipping into. “Can we get started? Please?”

Katie looks at him, already holding his bowl with both hands and nods. Artemis does too. The goddess straightens her back and gestures to the fire. Then, Will pours.

She’s not quite sure what she was expecting. She remembers back when Percy had offered his hair to Apollo, and how the fire burned a bright gold for a moment. This isn’t that, but Will shuts his eyes, and after a minute or two of nothing but listening to the leaves shake in the wind, the fire seems to brighten.

When his eyes open, they’re ringed with gold. Well, they’re always ringed with gold, but it’s just enough of a difference to prove that somewhere, Apollo is listening.

Next is Artemis. It’s an odd sight—a goddess, an Olympian at that, making an offering as though she were a demigod too—but it is a welcome one. Katie doesn’t doubt that most deities would have simply left them to their own devices. She didn’t have to do this. But then again, finding Percy means finding her brother. Perhaps it was an action borne of selfishness, but if it works—if it gives them a prophecy and a quest—Katie couldn’t care less about Artemis’s reasons because it just means they’ll get Percy back.

This offering takes longer. A few minutes for Will becomes ten for Artemis. But then there’s a sharp uptick of pressure, and as the air fills with ocean spray, a brilliant arc of moonlight paints the small clearing they sit in. Her eyes, typically silver, have the smallest pinprick of sea green in the center. She blinks and then nods her chin up sharply toward the final bowl.

Katie takes it and kneels, holding it over the fire. She breathes in. Out. And then, she prays.

She prays and apologizes and tries not to weep as she thinks of industrial cities and animals long extinct. If the few short hisses of steam off the fire are anything to go by, she doesn’t succeed.

Regardless, Katie prays and prays, and she’s pretty sure she should be asking Gaea for help with the prophecy, but she’s kept this buried from her friends, her siblings, even her mother. It hurts, and even though she won’t get a response, she needs someone to hear her.

When her thoughts—her prayers—finally slow, Katie opens her eyes. She doesn’t feel any different. Will still wears a hopeful expression, but when she looks at Artemis, her face shows nothing but disappointment.

It didn’t work.

The goddess places the third bowl back on the ground with a tense hand and a thud. It echoes louder than it should. Katie looks back at Will, whose hope has instantly twisted itself into an expression of frustration and grief that she hasn’t seen him wear since the Labyrinth. And it’s right then that she decides—

No. That can’t be it. That won’t be it.

Katie stifles an angry scream and digs her fingertips into the forest floor. She breathes and pushes deeper until it covers her knuckles. Her hands. Her wrists. And all the while, she begs in her mind, Please, help us. We need a prophecy. We need to find Percy. Please. Please, help us. Help us. HelpUsHelpUsHelpUsHelpUsHelpUs—

It starts at her forearms.

Two inches past her wrists, where skin meets earth, a trail of soil coils sluggishly up her arms. Under the loose sleeves of her zip-up, She brushes a weak greeting of fertile silt and age-old greenery. It is a lethargic, half-asleep hello. A cautious hand, outstretched in mid-dream, unsure whether to wake just yet or rest for a little longer.

It’s warm and earthy and powerful. Almost like her mother, but… no. Not quite. This is far too soft to be Demeter’s power. This is the gentle caress of the earth as it sweeps along her skin. The pulse of life that curls around her chest and squeezes like a warm hug.

No. Her mother is rage and vengeance and a possessive, overwhelming love that picks you apart at the seams. She is like Poseidon in that she loves with every drop of ichor within her, and she will raze everything in her path to get back what was taken—who was taken. And this? This is not that.

Coaxed closer, deeper, Katie feels a connection to the earth in a way she never has before. It’s all love and care, and in the back of her mind, she starts to hear a Voice whispering, let me in.

And Katie does.

“Five will go West to the god held in chains,

One left to mourn past the land without rain,

Another, their loss by a parent’s hand,

‘Neath threads of fate on a blackened land,

Thrice-rung bell with death shall tear,

A brother’s mourning rage laid bare.”

When the presence recedes, no longer pulling those fate-soaked, honeyed words from her, Katie looks up. If Will looks like he’s in shock, she’s not even sure what to call Artemis. This wasn’t even in the realm of expected possibilities. It was supposed to be Will, but somehow, she can’t find it in herself to feel anything other than relief in knowing he wasn’t forced to channel the prophecy through Apollo.

The last time Katie saw the Oracle give a prophecy, it looked horrifying. The mummified remains of a dead woman, face contorted as though in constant pain, spoke in a raspy, hollow voice that sounded like it was being cut out of her with a serrated blade. The Delphi of Gaea’s time is nothing like Apollo’s cursed Oracle, hidden away in a dusty attic corner.

It felt more like a cozy shawl draped over her shoulders and a careful guiding of words—her hand held the entire way. Only now, with her eyes open and finally focused, does she realize the sky has lightened. She’s unsure of how long they must have been sitting there, waiting for her, but it must have been several hours at the very least. Katie doesn’t let that bother her, though. She would rather focus on Will’s glowing smile and bursting excitement.

The giddiness on Will’s face is contagious, and she finds herself matching his grin because now, Percy is just a quest away. A thrum of joy pulses through her, and Katie catches it with ease. She wraps it in a mantra of Thank You’s, and ties love and gratitude and faith in a bow around it. It is the only gift she knows she can give, so she takes it and pushes it down through the tips of her fingers until she knows it has been received.

Drowsy, yawning, the earth accepts her thanks with a slow brush of affection across her cheek. It leaves behind a crumbling trail of soil and with a breathy giggle, Katie starts to pull her hands out.

And then,

She.

Can’t.

Breathe.

Warmth turns to blistering rage. Betrayal. Grief. Mourning. Jagged pebbles claw down her cheek, and where soil once was, thorns take root in her arms, tearing through flesh and muscle. She waters the earth with droplets of her blood, thick crimson tinged with gold.

There’s so much anger and despair and Katie just wants her mother back because this is not the wrath of stolen love and stolen daughters that’s been written in her bones. This is hatred and loathing that’s both blind and righteous, crawling past her lips and stripping the flesh from her arms as it pulls her deeper into the ground.

Piercing, toxin-tipped roots shred through her mouth, and with every shallow breath she tries to take, they rip their way in deeper. There’s blood coating her tongue, sharp and metallic. The back of her throat burns with bile and anguish and polluted topsoil, and as she gags, the Voice whispers to her, See me? Feel me? This is how they’ve made me suffer.

Thorns circle her neck, pulling tighter and tighter like they’re readying a noose. With every failed breath, her chest burns and her body grows hotter, and if her hands were loose, she’d be tearing out her nails trying to claw herself free, but they’re not, so all she can do is scream and plead within her mind because there are weeds stripping the life from her throat and she can’t make a single sound.

The tears that stream from her eyes burn like they’re made of nitric acid. Her lips are dry, cracked, torn open by the roots that have started crawling down her trachea—more and more and more of them until there’s no room left. No room to breathe or gag, and if she could still throw up, she would, but they’re in her esophagus too, and there’s no space left. But bone can crack, and cartilage can too, and to them, space isn’t an issue because they’ll just make more.

Katie wonders if they can grow inside a dead body. If they can ignore the rot and decay that’ll fester after they’ve torn out of her throat and found another place to live inside her. If they’ll grow and rip and shred until there’s truly nothing left of her to house them.

(Katie wonders if this is why the earth stays asleep.)

She thinks there might be thorns cradling her heart now. There’s no more softness or care, and she wants to take back everything she gave. All that warmth has become rage. Blistering, destructive rage, and Katie just wants to slaughter the mortals for all they’ve done to her. For polluting her soils and tainting the world she gave them, while all they do is grow and multiply and build over the ashes of what were once lush forests. Her sleep deepens with every bit of life they leech from her, and what have the gods done? She will tear them apart too, for casting her children into Tartarus and usurping the thrones of her beloved Rhea and Kronos. What have they done for you, Earth-Child? Feel the pain and suffering they’ve left for me? For us? Help me purify. Help me purge. HelpMeHelpMeHelpMeHelpMeHelpMeHELPME—

The Voice cuts out, and she can feel roots being torn out from between the cracks and crevices of the bones in her throat. Her first breath of air is both excruciating pain and blissful relief. Then, there’s only agony as she empties her stomach, retching until there’s nothing but acid burning its way out. The only respite is the soothing sensation running down her arms, now free of the ground.

There’s shouting around her that she can finally hear. It hurts to move, but she forces herself to open her eyes, crusted with half-dried tears. She wishes she didn’t. She wishes she had something left to throw up because anything is better than the sharp, acidic, dry heaving she’s doing again.

Even with blurry vision, what little she can see of her arms is enough to make her nauseous. Streaks of blood and golden Nectar lie over a patchwork of fresh skin. Not all of it is healed, and quite frankly, she’d rather it all be like that instead. She’s worked the infirmary before. She knows how to grit her teeth and help bandage a limb that looks like it’s been through a meat grinder. But this? This is something straight out of her sisters’ novels.

It’s almost as though her arms have been used for test fabric with threads made of black petunias and thorned, crimson roses. Dead ones, at least. The petals are dry and crumbling, but stems still weave throughout her arms like drunkard sutures. Even motionless, she can feel the thorns sitting under her skin now that she knows they’re there. She feels them winding through muscle and around bone, and when she flexes her hand, they tear her open from the inside out in no less than three places.

Katie’s not quite sure what happens after that, but it involves the pain of being carefully moved to lie on her back and having Nectar forced down her throat. The fluted notes of reed pipes float in and out of her awareness, and she thinks she hears Bianca talking at some point. She knows she hears Will crying because it’s a distinct sound she’s heard only once, and it was when they were in the Labyrinth. (She remembers a lot she wishes she didn’t from the Labyrinth.)

She floats in and out for a while, catching what she can of the conversation around her. They mention her neck a lot. The roots inside her mouth are gone, but apparently, the outside is a similar patchwork quilt to that of her arms.

Katie probably would’ve died had it not been for Bianca draining every bit of life in that entire clearing apart from the two of them. She’s unsure how much of the flowers remain, but Bianca holds her hand regardless of the thorns and doesn’t let go once.

If there’s one thing she knows she’s heard, it’s Bianca audibly eye-rolling through a wide range of phrases; each said with an equally deadpan voice: “I’ve always been able to do it. Yes, Nico can do it too. No, it’s only with plants. Yes, I’m sure, but if you’d like to volunteer your lieutenant, I’m happy to double-check. Clearly, we’re orphans. Probably Persephone. Well, there’s a first time for everything.”

It’s when they start to discuss the prophecy that Katie’s recent exhaustion starts to catch up with her. She catches Nico’s name dropped more than once and something about the Styx, too. But the conversation speeds up, or maybe she’s just too tired, and she loses track of who says what.

Katie falls asleep to voices washing over her like waves and Bianca’s hand, warm and comforting, in hers.

Chapter 15: Interlude: Zoe Nightshade

Chapter Text

Zoe Nightshade has lived a long life. She’s been Lady Artemis’s lieutenant longer than many hunters have even been alive for. She’s seen a lot, and she knows a lot, and she doesn’t care much for the opinions of others. Her Lady’s judgment is the only one that matters to her, and as such, she agrees without question to join a quest of four demigods who, pure and simple, hate her.

The daughter of Zeus said a lot about Zoe in her… tantrum. Thalia had never seen eye-to-eye with her—with any of the hunters, for that matter. But there was one phrase that stuck out among the rest. The details escape her, but it was something along the lines of “his blood is on your hands” and something about regret.

And, it’s odd. Truly, it’s odd how strongly Thalia feels about Perseus’s potential death. The other two girls as well. Zoe knows not everyone holds the same dislike of men that she does, but it’s genuinely baffling that losing him would cause them all this much distress.

After having her face scratched, Zoe stops listening. It isn’t worth her time. She walks back to her tent and considers the best way to track down her Lady’s wayward brother. As she walks, she thinks back to Thalia’s words. Questioning her about regret, of all things.

Zoe has one regret over the arrow she let loose—the arrow they hate her for. She has one single regret, and it is allowing anger to cloud her judgment enough for her to forget to account for the wind.

She aimed for his heart. She shot his shoulder. The only thing Zoe Nightshade regrets about tonight’s events is that she missed.

Lord Poseidon has not had a child in decades, thanks to the pact between him and his brothers. Officially, it was to stop the violence caused by all their children. Violence that led to the death of sixty million lives in six years. Unofficially though…

Unofficially, everyone knew it had nothing to do with the Second World War. Zeus knew. Hades knew. Poseidon, himself, knew. But a vote was a vote, and the Olympian council decided almost unanimously for the three sons of Rhea to swear against having children.

It’s well known that Poseidon loves his children. God, demigod, giant, cyclops. Monster or not, he loves them all blindly and unconditionally. He’ll drown ships and level cities in their names. They need only ask.

Even without their father’s intervention, the demigod children of Poseidon are a breed of monster all on their own. They are, perhaps, the worst kind: The beautiful monsters who lure you in with silky black curls and eyes of sea glass. It’s not until they’re close enough to kiss that you can finally see the blank, reflection-less eyes that know only three things. Greed, ruin, and death.

They are the ones who steal and kidnap and rape for nothing but their own pleasure. Who kill without care and laugh with their crewmates as they lazily wipe the blood off their swords. They are the ones who seduce you, ensure your assistance, and only when you’ve cut ties to your family—have ruined any chance of reconciliation—that they leave you alone on an island because there’s nothing left for them to steal from you.

Zoe remembers all too well the relief in Lord Ares’s eyes when he visited Lady Artemis that night the Oath was sworn. She remembers the warmth in her own chest when, in March of 1958, the Ares cabin housed its first warm body in over two hundred and fifty years.

(Everyone has a tipping point, and Ares’s was the disappearance of Edward Teach at sea. God or not, there are only so many children you can bury before it breaks you. Too many pyres he’s built by hand. Too many drachmas he’s placed inside mouths.

If sparing himself more of that grief means never having another child, then that’s what he’ll do.)

Zoe is old. Thousands of years old. She has burned more shrouds than she can count. She remembers the face of every hunter. Every Amazon. Every nymph, dryad, and demigod. She knows their faces and their deaths, and when that blessed oath was made, it was like an age-old knot in her chest unraveled with one single pull.

When she first hears the whispers of Perseus Jackson’s existence, she writes it off as a rumor. She prays, oh how she prays, that’s all it is. Then, just two weeks after that mess in Manhattan, St. Louis is devastated by an earthquake, and Zoe knows, without a doubt, that the rumors are true.

The very next morning, Lady Artemis sends her to Seattle on a month-long solo hunt. Zoe kills the Sphinx on her second day. On her third, she walks right through the front door of the Amazons’ warehouse and doesn’t leave for another twenty-seven days.

Zoe rejoins the Hunters on July 20th with bruised, thrice-broken knuckles and no voice; her throat screamed raw. Her bow was left in Seattle, broken into pieces because there’s no satisfaction, no release of anger, in shooting an arrow.

The hunters are her sisters in all but blood, but they don’t understand because they don’t remember. They weren’t there. The Amazons may not be immortal, they may not have been there either, but it is their history, and as such, they are the only ones she can turn to to understand.

Zoe spends the month away from her sisters, fighting, bleeding, and cursing Poseidon freely within the well-protected walls, enchanted by Hecate herself. She destroys hundred of training dummies, picturing the faces of Theseus. Hallirhothius. Orion. Of all the wretched sons of Poseidon who left nothing but death and misery and devastation in their wakes.

She doesn’t know what Perseus looks like, but Zoe’s met enough of his brothers to wager an excellent guess. She imagines black hair and green eyes. Tan skin and tall, with the voice of a siren.

She hates him.

When she’s not sparring or beating a wooden dummy into dust, she makes offerings to Lord Ares and curls her own grief around the droplets of pure anger he leaves behind. When exhaustion overtakes her, and she can no longer stand, Zoe allows a young woman to bandage her knuckles and laughs wetly at the familiar scowl she gets upon refusing to eat Ambrosia. Children of Ares all make the same face when they offer care and are declined. She knew many who once gave her that very look.

She’s outlived them all.

Lost in memories, Zoe grudgingly eats the meal she knows is laced with Nectar and a mild sedative. She lets Alcippe Leila angrily force her under the covers of the small infirmary bed, and despite being thousands of years older than the other girl, there’s something soothing in listening to her tales of mundane, daily life.

The next day, when she looks at Leila, she has to remind herself Alcippe is dead. They have different hair. Different skin. Leila is tall and muscular, whereas Alcippe was a slip of a girl.

And yet, their eyes are identical. The cadence in their voices is purely that of their father. Their short tempers and the speed with which they decide to befriend or hate you—it’s all the same.

It’s painful how alike they are, despite one significant difference. Leila is alive. Alcippe is not.

Leila has never met a son of Poseidon. Alcippe died at the hands of one. She died with a broken windpipe and finger-shaped bruises around her neck. With Hallirhothius’s skin under her nails and flesh between her teeth because she never stopped fighting him. She died with blood between her thighs, a sword in her belly, and a cursed prayer on her lips.

(Minutes later, Ares made an offering to his uncle in the form of Hallirhothius’s torn-off head. He spat in the waves for good measure and hid his grief with laughter as they dragged him to trial.)

Alcippe. Merope. Hippolyta. Molpadia. Antiope. Ariadne. Countless others harmed by the actions of a son of Poseidon. Perseus Jackson will just be more of the same. Of that, she has no doubt.

Zoe knows she’s not well-liked among some of the younger hunters. They think she’s a stuck-up bitch from the Middle Ages who’d be happy if every man on the planet dropped dead from a heart attack. She pushes them too hard in hand-to-hand combat and doesn’t laugh at their jokes. They don’t understand her, but that’s alright. She prefers it that way.

She’ll draw the attention away from the other girls when Apollo comes to visit. If he fixates on making poems from her words, he’ll stop watching Cassie and Sofia.

Zoe knows he’ll never touch her. Artemis will never forgive it. But girls who’ve been with the Hunt for paltry decades? They don’t understand what it means when Apollo starts looking. Zoe does, though. She’s seen enough of it and will happily be the distraction keeping them safe.

It’s not as though she actively hopes for the extinction of the entire male race; it’s just that she can’t help but think how much safer it would be without them. Realistically, Zoe knows it’ll never happen, so she resigns herself to teaching her sisters how to kill a man blindfolded, with their hands tied behind their backs. She shows them the weakest points of a body and teaches them how to incapacitate even the human shell of a god.

She’ll be the villain. The hard-ass drill sergeant who the youngest ones love it hate. It’s fine if they don’t understand yet. She doesn’t want them to. Because the ones who understand, are like her. They have their own Heracles haunting them and no more trust left to give out.

They’ll learn. They all do. Whether by hearing stories secondhand or slitting the throat of a mortal man as he pants into the ear of a sixteen-year-old waitress—they will learn. It’s inevitable, and Zoe might not be able to stop it, but she can give her sisters a fighting chance.

For her, it’s enough.

(It has to be.)

There are monsters, and there are monsters, and waiting at the treeline behind Westover, Zoe hadn't needed more than a glance to be sure of one thing.

Perseus Jackson is both.

Chapter 16: Memories of the Past

Chapter Text

Percy wakes up to pain. Excruciating pain that radiates out from dislocated shoulders and all the way down to his broken wrists. His arms are twisted behind his back, pulled tight in a way that makes his bones scream in pain at the slightest movement. Almost as bad, is the pounding headache that dots his vision with white and pulls at the muscles in his broken jaw.

“—cy. Percy.”

He blinks the crust from his eyes and tries to focus on the person calling his name. No, not person. God.

Apollo kneels a few feet away, positioned as though he’s holding something on his shoulders. It’s the ceiling of whatever ruins they’re in, but… not quite. There’s a fog shrouding it that’s almost iridescent, with streaks of deep blues and greys and blacks.

He doesn’t look like himself. There’s no trace of the sunfire that makes his skin burn hot and bright. His golden curls are limp, and there’s a thin sheen of sweat beaded on his forehead.

Even when masquerading as Fred, Apollo never looked so weak—so mortal. Percy remembers the visits from his “cousin” when he was younger. Fred would help him with his homework and braid flowers into his hair, and even back then, there was a sense of otherworldliness to him that couldn’t be hidden. Now, there’s a tinge of grey to his skin, and the ichor-gold blush on his cheeks is nonexistent.

Apollo’s arms tremble with the weight of his heavy burden, and the only divinity Percy can sense comes from the thick, silvery cuffs around his wrists.

Apollo? Percy tries to say. Tries, but does not succeed. It comes out muffled behind the f*cking muzzle that’s been strapped over his mouth. There’s a bar of metal between his teeth that he’d probably be able to bite through if his jaw wasn’t broken.

“Percy?” Apollo calls out again. “Are you alright?”

Something halfway between a snort and an irritated growl makes it past the gag. It’s as close as he can get to saying, What do you f*cking think?

“Right. Stupid question. Sorry,” Apollo responds with a wince.

Percy makes a questioning noise and hopes the word heal is understandable enough. It’s not, but Apollo seems to get it anyways.

“I’d love to, if these weren’t Adamantine,” Apollo says breathlessly, wiggling his wrists and drawing attention to the cuffs around them. “They block most of my powers. I’m sorry, Percy. I couldn’t if I tried.”

- - -

Percy discovers his ribs are broken when he laughs himself sick over finding out how Apollo was captured. Out of all the ways it could’ve happened, getting tricked into Adamantine handcuffs while trying to get his dick wet wasn’t even near the realm of possibilities. Children of Hermes were really quite devious. Not that Apollo explicitly said anything, but Percy’s old enough to read between the lines.

Living for more than two years in the world of the divine, he’s all but become numb to the borderline-incestuous relationships at camp. It’s an unspoken rule that you don’t date within your own cabin, but anyone else is fair game. Just looking at his own family, Despoina is his sister and his cousin, and his stepmother… technically. The idea of Apollo being with a niece bothers Percy far less than it probably should. Really, there’s nothing he can do but laugh at Apollo’s idiocy.

Percy knows that Apollo has had nothing but tragedy in his love life, but seeing it happen outside of the stories is strange, to say the least. He lives in a world of myth and legend, but it’s always interesting to see the way modernity both has and hasn’t changed them.

After Percy stops laughing and Apollo stops ignoring him like a child, Percy manages to communicate, Tell me a story. It takes a lot of guesswork on Apollo’s part to figure out what Percy means, but they get there eventually. With nothing but his own pain to focus on, Percy closes his eyes and tunes out the throbbing in his arms as Apollo begins to weave his tales.

- - -

He starts with the first time Zeus turned him mortal. When he and Poseidon had their powers taken and spent a year building the walls of Troy for King Laomedon.

He tells Percy of his namesake, the demigod Perseus and his slaying of Medusa. Of Theseus and Ariadne and her marriage to Dionysus. Of the Trojan War and the death of Achilles.

Myth after myth, Percy listens to him speak. He falls asleep and wakes back up to the same honey-smooth voice. Ignores the broken bones and hunger pangs tempered only by the nectar they feed him when he’s sleeping. He thinks they might be drugging him too, or maybe his body is just exhausted from trying to heal the bones that get re-broken every time he's fed. Or perhaps it’s the dry heat and lack of water.

At some point, the myths turn into stories of Apollo’s own children. Orpheus and his descent into the Underworld to retrieve his beloved Eurydice. His mourning and eventual death at the hands of Dionysus’ Maenads. Of Asclepius and his love for humanity, and his murder after playing with forces a mortal—demigod or not—was not meant to meddle in, in Zeus’s opinion, at least.

Then, when Apollo runs out of children, he starts on the lovers, and to say his love life is “tragic” is a gross understatement. There’s Coronis and Daphne. Cassandra and Cyparissus. Icarus and Hyacinthus, born hundreds of years apart, and yet both died right before Apollo’s eyes as he did nothing to save them. Captivated by their beauty and breaking free of the trance with an outstretched hand, only for him to be a moment too late.

Silence follows the final two as Apollo turns his thoughts inward and grieves. Percy, thrown off-kilter by the sheer emotion in the god’s voice, stays quiet as well. He drifts off to the familiar pain of broken bones and stray thoughts of melting wings and the unforgiving sea.

If the quest could be summed up in four words, they would be, “I told you so.”

Katie and Will get to say it after they fight the Nemean Lion in the Smithsonian. Thalia manages to electrocute it to death, but not before they level half the building and leave the other half in a blaze of electrical fires.

They sit in the car with their clothes still smoking as Will yells, “I guess we can add the f*cking Smithsonian to our resumes right below the Gateway Arch. Rescuing Percy can wait. Why don’t we visit Mount Rushmore next? What could possibly go f*cking wrong?”

Thalia’s turn comes when they camp out in the car in an open parking lot. Maybe the others are okay with spending a day in a police station and having CPS called on them, but Thalia has already gone through that once with Luke and Annabeth and she’s not so eager to do it again.

“It’s fine, Thalia. Stop worrying, Thalia. It’s just one night, Thalia,” she raves as they speed away from the two policemen left unconscious and crumpled on the asphalt. “Next time, maybe you should shut the f*ck up and listen to the only one of us that’s actually been homeless before.”

Zoe doesn’t need to say it out loud because her eyes are murderous enough after their car is totaled by a flock of Stymphalian birds, she told them were there. Apparently, hunters really do have a sensitivity to nearby animals. To be fair, she did warn them, but none of them are too inclined to listen to her. They all still hold a grudge for shooting the arrow led to Thorne and Percy falling over the cliff.

At least they have most of their supplies when the birds are dead, and the car has already gone up in flames.

But out of all of the, I told you so’s, Bianca would like it stated on record that hers could’ve shortened the quest by days and saved the Air and Space Museum from partial destruction.

She told them back in Maine. There was no reason to take a car when there was a perfectly stable entrance to the Labyrinth in Bar Harbor. It might’ve taken them a day or so, but it would’ve led them directly to Percy, just like it did to the Underworld when they first left the Lotus Casino.

Well, no one wanted to go through the Labyrinth, but Bianca gets her wish after she’s left behind in the junkyard of the gods. Alone. Abandoned.

She wakes up under a pile of debris with a twisted ankle and a terrible headache. Somehow, she manages to dig her way out of the heap of trash over her and begins to limp through the narrow paths between the machinery and discarded weapons, trying to find a way out.

It’s hours before she finds an escape in the form of a tiny work shed with the symbol of Daedalus carved into the side. So, with a smile on her face, Bianca descends into the Labyrinth.

“Do you think you could take me to my friends?”

And the Labyrinth pulses in response. It is pleased.

- - -

The last time Bianca was here, she had Will’s luminescent skin to guide the way. This time, she walks alone through the darkness, one hand on the wall as she follows the gentle tugging in her chest that, every now and then, pushes her to switch walls and turn the other way.

The few monsters she comes across, she shoots blind, letting the Labyrinth pull her aim where it needs to be and feeling the vibrations in the earth with each heavy step the monsters take.

Despite not being bothered by the dark, she still takes a torch of Greek fire off the wall when she finds a row of them in a corridor she’s led to. Bianca’s not quite sure what drives her to say, “Thank you” aloud, but she does.

(You’re welcome, the Labyrinth seems to say.)

She’ll never understand Percy’s description of the Labyrinth. There’s no trace of the cold, malevolent aura he spoke of. And she can’t imagine it ever trapping her for four months. If Bianca had to describe the atmosphere, she’d call it…almost playful, in a way. Chaotic, but not evil. Similar to that of a child playing a prank.

The winding paths take her past faded drawings and old sections of wall that have been dug out at the bottom, marked with a white X beside them. There are shoes so small, they could only be a child's, and in a darkened corner, a straw doll crumbles to sand when she tries to pick it up.

She even finds a room full of weapons and drachmas, just like the one where Will got her bow from. Bianca doesn’t take much. Nothing more than a celestial bronze knife and a sheath to fasten to her waist. She pushes forward after that—continues on with the Labyrinth pulling her this way and that. It’s several hours of comfortable silence until she pauses.

The Labyrinth brings her to a wide corridor with a floor of bloodstained stone, and Bianca stops breathing.

There are bones strewn across the hallway. Small bones that belong to a child. A girl, Bianca can tell. She died young, and she died in pain. After spending a full year in the Underworld, Bianca doesn’t usually cry for the dead, but something about the scene is tragic in a way she can’t even begin to explain.

Children die every day, she knows. But Bianca closes her eyes and touches her fingers to a too-small skull and sobs for this little girl who died terrified and alone and screaming in pain. She can hear echoes of her last moments, calling for her brother and her sister and the sheer despair she feels when neither come running.

Her chest burns, and Bianca can’t tell if it’s the heaving sobs or the ribs tearing through her lungs that cause it. It hurts. It hurts so much. She can hardly breathe, and are those tears or blood blurring her vision? It’s so loud and so painful and why won’t she just die?

There’s blood everywhere and her arm isn’t there can’t move. The pressure is getting worse and worse. Her hips crack and her chest is so tight that every breath is a battle. There’s no water near her, but she feels like she’s drowning anyway.

What did she do wrong? Why did he leave her? Please, come back. She’ll never say it again. I’ll never say it again.

A small shriek tears out of Bianca as she forces herself to now. Her head spins and it takes her far too long to remember the mantra of, “Bianca Di Angelo. You’re fifteen. You were born in Venice. You have a brother named Nico. You’re not dead. You’re not dead.”

She hates how easy it is to get lost within the deads’ memories.

Bianca looks down at the skeleton, wrangling her sanity together. The clothes the girl wore at the time of her death have long since decayed, all except a half-torn veil, somehow perfectly preserved. It’s made of a beautiful red fabric with bright yellow suns embroidered around the edges. It’s something that belongs in a museum, not hidden away for centuries like this.

With tears still blurring her vision, Bianca painstakingly pulls the veil away from the bones it lies beneath. She folds it carefully over the long side until it’s a thin enough strip to tie around her own hair, pulling the stray wisps back and tying the ends of the fabric by the nape of her neck.

She knows she doesn’t have time for this. She should be focused on getting to Percy, but no one deserves to have their remains left like this, so Bianca collects the bones. Picks up every last one she can find, and though there's no soul hovering, places a drachma placed right next to the skull. Then, she holds out the torch and lights them with Greek fire and waits until they’re nothing but ash.

Bianca doesn’t know where the wind comes from. They’re underground, but somehow, a breeze still comes, spreading the girl’s ashes out until nothing remains. Only then, when she’s been laid to rest, does Bianca continue walking.

- - -

The looks on her friends’ faces when they see her walk out of a random wall in the ruins of Mount Othrys are ones Bianca will cherish for the rest of her life.

“I told you so,” she says, her voice thin as Katie squeezes the breath out of her. “I could’ve gotten us here in a day.”

Katie takes a ragged breath and lets out a laugh, “Next time, we’ll do it your way.”

Will tugs her away from Katie the second her grip loosens. “We thought you were dead,” he says, clutching onto Bianca like she’s his only lifeline.

She laughs and ruffles his hair like she knows he hates, “You can’t get rid of me that easily, Glowstick Boy.”

He ducks his head to escape Bianca’s teasing and glares at her. Squeezing both her hands, his voice deadly, he says, “If you ever die on us again, I’ll go straight to the Underworld and drag you back myself.”

“You act as though I wouldn’t drag myself back out. Do you really think I’d leave Katie alone to deal with you, Percy, and Nico? The three of you are terrors together.”

Bianca never got to spend much time with Thalia, but still, her cousin pulls her into a tight hug and whispers, “I’m glad you’re alive.” And Bianca can only smile in response.

- - -

Thalia has hated many things in her life. Her mother. Her father. The monsters that came after her, Annabeth, and Luke.

Luke.

Of all Thalia has ever hated, she never thought Luke would be on that list. But here they are, standing at the peak of Mount Tamalpais—Apollo holding up the sky and Percy, bound and muzzled like a rabid animal, half unconscious and upright only due to Atlas’s grip on his hair.

Luke was her brother, yes, but so is Percy. He was the one sitting at her bedside when she woke up for the first time since the Fleece pulled her from the tree. He was the one who freely offered a place to stay that wasn’t camp. He and Sally gave her a home, something she hadn’t had in a very long time, and for that, she will always love him.

Thalia hates the gods. She’d kill her father with a smile on her face. But there is no f*cking way that Kronos would be a better option than the system already in place.

So, it’s with her teeth bared that she rushes at the boy who she once called her brother, her spear flashing with lightning and rage fueling her blows.

- - -

The square of ambrosia that Will shoves down his throat is the best thing Percy’s tasted in days. And unlike the nectar, he’s actually awake for it. Even better is the bottle of water that gets dumped over his head after the celestial bronze rope is cut from around his arms. Straightening bones and popping back shoulder joints, especially at the speed Will is, isn’t the most pleasant thing, but it’s just fast enough that by the time Atlas has torn free of the vines Katie trapped him in, Percy has already clawed out one of his eyes.

Her and Bianca move back, letting Percy take over the fight. Cursing, Katie runs over to the third girl in silver that was knocked into a wall just a minute before, and Bianca turns her bow to the bearded old guy that had been standing beside Luke and Atlas.

Once they’re out of the way, he wastes no time, and as the Titan screams expletives and grabs onto his face, Percy tears out half of Atlas’s bicep with his teeth. He spits it on the ground and relishes the burn of ichor on his tongue.

“Should’ve gotten a better muzzle for me, asshole.”

Percy’s voice is raspy from the lack of use. His arms are in pain, and his wrists are probably still half-broken, but his hair is soaked in water, and for the first time in days, his head feels clear. Finally, he feels strong enough to use his powers.

His smile is painted with gold, and as Atlas’s blade skims the scales on his shoulder, Percy thinks to himself, What is ichor if not sparkly blood?

He’s controlled the blood of demigods and monsters and Cyclops’. Why not add a Titan to that list?

And with that thought, Percy grabs, and Atlas stands still.

Determination burns in his eyes as he glares down his opponent. Percy doesn’t know how long he can hold it for. Already, it’s proving to be more difficult than any other monster he’s done this on.

But then again, Atlas is more than just a monster. He’s not a Sphinx. He’s not Echidna and her Chimera.

He is a Titan. Second generation, perhaps. But he is the eldest son of Iapetus. The Piercer. He is the grandson of Oceanus, of Gaea’s firstborn, and Percy would be a fool to ignore those facts.

(Born fully grown, Atlas’s first rattle was a massive, bone-hilted blade of celestial bronze, threaded white with Orichalcum and the barest hints of Adamantine. His armor was painted with the blood and ichor of his enemies; of the cup-bearers with unsteady hands; of the pitiful humans too fragile to survive laying with a titan.

He drank his nectar mixed with blood and laughed at Rhea’s pointless mourning when she allowed yet another one of her children to be eaten. It was with a smile on his face that Atlas crushed his own brother’s throat on the battlefield upon finding out Prometheus had sided with Zeus.

The myths may have eroded him down to simply the Bearer of the Sky, but Atlas was raised at the knee of Kronos’s executioner, and millennia of divine punishment did not erase who he once was.)

Percy can feel the weight of Atlas’s furious gaze upon him. The tension in the air is palpable, but Percy remains resolute, and with the sheer desire for vengeance fueling his power, Atlas is forced a single step back towards Apollo.

Around him, Percy can hear the scraping of steel against steel filling the air. Adrenaline courses through him and with a low growl, his next step forward is, yet again, mirrored by Atlas.

Gold-tinged blood drips from Percy’s nose. He can feel the strain on his body growing with each passing moment. His muscles scream in protest but Percy just curls his will deeper over Atlas’s ichor. He sinks his mind into every little droplet and he tugs until they take a third step towards Apollo.

But that third step is all he gets.

Percy’s focus is so fixed on Atlas, that he barely has time to move out of the way of the Dracaena leaping at him. Instinctively, he swipes his claws, leaving behind five gashes across her chest. He shoves his hand into his pocket, finding Riptide, and cuts her clean in half, gold dust dissipating into nothingness before her upper body can even hit the ground.

For just a moment, he allows himself to be distracted by Thalia’s shouting match with the son of Hermes—Luke. He can barely understand what she’s saying, but he can hear the single-minded rage in her tone. Aegis is gone, likely somewhere amidst the rubble as a charm bracelet. Nearby, Will is alternating between healing the fallen girl and fighting off what monsters manage to slip past Katie. And Bianca… Bianca is just talking. Her shoulders are tense, but her bow is lowered at her side as she speaks to the bearded old man. The one with unnaturally cruel, blue eyes, reeking of DeadButNotRotting.

Behind Percy, there’s a shift of air, and a sword glints in his periphery. Quick reflexes ensure that his head isn’t taken clean off, but it’s only by the grace of the scales curling up his neck that Atlas doesn’t manage to slit his jugular either.

“Half-blood filth! You dare?” Atlas bellows, flexing his fingers around his sword and regaining feeling in his limbs all too quickly. “If Lord Kronos did not wish you for himself, I’d already have you strung up and bled dry. You dare repay our mercy—my mercy—in this way?”

Their swords meet and Percy’s arms vibrate with the force of Atlas’s swing. The pain travels through his still-injured bones up into his shoulders. It hurts. Gods, does it hurt. But Percy grits his teeth and holds his ground, unwilling to allow his knees to buckle.

Quickly, he pulls Riptide to the side, their swords scraping against each other, and rolls out of Atlas’s reach. Ending in a crouch, Percy bares his teeth and snarls.

Atlas’s only response is a sharp laugh and with a single step, he’s standing over Percy once again. Unlike last time, his agility isn’t enough to twist out of the way. Nor are his scales enough to protect him.

He’s injured, a week out of practice, and fully unused to fighting an opponent with more intelligence than a lowly monster. No, this is an opponent who, like Percy, is smart enough to learn and moreover, adjust.

Rather than another heavy downward swing, Atlas steps to the side and draws his sword up across Percy’s right shoulder. While he manages to keep his arm attached, the Titan’s blade still catches below a number of scales, as intended.

Atlas offers no mercy, and instead of following the momentum of the swing—a move which would have filleted the skin off of his upper arm in a single smooth motion—he angles the edge of the blade back towards himself.

A raw, guttural scream escapes Percy as the scales over his bicep are torn straight from his flesh. Some slide towards his elbow, following the path taken by the trails of blood left by the strike. Some remain in his arm, just barely escaping the pain of being fully removed.

And some, they stick to Atlas’s sword, along with the demigod’s glimmering blood. He pauses for a moment, taking the time to observe the scales. He holds one between his fingers and laughs in amazement when the edge is sharp enough to draw ichor.

Grateful for the pause (and hating himself for needing it), Percy’s brain spins in overtime, trying to think of a way to get the Titan into Apollo’s place. And then, suddenly, he hears Annabeth’s voice echoing in his head. A moment from Polyphemus’ island pops into the forefront of his mind, and her words come back to him.

Are you stupid? You’ll exhaust yourself if you try to fight him head-on. For once, will you stop acting like a hot-headed idiot with nothing but seaweed in his brain?

Oh, well, excuse me, Percy had responded. If you’re so f*cking wise, how about you give me a plan instead of just telling me mine is stupid.

You hunt, idiot. You find weak spots you can reach, and push them. Just like your damn seals, she yelled back, expertly dodging the rocks being thrown at them by the Cyclops. You’re the one always saying you’re more animal—more monster—than human. So stop thinking like one and use your instincts instead.

“—such a bother when they’d break from one good f*ck. Perhaps once this war is won, I’ll ask Lord Kronos to spare your life and keep you as my bed warmer. You’re far prettier than most of Poseidon’s little beasts.”

Percy tunes it out. Doesn’t let a single word through. He doesn’t think about how Atlas is stronger. Faster. Older. How his eye has already healed itself from when Percy scratched it out a few minutes prior. He forces himself to think one thing, and one thing alone:

PreyPreyPreyPreyPrey.

He throws Riptide—a distraction—and sinks deep down into the recesses of his own mind. A place where there are no detailed plans or fancy swordplay. There’s no recalling footwork or dampering the part of himself that struggles not to level the entire mountain as he did the Gateway Arch. There is only—

Hunt big prey. Fast. Quick. Protect mine.

He loses himself to the fight.

- - -

Zoe stands beside William Solace, wondering how she’s not dead as her arms tremble from the weight of her bow. Her father showed no mercy. It was a killing blow, and they all knew it. And yet, here she is. Alive and healed just enough to hold a weapon, but not strong enough to use it. Zoe pushes down the frustration of helplessness when she’s forced to rely on Will for protection.

Black spots dance before her eyes. Her head feels light, and she knows she can’t risk another confrontation with Atlas. Even if she could, though, she wouldn’t. Zoe would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to be forced into the middle of… that. Not that it’s even necessary. He seems to be doing just fine on his own.

Anaklusmos lies abandoned in favor of Percy’s claws. They’re both covered in blood and ichor and viscera. She knows mortals are known for having sudden bouts of extreme strength in near-death situations when their adrenaline runs high, but this is truly something else.

Zoe is pretty sure he’s fighting with a broken arm. Well, better broken than no arm at all. Atlas is a testament to that, seeing as his right one has been torn off at the elbow. His sword lies some feet away, not that he’s able to get to it. The backs of his knees and both Achilles’ tendons have been slashed deep enough that they’re not healing immediately, preventing him from standing up.

Gods and Titans don’t have bodies the same way humans do. You can’t stab them in the belly and wait for them to bleed out. The best you can do is incapacitate them enough that they’re unable to fight back.

Percy has done exactly that.

Even a Titan needs a spine to stand, and Atlas’s is torn at least a quarter of the way out, with several vertebrae now missing from his lower back. His mouth is a mess of raw flesh—the lower half of his jaw having been ripped off as well.

It’s with very little fanfare that her father is forced into the spot Apollo was previously occupying. The god falls to the side, breathing heavily, and Percy is left standing above them, motionless. He seems to be tuning out Atlas’s incomprehensible screams, and it’s not until Apollo looks up and quietly says something that Percy moves.

He clenches his fists and nods tersely. Then, he turns and begins to stalk over to Thalia—still fighting Luke and practically sparkling with lightning.

As he passes by Zoe and Will, Percy pauses. He claws out the throat of the Empousa Will had been fighting with ease. When she’s dead, he glares at Zoe for a moment and, with an irritated noise, points towards Atlas’s sword, still lying on the ground. Then points at Apollo and growls, “Chains.”

She gets the message loud and clear, and it takes every bit of willpower she has to not snap at him for giving her orders. But Zoe knows this isn’t the time or place. Her vision is spotty and she’d be useless in a fight, no matter how much she hates to admit it. She came here to free Lord Apollo, so Zoe looks the son of Poseidon in the eyes—dilated green eyes that look more like blazing Greek fire than the sea glass of Theseus and the rest of them—and bites back the curses she wants to spit at him. She nods tersely and with that, goes to pick up the sword she remembers all too well from her childhood.

- - -

Percy’s mind is stuck halfway between human and something else. Riptide remains on the ground somewhere because he can’t comprehend the idea of using a sword at the moment.

Too long and bulky and why would he use it when he has perfectly good weapons attached to him already? Teeth and claws will get the job done just as well.

The fight with Atlas is a blur of kill protect kill protect, instincts split between tearing apart his prey and keeping his family safe. If Apollo hadn’t caught his eye when he did, Percy doubts there would’ve been enough left of the Titan to hold up the sky. It didn’t snap him out completely, but it was enough to pull some rationality to the surface. He’s pretty sure when Annabeth said to use his instincts, that wasn’t what she had in mind.

“f*cking move!”

Percy hisses in pain when something sharp slides through the ragged patch of flesh missing scales. He doesn’t have time to even see what kind of monster it is because by the time his vision focuses, the twisted-off head in his hands is fading into golden dust.

Looking up, he sees Thalia standing in front of him. Her eyes look watery and red and her mouth is set in an angry grimace. She’s holding her spear, but Aegis is nowhere to be seen, probably lost somewhere in the rubble. It takes him a moment to realize her lips are moving. Percy blinks a few times and tries to focus on her words.

“—stupid? Why didn’t you move?”

Percy looks around. Most of the monsters have been cleared out, Atlas is back under the sky, and Luke is nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Luke? You were just—”

“f*ck Luke,” Thalia spits, offering no other explanation. She grabs onto his arm and drags him towards Bianca with her. Percy’s pretty sure his arm is still broken, but he’s running on adrenaline fumes and the pain hasn’t hit him yet. He’s not looking forward to when it does.

Thalia fixes her grip on her spear, her knuckles bone-white. They’re close enough now that Percy can hear Bianca's conversation and it’s then he starts to notice again that there’s something wrong with the man. Something really, really wrong. He can feel it.

The guy is dead…but not quite. Not rotting, like an undead corpse would. But there’s something Percy can’t point out. His mind is still a jumble of mine protect hunt.

“—kind, brown eyes. My daughter had those eyes. Ariadne; that stubborn little bitch. I wonder… Bianca. What would it take for you to put an arrow through your brother’s belly? If you could see him again, would you forgive him for his betrayal or would you gut him with a smile on your face?”

Thalia raises her spear and starts to lunge at him, skin and weapon both sparking.

(The sequence of events that follows is one that will haunt them all for years to come.)

It happens so fast that Percy can only watch as the man grabs the dagger at Bianca’s waist. He smiles, and the cruel glimmer in his eyes seems familiar to Percy in the worst of ways.

One second, Bianca is whole. The next, the knife pierces just above her hip and is pulled sharply to the right. Her stomach is slit open and all he can do is watch. No one has a chance to move—not him, not Thalia, not Katie or Will or Apollo, still being cut from his chains by Zoe. Within seconds, the man disappears into a ghostly mirage and fades into the ground.

NotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgainNotAgain.

Percy can’t move, and it’s Katie who catches Bianca as she falls to the ground. In the distance, there’s a flash of burning heat as Apollo frees himself, but Percy couldn’t care less—Bianca is bleeding out, and he can’t watch another sister die. He can’t go through this again. Seeing Katie die once was enough. He can’t do it. Not again. He can’t.

Next to him, Will burns. The earth starts to shake. And Katie Gardner screams.

Chapter 17: Prophecies Are Fickle Creatures

Chapter Text

In this life, Bianca Di Angelo was given more time. She laughed and cried and dreamed, but her story has been woven by the Fates, and in every iteration—every life—she dies with her brother on her mind. She is destined, or perhaps damned, to die for the sake of her family.

Bianca looks up. Katie is there holding her hand, and above them, Atropos stands, scissors poised carefully over a dark green thread. Bianca shudders. She breathes out.

- - -

Katie Gardner is eighteen. She is eighteen, and she was born screaming life into this world.

She’s only had Bianca for a year and a half, but she would raze the earth to keep her safe. f*ck the consequences—Bianca is her best friend. Her sister. And Katie would sooner slit her own throat than let her bleed out like this.

No. She will not die.

Katie refuses to allow it.

- - -

Most of Apollo’s children have an innate understanding of the future—of prophecies and fate. William Solace, however, can hold but tiny wisps before they escape him like smoke.

Make no mistake, he understands with striking clarity, perhaps better than any of his other siblings. But he is not like them in that he’s never spoken the words of fate as they have. Nor will he ever.

For a child of Apollo, his gift in foretelling prophecy is severely underdeveloped. That talent lies with his siblings, and his siblings are not like him. They are meant for healing and singing and looking to the future with sparkling blue eyes.

No, they are not the same.

Oh, Will can heal when he needs to. It comes to him as easy as breathing. He can sing the hymns painted into his mind at birth by Apollo, but he knows deep in his soul he is not meant for that. Will was born with devastation and chaos and disease at the tips of his fingers.

This is the inheritance passed down to him by his father, but Will is old enough to make his own choices in life, and so, the hymn he sings is an unfamiliar one. Not one of healing, but of decay and withered life and mangled, twisted prophecies.

Not like his siblings, indeed. For who is he to preach the stories of Tapestry of Fate, when he can destroy them instead?

A thread of equal strength must be exchanged. Will knows this in his bones. But what singular soul can compare to that of Bianca Di Angelo’s? Of that dark green thread tied around her heart that was always meant for more.

Will does not foretell Fate, but manipulates it with nimble fingers that don’t even realize what they’ve done. This end was never meant to be Bianca’s. It was the gleaming silver thread of Zoe Nightshade meant to be between Atropos’s scissors.

But Fate has a secret talent. It is not set in stone, all those who see glimpses of the future know this. There are many paths, though some are more likely than others. These ones are so magnetized that they will do anything to stay on track, and if the narrative is broken, it will simply find a new path to stick itself to.

The future is fluid and prophecies have many meanings. But fate can be bitter and petty, and when it doesn’t get it’s way, it can latch onto something far worse than it was ever meant to be.

It was never Bianca Di Angelo who was meant to die. But Zoe Nightshade was saved, and someone’s thread needed to take the place of hers.

Will knows this.

It is unacceptable.

- - -

Katie Gardner screams.

William Solace looks Atropos in the eyes. He breathes in Katie’s desperation. And then in one fluid motion, with power fueled by her grief, he plucks the scissors from the oldest of the Moirai and he cuts.

His hand is steady and purposeful, and not even the deafening screams of the dead and dying make him pause. The Fates’ tapestry frays into tens of thousands of threads at the hands of a thirteen-year-old demigod.

And then, Bianca breathes.

Some fundamental laws of the universe begin to shift for the second time that night as they try to accommodate the changes Will has caused. Zoe Nightshade was meant to perish by a parent’s hand—She was saved. Bianca’s thread was meant to take the place of hers.

And yet, she lives.

There’s an ear-splitting crack that echoes through everything and everywhere, audible to all those that hold the gift of the Fates. Across the world, they stop and listen as the sound of a twice-broken prophecy rings like a shattered bell.

- - -

Apollo hears the bell loudest of all. It’s brassy and deafening, and he can hardly think. In his mind, there is nothing but grief fear and mourning terror, and an all-encompassing voice that wants to scream at the foolish boy, What have you done?

Messing with the tapestry—this was more than saving a life. This was something else entirely, and the god already knows what comes next. Apollo looks at his child and can’t tell if it’s Will or Asclepius standing there, grinning, oblivious of the consequences that come with changing the natural order to this degree.

His bones feel hollow, and there’s nothing but raw desperation and panic as he reaches towards his son—his favorite son who’s too relieved to sense the ozone gathering in the air.

He smells it before he sees it—but so does Thalia—and how did he get so weak that he can’t move fast enough to grab his own son? Apollo doesn’t even have enough time to reach his hand out all the way, let alone steal him away to Delos.

He sees it before he hears it—a blinding flash and the thundering echo that follows. He watches, weak, frozen, as Thalia tries fails to push his son aside. She’s foolish to think she could escape the divine punishment of their father.

When the smoke clears, Will and Thalia lay on the ground, unmoving, and for the second time in his life, he mourns a son whose only sin was power.

There’s a loud, horrible disturbance. Like the sound of a massive joint, scraping bone against bone as it’s popped back into place. The prophecy self-corrects, and for the third and final time that night, a bell rings out.

(The following day, the world will mourn those who died in the freak natural disaster that wiped out all life within several miles of Mount Tamalpais. The earth will be black and dead as far as the eye can see, all those mortal lives just past Mount Othrys, snuffed out like a candle.)

Dubbed “The Leeching,” the disaster surrounding Mount Tamalpais will remain in the news for months to come—the media vultures feasting until there’s nothing left. Compared to it, California’s wildfires are old news, and as such, there isn’t much reported on the one that flares up in Oakland Hills that very same night.

The only people who really notice are the Atmospheric Science majors at UC Berkely, who spend that evening on the roof of their dorm, passing around a joint and reverently watching the flashes of a dry thunderstorm spark a fire a few miles away.

Not one drop of rain graces the air, but a lightning storm rages across the California skyline all the same.

Chapter 18: Suffocating in Isolation

Chapter Text

“Persephone does not have demigod children.”

This is what was said to him just before a decaying crown of asphodels appeared over his head. Grover stared. Annabeth stared. Chiron stared. Mr. D stared the longest, purple eyes of madness boring into Nico (flickering into the serpentine yellow of Zagreus as he appraised his newfound mortal brother.)

They send him to the strawberry fields with the children of Demeter, who teach him the hymns to make the plants grow. When he kills the strawberries, they send him to the grape vineyards. Then the apple orchards.

He kills those too.

When they take away his tools and tell him to tag along with the Hermes cabin, Nico nods and walks away. He takes the long path to the far outskirts of the fields, finds himself an untouched patch of land, and pulls out the little packets of seeds he found under his pillow this morning.

Nico plants spider lilies and asphodels. Roses that are pitch black and others that have petals the color of blood. He might never grow strawberries, but he’ll make the best damn pomegranate grove they’ve ever seen.

Everyone knows his mother is Persephone, but for some reason, they expect him to be a blond-haired, smiling child with wildflowers in his hair—singing to woodland creatures like he’s f*cking Snow White.

They look at a child of Persephone but expect a child of Kore. They want gentle hands that coax plants into growing. Not ones littered with papercuts that wilt them with just a touch.

Nico’s mother is no innocent maiden, playing idly with flowers in a meadow. Once upon a time, her flute-like voice sang songs that were beloved by the nymphs she played with. Now, when Persephone sings, it is a threat and a warning that the Underworld trembles before.

She is the Queen of the Dead who sits beside Hades as his equal. When souls turn to her for mercy—the unrepentant murderers, the rapists, the child abusers—she laughs and shows them why the entire Underworld is terrified of her wrath.

Queen Persephone tends to her garden with blood and bone ash. She is destruction and death and sickly sweet flowers rotting atop a freshly dug grave. She is burning rage with fingers wrapped around a crackling inferno of a torch.

And Nico Di Angelo is just as much her son as he is Hades’s.

- - -

Nico senses the second it happens. He collapses barely a moment after the sun returns in full force. Disoriented. Terrified. He feels a sharp pain in his stomach, his blood runs cold, and he knows.

He hears Castor shouting, but it’s nothing more than a muffled buzzing in his ears.

The tips of his fingers start to numb, and he couldn’t care less about the circle of grass around him having the life leeched out of it. The air around him hums. His skin begins to warm, not that he can feel it. To Nico, there’s only cold.

Molten red fractures appear over his exposed flesh; beneath them, as his terror turns to rage, fire begins to crackle.

The son of Hades he may be, but Persephone Brimo, too, lurks in the ichor flowing through his veins.

(The Angry. The Terrifying. Persephone of the Crackling Flame.)

Fire licks where his hair touches the nape of his neck. It burns like magma, glowing below his skin. Beside him, his friends recoil from the heat, but all Nico feels is a bone-chilling AngerLossGrief because Bianca is gone.

Up above, the sun beats down on him for the first time in weeks. Sun means shadows, and shadows mean it’s easy as breathing to melt into the darkness and reappear in his father’s palace.

He storms into the throne room, cutting off Thanatos mid-sentence.

“Where is she?” Nico all but screams, his voice cracking with every word. His chest feels empty. Like the little tether that connected him to Bianca was torn out at the root. Each breath he takes is harder and harder to pull in, and it feels like his chest is being skewered through with ice picks.

Thanatos tells him to calm down.

Nico gouges out half his cheek and lip with blunt, human fingernails.

Clutching his face, the god of death sneers and hisses, “Control your brats, or I’ll do it for you, Lord Hades. I’ve had enough of your escapist little wretches after Levesque.”

Hades doesn’t have a chance to respond, for the hall’s doors swing open to reveal Persephone.

She looks enraged. The crown of flowers she usually wears wilts by the second, and her face is nigh unrecognizable to Nico. When she lays eyes on him, though, her fury abates, expression softening.

Persephone pulls him into a hug, wrapping her arms around him. And then—

Thanatos doubles over in pain, and Persephone freezes. She and Hades exchange horrified expressions. And Nico… his chest feels warm again.

“What was that?” He whispers. Nico extracts himself from his mother’s arms and turns to his father. Louder, he asks, “What. Was. That?”

Hades ignores him and begins barking orders, “Thanatos. Take Hecate. Macaria as well. If Hermes is not already there, send for him immediately.”

With ichor still staining his face, he nods and glares at Nico a final time before vanishing.

“Alecto!”

The Fury appears in a column of flames and kneels before Hades’s throne. His voice is deadly when he says, “Bring me my daughter. Now.”

As quickly as she came, Alecto disappears without a word.

His head spinning, Nico steps closer to his father and repeats, “What was that?”

His father’s eyes are pitch black. Not a single flame is reflected in them. They observe him for long moments, during which Nico only gets angrier.

Then, he speaks. “Your best friends just decimated part of California trying to revive Bianca.”

“What? But she’s….” Nico stutters, unable to keep himself from shaking. “I felt her… And now she’s not… What did Percy do?”

Hades scoffs. “Perseus did nothing. Demeter’s daughter drained the place of all life several miles in every direction, and William Solace stole from the Fates—”

“Will did what?” Nico asks, his mouth dropping open.

The throne creaks under his grip, indestructible material threatening to break regardless.

“That boy Cut through their Tapestry like it was a little art project and ended fifty-thousand lives long before any of them were meant to end,” Hades spits. “Do you know how much paperwork that takes?”

Nico breathes a sigh of relief, “But Bianca’s still alive.”

“Yes, she’s alive because of his arrogance. Playing with powers demigods have no business touching.”

“But she’s alive,” Nico repeats slowly. Staring daggers at his father, practically daring him to argue.

Nico doesn't care how many people die. Fifty-thousand. Fifty-million. It doesn’t matter how much paperwork it'll give his father. Bianca is his sister, and he’ll burn down everything in his path to keep her alive.

He’ll happily make a hypocrite of himself when he tells deceased souls, “The dead should stay dead,” because he knows in his bones if they’re ever separated, he’ll drag her out of the Underworld no matter what it takes. Nico will walk through Tartarus, through the Doors of Death themselves, if it means her freedom.

As much as children of Hades are said to belong in the Underworld, the ones who die early deaths never seem to stay there for very long.

He’s never met her, but Nico knows he has a sister locked away in the Fields of Asphodel. She’s chained to a tree behind layers and layers of Hecate’s magic. He might not be able to hear her, but he can see her, albeit from a distance, and every single time Nico’s snuck off to find a way through the wards, he’s never once seen her stop screaming.

(Hazel Levesque howls profanities and curses out Mors and Trivia and Pluto himself. She screams and screams until her throat is raw, and then she screams some more. Her voice is perpetually hoarse, and the taste of ichor on her tongue is something she’s had decades to get used to.

In all the time she’s been there, though, not once has a tear been shed. She doesn’t cry or beg, no. Hazel curses with words her mother would be ashamed to hear. She sits. She screams. But most of all, she waits.

Hazel is already dead, and forever is a long time. So it’s just a matter of waiting until a mistake comes, and she can free herself once more.

Perhaps she’ll last longer than two years this time.)

Hades seems to sag in his throne as he finally responds to Nico’s angry words, “Yes, Nico. She’s alive, and until I return from the inevitable summons to Olympus, you’re not to leave the palace under any circ*mstances.”

“What?” Nico exclaims, taking a step forward. “But what about Camp? Bianca hasn’t even been there yet!”

In less than a second, Hades has risen from his throne and crossed the distance to Nico. He clamps a freezing hand over the nape of his son’s neck, leaning down to look him in the eyes.

“You foolish boy. Do you have any idea how much danger Bianca would be there?” He whispers, fingertips leaving bruises on Nico’s very much mortal skin. “Letting either of you go anywhere my brother has eyes is nothing short of suicidal. Right now, Artemis is convinced you are Persephone’s children alone. That means Zeus is convinced as well. I will not jeopardize your lives with that sort of recklessness.”

He’s never seen his father this angry, and he’s at a loss for words. His heart pounds in his chest as he tries to phrase any sort of response.

The room gets colder. Hades shakes the back of Nico’s neck and shouts, “Do you understand?”

Then, the hand is gone, and Nico falls to the floor, scrambling backward until Persephone stands between him and Hades.

“Husband,” she says. Her voice is sharper than a knife. At the angle her face is turned, he can just barely make out the flames burning bright in his mother’s eyes. Her grip tightens around his wrist until the false bones creak. “Your fear and anger are not excuses for you to harm our son.”

No one speaks for several moments, and all Nico can do is watch as his parents have a silent conversation he's left out of. Then, Hades exhales raggedly and slumps against her. His face is pressed into the side of her neck, and at that moment, Nico sees not a king but a grieving father.

He wants to say something but can’t find it in himself to break the silence. It’s intimate and private and altogether uncomfortable to witness. Nico leaves without a sound, slipping into the shadows and stepping into Bianca’s room.

It’s empty.

Nico pulls out his Mythomagic deck and sits on his sister’s bed. With nothing left to do but wait, he begins to shuffle.

- - -

“I’m sorry.”

That’s all Nico can say to Bianca.

I’m glad you’re alive. I love you. Why don’t you hate me? He wants to say them all so badly, but his lips won’t form the words, no matter how hard he tries.

“I’m sorry…” I got them killed.

“I’m sorry…” I almost got you killed.

“I’m sorry…” I didn’t tell anyone.

“I’m sorry…” I trusted Minos more than you.

- - -

The sound of footsteps grows louder until they’re barely a few feet away. Nico stills his swinging legs. There’s shuffling behind him, and with a heavy sigh, the person sits down.

“Your pomegranate trees are getting bigger. I think they’ll start growing fruit soon.”

Over the ledge, his legs begin to swing gently once more. With each tap of his heels to the cliffside, stones chip off and crumble, falling into the deep abyss below. He wonders what it would be like if he jumped.

“Summer session started today. Don’t you want to see what camp is like when it’s full? The sing-along was so much fun tonight.”

He ignores her.

“Castor and Pollux have been asking about you. They said you’re still ignoring their IMs,” Bianca tries again. “And Lou Ellen is getting better at shadow traveling. She keeps talking about kidnapping you to camp, and I don’t think she’s joking.”

Silence.

Bianca makes a frustrated noise and inches closer to him. The entrance to Tartarus haunts them from below.

“It’s been five months up there, Nico,” she says. “Please, you can’t keep doing this. We’re all worried for you.”

Nico picks up a rock next to him. It’s jagged enough that it pierces his skin with ease when he pulls his thumb across it. Without a word, he tosses it forward and watches it fall into the darkness.

“I went to see Will a few days ago.”

Nico stiffens.

“He misses you, you know? Says Elysium is boring, and there’s no one to play Mythomagic with. He’s still waiting for you to give him the grand tour.”

His legs stop kicking, and he stands up. Nico catches a glimpse of brown hair, but he forces himself to look away before she can guilt him into staying.

Behind him, Bianca scrambles to her feet. Her hand darts out, and she manages to catch his wrist.

“Wait, no. Nico, I’ll stop asking about him. But please, can you at least come with me to camp? Only for a little while. You don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. We can just sit on the beach and do nothing. Please.”

He wants to. Gods, he wants to.

Nico’s lip quivers, and for the first time in (five months? Two weeks? Three? He hasn’t bothered converting his days here to mortal time) a rather long while, he speaks. “I don’t—I can’t leave.”

Bianca inhales sharply at his hoarse voice. She doesn’t comment, though. Thankfully. She simply responds as though he hasn’t stopped talking since his meltdown at Will’s trial.

“Just once. Please. For me.”

He turns to her and flinches. The circles under Bianca’s eyes are just as bad as his own. She looks paler than normal, and her cheeks have hollowed just enough to be noticeable.

Her eyes start to water looking at him, and before he can pull away, he’s yanked into an iron-tight hug. He can feel her trembling against him. Bianca’s fingers clutch onto his shirt so tight he’s afraid it might rip.

It takes him a moment to notice, but they’re no longer the same height. She’s grown at least two inches, not having spent all this time in the Underworld. The reminder has him choking on short bursts of oxygen that make his chest burn.

Desperate sobs echo through the air, loud enough to drown out the sound from the Fields of Punishment. They’re raw and painful cries of mourning—the building despair of someone that has finally cracked. It’s grief and regret and agonizing heartbreak.

It’s not until his knees give out that Nico realizes the heaving sobs are his own.

He can barely breathe, let alone speak. He can hear Bianca Mamma’s voice hushing him, and suddenly, it’s like he’s a child again—cold and shivering on an enormous ship to America, mourning the loss of their home and terrified for what the future might hold. He’s scared and wants nothing more than to rewind time. To go back to what was normal.

He hears his name again. She’s asking why he can’t leave, and finally, the words are torn out of him.

Nico sobs.

“Because he’s never gonna get older, but if I leave here, I will.”

Chapter 19: Two-Front War

Chapter Text

When Katie wakes up, it’s to the smell of chocolate chip cookies. Everything feels hazy, like she’s waking up from the aftermath of a horrible migraine. Her eyes blink open to the blue walls of Percy’s room.

The desk opposite the bed is a mess of papers, pens, and all the little things Percy would pick up off the floor but never return to their original spot. It drove Sally mad, but she never berated him for it—or Thalia, for that matter, when it turned out her organizational skills were even worse than Percy’s.

Sally was everything she wished her dad could have been when “dealing with” Katie’s ADHD, as though he was the one who was struggling. She was kind. Patient. Never got mad when Percy’s hyperfixations led to him spending an entire weekend painting marine animals all over his walls with her, Thalia, and Annabeth. She found them an hour in, took them to buy better brushes and non-toxic paint, and that was that.

Nothing, in particular, triggers it, but between one thought and the next, a flood of memories suddenly tears her mind.

It’s all a blur.

Like trying to watch a movie with a scratched-up CD—freezing and skipping at the most inopportune moments and remembering the worst of it.

One moment Bianca was taking a knife to her stomach; the next, they were both flying backward into broken stones—injured but alive. Every inch of her skin was buzzing, and it felt like someone had taken a hammer to her skull. She could barely see past the spots in her vision.

And then, the smell of charred flesh filled the air. Even with a splitting migraine, she saw enough that it barely took a glance for her stomach to empty. When nothing but bile was left, she continued to gag until she was spitting blood onto the ground.

Only when Apollo tapped her on the forehead did the nausea finally abate. Katie looked up at him through bleary eyes, and if she thought he looked terrible while holding the sky, it had nothing on him now.

His divinity may have returned, but his face was devoid of emotion, and his eyes looked like a dead man’s.

Apollo might have said something to her, but Katie couldn’t hear a thing past the white noise in her ears. Her fingertips were vibrating, and her skin felt like it was about to peel itself off.

The pain came out of nowhere. First, in her neck. Then, her chest and her arms. It was as though the leftover roots they couldn’t remove had returned to life and began to grow again.

Katie could feel them tightening around her throat and crawling down her arms. Thorns pierced her flesh from the inside out. The only reprieve was the lush bed of grass beneath her palms, growing in the shape of handprints everywhere bare skin touched the earth.

The last thing she saw before everything went black was Apollo’s expressionless face and a pair of burnt-black figures in her periphery.

Now, Katie looks over her arms in a panic. Scars cross-cross over them in every direction, but the roots themselves are entirely gone. Her hands shoot up to her neck, and she hisses at the sharp pain beneath the bandage she finds there.

“Try not to touch,” she hears Sally say. Her hands feel warm when she pulls Katie’s fingers away from her neck. She smells like cookies. “They’ve been slowly wilting, but they’re not fully gone yet.”

Katie sits up gingerly, struggling to keep her head from turning. Every shift tugs at the roots still threaded through her neck.

She has so many things she wants to ask, “What happened,” being the first. Her heartbeat rabbits in her chest, pounding against her ribcage with the force of a war drum.

How did I get here? Is Bianca alive? Where’s Percy? Why am I in his room? How long have I been here?

“They’re dead.”

All those questions and that’s the only thing she can say.

Katie doesn’t struggle when Sally wraps her arms around her, pulling her in for a hug. All she can do is bury her face in the soft wool sweater and stifle the sob that rips free. Katie’s fingers tangle into the blanket still covering her legs.

She can’t breathe.

“They’re dead.”

Beneath her hands, buds of cotton start to sprout from the blanket’s bleached, over-processed fibers. The plants coil up her arms slowly as she cries. It’s a striking juxtaposition of softness compared to the harsh thorns that were recently there.

The bracts of a cotton plant dry and stiffen as it grows, and by the time it’s matured, those walls surrounding the boll are sharp enough to shred skin. If she were more coherent, Katie might have noticed the lack of pain, but she has no thoughts to spare on anything but her dead and missing friends.

(These plants are hers alone, and that which is grown by Katie’s own hand will never harm her.)

Not even the warmth of Sally’s arms around her can help the cold sinking into her bones. Katie cries, and outside, nature grieves right alongside her.

- - -

At the topsoil, human greed lays waste to the lush greenery that once existed. Mile after mile, they do nothing but take, never noticing the poison which seeps into the earth with each footprint.

Humans multiply, and Gaea’s earth rots. Infected with hate, she slumbers and does nothing to cull the parasitic mold growing in her heart. From the inside out, the world blackens and decays. Her malice is a sickness, and as she dreams of revenge, it creeps closer to the surface, stealing away the life she once gave it.

Gaea is a protogenos. She is the earth. Without her, everything would crumble, for she is the lynchpin that holds together everything.

However, nature is not inherently beholden to her will. Millennia before, she provided the spark to make it flourish, but the flora and fauna that populate the earth are their own. And so, it is with wailing desperation that life clings on, fighting a two-front war against its mother and the humans it once loved so much.

It is for this reason that when Katie Gardner’s cry for help echoes out of the ruins of Mount Othrys, nature answers of its own free will. It does not sense the greed of humans nor the hatred of its mother. The only anger she feels is rooted in desperation and grief, rather than a desire for revenge.

She speaks no words that human minds can understand, but nature co*cks an ear and listens to the unspoken cry of, help me, please, someone help me.

Nature looks to the humans above, to their mother below, and to this little godling begging for help—asking, but never demanding. She may be young, but she is brimming with power and potential, and maybe it is time for life to be greedy, for once.

With curious touches, it wraps itself around the godling and holds her tight. It senses her thoughts; feels her intentions. Cradles her in warmth and learns her thoughts as it dips beneath her skin.

She loves. Oh, how she loves.

Her roses. Her firethorns. The rows and rows of strawberries she grew with her own hands. And humans. Not all humans, though. Only hers.

She loves and takes care of that which is hers. For them, she would burn the world and that is the devotion that after thousands of years of neglect, life longs for.

With a cry of euphoria, nature rejoices.

It does not say goodbye. Mother is too full of hatred, and the humans do not understand. It is tired of fighting a war it cannot win—of being used as a weapon whether it likes it or not.

But her? This new godling? This little girl who, even beneath layers of despair, knows joy and laughter and life?

For her, nature will fight. For her, it will be a weapon, because it knows her goodness and her ability to love. It will cleanse the taint of Mother’s roots, and she will be a home without poison in her heart.

Together, they will grow and create and be something new.

- - -

There are some who may claim the power now coursing through Katie’s veins was stolen, but all those who listen—truly listen—know better.

Life made a decision and only time will tell if it was the right one.

Chapter 20: Delos

Chapter Text

“I said, let me go!” Percy screams. The ground shakes beneath his feet, but other than the shifting of the pristine sand, everything stays in place.

“Do you think I want you here?” Apollo shouts back, eyes glowing gold and divinity flaring beneath his skin. He sounds like a dying thousand voices, all wailing at once. “This is my home. These are my beaches. The only reason you’re here is because no one trusts you enough to let you stay in the mortal world until you calm down!”

“Calm down? Calm down?” Percy’s words are said in a shrill, ear-piercing voice, vibrating with the very wrath of the ocean in them. The waves crash behind him, matching his anger, and the only reason a storm hasn’t gathered yet is that Apollo is the one who decides the weather on his damn island. “They’re both dead, and you want me to calm down?”

“You think I don’t know that? I had to watch every second of it!” Apollo screeches like an out-of-tune violin. Percy can feel his face burning like he’s spent the last twelve hours out in the sun. “Do you know what it’s like? The joy of having children, only to have them ripped from you year after year! The one time I thought I’d finally have a son make it past high school, he’s dead at thirteen!”

“Let me f*cking leave,” Percy cries out, furious tears streaming down his face. His claws draw blood from his own palms, not that he even feels it. “Let me go, and I’ll drag them out myself!”

The laugh Apollo responds with is high-pitched—dry, and humorless. “What are you going to do, Perseus? Kill Hades?”

Before Percy can respond, there’s a searing pain across his face. Apollo’s fingers make contact with his skin, blisters bubbling beneath the unyielding grip. Percy gags and struggles to suppress the bile from rising as the familiar scent of burning flesh surrounds them. The god's voice is soft this time, but Percy instantly feels like cornered prey—a butterfly trapped behind glass, wings pinned and suffocating.

“You, my darling, are nothing more than another trigger-happy demigod with anger issues the size of Mount Vesuvius and an over-inflated ego, stuffed inside an inferiority complex so big it makes me nauseous,” Apollo whispers, sharp and deadly. “You’re not leaving until you can walk on mortal land without cracking the f*cking state in half. Now go throw your tantrum and stay out of my way.”

Percy spits in his face.

Apollo backhands him so hard that his jaw breaks again.

(Something in his chest seems to crack alongside it.)

- - -

Being on Delos is torture.

The sun never sets, never graces Percy with the cool breeze he’s come to expect from summer nights. The sea rages with him, but never enough to wreck Apollo’s pristine beaches. The ground shakes but never cracks, for the god would never sacrifice his beautifully groomed gardens of sunflowers.

Destruction runs through his veins. It’s all Percy knows. It leaks from his pores and settles over his skin in a thick miasma of rage.

He wants to break something. Wants to slash and claw and hurt because Will is gone. His best friend. His brother. The first one to extend a hand to Percy, an offering of nectar and friendship when his mother was just taken from him. Someone who looked past the unsettling eyes and sharp teeth that had scared off so many others, and loved him unconditionally.

Thalia is gone, too. Dead at the hand of her own father. They had barely six months together, but she was his sister just as much as Katie and Bianca. She understood his anger in a way that others could not, for the very same rage simmered beneath her skin towards the ones who had wronged her and hers.

He wonders if this is how Thalia felt when her brother was taken from her all those years ago. Back when she spent years screaming at the skies, cursing her father and her mother and the world for all their cruelty. When she gave a shivering Annabeth her leather jacket and slaughtered a pack of hellhounds on her own, her skin a patchwork of Lichtenberg figures—cursed, like the ones on Percy’s back—as a reminder to Know Her Place.

Will and Thalia. They were both his, and now they’re gone, and Percy can do nothing but scream in resentment towards Apollo’s palace when the earth refuses to crack beneath his feet and the sea will not bend to his will, refusing to wreck the golden beaches of Delos. Even the trees he hacks away at with Riptide are free from marks within hours.

A part of him almost hopes Apollo will be angry enough to strike him down and let him join Will and Thalia. Ceaselessly, it wrestles with the part that wants to go home. To seek comfort from his mother. To be with Katie and Bianca and Nico.

He hates it here. Ignored by Apollo and left alone with nothing but his own mind for company for what feels like months. Gods, does he hate it.

It’s on a bad day, when he loses himself to the screaming in his brain, that one of Apollo’s Muses finds him.

Melpomene of Tragedy.

She sits down on the sand beside him and smiles, ignoring how the ground vibrates beneath them. Percy tenses, hackles rising instinctively like he’s a trapped animal.

If she notices, she doesn’t comment. In fact, she doesn’t speak to him at all. They sit together in silence for long moments until, eventually, she begins to hum.

At first, there are no lyrics. Just a mournful tangle of harmonies she somehow makes with a singular voice. But little by little, the pace increases. The melody becomes joyous and uplifting, and she’s no longer singing a funeral march but an ode to life. To Will and Thalia.

There’s no distinct change in her humming, her lips remain closed, but somehow, Percy begins to hear the lyrics she composes, unspoken yet audible to all those who would listen.

Melpomene sings the stories of their lives. The good, the bad, and everything in between, before their tragedy struck. She tells of Will’s feud with the Hermes cabin and the time Thalia stole a police car just to prove she could. She tells of the Labyrinth and years on the streets. But most of all, she sings of the marks they left on the world.

The sharpied suns drawn by Will’s hand on the walls of every building at camp. The scars left over from the scrapes he bandaged and bones he set. Stray wrappers under beds and behind mattresses from the cherry lozenges he gave out by the handful when the inevitable summer plague came around.

Thalia’s tree still stands proud at the top of Half-Blood Hill, the Golden Fleece feeding its power into strengthening the border. The leather jacket that Annabeth used as a pillow for the last eight years remains in perfect condition. Thalia’s legacy lives on in the TG, still carved above the entryways of warehouses up and down the East Coast.

They may reside in the Underworld now, but they’ve left their mark, both corporal and in the memories of others.

When Melpomene stops humming, it’s silent. The sea doesn’t surge, and the earth has stopped rumbling. For the first time in days, Percy feels his mind quiet, anger making way for bone-deep loss. Melpomene presses a kiss to the crown of his head and whispers a blessing. As she walks away from Percy, the floodgates finally open, and for the first time in weeks, a sob rips free.

He can barely breathe. His chest screams in pain and his lungs burn when the air doesn’t come quickly enough. Lost in his tears, Percy doesn’t notice how the ocean creeps forward until he’s been enveloped by the waves.

The marine animals Apollo permits entry to his island are few compared to the actual ocean. Not one shark swims the waters of Delos, but dolphins and sea turtles are plenty. There are sea horses and schools of brightly colored fish.

The irony is not lost upon him when the first animal to approach Percy is a seal. He’s unsure if it’s a sob or a laugh he chokes out when the pup puffs up his snow-white coat and darts forward to nuzzle into Percy’s neck, blowing bubbles and yipping loudly. The others seem to have some sense of self-preservation, staying further away, but the fearless pup just butts his head against Percy and claims a spot in his lap.

A small herd of seahorses hovers around his arm, and several clownfish settle on his head as though his hair is a sea anemone. Turtles swim closer and sit on the ocean floor beside him. Betta’s and Dragonet’s dart past, brushing their fins across his cheek in an attempt at comfort.

They don’t know why Percy’s grieving, just that he is. To them, the circ*mstances do not matter. All they see is their prince in pain, and to them, it is an honor to offer him the unconditional devotion all marine creatures have for the royal family.

Percy doesn’t know how long he remains there, hours or perhaps even days, leaning against the body of a dolphin with his face buried in a fluff of white fur and the weight of several sea otters draped over his shoulders. But eventually, the crying tapers off, and exhaustion sets in. In the safety of the ocean, under the watchful eye of this cluster of sea creatures, he allows himself to drift off. He doesn’t need their protection, but something in his chest unfurls at the thought nonetheless.

Percy sleeps, and for the first time in a long time, he isn’t plagued by nightmares of a hateful sea. He dreams of Will’s ugly laugh and Thalia’s complete inability to sing, and beneath him, the earth does not shake.

(The peace will not last forever. Soon enough, anger will find a way to crawl back into his heart, but perhaps, this can be a start.)

- - -

In all his years of divine life, Apollo has only sealed his studio once. Now, thousands of years later, he locks the doors for the very same reason as he mourns another son.

He does not seek out the Muses for comfort. Nor his sister or mother, for they could never understand the fragility of a demigod child and the ephemeral nature of their mortality.

Apollo knows they visit. Melpomene sings Percy through his grief on the days he comes above land, when it feels as though a reset button has been pressed on his anger. She spends weeks calming his rage until Apollo is no longer forced to waste energy on holding back tidal waves and knitting Delos back together.

Better he lets his rage out here than in the mortal world. Better to learn that fighting back cannot be his answer to everything, because no matter what pact Zeus has with Poseidon, the moment Percy steps out of line, he will share Will’s fate—whether it be at the hands of the king or the Olympian Council, who would surely vote for his death. And if that happened, well, Apollo isn’t how much more he can stretch before he breaks. Even now, the only thing keeping him from retaliating is the knowledge that his remaining children would be massacred should he fail.

Percy, for all his power, doesn’t understand. He is like Will: Stubborn and loyal but does not think of the consequences of acting rashly. Will did not think before saving Bianca. And Percy, had Apollo not knocked him out within seconds of the lightning strike, would not have thought twice before destroying all of California.

Will. His son. His favorite son. The only one who stood a true chance at making it to adulthood. Graduating and living a real life were within his reach. And now he’s gone. Dead. All because he loved too deeply.

Who does he have left? Michael, Lee, Victoria, Kayla, Austin, Gracie. Yan, still too little to come to camp. Jerry, across the ocean in London with his mother. Apollo wishes he didn’t love them as much as he does because he knows, he knows, most won’t live to see their eighteenth birthday.

For all that Apollo is the god of prophecy, he is not and will never be its master. He watches and observes. Nudges to safety who he can and hopes he hasn’t overlooked a worse path. But he knows better than to manipulate the tapestry itself—only petitions the Moirai with actions and obedience.

The irony of being freed from Adamantine chains is truly something else. Apollo hasn’t known freedom since his greed for knowledge led him to gather the domain of prophecy piece by piece. From Poseidon. From Phoebe and Themis and Gaea. From Dione and Zeus.

The metaphysical chains around his wrists are ones of his own making. Formed with every drop of prophecy he collected until one day, he ruled its domain, but forbidden from making changes on a whim.

Everywhere he looks, he sees strings each color of the rainbow, and then some. The tapestry that the Fates weave settles over the earth like an enormous matrix, threaded through every person, every animal, every object. Everything is a point of potential, and though he’s long learned to suppress his vision, some refuse to go unseen.

They call to him. Beckon him closer with soft whispers he cannot ignore, coaxing him to strum the invisible threads like the strings of a lyre. No matter how much he tries, he can’t help himself. Apollo is the god of knowledge, and the temptation to know is one he gives in to every time.

Some threads are made of wool, soft and malleable. These are the ones he can manipulate. Futures not set in stone, still young and far from fully formed, have enough give for him to push and pull until they settle into something better, or perhaps worse, depending on his mood.

Others are made of iron. Immovable and set in stone. He avoids these, for he knows he cannot resist the temptation to know the future they hold. It is why he seldom visits his cabin at camp. It is plagued with threads of iron he can’t escape from. He can’t walk through the bunk without being assaulted by the images of blood and pain and death that will bring about the end of his children.

Will was one of the lucky few. Surrounding the bright yellow thread tied around his heart were hundreds of strings, of paths he could take, of futures he could live.

Now, there are none. Now, his son is dead, his children are dying, and Percy is passively suicidal in his craving for vengeance.

Percy, whose luminescent green thread is laced with more and more gold each year. Edging closer to the day it will intertwine with Apollo’s, caught in the web of tangles he so shamelessly knots before the Fates’ knowing gaze.

He’s so close to being something more if he doesn’t get himself killed first. But Apollo’s learned his lesson twice over now, with too-powerful sons who didn’t think before they acted. Percy won’t leave Delos until he gets his anger under control because if Percy dies before his thread turns entirely gold, Apollo’s wrath will be remembered for millennia.

Calliope has already begun drafting epics grand enough to make Homer weep. Erato writes of infatuation and possession, composing lyrics to the sharp melodies of Euterpe’s flute with a fervor not seen since Icarus. Clio records every detail of Percy’s life, for she is the keeper of history that will ensure his memory is not lost to time.

A simple life will never suit Percy or Apollo, so Thalia writes black comedies while Terpsichore leaps and twirls and glides across a stage to invisible symphonies only she can hear. Melpomene sits patiently, waiting for tragedy to strike with Urania, who maps the stars and plots out a worthy constellation should he die a mortal.

And finally, there is Polyhymnia, who, unlike her sisters, does not prepare for the worst. She, too, lies with Apollo and listens to the words of fate he whispers in her ears. He paints a fresco of bitemarks and golden bruises as he shares visions of futures that may or may not come to pass.

When they have parted, she stands before a mirror and maps out the markings of Apollo’s love. There, she thinks of green eyes and composes poems and hymns that tell of a new god. One who is as loyal as he is wrathful. She does not know if the boy will survive all that is to come, but should he make it to the day when all that remains in his veins is ichor, he will already have hymns of worship ready to be sung.

Now, though, Apollo grieves. He paints and paints until sharply focused sunlight sparks a flame on the half-finished canvases. The floor of his studio is littered with ashes and broken paintbrushes. With portraits of Will, some burned, others torn to shreds in his mourning.

Between the painted memories of his son lie discarded canvases of green eyes that he can’t get right no matter how many iterations he attempts. Fewer in number, but still there, are the cracked open rib cages and bleeding heart with a burnt black handprint curled around it. He casts those from his thoughts, painted only when his mind slips into something far older by accident.

In those days, he could cast a plague in grief and anger, and Zeus would only roll his eyes. He could steal Percy away and force a golden apple down his throat with few repercussions, aside from a tumultuous sea and Hera’s irritation. It was easier back then.

But it’s a different age now, and should he steal Percy away for his own, Apollo doesn’t doubt his children would be forbidden from stepping into a body of water for all eternity. That being said, Percy won’t be leaving Delos until he gets his anger under control. Poseidon knows this just as well.

Will is gone, and he refuses to lose Percy too. He will stay on Apollo’s island until he has calmed enough that the destruction he causes in the mortal world will not be enough to earn Zeus’s ire. No, Percy won’t be leaving Delos until his departure is no longer a death sentence.

Zeus will not be the one to kill Percy. Apollo won’t allow it. The boy will ascend, or he will die, but should his death come before his thread turns fully gold, make no mistake, it will be with Apollo’s hand around his heart.

- - -

A couple of months later, there are no goodbyes between him and Apollo when Melpomene brings Percy back to the mortal world. It’s the middle of the day, but he’s too exhausted to do anything other than sleep. He passes his room and walks straight into Thalia’s. It’s exactly how they left it before leaving for Westover. His clothes are covered in sand, but he climbs into her bed regardless.

Percy falls asleep in seconds.

- - -

Sally finds him when she returns from work that evening, curled under the covers with his face buried in Thalia’s pillow. She strokes his hair several times before pulling the blanket to his chin. The lights are still on, so she dims them halfway and leaves quietly, closing the door behind her.

Tomorrow they’ll talk, and it’ll be horrible and painful now that he’s away from the numbing magic of Delos. But she’s spent the last month doing the same with Katie, and just a few days ago, she smiled for the first time since California.

She knows it’ll take a while, but he’s her only son, and there is nothing he can do to make Sally give up on him. It might be weeks. It might be months. For all she knows, it might be an entire year. But one day, Percy will heal, and she will be there holding his hand the whole way.

Chapter 21: Dreams of the Future, Nightmares of the Past

Chapter Text

Sometimes Rachel only watches the dreams. She observes from afar, unable to move or speak or close her eyes to stop the horrific scenes from burning themselves into her memory.

She dreams of a young boy, no older than ten, screeching as his body is taken apart piece by bloody piece. He’s not always human, shifting through animals faster than she can see. He almost escapes as a snake, only to be frozen by a shrill scream that bleeds her ears, and then they are on him again.

She never sees the perpetrators, nor does she ever want to. The silhouettes of those feasting black shadows are enough to haunt her, and she knows if she ever glimpsed their true forms, there would be no saving her sanity. Whatever is left of it, that is.

Other scenes have Rachel standing by, immobilized, as a figure falls from the sky, fingers outstretched towards the sun as they plummet into the ocean. On the rare occasion that she wakes up before the sharks begin to feast, she stumbles out of bed, eyes bleary with sleep, and scrambles to find a shred of paper to draw on before the details elude her.

More often, though, she’s frozen, her body locked up in horror as the sea turns a bloody crimson. The water ripples and parts for the fins that glide through the raging waves, sea foam frothing around them. She’s forced to stay still as the water rises, higher and higher, until it passes her ankles, her waist, her collarbone. Until it spills into her parted lips, the salt burning her nose and stinging her eyes.

There’s nothing she can do against the powers that keep her dreaming—no way to swim or cough or choke. Those nights, Rachel wakes up gasping for air, her half-asleep mind still convinced she’s drowning.

Only thrice in the months since the dreams started has she been given some reprieve. On these blessed nights, she rests by a stream that feeds into a small pool of water. It’s deep but no wider than a rain puddle, and despite the moving water that fills it, its surface is as still as glass. If Rachel could move closer, she knows she’d be able to see her reflection as perfectly as she could in a mirror.

During these calmer dreams, she listens to the sound of running water from the wider river that skims the edges of the distant palace. Branching from it is the small stream she perches near. It slows as the bank narrows, snaking down languidly until it reaches the spring.

There waits an unseen figure wrapped in a cloak made of the night sky. Long-forgotten constellations glimmer across the shadowy fabric, memories of old beauty captured and immortalized.

Next to her is a ghostly young girl covered in blood and dirt, clothed in the tattered remains of a once-beautiful dress. Her tears are silent as she wrings her hands together, fingers tight enough to bruise.

The tall figure carefully washes the grime off her face with a steady hand, consoling her tears each time they reappear. They speak a language unlike Rachel’s ever heard and one she’s had no success finding in the waking world.

Out of the collection of horrifying dreams she’s amassed, this is the one she prays for because it’s the only comfort she’s offered against what she’s dubbed The Nightmare.

In the rest, Rachel is but an onlooker. An unconsenting voyeur forced to witness the preternatural carnage from afar. But despite the trembling fingers and stifled screams she wakes up to, they all pale in comparison to the one she endures firsthand.

Objectively, all her visions dreams can be classified as nightmares. However, that one is so sickening that it feels wrong to compare them. It’s the worst, and unfortunately, the one she suffers through practically every other night.

At least in the others, she’s herself. She may not have control of her body, but her thoughts are her own—her mind is her own.

The Nightmare doesn’t give her that luxury. There, Rachel has every bit of faculty stripped away from her. She’s squeezed into a body too small to be her own and given a petrified mind that knows one thing and one thing only—the desperation to live.

Only when she wakes, snapped back into her own skin as though yanked by a bungee cord, can she discern the utter violation of having someone else’s thoughts forced onto her.

In The Nightmare, she’s no longer Rachel Dare. She is someone else entirely, and the fear surging through them her is so paramount that she hasn’t the faintest idea of who she is.

There’s no identity. No sense of self. Nothing that distinguishes her as a real person.

She has no name. No defining characteristics she can lean into for comfort. She’s an object more than she is a person, really. She’s skin and bones and fearfearfear—an all-encompassing terror that strips her down until nothing remains but panic and pain.

The Nightmare forces her inside this foreign body and takes away everything that makes Rachel, Rachel. Her mouth forms words she doesn’t know, body involuntarily struggling, as though determined by an outside force she has no control over.

It’s the same each time.

The same words. The same motions. If the dream were a film, it would unfold meticulously, aligning frame by frame down to the most minute details. It’s as though she’s stuck in a loop that gets reset each time she wakes. Her will, her humanity, stripped and bared—peeled away layer by layer until she’s little more than base instincts clinging to survival.

The smell comes first, like clockwork—hot, rancid breath that makes bile rise in her throat. One moment she’s standing barefoot on cool stone. The next, she’s weightless, too-thin legs kicking helplessly as she screams. They’re nonsensical words, but the tone makes it clear they’re cries for help.

There’s a gruff snort and another puff of foul air before her arm is suddenly dislocated at the shoulder. The monster jerks it again, and she can only scream.

That pain, however, is nothing compared to the feeling of the flesh being raggedly severed with brute strength. It’s like white-hot flames licking up her entire right side, the agony radiating mercilessly over every inch of her.

After her arm is her torso, and so the tortuously familiar pattern continues.

The pressure around her midsection tightens. Her lungs burn from the speed of her panicked breaths. She cries out a word, a name perhaps. Then, as in each prior iteration of the dream, the first rib snaps.

Then another. And another.

Her breaths become shallow, the sharp pain of broken ribs forbidding the cool reprieve of air her lungs ache for. Whatever words she tries to say next choke off within the first few syllables, physically unable to speak through the torment. She coughs—sobs, her mind white with agony.

Strands of hair brush her cheeks as they fall loose from their former knot, and another wet cough forces its way out. Blood coats her tongue, the metallic taste overpowering her senses.

She turns to where her arm should be and struggles to suppress a sob at the sight of her shoulder. The vile mess of tendons, ligaments, and bone bleeds profusely, the severed limb having already been devoured, shoved down the ravenous monster’s own gullet.

Another squeeze. Another crackcrackcrack.

Then she’s choking. Blood. Bile. It stains the front of her dress and joins the grisly pool beneath her. Her eyes blur with tears, a blessing that steals her sight. The monster’s roaring gradually starts to fade, replaced by a ringing in her ears.

She’s cold. So cold.

Her toes feel numb. There’s another crack, a more muted hurt this time. Something in her stomach shifts. Bursts. There’s no pain. A shattering crack vibrates up her back, and then, nothing.

Rachel Elizabeth Dare wakes up with a silent scream on her lips and the feeling of her spine being snapped in half.

She trips out of bed and forces herself upright onto unsteady legs. Body shaking but unbroken, she wipes away the tears, snatches the spare sketchbook on her desk, and, with a still-trembling hand, begins to draw.

There are days when she considers the logical explanation: Those medical diagnoses that would force a far more colorful co*cktail of drugs down her throat and lock her in a psych ward for life.

The Beings she saw on the streets made for some problems when she was younger, but her parents calmed down after she “admitted” to making up the monsters for attention. Their willful ignorance was a gift that quickly wore off when she came home from Westover early, excused under a medical leave of absence. "Heat stroke," the school claimed.

The imaginative dreams they dismissed and drawings they pretended not to see when she was a child are no longer ignored. They try to mask it, but Rachel sees their disturbed looks at the occasional sketches she forgets to hide. Now, she leaves out the sunsets and lush green landscapes she paints in her mandated therapy sessions. The gruesome images of her dreams are kept in a downtown art studio. There, she can paint as she wishes, free from the judgment of her parents or the doctors paid to “help” her.

Her parents don’t bother her much about school anymore. After a week of screaming bloody murder in her sleep, the pamphlets for Goode and Clarion were replaced with ones of private psychiatric facilities. It took another week before those disappeared, exchanged for a personal team of experts to fix her crazy from home.

She figures her parents realized having a certifiably insane daughter would be bad PR for Dare Enterprises.

There’s an unspoken agreement between them that as long as she takes the little white pills prescribed to her, she’s left alone at the studio—for now, at least.

(Her morning routine begins with flushing the anti-psychotics down the toilet and ends with full coverage concealer and setting powder to hide the circles that look more like black eyes.)

Rachel is no stranger to insane dreams. As a child, she saw monsters, whether asleep or awake.

(She still does.)

Fantastic, sometimes frightening dreams of teens with swords turning beasts into golden dust? Sure. Kids in casinos and never-ending mazes? Whatever. Ancient princesses learning magic from their mothers? Old news.

There’s an entire cast list of nameless characters in her mind that she’s grown up with. The boy with green eyes—claws and fangs and skin sometimes translucent enough to see bone. The glowing blond and his dark-haired pair orbiting each other like planets. The girl with a red veil and another with flowers budding from her neck. The wolf-boy and his sister with lightning for blood, always fighting tooth and nail to reach the other, but never quite touching.

There were others. Many others. But now, these new horrors are erasing the best of dreams she once had. Years of adventures slowly dwindling, preserved only in the memories of her sketchbooks.

(Rachel staunchly ignores the part of her that says they’ve always been more than dreams—pushes away memories of the girl in her history class and the brother that tailed her like a baby duckling.)

Slowly but surely, she’s forgetting what happiness felt like. What safety felt like.

Rachel sees ruby eyes peering at her from dark corners and alleyways. Subways are a thing of the past, for monsters lurk in the tunnels, and the underground stations smell like rotten monster’s breath.

In broad daylight, she blinks away blood and viscera from the sidewalk on the way to the studio. It’s been months since she walked home at night because of the clouds of black shadows writhing in her peripheral. She knows they aren’t there. She knows they’re not following her, but she sticks to daytime, nonetheless.

God, Rachel wishes she could dream of something other than bloody, traumatic dismemberment. Just a night of peaceful sleep is all she asks for. One single night.

A scrap of mercy to distract her from her slowly declining mental stability because she’s not sure how much longer she can sustain this. Rachel wouldn’t be surprised if she simply dropped dead from exhaustion and paranoia one day.

In all honesty, she’s starting to think that might be the preferable option.

“You… are one of mine.”

This is Bianca’s first introduction to the infamous Mr. D—irritating and infuriatingly cryptic.

When Katie presents her to him and Chiron, there’s a physical shift in the atmosphere. The second Mr. D makes eye contact with her, his posture goes ramrod straight. He looks years younger, perhaps around Nico’s age. Every exposed bit of skin is covered with thin silvery scars, and his eyes are a piercing shade of yellow.

His words echo in her ears, but before she’s given a chance to respond, he changes, appearing again as a pot-bellied middle-aged man in a leopard print shirt.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” Bianca asks, still trying to wrap her head around the whiplash of him switching forms. Something about his words sits right over her chest, heavy and deeply unsettling.

Purple eyes bore into her own, and she can’t help the shiver that runs down her spine. A shimmer of Mist blows through the air like wind, and then the oppressive aura is gone, as though it was never there.

Mr. D slumps in his chair and frowns, looking at the cards in his hand. “I fold.”

He gives no response to Bianca or even any indication of hearing her. Nor do Katie or Chiron, for that matter. It’s as though the last few seconds never happened.

Next to him, Chiron chuckles and lays his cards out on the table. “I suppose this round is mine, then.”

“Yes, yes. Gloat while you still can.”

Mr. D makes a noise of irritated agreement, waving a hand through the air. He resets the cards with snap and shuffles several times before dealing them out.

Bianca stares at Mr. D. Her head feels hazy. She opens her mouth to clarify, but nothing comes out. The question simply slips away. It’s on the tip of her tongue. Right there, but her lips won’t form the words.

Mr. D looks at her pointedly as if daring her to ask again. And that? That Bianca hates.

She grits her teeth and focuses on the prickles of Mist around her tongue. It’s almost like unraveling a snarled ball of yarn, finding the correct string to tug until the layers of magic fall apart on their own.

She’s almost there when Mr. D’s eyes glint with some emotion she doesn’t quite catch. In seconds, the Mist reworks itself, and this time, unraveling it is more like a tangle of ivy vines to trudge through.

Bianca can feel a headache forming at her temples. Pounding, whispering, give up, give up, give up.

As if.

His insistence on forcing her to ignore the cryptic words only spurs her on further. She refuses to back down now. She wants an answer for whatever sick amusem*nt he gets from messing with her head.

Just a few weeks back, Bianca’s mother told her to be wary of letting her determination get the better of her. Some things simply weren’t possible to achieve, no matter how much she wanted.

There was nothing to be done about Will’s sentence, they all told her. The trial was a formality, a farce before he would be thrown to the Fields of Punishment for all eternity. That was unacceptable, and if no one else would fix it, Bianca would.

Will’s trial should have been no longer than half an hour, but at the very start, Bianca begged to speak. With her father sitting in for Minos, the judges indulged her words like they would a child. That was their mistake—she talked circles around them before they even discussed Will’s life.

Four hours and a nervous breakdown later, all three conceded to a reduced sentence: Elysium with Thalia, rather than the Fields, under the condition that his time would be split among the Archives, where he’d be filing paperwork for all fifty-something thousand souls by hand.

They all knew the biggest issue for Hades wasn’t Will’s actions. After all, it was what had saved his youngest daughter’s life. No. Once he calmed down, his problem lay with the mind-numbing, sanity-sapping influx of paperwork he’d be forced to do after it.

Especially now that he would have to do Minos’s duties on top of his own, any chance to hoist the bureaucratic nightmare onto someone else was a win in Hades’s book.

In the end, though, the real deciding factor was Nico. It was clear to anyone who witnessed his meltdown that he blamed himself for both deaths.

(“Bianca wouldn’t have died and Will wouldn’t have tried to save her and Thalia wouldn’t have tried to save him and, and, and—”)

It was painful to watch. All Bianca wanted to do was wrap her brother in a hug, but the moment she saw her father’s eyes soften, she took the opportunity and spun it not as a benefit to Will but to Nico. An apology for getting physical with him, something Bianca still hasn’t forgiven him for.

The argument was thin but enough to grant Will entry into Elysium with Thalia, where Nico would be allowed periodic visits.

Contrary to what her mother thinks, Bianca is of the opinion that determination is one of her best traits. Although she’ll admit that, on occasion, it’s driven more by spite and annoyance than anything else.

So, it’s with the same burning desire for success and more than a bit of spite that she pushes past the headache given to her by Mr. D. Gritting her teeth, Bianca picks apart the tangles of Mist on her tongue and, with great difficulty, manages to ask, “What did you mean?”

Mr. D looks up at her with an expression of innocence that she wants nothing more than to slap off his face. He takes a sip of Diet co*ke and fakes confusion as if he didn’t just say one of the most suspicious and cryptic things Bianca’s ever been told. And not to mention trying to wipe it from her thoughts after.

Bianca’s fingers twitch towards the knife at her side when he responds.

“Brag. Boast. Take pleasure in. I meant Chiron can gloat all he wants, but I’ll be winning the next round,” he says. “Pick up a dictionary, Beatrice. I’m sure cabin six can lend you one.”

Her laugh is hollow. She’s not sure if she wants to stab him or stomp her foot like she’s five years old again.

“Are you f*cking kidding? You know exactly what I mean!”

Bianca knows she sounds like a petulant child, but it'll eat at her for days if she doesn’t get answers.

(There’s a tiny part of her, a barely-there voice in the corners of her mind whispering from miles away to stop pushing. To leave it alone. To stop digging for things she’s not ready to hear.)

Curiosity drips from every pore, so she tries again. “What did you mean when you said I’m—”

“Kathleen, take her to your cabin and then give her a tour,” Mr. D cuts her off, rolling his eyes and dismissing Bianca. He stands, and with a wave of his hand, the cards appear perfectly packed back in the deck.

With a sharp tug, Katie drags her away, hissing under her breath to stop provoking him or he’ll make both their camp lives miserable. Bianca glances over her shoulder and curses as she watches him disappear, leaving Chiron alone.

She tries to cast her mind off the interaction, but as they walk off, Bianca hears Mr. D’s voice one last time. This time, his words aren’t as cryptic as they are menacing. Haunting.

“Don’t go looking for answers you don’t know the questions to. You may not like what you find.”

The first time Dionysus meets Bianca di Angelo, he immediately knows something very, very wrong with her. An “aftertaste” of sorts that is incredibly unsettling.

It’s well known that demigods who are full siblings always have an uncanny resemblance to one another, both in looks and in divine aura. She and Nico are recognizable as blood siblings, but there’s something about her in particular. You’d never notice it at first glance, but something in her eyes marks her as other.

They’re both so clearly Hades’s children as well as Persephone’s, but it’s more than that. She’s… familiar in a way he can’t explain. Something about her makes the oldest of hymns ring in his memory.

The scent of death and pomegranates follows Bianca, just like her brother. But unlike him, there’s an undertone of something sweet that cuts through the acidity, like fresh spring water. And if he focuses, he can tell that the smell of the underground is stronger in her than in Nico.

His temples throb, his body shifts, and then he can smell everything. With a snakelike flick of his tongue, he’s suddenly assaulted by the scent of strawberries from the fields. It’s countered by the overwhelming grief coming off Katie in waves and bone-deep exhaustion from Bianca. There’s grief, yes, but more so, the scent of her loneliness hangs heavy in the air.

His tongue flicks once more, and it’s with abject horror that he finally recognizes the familiar sweet scent that lies under her skin—water from a pool still carefully guarded, but not used in centuries.

Hymns and prayers and burial rituals long forgotten, remembered in the modern world on remains of gold-leaf tablets and half-destroyed papyrus. There are no worshipers left. Only academics who make it their life’s goal to uncover the secrets they left behind.

Dionysos Zagreus sits up straight, concealing a wince as the scars over his body pull tight. For the first time in centuries, he is fully conscious. Fully aware of his surroundings and who he is. The boy co*cks his head and looks at Bianca.

“You… are one of mine.”

But you never meant to be, did you?

Chapter 22: Mirror Image, Shattered

Chapter Text

Some days, he feels madness bursting from his chest like over-ripened grapes. His veins become vines of ivy that stain his false skin gold as they pierce their way out. Inch by painless inch, Dionysus pulls out tangles of poisoned leaves and wishes they would sting.

On days like these, Ariadne finds him by following the trail of empty bottles of ambrosia-laced wine. The floors are littered with broken glass and shards of mirrors, and she knows, without a doubt, that not a single piece of those reflective surfaces remain in their home.

(Ariadne shoves away the age-old grief that still threatens to consume her as cracked spiderwebs of her own amber-brown eyes follow in the broken mirrors.)

She finds him on the roof, most times, mapping out constellations in a half-drunken stupor while his visage flickers from form to form.

One second, he’s a dark-haired young man with purple eyes, crowned by a wreath of ivy. The next, an effeminate face, shrouded by a scented veil and long, blond ringlets that tumble over her slender shoulders. After that, a robed older man with a full beard, his thyrsus by his side.

Sometimes, he’s a bull or lion or a snake. Or perhaps he’s no more than a boy. A child with slitted yellow eyes and drakon's horns—thin, silvery scars lining every inch of his body.

Those, however, are uncommon as of late. It’s been several millennia, and as those initiated into the Orphic Mysteries grew fewer and fewer, so too faded the memories. Not all, though. Those few he desperately clings to still remain, but they are not so much memories of the past as they are echoes of past feelings, emotions.

-

He remembers flashes of happiness. Springtime with his mother when she rose from the Underworld. When she would braid flowers into his hair—beautiful and poisonous and deadly. The cool reprieve of darkness in her wintry descent and reuniting with his sisters once more.

He remembers the Erinyes wielding their whips in glorious torment. Alecto. Megaera. Tisiphone. Draped in serpents and mourner’s robes, they exacted their wrath on the deserving. Matricide, patricide—the worst of the worst—his attention rapt as he watched the madness brewing in the sinners’ eyes at the hands of his sisters.

He remembers bathing in the Styx with Macaria and Melinoë. They pinched him and taunted him, pulled his hair, and drew blood just because they could. They claimed to hate him, but their teasing words held affection—nothing like the fake smiles and thinly veiled disdain of his Olympus-dwelling brothers and sisters.

Wearing a scowl that did not reach her eyes, Macaria still took him to collect souls of the blessed with her. With too-sharp nails digging into his palm, Melinoë held his hand as they danced and twirled through the world above—weaving terror and madness through the dreams of mortals with a train of ghosts at their backs.

He remembers the yearly ascent. Demeter’s will nipping at his mother’s heels at the waning of the sixth moon. Springtime meant seeing her true smile, illuminated not by the Phlegethon but by beaming Helios and radiant Selene. It meant garlands of wildflowers and bathing with the river nymphs in the too-calm waters of the Overworld.

Springtime meant his mother’s happiness, but it also meant Olympus and all that came with it. It meant Athena’s skeptical gaze and sharp words. Hermes’ jests that always cut a sliver too deep, and Ares’ resentful sneers. It meant Apollo with his muses gossiping away in the gardens of roses and sunflowers and orchids.

(The roses are the wrong shade of red, too light to be the blood-painted petals that grow in his mother’s gardens. The fertilizer smells fresh. Earthy. A stark reminder that these are the gardens of Olympus, and not home, where the Queen sows her seeds with bone-ash—a sprawling garden of asphodels and pomegranate trees behind Hades’ palace.)

But most of all, Springtime meant his father.

The youngest of the Kronides, with black hair and piercing eyes that mirrored the state of the skies. Dark and stormy in his anger, the scent of ozone thick in the air; a bright, cloudless cerulean that marked his joy and contentment. And sometimes, when it was just the two of them, the King’s eyes would flash a serpentine yellow, the very same shade as his own. On those rare occasions, scaled, leathery skin would adorn the thunder-bringer—the horned, draconian form he wore at his favored son’s conception.

His smile when his declared heir visited Olympus was brighter than it had been for any of his other children. Not golden-haired Apollo, nor bloodstained and beautiful, war-torn Ares. None could elicit the same response as him. None but Zagreus were allowed to sit on the throne of the King and wield bolts of lightning that, before Zeus, had been touched only by the Cyclops who made them.

-

But these are only flashes—memories that burst on his tongue like a single droplet of wine. There one moment, gone the next. The fleeting thoughts never stay long but oftentimes remain as a certain nostalgia that is nothing more than a cruel taunt.

(Dionysus does not dream, not since ascending to godhood. And even in the times when he still did, he did not dream in images. Only a myriad of confused feelings and sensations and an inexplicable longing for something he could not remember.)

There is but one memory Dionysus still remembers in full (remembers, but does not understand—cannot understand). The only one that, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to forget. He despises it with every drop of ichor in him. The helplessness. The terror, not of his looming death, but of having his autonomy wrestled away from him in such a way.

He still remembers their hands on his body, grabbing on not a moment after he picked up the mirror Queen Hera had given him. A gift, she said.

A distraction.

Their claws dug under his skin and held fast, no matter what form he took. Not even as a serpent did he manage to slip away from their grasp, but he fought nonetheless. A mad, feral struggle as he battled for freedom.

Then, Hera’s rage echoed in a scream, and he stilled for a split second. No more than a minuscule pause, but it was enough. That hesitation was his undoing.

The Titans took him apart piece by piece. Limb by limb. Stripped the flesh off his bones and ate all but his heart. Their strength outweighed his own, but he never stopped fighting.

He scratched. Clawed. Bit. Spit venom and tore out throats with too many teeth. Alas, it was not enough. He was but a boy, and in no time at all, the Titans began to feast.

They japed and laughed and drank his blood as though it was the sweetest nectar, and oh, how it hurt.

There was nothing he could do but cry out. To beg for help, even when he knew none would come.

His sisters were not welcome in Olympus, and it would be several moons until his mother returned as well. So it was with breathtaking relief he allowed himself to fall limp when the scent of ozone suffocated the throne room.

There was a flash, a thunderous roar of unyielding fury, and then, nothing.

Dionysus is not Zagreus, but a part of him used to be. The still-beating heart of the child god was fed to Semele, and so, by laying with Zeus, his twice-born son was conceived. Flashes of memories lay buried, hidden deep in his mind, never meant to be uncovered.

Dionysus is not Zagreus, but he flinches at the sight of Aphrodite’s favored mirror. He’s never seen it before in his life, but he knows it is encrusted with rubies and emeralds and adorned by a gold filigree. He never comes close enough to check, but sometimes when she walks past, he swears he cansmell the barest hint of ozone.

Dionysus is not Zagreus, but he learns to weave madness with an unnatural ease. His craft pays unintended homage to those who have mastered the domain, noticeable only to the few who frequent the Fields of Punishment, a place Dionysus has never been. His tongue is whip-sharp, his laugh wild and unrestrained in the same way Megaera’s is. His anger burns hot and bright, and as he sows lunacy into the minds of mortals, his eyes widen in a perfect parallel to Alecto’s. He holds his thyrsus carefully, his wrist loose, fingertips wrapped around the staff lovingly, adoringly. A thyrsus is no whip, but he mirrors Tisiphone’s grip nonetheless. Dionysus dances with his Maenads to a half-remembered song; his hand curled as if passively expecting the hold of another. The melody is lost to him, but the beat thrums strong and steady in his ichor-filled veins. He does not think of Melinoë, but his head tilts back, and he twirls her rhythm all the same.

Dionysus is not Zagreus, but when he descends into the Underworld to collect Semele and his beloved Ariadne, he is greeted by the Ferryman with a smile. The waters of the Styx welcome him and lave the sides of Charon’s skiff, rocking gently yet careful not to splash. The branches of the Queen’s pomegranate trees stretch out towards him, swaying closer despite no wind. They beckon him to the edge of their grove, but no further, for they know he is no longer theirs.

Dionysus is not Zagreus. The mortals forget, and the gods do too.

The King himself locks away memories of his most precious son and lets his father’s curse, his grandfather’s prophecy, fester within him.

Apollo and Hermes walk the streets of Olympus, each with one arm thrown over their younger brother’s shoulder. Dionysus walks between them, drinking and laughing and recounting his newest fermenting process to them. They listen and joke and never mock.

Athena dislikes his drinking habits yet treats it no differently than Apollo’s penchant for haiku’s. All her brothers irritate her to a similar degree, and he is no different from the rest of them.

Ares stands with him in unspoken solidarity against their father and matches Dionysus in his devotion to his children. Together, they bend the Ancient Laws just short of a circle to ensure their children make it to Camp alive.

(Ares stands with him in unspoken solidarity against the children of Poseidon. They look at their demigod cousins—the same eyes as Halirrhothius, as Theseus—and resist the urge to kill them where they stand.

When Perseus Jackson washes up on the beaches of Camp Half-Blood, the activities schedule shifts to ensure the Ares cabin is around him as little as possible. There is nothing he can do about Clarisse’s lack of self-preservation, but he keeps the rest of her siblings away from Perseus nonetheless. Ares doesn’t say thank you, but Dionysus knows his brother well enough to discern the relief on his face.

Percy Jackson is no Halirrhothius. He is no Theseus. But he may just be another sort of monster altogether.)

And so, the gods forget the son of Zeus and Persephone. They welcome Dionysus into their ranks with a seat on the Olympian council. He lounges on his ivy-wrought throne, a goblet of wine in hand, and tunes out the chatter as he muses on which dress Ariadne draped herself in that morning and the color of kohl that might line her beautiful eyes.

Olympus forgets, yes. But the Underworld does not. Dionysus is not Zagreus. He does not remember. He does not understand, and perhaps he never fully will, but it won’t matter because the Underworld will remember for him—for him and all its children, both born and chosen. Whether a different time, or a different land, or even a different body, a piece remains buried deep within them, ready to welcome them home should they ever desire it.

Dionysus should not be Zagreus. He has not been Zagreus in many, many years. He should not remember or understand, but looking into the eyes of Bianca di Angelo, his chest rattles, and old scars pull at his skin, and in that moment, he knows exactly who he is. He is Dionysus, but he is Zagreus, too, and understanding blooms before their very eyes.

After all, like recognizes like.

Chapter 23: The Apology

Chapter Text

“Stop. Just stop."

Will’s voice is uncharacteristically sharp as it cuts through the rambling apology spilling from Nico’s mouth.

“That’s not—” Will takes a deep breath, thinly laced annoyance clear in his tone. “That’s not how it works. You trusted Minos, yeah, but everything that happened after snowballed from what I did. Not you.”

“But—”

“No, let me finish,” Will snaps. “Bianca should have died.”

Nico’s face pales at the harshly stated words, but Will steamrolls forward before he has time to speak.

“Direct cause and effect isn’t how fate works. Some events are fluid and have lots of outcomes, but others are completely set in stone. Dad used to describe them as different colored threads, but it’s more like they’re made of different materials. Those fluid events have flimsy strings. Cotton, or wool, or something. Anyone can cause those to change, and the outcome isn’t clear because of the number of possibilities. But some… some strings are like steel. They can’t be moved or changed.”

Will clenches his jaw and takes another deep breath.

“That’s why what I did was such a big deal. Bianca’s death should have been inevitable. She should have died. And even if Dad knew about it, he’s bound by all these oaths and promises that keep him from interfering with fixed events. But me—I’m not bound to those oaths. I don’t know how I did it, but it happened.”

“Will…”

“Do you get it, Nico? I changed fate in a way that it was never meant to be changed. Saving Bianca meant cutting the tapestry where it should never have been cut. I cut and frayed and tangled it all on my own, and… well… there’s a reason we have three Fates. It’s dangerous for one person to have all that power.” Will’s voice grows softer. “Bianca would have died whether or not you had met Minos. But I somehow changed that. It was my choice that got me killed. It was Thalia’s choice to try and push me out of the way like a complete moron—”

A pillow flies through the air and narrowly misses Will’s face. “Shut the f*ck up, Solace.”

“Am I wrong, though?” Will asks, tossing the pillow back at her.

“My mistake,” Thalia laughs dryly. Her voice is bitter, matching the anger burning in her eyes. “Guess the joke’s on me for thinking daddy dearest would be a good parent for once in my life. I don’t even know why I’m surprised, honestly. You’d think after Ja—”

She pauses, then huffs and squeezes her eyes shut for a brief moment. Her jaw clenches.

“No, he wouldn’t know parenting if it hit him in the face. And don’t even get me started on the ruling. Some male superiority ‘my word is law’ crap,” Thalia spits.

Nico watches as Will and Bianca shift uneasily at her words. Will is the first to respond. “You really shouldn’t—”

“No, don’t f*cking give me that, Will. We both know it’s bullsh*t.” Thalia’s voice shakes in anger, and Nico can practically see the wrath and loathing coming off her in waves. “King? What a f*cking joke.”

“Thalia,” Bianca snaps. “Just because we’re in the Underworld doesn’t mean—”

Electricity sparks across her shoulders as she responds. “What’s he gonna do, Bianca? Throw another bolt at me for having an opinion? I’m already dead—”

“Are you stupid? Your lack of self-preservation is ridiculous.” Bianca’s voice cuts through their cousin’s rant. “The Titans? The Giants? You know just as well as I do that he could toss you right into Tartarus if he wanted to.”

“She’s right,” Will says, picking at the threads of the soft, fraying grey blanket around his shoulders. “He killed you with no remorse. Dead or not, if he sees you as a threat, he’ll make sure you’re out of the way, and none of us will be able to stop that. History’s proven that.”

Thalia’s nose flares. Lighting sparks from her fingertips. Then, she stands up roughly and stomps over to the far corner of the room where her spear rests.

“Cowards,” she spits as she flings open the front door. “You all know I’m right.”

Nico flinches at the resounding slam of it closing. He feels the couch cushions shifting as Bianca rises and tries to go after her. She’s quickly stopped by Will, though.

“Let her go. She’s probably just going out to beat up Theseus again. Or spar with Perseus if she can find him,” he says, pulling the blanket tighter around him with one hand. “It’s been good for her. The anger isn’t as constant as it used to be.”

Bianca sighs. “Okay. Okay, I’ll bring it up when she’s calmer.”

“Probably for the best.”

An awkward silence fills the room that makes Nico wish he’d never come here. He wants to sink into the pillows and staunchly ignore the looks Will keeps sending his way. The elephant in the room sits on his chest, and he wants nothing more than to simply disappear.

Then, Bianca speaks.

“Styx, I forgot,” she says suddenly, springing from her seat and walking briskly towards the door. “I promised Katie I’d help her with something back at camp.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Nico sees an expression of something akin to jealousy cross Will’s face. He looks away, tampering down on the guilt that rises like bile in the back of his throat.

“—but Nico’s free to stay.”

A strangled choking sound catches in his throat, and before he can speak her name, his traitorous sister is melting into the shadows. Nico is left behind in the room, suffocating under the weight of Will’s gaze and his own guilt.

“So…” Will says after a few moments of awkward silence. “How’ve you been?”

Nico fidgets in his seat, his fingers mindlessly shuffling his Mythomagic cards. This conversation was inevitable, he knows, and it’s just as horrifically uncomfortable as he expected.

“Good,” Nico somehow responds. It’s all he can manage because what do you say to your supposed best friend when you’ve ghosted him for months?

“Been a while,” Will pauses for a beat. “I haven’t seen you since the trial… I’ve been meaning to thank—”

“Don’t,” Nico’s voice cracks on the single word. His hands freeze in their comforting, repetitive motions. “Don’t thank me. I don’t— Your fate stuff— Gods,there wouldn’t have even been a trial if I hadn’t been stupid and selfish and blind and realized what Minos was doing. I—”

“Your only selfishness was choosing not to visit.” Will’s voice is flat. Colder than Nico’s ever heard it, it makes him want to shrivel up in a ball and hide away forever. “You spent time at camp. At your father’s palace. But you couldn’t spend a few minutes to keep me company?”

His tone pitches up. Those last few words convey all the hurt and betrayal Nico knows Will must feel.

“Will, I—”

“No. No, you’re gonna listen to me,” Will says, slowly getting louder. “I’m dead.”

Then, his voice breaks with a sudden hitch, and this time, he shouts, “I’m dead! And I don’t have the privilege of coming and going whenever I want. You can leave whenever you feel like it while I’m stuck here. Like this.” Will gestures angrily to his body. “Fourteen, forever. So don’t you dare sit there and feel sorry for yourself. Yeah, maybe it was stupid of you to trust Minos, but her fate was set. Bianca still would have died. Maybe it would’ve been Atlas. Maybe Luke. Or some stupid freak accident. But she would still. Be. Dead.”

Will has to stop and catch his breath from how loudly he’s shouting. He’s all but crying now, and Nico can’t help the burning in his own eyes.

“The second I f*cked with the tapestry, mine and Thalia’s threads got tangled. So, if anyone is to blame for our deaths, it’s me. I’ve accepted that, and you’d better too because if you keep wallowing in your pity party, I’ll break your f*cking nose.”

He stops to take a shaky breath, trying failing to take control over his wavering voice. His eyes are red and glassy as he struggles to hold back his tears.

“It’s not about you, Nico. If there’s anything you’ve been selfish about, it’s that.”

Nico can barely see Will through the tears in his eyes. The back of his throat is so tight he can barely swallow. His shoulders shake silently, unwilling to make noise through his crying.

“Do you know how miserable it is here?” Will asks softer now, practically hiccuping. He wipes his eyes roughly with the back of his hand before continuing. “Thalia’s gone for days at a time sparring with other half-bloods; when she is here, I’m walking on eggshells, trying to avoid any conversation that might bring up her dad. So otherwise, I’m stuck here, alone. Walking to the Archives under that sh*tty illusion of a sun, hoping my best friend would come and visit me. And he never does. If you’re gonna apologize for anything, do for that.”

Nico opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again, trying to find the words to respond. In the end, he settles for a single, broken “I’m sorry.”

He sniffles and scrubs at his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t—”

Will is openly crying now, his entire body shaking as Nico finally manages to apologize. The aftereffects of months of silence come crashing down on both of them. He looks just as much of a mess as Nico feels.

“I just didn’t want you to hate me,” Nico admits, his voice thick. “And I… I was scared. I thought you would blame me.”

“I didn’t. I don’t. I never blamed you,” Will hiccups. “I’m not—I’m sorry for yelling. I’m not angry. I promise. I’m just… It just really hurt, you know?”

Will curls in on himself, his voice trembling. His fingers are white around the edges of the blanket he’s wrapped in.

“You’re my best friend, and even though you could visit, you chose not to. I don’t—I’m not trying to guilt trip you. But I just wanted to know why. If it was really the guilt or if I did something that made you—” He turns away from Nico and rubs at his eyes again, the tears slowing. “I’m sure Bianca had to drag you here. And you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to. But I… Maybe I’m the selfish one, but I’d really like it if you stayed.”

Nico scrambles off his couch and almost trips over the coffee table before throwing himself into the space beside Will. He barely notices his Mythomagic cards slipping from his hands. They scatter across the floor with no acknowledgment from their owner.

“I want to. I want to stay,” Nico croaks, fingers twitching against his palms. “I’m so sorry, Will. Please. I want to stay.”

Will sniffles and blinks away some of the stubborn tears that remain. For the first time, Nico can see the ghost of a smile settling over his face. “You owe me so many games of Mythomagic, Di Angelo.”

“That’s cheating!” Nico shouts, enraged at Will’s absolute audacity. “Just because Elysium lets you wish a custom deck into existence doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it!”

From out of nowhere, the Mythomagic rulebook materializes on the coffee table. With his chin, Will gestures to it and says smugly, “Show me where it I can’t.”

“I… You… That doesn’t matter. It’s still cheating!” Nico sputters.

“Nope. I’m not breaking any rules. I can put whatever cards I want in my deck,” Will’s laugh rings like a bell. “…so if I want to use Apollo on every turn, there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

Nico gapes at Will. He blinks a few times, absolutely bewildered. Any awkwardness left between them has fizzed away, leaving only a warm, content feeling behind.

“What kind of idiot uses Apollo for every single turn? There are so many ways to—I can use Hades or Nyx or Erebus. I can even use two Artemis’ if they’re in my Seven,” Nico raves, holding a full hand of cards and gesturing wildly to the rest of his deck that lies on the table, unused. “Helios beats Apollo point blank each time. So does Python. Yeah, Apollo’s ridiculously OP compared to the rest of the Second Gen expansion, but there are at least fifteen cards that’ll beat him solo—literally any card in the Primordial pack or the Titan one. Most of the First Gen, too. And that’s not even getting into all the combos I could play to beat him.”

Will is unperturbed. His grin remains unmoved on his face. It’s a little terrifying, in all honesty.

“Yes. Technically, you’re right. However, you overlooked one very important fact.” Will looks at him with a manic gleam in his eyes. “Unless you managed to draw the Erinyes or the Anemoi or some other three-plus set, you can only combo a double of the same card. That’s true. But. You forgot the Sacred Number Clause.”

A look of horror crosses Nico’s face as he realizes exactly where Will’s train of thought is leading. “You’re not serious…”

“Oh, I absolutely am. Remember that time you played four Hermes’s?” Will cackles and lays down his entire hand of cards, seven gleaming Apollo’s now face-up on the table. His red eyes are the only evidence of the tears that were being shed not twenty minutes before. “Yeah, I dare you to try and top seven Apollo’s.”

Nico’s lips twitch. The shadows he’s shrouded himself in these past few months are slowly burning away with every burst of sunlight radiating from Will’s laughter.

“I regret ever teaching you,” Nico says with a huff. He falls backwards, dramatically dropping his cards to the side and sprawling his arms over the floor.

“No, you don’t.” Will’s face glows so brightly Nico almost has to look away. “You liar.”

He cracks a smile. “No. I don’t.”

Then, for the first time in months, Nico di Angelo laughs.

Chapter 24: Preparing for War

Chapter Text

The edges of the world look fuzzy, as they usually do when Bianca is asleep. A nonexistent wind rustles the leaves of the white Cypress tree she stands beneath. Her feet are rooted to the ground, wood of the trunk wrapped around her ankles. There’s a large pool of water in front of her. Further down, it forks, and it’s the thinner stream to the right that her eyes follow.

There, on a jagged rock, the starlit woman sits. Her gaze is piercing; the same discomfort when she sees the woman in the Underworld. Awake. Watching her. Always watching her. No matter the dizziness and nausea, Bianca finds herself drawn to the woman.

She knows her. She knows she knows her. She isn’t sure how, but she knows it’s painful. Bianca knows her in the same way she knows Percy. In the same way she knows Dionysus.

It’s the same raw hurt she feels when she trails her fingers across the walls of the Labyrinth.

For a year and a half, the woman has watched her. For a year and a half, Bianca has fought to avoid meeting her ancient gaze. The dreams unnerve her, but her other option is painfully dying in that blood-stained corridor of the Labyrinth, and had she a choice, she’d pick this one every time.

Because these dreams never last long, and after a brief minute of those all-knowing eyes locked with her own, she wakes to the sounds of the Demeter cabin scrambling to tidy the bunk before they leave for breakfast.

(She wakes to the taste of blood on her lips, and a voice whispering, “Find me, Princess.”)

In February, Bianca finds an entrance to the Labyrinth at the base of Zeus’s First, and suddenly, the mad ravings of Chris Rodriguez make sense. Bi-weekly counselor meetings turn into daily battle planning under Annabeth and Clarisse, who spend their evenings bent over a map of Camp, making contingency plan after contingency plan.

The entrance to the Labyrinth has a rotating set of guards at all hours of the day, and after weeks of pleading, Chiron allows Bianca to go on short expeditions with Annabeth and Clarisse, provided two children of Hermes accompany them. Bianca doesn’t need protection against getting lost, but she agrees anyway. He stops enforcing the rule when one is separated from the other four and never finds her way back to camp alive.

Bianca can’t control the Labyrinth, but she can whisper into its walls and ask politely to bring them back home. Even that, though, is a faulty strategy. It brings them to Venice more times than she can count and to Greece just as often. In early March, just before the start of spring, Annabeth and Clarisse meet Persephone when the Labyrinth smugly lets them out in her Garden.

(Persephone knows grief and longing. She, better than any, knows the despair of being separated from her family. The Queen of the Underworld tucks an Asphodel behind the ears of Bianca’s friends, presses a soft kiss to her daughter’s forehead, and walks into the throne room with pomegranate juice on her lips. Hades distracted, Bianca takes her friends by the hands and pulls them towards a quaint little house in the sunniest part of Elysium.

Wide-eyed, Annabeth crumbles into Thalia’s arms when the front door opens. Her sobs ring through the streets of Elysium. Clarisse breaks Will’s nose and then hugs him hard enough to crack a rib—but they heal instantly, and Will returns the hug with equal strength.

They come back to camp red-eyed, with teary smiles on their faces and the closure they never thought they’d get.)

The Labyrinth hums in Bianca’s ears like a petulant child when she asks to return to “Camp Half-Blood” and not “Home.” It doesn’t want to, but it does anyway, so every time the door slides open to Zeus’s Fist, Bianca presses her forehead against the stone and whispers, “Thank you.” A gentle breeze responds: Please don’t go again, I’ll miss you.

“I’ll return,” Bianca says every time, truthful and earnest.

(She says, but does not swear it. The Labyrinth does not like oaths. Bianca doesn’t like them either.)

With her leading the way, the three girls return with lists of monsters and half-heard snippets of news they overhear from Luke’s forces. They pick up leftover weapons from the hands of starved corpses. Some are century-old skeletons, barely a pile of dust-covered bones. Others have sallow skin infested with maggots and wear bright orange shirts.

(Two weeks after she is lost, the Hermes cabin is returned bones of Julia Feingold—three decades old and crumbling. Annabeth and Clarisse are the only ones who accompany Bianca into the Labyrinth after that day. They link arms when the door closes and don’t let go until they’re back at Camp.)

Bianca ties her hair back with the red headband she made herself, folded and sewn from the beautiful scrap of fabric she found in the Labyrinth near Othrys. She takes to carrying drachmas with her and sends lost souls off to the Underworld with Stygian Iron and burial rites no one else thinks they deserve. The girls pry celestial bronze swords from their hands and pretend not to see the little C.B. that Beckendorf carves into the handles of every blade he makes.

The Hephaestus forges blaze mercilessly as their campers pump out swords, spears, arrows, bullets, and anything sharp enough to stab with. Dulled and broken blades are melted down and re-purposed, as are any brought back from the Labyrinth.

Beckendorf gives Malcolm, Annabeth, and Clarisse updates on weapon stocks. In return, he’s given more blueprints of traps designed by the Athena cabin. Tyson’s arrival is an absolute blessing, and they make offerings to Poseidon for a week straight.

Silena quietly slips them lists of campers missing from Bunk inspections—the Hermes cabin passes a summer-session inspection for the first time in years now that the floor is cleared of sleeping bags.

Travis Stoll borrows the Camp van enough times that Chiron gives up on stopping him. He leaves mortal money in the cupholder so that Travis doesn’t get arrested for shoplifting medical supplies, among other things, and insists that he make Strawberry deliveries if he’s already going to be out of camp. Katie goes with him to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid. It gets her out of camp, too, which is nice nowadays.

(Katie goes with him because he doesn’t whisper or stare at the thorny vines threaded through her neck and arms. Because he still puts itching powder in her clothes, but only her socks. Because he moves her cabin’s bunk beds two inches to the left instead of sticking them upside down on their ceiling again.

Because he pranks the Big House by covering all the wooden furniture with Chia sprouts, and when he’s forced to install the replacement cabinets by hand, he mounts them far too low, but not enough for Chiron to complain. She goes with him because when he organizes the kitchen supplies, he moves the teas down to the counter and Katie’s favorite mugs to the bottom shelf. A shelf now low enough that she can make tea without thorns tearing through her skin when she tries to reach up.)

Sherman Yang unofficially takes over for Clarisse as their bunk’s head counselor. Malcolm Pace does the same for the Athena Cabin. They coordinate activities and increase weapons training slots. Arts and Crafts becomes Arrow-Making. Volleyball turns into another hour of practicing sword skills. They scrap Greek history altogether. After a month of pleading, Chiron begrudgingly agrees to allow maiming in Capture the Flag. They need practice fighting through injuries, and the Apollo cabin needs to teach other campers basic first-aid.

Drew Tanaka talks one of the Hecate kids into letting her borrow a book on Runic magic. She barely understands a third of it but still reads it cover to cover. Thrice. She uses liquid eyeliner to draw protective enchantments on her siblings’ arms and makes them as permanent as she can—she doesn’t waste her energy cursing campers with month-long clown makeup anymore. Silena yells at her for a good ten minutes the first time Drew passes out from the exhaustion of keeping the makeup permanent. She gets a week of dish duty and a tattoo gun with a celestial bronze needle.

The Apollo cabin argues, saying that it makes more sense for them to be the ones tattooing. Especially if it’s something like protective runes that can’t be removed and are dangerous if drawn wrong. Drew Tanaka raises a perfectly shaped eyebrow and smiles with perfectly painted lips. She blinks with eyelids lined sharper than a knife and tells them to get out of the f*cking cabin—and they do.

Children of Apollo are known for their steady hands. For the arrows that never miss and the flawlessly placed stitches. They have the hands of a surgeon; that much is true. But Drew is fifteen years old, and not once in her life has she needed to fix her eyeliner. She isn’t an archer and she’s not stitching a wound. She’s inking runes into skin, and runes are nothing more than a cluster of the same perfectly thin lines she draws over her eyes every morning. Makeup is both her art and her armor, and they’ll be prying that tattoo gun out of her cold, dead hands before she lets them use it.

Chiron comes to him after he skips weapons training for the sixth day in a row, but considering Percy has only been back at camp for a week, the visit is warranted—in Chiron’s eyes, at least. But Percy? Percy would rather jump out of the St. Louis Arch again then take another lesson from Quintus.

He tells Chiron as much and gives no explanation. They compromise on Percy training with the Ares cabin during his free block. Chiron doesn’t understand. Most don’t. Most can’t.

Katie does.

(Katie’s scars twitch when he walks by, and Life screeches at him, wrongwrongwrong.)

Apollo does.

(The sun didn’t shine for three days after he saw Quintus for the first time.)

Bianca doesn’t, but she avoids him anyway.

(She knows him. She know she does. Somehow.)

Quintus sets him on edge the same way the Labyrinth does. It makes his teeth grind and his hair stand on end. Percy has no problem admitting the man is as talented with the sword as he is intelligent, but he still won’t go near him unless he has to. He doesn’t mind the company of Mrs. O’Leary. In fact, he enjoys spending time with the Hellhound. But when she’s with Quintus, Percy stays as far away as possible.

His dreams have been worsening lately, especially with some of his closest friends trekking through the Labyrinth for days at a time. He knows Clarisse and Annabeth will be safe with Bianca, but the thought stays in his brain. That ‘what-if’ that haunts him and tells him it’s all a trick from the Labyrinth and one day they won’t come back. His dreams of violently drowning to death are interspersed with watching the war Oceanus has started to wage on Atlantis.

Apollo’s visits are the only brightness in his life. The god apologized some months after Percy’s not-quite-kidnapping, apparently at the urging of his muses. Calliope, Clio, and Melpomene refused to speak to him until he did.

They talk about nothing and everything. Percy tells him how his training is going, and in return, Apollo recites awful Haiku's. Some days, they sit on the dock in absolute silence protected from curious eyes by a barrier of Mist, and on others, Percy leaves with sunburns fueled by Apollo’s grief. Those days are few and far in between—occurring only when Bianca brings him a smuggled letter from Will. The water at their feet will steam, and Percy’s skin will start to redden and burn. In his fury, Apollo’s eyes turn to molten gold that Percy can never bring himself to look away from.

In early June, Percy finally gets the courage to ask. “Is there a reason you keep them blue? The Mist would hide them from mortals anyway, and it’s not like it would bother anyone at Camp or Olympus.”

Apollo doesn’t respond for a long while. They sit there in silence, Percy itching to move. When he finally responds, it’s so quiet that Percy barely hears it. A normal demigod wouldn’t have heard anything at all.

“Father despises them.”

He looks at Percy. It’s like staring into two blazing golden suns, but there’s no anger or fury in them anymore. To be honest, Percy’s not quite sure what emotion it is.

Apollo’s clothes glimmer and shift into a one-armed yellow chiton fastened with a sun-shaped brooch by his clavicle. Percy’s blood rushes in his ears when Apollo pulls it down until his entire chest is visible.

“The Crooked One had gold eyes. Skips a generation, I suppose,” Apollo says, interrupting Percy’s racing thoughts. He blinks several times and feels the Mist he didn’t even realize was there clear from his vision. He looks back at Apollo’s chest and freezes. Over his ribs lies the center of an enormous lightning scar.

“Someone told me my eyes were pretty once. Back then, I wore just the iris blue. But he said he loved them gold—fully gold—and meant it. So, for the next council meeting, I decided to leave them like that. Completely gold.” His laugh is hollow. “My mistake.”

Percy reaches out, knuckles hovering over one of the fractals branching to the side. They spread across his entire torso and over his shoulders, halfway down his left arm, and all the way to the tips of his fingers on his right. A few scars come up his neck; others dip below the chiton, still covering his hips. One cuts across his jaw on the right, stopping at the corner of his lip. Percy can see scarring down the side of his thigh, too.

Apollo smiles bitterly, the scar by his lips stretching white. He taps the back of Percy’s neck where his own lightning scars peek out. A scalding hand tugs on his shirt collar to better see the still-bright marks.

“I’m happy he didn’t have his Master Bolt when he did this,” Apollo says, scratching a sharp fingernail over one of the pink fractals. A shiver runs down Percy’s spine. “You deserve a death far more glorious than that.”

Ten days into June, Percy wakes up to banging on his cabin door. The smell of fear and panic is so strong that it pulls him right out of a nightmare.

(DrowningDrowningDrowning.)

When he opens the door, he isn’t even given a second to speak because Nico near-shouts through his ragged breaths, “I can’t feel Bianca!”

Percy’s blood runs cold. Nico’s panicked voice is nothing but static in his ears. His eyes meet Katie’s, who stands right beside Nico, worry clouding her expression.

“—Labyrinth, but she never said she was going and she always tells me first and she’s been acting weird for days.”

Percy shudders at the mention of the Labyrinth. Most of the older campers have gone in with Bianca at least once, all except Percy and Katie.

Katie’s voice is gravelly when she speaks.

“Chiron’s never gonna let us go after her.”

Percy knows she’s right. He won’t risk any campers going in after her. At best, he’d make them wait a few days to see if she would come back on her own before sending out a search party. Maybe.

But Nico is right. She has been acting off lately. The shadows under her eyes seemed darker, and he knew from Katie she hadn’t been sleeping well. Not that any of them slept much better, but her dreams were worse than usual.

“She left this,” Katie says, holding out the headband Bianca scarcely removed. Percy takes it and winds the soft fabric around his hand. Bianca would have never left without it—the fact that she did is what worries Percy the most. It means she was either taken or something bad enough happened to make her leave on her own. To run off into the Labyrinth without telling anyone.

Percy takes a deep breath. “Does Chiron know?”

Nico shakes his head. His fingers twitch before curling into fists with no Mythomagic cards to shuffle. “No. It’s only been a few minutes. But time in there gets—”

“We know. Trust me, Nico. We know,” Percy says, looking at Katie, who, just like him, knows how pointless of a concept time is in there. Both of them are four months older than they should be. “f*ck. She could be anywhere by now.”

Percy looks out at camp. It’s still dark. The sun won’t be up for several hours, so they have more than enough time to slip away.

“We don’t tell Chiron. I’ll leave a note for Miranda, and she’ll tell him in the morning,” Katie says hoarsely. Then she turns to Nico. “Stay quiet and go pack some—”

Nico melts into the shadows before she can finish speaking.

“…and he’s gone.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Percy thinks back to their horrific first quest in the Labyrinth. Four months of nothing but darkness and monster flesh. If this time is anything like the last, he’s not eager to go back.

“You think Camp store has four months’ worth of protein bars?” His voice is shaker than he’d like.

“I think we’re gonna be rationing until we find Bianca,” Katie sighs, looking back in the direction of her cabin. “And I think we should hope the Labyrinth likes Nico more than it hates you.”

“Doubt it,” Percy says dryly. “Bianca can deny it all she wants, but that place is out to kill me.”

Katie exhales sharply.

“Try not to let it. Please,” her voice is strained when she speaks. “I don’t– I don’t know if I would survive that.”

Percy can hear her heart beat slow and steady.

Truth.

He doesn’t respond. There’s nothing he can say to ease her worries, so he doesn’t try. He butts his head against hers lightly, nuzzling against her temple.

(He ignores the scent of sickly sweet roses whose vines still thread through her skin, not growing, but not withering either.)

Technically fifteen, he’s the same height as her now. At the rate he’s been growing, he’ll probably be the taller one within a few months.

(He ignores the part of him screaming that Will will never be taller than five-foot-four.)

Katie pulls away first, squeezing Percy’s hand.

“Go pack. I’ll meet you at the Camp store.”

Percy shakes his head. “I’ll go myself. Take Nico to the Big House. He needs to see the Oracle before we go.”

She nods. “I can go—”

“No. Just Nico,” Percy replies. “It’s his quest. He needs to see her alone.”

There’s a rustling in the nearby bushes. Percy’s vision narrows and Riptide is out in an instant, ready to take off the head of whatever monster—

“Silena?”

Percy blinks a few times.

“Mind moving the sword from my neck?” She asks with a soft laugh. “A three AM beheading wasn’t on my schedule for the day, unfortunately.”

“f*ck, I didn’t even hear you,” Percy says, capping Riptide. Then, his eyes narrow. “How much did you hear?”

She looks him straight in the eyes. “Absolutely nothing.”

Percy snorts as he feels her heart rate speed up for just a moment. Even if he couldn’t feel her heartbeat, he’d know it was a lie.

“Chiron won’t hear it from me. Just bring back Bianca in one piece. Don’t worry,” she says, smiling. Her hair starts to lighten from the dark brown it’s been the last few weeks. “I’m an expert at playing the dumb blond.”

Katie matches his sigh of relief.

“Thanks, Silena,” she says and turns to Percy. “I’m gonna go get some stuff together and take Nico. I’ll meet you outside the Big House.”

She walks off towards her cabin, and Percy turns back to Silena, now bleach blond.

“What were you doing out?” He asks, noting the uptick in her heartbeat the moment he asks. “I thought Beckendorf was on the day shift this rotation.”

“He is. I practice with Clarisse some nights.” She pulls out a pair of knives from a sheath by her lower back. “There’s never any time during the day, you know how it is. Charlie joins us, too, sometimes. More now that Tyson is here.”

Percy winces at the mention of his brother. He’s thankful Tyson’s in the forges tonight, or it’d be impossible to sneak off.

“—I swear, we need to throw him a party or something when all this is over. Charlie’s bunk can actually sleep now without worrying about how many swords they haven’t made.”

Percy’s fingers start twitching at his side, and he looks out to the Demeter cabin, where two shadows are walking away. “Sorry… I really gotta—”

Silena sheathes the knives and ruffles his hair. He’s reminded again of his first quest when she helped him cut his hair before sacrificing it to Apollo.

“Stay safe, Percy,” she tells him.

Percy doesn’t watch her walk off. He sprints back into his cabin and starts scrambling to pack everything he thinks he might need. He pulls out some clothes from his clean laundry bag. He’d been avoiding folding it for five days now, and all the shirts were horribly wrinkled—not that it mattered for a quest. They’d probably come back torn and half-burned anyway.

He pulls out his backpack from underneath his bed and starts shoving clothes into it, running through in his head what else he might need.

Water. Protein bars. Water. Ambrosia. Nectar. Water. Flashlights and batteries. Ocean water. First aid supplies. The Camp store’s fancy Liquid IV powder stuff so they don’t almost die of dehydration in the Labyrinth again. Drachmas, so when the Labyrinth inevitably spits them out at an abandoned research facility in the North f*cking Pole and doesn’t let them back inside, they can call for help.

He scribbles out an apology note for Tyson, pulls on a sweatshirt, and leaves for the store without a second glance back.

Percy’s mind races with far too many emotions to count, but fear is the primary one. Fear of losing Bianca. Fear of getting lost forever inside the Labyrinth. Fear of damning Katie and Nico there with him.

He ransacks the shelves, his thoughts miles away. He can almost feel his skin vibrating from the nerves. A stolen backpack gets filled with everything from his mental list, and he feels no guilt when he takes some mortal money from the cash register.

He takes three wristwatches. Just in case.

He has Tyson’s and Katie still wears the one with the broken face, but he’s pretty sure Nico doesn’t have one.

The Big House isn’t far. He finds Katie waiting for him by the back porch, furthest away from Chiron’s room. She holds her hand out for the pillaged backpack and rummages through it momentarily before handing it back with a silent stamp of approval.

How long? He mouths at Katie, and points at the attic window. A dim green glow pulses through the glass, shadowing their faces.

Katie holds up three, then four fingers. Almost four minutes, she responds.

They wait together in silence for another few minutes. The light dims, leaving them in darkness. It takes another ten for Nico to return. The two of them quietly debate whether to check on him when he walks right out from the shadow of a nearby tree.

Percy can smell the tears on him. He reeks of anxiety and terror. Percy doesn’t mention anything. Bringing attention to it would only make the kid angry.

Nico is the first one to speak, and all he says is, “Let’s go.”

Neither of them argues, and together, they walk towards the direction of Zeus’s Fist. It’s silent except for their footsteps and Nico’s occasional sniffling.

It’s not until they’re inside the Labyrinth and the door has already slammed shut behind them that they learn the reason why.

On bloodstained stone in the endless maze,

A life thought lost, through dreams shall raise.

A brother’s oath, a sister’s tomb,

A father’s scorn, a mother’s loom.

A woven reminder to find and unveil,

Unraveled by a mourner’s wail.

A coward’s flight, a love betrayed,

Her grave avenged, and debt repaid.

Chapter 25: "I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven"

Chapter Text

The world passes by in a blur of colors. She can feel the pine needles beneath her feet as she walks away from the heart of camp and into the forest. There, the darkness settles over her like a warm cloak. She doesn’t know if her eyes are open or closed as she makes her way to the entrance of the Labyrinth.

When the door closes behind her, Bianca does not stop to look around. She walks and walks and never worries of the danger she might face. Half-stuck in a dream, barefoot and weaponless, but she knows she is protected.

Bianca walks through the corridors, dazed. Not knowing where she is going, but following the tugging in her chest. Around her, the walls grow older and older. The mosaics here are dulled and scratched. Remnants of white chalk would be visible, had she any light to see it with. She steps over dried flowers and apricot pits, old scraps of embroidery thread and books with crumbling pages.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been walking for when her mind finally clears. She blinks the sleep out of her eyes and tries to gather her thoughts. Bianca looks around, and for a moment, the world stops spinning.

The dried blood on the walls looks exactly the same as it did when the Labyrinth brought her here last winter. A torch of Greek fire hangs to her left, illuminating the stone. The bones of the girl are gone, but Bianca knows exactly where to look to see the spot where they once lay.

Now, though, her eyes catch on an inscription written on the opposite wall. She frowns as she walks closer. The words look like they’ve been carved into the wall. Or, perhaps not carved—imprinted by a perfect hand, somehow. It’s faded, but she can still make out certain parts of it.

_{You will find spring Hades’ halls}

_{the cypress luminous sheen.}

_{Do not go near or drink its water.}

_{another, cold water}

_{Memory’s lake; guardian stands before}

_{Say: “I am a child of Earth ,}

_{descended know this.}

_{parched with thirst and dying: quickly}

_{the cool water flowing from Memory’s lake.”}

_{they give from sacred spring}

_{then join the heroes rites.}

Under her breath, Bianca whispers the words that are still readable, the ones not yet stolen by time.

There is a soft white glow among the shadows of green, she notices. Above the words is a small circle, pulsing with the same energy as the Labyrinth’s blue delta’s. She brushes her fingers over it, and the wall fades out of existence as though it was never there.

When Bianca steps through, it’s as though she’s walking right into one of her dreams, except she knows this is real. Everything is perfectly crisp, and the sound of running water isn’t muffled in her ears.

Up close, she sees the woman—no, the goddess for what she truly is. Bianca takes slow breaths to try and calm herself. There’s a pounding in her temples that only gets worse when the goddess rises from her seat and takes a step toward her. She extends a hand, and Bianca can’t help but walk forward.

How she hadn’t noticed before is a mystery, but up close, there’s no mistaking the power buzzing beneath her skin. Her eyes are the color of the night sky, swirling with knowledge and memory of ancient times.

Her dress is unlike the chiton’s Bianca’s mother wears, nor the modern clothes favored by Macaria and Melinoë. It’s almost as though someone made a fabric out of the very sky, draping her in constellations forgotten by humanity. It is dotted with dead stars that have long since collapsed into black dwarfs—brilliant explosions of celestial light, snuffed out by time. She wraps herself in their memory.

“You’ve been avoiding me.” The goddess’s eyes are piercing, but her smile is warm. Despite the unyielding headache, Bianca finds herself calm at the somehow familiar smile. She takes the offered hand and lets herself be pulled closer to the spring. They sit down together.

From a distance, Bianca can see her fathers palace. Across the other side of the Lethe lies Elysium. It lights the Underworld in a faint glow and she has to shut her eyes when the brightness makes her migraine flare.

“I’ve been dreaming of you,” Bianca says, opening her eyes away from the light. She watches the goddess swirl the tips of her fingers in the shallow water of the pool. Her stomach turns from nausea.

Bianca can barely hold back the whimper of pain as she blinks back the stabbing sensation behind her eyes and the spots of black that dot her vision. Tiny droplets of water, little more than mist, splash across the corner of her mouth, but Bianca can barely keep herself from falling over. The goddess blurs and spins before her as the pressure in Bianca’s head grows.

“Mnemosyne,” she says without looking up. “I am Mnemosyne.”

Mnemosyne, the titan goddess of memory. Daughter of Gaea and Ouranos. Sister of Kronos.

“You’re his—” Bianca pales and scrambles backward. Her hand slips on the edge of the spring. Mnemosyne does nothing but watch with knowing eyes as Bianca falls sideways into the cold water. From the surface, it seemed shallow, no deeper than a few inches. But she slips, and then she’s falling falling falling.

Her head feels as though it’s being split open with a sledgehammer. Her mouth opens, and she gasps, choking on the water that floods past her lips. If she weren’t so focused on the pain in her head, she might have noticed the lack of burning in her lungs. She’s drowning, but not. Her screams bubble to the surface of the spring soundlessly.

Bianca swallows a mouthful of water. Her mind cracks open.

“Another!” She shouts, holding her hands out. Her fingers are sticky from all the figs she’s eaten.

The boy next to her picks a new one from his satchel and begins to peel the skin off. He knows how much she hates them. She fidgets eagerly, waiting for another taste of the fruit she’s forbidden from eating at the palace.

“Your sister won’t be happy if you spoil your appetite again,” he says, looking down at her. He raises an eyebrow at her but gives her the fig anyway. “That’s your last one.”

They sit on a large cluster of rocks, cerulean waves crashing below them. The sea spray feels nice on her face, cooling her down from the sun’s overbearing heat. She doesn’t really like days like today—when it’s hot and sticky outside. She’d rather be inside the Labyrinth, where it’s nice and cool. Mama says it’s because she was born there that she likes the dark.

She doesn’t not like the sun, it’s just easier to play and hide in the dark. She so enjoys jumping out from behind corners and her favorite secret spots. Much better than lessons with the awful tutors she has to suffer through. Not including Mama’s magic lessons, though. Those are her favorite. She hates that she can only learn in secret, when her father isn’t there.

Her brother turns to her as he pours water from his waterskin over his hands to clean them. “You’ll be okay on your own in there?”

He’s always worried. If anyone found out, the king would have his head (and hers, probably). He’s not supposed to leave her alone, but it’s part of their deal: He plays with her, never argues when she wants to spend time in the Labyrinth, and brings her the foods she’s never allowed to eat. In return, she lies, saying he’s been watching her in the Labyrinth the whole time. But really, she goes off exploring by herself so he can have a few hours alone.

He’s not allowed to go outside, but she doesn’t mind playing alone for a little while. He’s her brother in everything but blood, she knows he loves her. But she knows he loves the sun too, so even though he’s worried, he’s okay with her going off on her own. And besides, she knows if she was really in trouble, he’d come to save her. He swore it by blood years ago.

No one else really likes it inside the Labyrinth. They’re all scared of the Monster, which is silly because he never leaves the catacombs, deep down in the center of the place. She’s seen the maps and knows where she’s not supposed to go. She’s very careful not to take anyone where it’s dangerous. But still, her older brother is the only one who likes playing with her. Her youngest brother—a real brother by blood—is too little to play with, and her favorite sister never has time anymore. She’s always sneaking away with that stupid Athenian boy.

She’s told her sister a million times that he’ll leave without her one day. She even did it once in the scary voice their father hates. Mama says she’s blessed by Apollo, but Father calls her a plague from the gods.

Above her, the sun flares, and she knows she should leave now. Carefully, she makes her way back to the open door in the cliffs that leads back into the Labyrinth.

“Don’t get lost!” Her brother shouts at her, not taking his eyes off the blazing sun.

She just giggles in response. As if she’d ever get lost. She’s got the place memorized down to every unfinished and half-built corridor. When she’s really trying to hide, there’s no one in the world that can find her. Not even Daedalus, and he’s the one building it.

“You’re overthinking again.”

Dionysus feels a soft thumb rubbing the crease between his eyebrows. He glances to the left where his wife is lounging beside him. Her hair falls in soft curls around her face and her cheeks are flushed red, as they have been all evening. He turns to her, slowly tracing his fingers up and down her collarbone.

“My love,” Dionysus whispers, leaning closer to her. He presses a kiss to her neck. “You are exquisite.”

Ariadne pulls back to look at him. With a raised eyebrow, she responds, “And you, are deflecting.”

He grins at her and smoothly flips them so she’s underneath him. He leans over to kiss her, but she twists her head away. Dionysus nips at her jawline instead and reaches down to untie the loose knot of her robe.

“Stop trying to distract me,” she laughs, lightly knocking him upside the head. His center of gravity shifts, and Dionysus lets out a sharp huff of air as he lands on his back.

Ariadne climbs off him and draws her robe closed again. She looks him in the eyes, not even trying to hide her worry. Her irises are a beautiful amber-brown—like honey, in the right lighting. He thinks of them far too often, lately… and for less than happy reasons.

“Tell me about your sister,” he says before he can stop himself.

Ariadne’s expression darkens immediately. Her shoulders go rigid, and her entire body tenses. She slips off the bed and walks over to where her shirt had been discarded earlier. Her voice is strained when she next speaks.

“Which one?” She asks him, pulling it back on. Her jeans are picked up off the floor as well. She continues in a sharp voice, “Not that it should matter, considering they’re all long dead.”

Dionysus knows to tread carefully around the topic of her family, but the question has been eating at him for months.

“Whichever one looked the most similar to—”

She spins around to look at him and her face is cloaked in rage. His wife isn’t one to get angry often, but when she does…

“You should stop talking before you say something you regret, Husband,” she spits out the last word like it’s a curse. “Pick your words very wisely.”

There’s a short lull in the conversation as Dionysus does just that.

“I have a camper. A daughter of Hades and Persephone.” He pauses for a moment to collect his thoughts. Then, slowly, he continues, “They say eyes never change no matter how many times a soul is dipped in the Lethe—”

Dionysus stops talking, and a wave of instant regret rolls over him. Ariadne’s face is blank, completely devoid of all emotion. Her voice is flat when she speaks.

“My sister starved to death in the Labyrinth. Alone. In the dark. Probably trapped somewhere they walled up. Daedalus brought back part of her veil, eventually. But she never got a proper burial because there was nothing left of her to bury. We never found her. Mother was forbidden from making a shroud, and our father refused to hold rites for her spirit,” Ariadne says, monotone. She turns towards the door and refuses to look at Dionysus as she walks out.

“If you ever ask me about Xenodice again, I’ll lock you into the Labyrinth myself and let it drive you mad until you beg Chaos to swallow you whole.”

Chapter 26: Old Friends, New Friends

Chapter Text

They walk in silence for over an hour after Nico shares the prophecy. The darkness of the Labyrinth weighs down on Percy like a shroud made of lead. He can’t tell if the fear is his own or if he’s smelling the remnants of those who died in these walls.

In the last three years, Percy has faced more monsters than some demigods encounter in their entire lifetimes. He’s fought Medusa, Echidna, Polyphemus, and even Atlas himself. They invoke anger and rage in him, but the Labyrinth? That is the one monster that makes fear dig its way under his skin like rotting maggots. Faceless and unknown and terrifying—a true monster, something he doubts the other campers understand.

There are days Percy looks at himself in the mirror. He thinks back to the creatures he’s killed and asks himself what makes him so different from them. The older campers have grown used to him, but the younger ones take one glance and run the other way. Most of them, at least. If they’re not avoiding him like a plague, they’re staring at him like an animal in a zoo enclosure.

(Percy looks back at them with their bare, fleshy arms and breakable bones. Their teeth are too blunt to do any damage, nor are their jaws strong enough. Their nails are too soft, and their reflexes are atrocious. They get concussions from being pushed to the ground too roughly and bleed from a gentle swipe of a knife.

He could tear their throats or rip them limb from limb if he wanted to. Not that he does, but the thought sits in his chest like constant nausea. If he can do that much with ease, walking past camp boundaries is an inevitable death sentence for them. No matter how much Annabeth and Clarisse prepare or how many battle plans they make, they can’t save them all from dying.

The demigods look at him and see a feral monster who might snap and kill them at any moment. Percy looks back with pity and makes offerings to Apollo and Artemis, protectors of young boys and girls. It’s not enough, and he knows it. But he’ll try anyways.)

The young ones might not like him, but he has friends—he has family—among those his age. Katie, Bianca, and Nico are a part of him, but his love—his possessiveness—extends to more than just them. The people at Camp have burrowed under his skin; whether they like it or not, they’re his now.

There’s Clarisse, with her spears and swords, who gets back up until she physically can’t anymore. Annabeth and the endless notes she takes to help him train with a sword while still using teeth and claws. Efficiency is everything to the daughter of Athena, so even when he practices the powers he knows terrify her, the smell of determination and curiosity outweighs that of her fear.

He has Silena, whose gentle words calm the newer campers upon seeing him for the first time. She cuts his hear when it gets too long and wears her makeup in shades of pale blue and green to match his scales. Like her, Beckendorf studies his scales, too. He makes sketch after sketch and then disappears into the forges for days, only emerging to compare the steel body armor mimicking the scales that line Percy’s skin.

The entirety of the Apollo cabin has his eternal loyalty. They were his shield when he first came to camp. Now, he looks at little Kayla, painfully unsure of her place among her siblings, and knows he would slaughter armies in her name. Fourteen children with blond curls and blue eyes—he sees Will in the curve of their smiles and the lilt of their words. He couldn’t save Will, but he’ll keep them safe no matter what it takes.

Nico’s abrupt stop breaks him from his thoughts. There’s a fork in the road in front of them.

“Which way?” He asks, his voice thin. His fingers twitch towards his pocket, for once without his deck of Mythomagic cards. Nico probably didn’t want to risk losing them, which leaves him fidgeting with his backpack straps.

“Your call,” Percy responds. Despite the oppressive feeling of disdain and hatred bearing down on him, he can’t help but feel a sense of budding relief. With Nico leading them, they haven’t run into a single monster. Yet. “I’ve got historically bad luck with this place. We’ll probably end up in Tartarus if you let me choose.”

Nico winces and turns to Katie, who just shakes her head. “You should choose,” she says. “This place trapped us for four months last time we were here without Bianca. I don’t want to risk it.”

It’s a few minutes before Nico speaks again. There’s an odd frown on his face when he does. “I think… I can’t explain it, but I think it knows we’re looking for Bianca.”

“Yeah, probably. That wouldn’t surprise me at all,” Percy says with a shudder. “This place is absolutely f*cked. I’d rather fight Kronos than be in here.”

Nico gives him a look he definitely learned from Thalia. It’s a deadpan sort of stare that expertly combines “Really?” and “Are you f*cking stupid?” and “You’re useless, I’ll do it myself.”

He glares at the two tunnels like he’s waiting for Bianca herself to walk through one of them. Nico lets out a deep sigh and then plops down on the ground.

“Uh, Nico?” Katie says slowly. “Staying still in here is a terrible idea.”

“Shh,” Nico says, closing his eyes. “I need to think. This place is full of shadows—”

“Are you insane?” Percy hisses. He rounds on Nico and drops down in front of him. Gripping Nico’s shoulders in a panic, he whisper-shouts, “Under no circ*mstances are to go shadow-traveling in this place. Bianca would kill me, resurrect me, and then kill me again if I let you go off on your own.”

Nico shakes himself out of Percy’s grip. “Stop acting like you’re responsible for me. You’re a year older. And I wasn’t going to shadow-travel idiota, I was just going to look through them.”

Waves roar in Percy’s ears.

“I’m acting responsible for you because I am responsible for you. I am two years older than you because, in case you weren’t listening, I was trapped here for four f*cking months when I was your age. We ate monster flesh so we wouldn’t starve, and we had no water except what I could pull out of the air.”

Nico looks back at him, frozen. There’s a horrified expression on his face, and he doesn’t even try to break free from Percy’s hold. His face is paler than usual. He looks nauseous at the mention of eating monsters. Or, perhaps, it's just seeing Percy so violently panic-stricken that's making him sick to his stomach.

“Do you think I was born like this?” Percy all but tears his shirt off to show Nico his chest. He gestures wildly to the scales lining almost every inch of skin. “They were like paper when I was a kid—only came out in the ocean. When my mom died, they hardened but were f*cking useless in a fight because all they covered were my arms—until we got stuck here.”

He thinks he might be shouting, but he doesn’t care. Percy will not let what happened to them ever happen to Nico.

“All of this showed up because we couldn’t sleep without getting attacked. Because Will was catatonic half the time and Katie was recovering from dying temporarily.” Percy’s claws dig into Nico’s arm. They pierce through his shirt without effort, and the orange takes on a red tinge. “That’s what this place does to you. It turns you into a monster because nothing else survives here.”

His breath comes out in heavy pants by the time he’s finished speaking. Percy can feel himself shaking. Then, he notices his claws in Nico’s arm. The kid is sitting, frozen.

“f*ck. f*ck, I’m sorry,” Percy rasps, carefully pulling his fingers back. He keeps the blood from pooling and forces it to clot faster. Nico doesn’t even acknowledge it. “I just– I can’t let that happen to you. I know you think you don’t need anyone to protect you, but this place is– This place will ruin you. Promise me you won’t go off on your own. Please.”

A hand touches his shoulder, and Percy can’t help but flinch. Katie’s there, looking down on him with an expression he can’t quite parse. “The more you call yourself a monster, the more you’re going to believe it. You’re allowed to be scared, Percy. It’s not just you that doesn’t like being down here.” Then, her eyes harden. Her voice is pure steel when she speaks. “But your fear and self-loathing don’t ever give you a reason to hurt him like that.”

Trembling, Nico whispers, “I’m only looking through them. I won’t go off alone. I just need to see if I can see her.”

Percy sits back on his heels. He pulls his shirt back on, unable to look away from the little tears in Nico’s own. Pinpricks of white dance through his vision as he pushes the heels of his palms against his eyes. He slumps back against the cool stone of a wall and tries to ignore the way the Labyrinth is giggling at him. A sound—a halfway cross between a laugh and a sob—breaks from his chest.

“This place makes me crazy.”

His only response is deafening silence.

Bianca wakes up back in the Labyrinth with a name on the tip of her tongue. It’s so close, yet just out of reach. Faceless memories mock her as the dream fades to a dull grey before slipping away entirely. All she’s left with is a warm feeling in her chest. Happiness and love envelop her like a cozy blanket.

It’s the same warmth she sees in Nico’s eyes when they spend time together in their mother’s garden. It feels like Katie’s tight hugs and Thalia’s fond grin after a spar and the brightness in Will’s eyes when she sneaks honey cakes into the Archives for him. It’s the love that radiates off Percy when he knocks his head against hers or draws blood from her scale-less shoulders because he’s forgotten biting people isn’t a typical form of affection… again.

She stands up and, with that warmth surrounding her, begins to walk home. The feeling never goes away entirely, but as she goes further, her mind starts to clear until she remembers the short encounter with Mnemosyne. Bianca can’t remember how she got back into the Labyrinth, but no one else could have returned her. She doesn’t know how long she’s been here, but hopefully, she’s back at camp by breakfast. As if on cue, her stomach growls in protest.

She’s got no water, no food, she’s not wearing any shoes, and her bow is still at camp. From the corner of her eye, a blue delta glows. It’s not camp; she can tell that much. Still, she presses her fingers over it with the hopes that she’ll find something to help—

There’s a thump and a pained noise as the door swings open into the face of a red-headed girl Bianca swears she’s seen before. She’s wearing a paint-splattered jean jacket and seems more exhausted than a demigod with night terrors. She looks as though she hasn’t slept in weeks. There are dark circles under her puffy, red eyes, and she’s clutching her nose, which is now dripping blood.

“f*ck,” Bianca curses as she digs through her pockets for something to stem the bleeding. There’s nothing, of course, considering she’s still dressed in the clothes she went to bed in last night. Bianca takes a step, and the girl trips backward, eyes wide, looking like a deer caught in the headlights of a still-moving eighteen-wheeler. Bianca manages to catch her before she breaks a hip on the pavement as well.

“Can I…” Bianca asks, pointing to her nose. “I’ve got experience with broken bones.”

(She avoids mentioning that her “experience” is sitting in graveyards with Nico, eating McDonald’s, and digging up freshly buried corpses to try and manipulate the bones in the same way Percy does blood.)

She nods, and Bianca weaves a lattice of Mist over her eyes to hide her setting the bone and healing the fracture with a twitch of her fingers.

“Oh my god, what the f*ck!” The girl shouts, scrambling backward onto the sidewalk of what looks like Manhattan.

Bianca has a split second of panic as she realizes the Mist covered absolutely nothing. She puts her hands up placatingly and says, “I can explain.”

The other girl takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. Softly, she starts muttering to herself, “not real, not real, not real.”

Bianca watches the redhead expertly talk herself down from a panic attack. Unfortunately for her, Bianca is still there when she peeks through squeezed-shut lids.

“Right. You’re still here. So, either you’re a figment of my imagination, and I’m crazy,” she says, her voice high-pitched and not nearly as calm as she’s trying to sound. “Or you’re real, which means the dreams are real, which means I’m actually insane. Either way…”

She trails off slowly, and Bianca finally gets a good look at her. It takes her a few seconds to recognize her, but eventually, she does.

“You went to Westover, didn’t you?” Bianca asks. She keeps her tone soft, trying not to freak her out further. “Rachel, right?”

“What the f*ck? You were in my History class,” she whispers under her breath again. Then, her voice grows panicked. She lurches forward and grabs Bianca’s wrist. “The vice-principal, it was a creepy guy named Dr. Thorne, right? Not Mrs. Cohen?”

“I’ve got no idea who Mrs. Cohen is,” Bianca says, her jaw grinding at the thought of the Manticore and everything his actions led to. “But yeah, it was Thorne.”

The tension seems to leave Rachel’s body all at once as she sags in relief.

“I knew it,” the words are sobbed more than they are spoken. She wipes away the blood beneath her nose with her sleeve. “They said I had heat stroke. Mrs. Cohen was the vice-principal for the last five years. No one even recognized his name.”

“Heat stroke?” Bianca asks incredulously. She knows the Mist hides things in ridiculous ways, but that seems like a stretch. “It was the dead of winter. In Maine.”

Rachel laughs, although it sounds more like she’s clearing her throat. “That’s what I told them, but they said the furnace was having electrical problems. Which makes no sense because then it would have been even colder.”

Before she can form a response, Bianca notices a blue box at Rachel’s side. It’s open, flipped onto its side after being dropped a few moments earlier. Through the tissue paper poking out, she sees a pair of sneakers nestled inside. They’re the same black and white Adidas currently tucked under her bunk at Camp. Bianca looks at Rachel again. She has curly red hair and freckles, and her eyes are the exact shade of green as the Oracle of Delphi’s smoke.

Bianca sends a silent prayer to Hecate, asking not to smite her for the explanation she’s about to give. She takes a deep breath. Then, she begins to speak, and Rachel Elizabeth Dare’s entire world shifts on its axis.

“We call it the Mist.”

Chapter 27: Trust

Chapter Text

Nico’s body sits on the floor of the Labyrinth for a little over an hour.

He looks half dead, pale skin turning more translucent the longer he stays gone. The further his soul travels, the more he looks like a corpse. As the minutes pass by, his breathing slows. His heartbeat is almost nonexistent. Any mortal doctor would have proclaimed him legally dead by now.

The act itself doesn’t bother Percy. He’s seen Nico do this plenty of times. It’s not like shadow-traveling, where he stands the risk of getting permanently lost in the darkness of the Labyrinth. If anything goes wrong, his soul will snap back into his body, and he’ll spend the next few days trying to settle back into his own skin.

No, what Percy is most unnerved by is Nico’s scent, or rather, lack thereof.

Everything has a scent. Living or dead, organic or not. Even ghosts have an aura Percy can sense or smell with his eyes closed. But like this, Nico smells empty. Like his scent is gone. Not muted or dulled. Gone. Percy knows full well that Nico is really there, and yet his mind screams that it’s a hallucination because nothing else makes sense.

It’s wrong. Seeing his body but not being able to smell it feels wrong. As he is now, Nico’s body is little more than an empty husk. It’s not waiting for its soul to return because it doesn’t know it has one. With his soul miles and miles away, his physical self is just an organized pile of flesh and blood and bones, no more conscious than the stone beneath it. It’s like one of those perpetual motion desk toys, the bodily functions automated until it runs out of energy to sustain it.

Percy lets out a sigh of relief when the scent of rotting pomegranates fills the air. Slowly, Nico’s body regains color. His heartbeat speeds up, and little involuntary twitches start from his fingers.

His eyebrows furrow, relax, and then furrow again. He cycles through determination, hope, dejection, frustration, and at least fifty other facial expressions during the few minutes it takes him to wake up. When he finally opens his eyes, he doesn’t look happy.

“Anything?” Katie asks hopefully, looking up from her book. She folds the corner to mark the page and closes it.

(A book. A f*cking book. Who, in their right mind, brings a book with them into the Labyrinth? Katie, apparently.)

“No,” Nico says, shaking his head. “But I think I found some of their bases. Luke is the blond one, right? With a scar under his eye?”

“Yeah, that’s him,” Percy snarls, thinking back to the day he returned to camp from his first quest. He had only talked to Luke once or twice. He didn’t do a single thing aside from exist. But for whatever reason, the guy decided to set a pit scorpion on Percy anyway.

“Did you hear anything about an attack on Camp?” Katie asks, sounding nervous. “Do they have Ariadne’s String?”

He shakes his head again. “The sound is muffled, but I don’t think so. I saw Luke talking to someone, and he looked annoyed. He probably doesn’t have the string yet.”

“This could all be avoided if we just kill Daedalus,” Katie says. “I’m not saying we should go out of our way to look for him, but if he’s dead, the string stays lost. Problem solved.”

Percy rolls his eyes as he stands up, grabbing his backpack and slinging it over his shoulder. “And they think I’m the bloodthirsty one.”

He helps Nico off the ground, and then the three of them are staring at the fork in the road again.

“So,” Percy says with a weak attempt at a smile. “Left or right?”

Nico looks between the two pathways. They seem identical, but something seems to draw his attention. Percy’s not sure what changed, but Nico must have seen a difference between them this time. He nods his chin towards one side and points, “We go left.”

Percy has no reason to argue, nor does Katie. He stretches as he stands up and slides his backpack on again. With a sharp ear listening for noises other than themselves, Percy follows his cousins into the left corridor.

It feels no different than anywhere else in the Labyrinth. Just as dark and awful. When he turns around, the hallway from the left fork is gone. There’s nothing but a stone wall a few meters behind them.

“I’ve been dreaming about Kronos.”

Pause.

Percy turns back around to see Katie staring at Nico with an equally horrified expression on her face.

“Say that again?” She chokes out, almost tripping over a protruding stone.

Nico’s expression morphs from wariness to guilt as he repeats, “I’ve been dreaming about Kronos.”

“Are you—”

His face drops before Percy can finish his question. The air scalds his skin, blistering in the few places uncovered by scales.

(Nico Di Angelo is his mother’s child. His fury burns hot and bright like the fires of the Phlegethon.)

“Am I what?” Nico asks sharply. He glares daggers at Percy, flames of green dancing behind the blacks of his pupils. “Am I going on this quest to join Kronos? To pledge myself to the reason Will is dead?”

Guilt tears into him because he hadn’t even thought about that being an option. Percy can’t help but glance again at the rips in Nico’s shirt. He lowers his voice when he responds, rasping softly, “I was gonna ask if you were okay?”

Nico recoils like he’s been hit, as though a bucket of water has been poured over a pile of blazing embers, extinguishing them entirely. “I’m sorry, I—”

“No, no, it’s not—Don’t—” Percy pauses to collect his thoughts before he continues. “I’m sorry I yelled at you earlier.”

Nico doesn’t meet his eyes, content to look anywhere except for Percy’s face. His fingers twitch, longing silently for the cards. The brick walls of the Labyrinth are bare, but to Nico, they seem to be the most exciting thing in the world.

“They’re dreams. No one’s mad at you for having them,” Percy says. He takes a step away to give the younger boy room to breathe. An action Nico appreciates if the way his shoulders relax is any indication. His face, though… It’s the one he wears when he’s thinking about Will’s death. “You know we trust you, right?”

Nico makes a soft noise of disapproval, and Katie immediately pulls him in for a tight hug. Percy has to fight to keep the amusem*nt off his face when Nico squirms and tries to pretend he hates it for the first five seconds. She doesn’t let go, and he melts completely, just like he always does when someone he cares about forces him into a hug.

“You shouldn’t,” he sniffs, swallowing hard. His voice is muffled, speaking into Katie’s shirt. “It’s my fault. I trusted Minos—”

“Yeah, and if you ever see him again, you do your absolute worst to him. We. Trust. You,” Percy says firmly. His lips quirk into a smile. “Besides, Kronos lives on a cruise ship, and we all know you turn into a drowning cat when you get a drop of seawater on you.”

Nico extricates himself from Katie’s arms and turns to Percy with a look of indignation.

A cat with its hackles raised, Percy thinks to himself.

It takes Katie a few minutes to calm Nico down from the teasing. He’s still annoyed, but an annoyed Nico is far better than one terrified of his own family.

They start moving again, with Nico quietly sharing the dreams that only Will knows about, apparently. Every time he says something new, Percy has to cull the boiling rage building inside him. Any humor he had felt before is gone within minutes.

Nico tells them about Kronos’s golden sarcophagus, filling up piece by piece with every new pledge; Luke walking through a palace of black marble and being aided by a horrific monster from Tartarus—Kampê; mentions of aid from Hecate and negotiations of some kind of deal; he confirms that Kronos’s forces plan to attack Camp and then, “There’s a spy.”

Percy tunes out the rest of the conversation. He walks ahead of them by several feet and stays there alone, leading the way forward as Nico and Katie continue talking.

All Percy can think is, there’s a spy, there’s a spy, there’s a spy. Logically, it should make sense. Of demigods still at camp, there was bound to be someone feeding information to Luke. But right now, he’s not thinking logically. He’s got hurt and betrayal coursing through his bloodstream.

It’s precisely these feelings blinding his senses so heavily that he doesn’t notice the sunlit corridor they walk into until he trips over a pair of legs.

Percy looks up, and Bianca stares back at him, a trio of fries halfway to her mouth. To his left are windows showing the Manhattan Skyline that let sunlight stream into the Labyrinth. Bianca is still in her pajamas, sitting calmly on the floor next to a redhead with thirty dollars of McDonald’s between them.

“Um, hi?” Bianca says, not putting down the fries. She eats those and follows them up with a couple more.

“Bianca, what the f*ck?” Percy chokes out. “We’ve been—are you—”

He doesn’t know what to say. Behind him, Katie and Nico seem equally stunned.

“What are you guys doing here?” Bianca asks as though she hadn’t disappeared in the middle of the night. Then, her confusion dissipates. Her face turns to stone. “Did you come in after me?”

There’s a rush of air beside him, and then Nico is next to his sister, yanking her in for a hug. A rare occurrence—two hugs in fifteen minutes and one initiated by Nico himself. “You can’t just disappear like that! Obviously, we’re gonna come after you.”

Bianca hugs him back and glances out at the daylight. She frowns to herself slightly.

“Rachel says it’s the tenth. It hasn’t even been a full day…” Her eyes fill with panic as she looks over at Percy and Katie. “Have you—How long have you been down here for?”

“Oh my gods, no, we’re fine!” Katie rushes to say. “It’s not like last time. We’ve only been here a few hours.”

“So, you left this morning? Does Chiron know you’re here?” Bianca asks. The second question leaves no doubt in Percy’s mind that she’d be furious if he had. She pulls back to look at Nico. “Is this a quest? I swear if he sent you on a quest to find me—”

Nico lets go of her and sits against the wall opposite her. Trying to appease her, he says, “No, no, he’d never—”

Abruptly, he cuts himself off as he realizes there’s no right answer to her question. Only bad and worse. Bianca puts down the fry she’s holding. Her voice is terrifyingly calm.

“You left. Alone?” She turns to Percy and Katie. Her eyes tell him exactly how livid she is. Unlike her brother, Bianca’s anger is like a blade of frozen steel. Cold. Calculating. Sharp. And yet still capable of frost burn that blisters like the flames of the Underworld. “And the two of you went along with this?”

“Don’t get mad at them for—”

“Katie, you let them go through with this?” Bianca cuts Nico off and gestures around them. Then she looks at Percy, just as furious, if not more so. “And you! Are you insane? You’ve said yourself how much this place supposedly hates you. How could you risk your life, and Katie and Nico’s lives at that, on the off-chance you might find me?”

“But we did find you!” Nico shouts at her, throwing his hands up angrily. “We found you in three hours without meeting a single monster—”

“What if you hadn’t, Nico? What if you were lost here forever? What if you died?” Bianca asks desperately. Her voice cracks at the idea of her Nico dying. “You know souls can’t move on from here on their own.”

She lurches towards Nico and hugs him again, twice as tight as he did. It’s almost as though she’s terrified he’ll float away forever if she doesn’t hold on. As soon as she pulls back, she stumbles to her feet and wraps one arm each around Percy and Katie.

“Thank the gods, you’re all safe,” Bianca murmurs, relief evident in her voice among the anger. Then, without warning, there’s a sharp pain in his ear as she pinches his and Katie’s. “Never do that again.”

Sitting on the stone, holding a handful of fries, Nico asks, “So, who are you?” He’s glaring at the girl, blatantly suspicious. She doesn’t seem fazed at all, considering the deadpan stare she’s giving him right back.

“This is Rachel. She was at Westover with us before the whole Percy getting jumped by a Manticore.”

Percy stiffens. The girl smells mortal underneath the paint fumes she’s covered in. It’s safe to say in here, hidden from the gods’ purview inside the Labyrinth, but she should know they’re not allowed to tell mortals about the divine world. “Bianca, she’s—”

“She’s clear-sighted. Like, really, really clear-sighted.” Rachel’s face screws up like she’s in pain at Bianca’s words. Her fingernails have dried blood under them that match the scabbing on her thumbs. The nailbeds are picked bloody, too. “Like, put on anti-psychotics clear-sighted—”

“I think they get it,” Rachel snaps before taking a loud sip of her drink. “No need to go into that much detail.”

Bianca looks sheepish. “Right, sorry.”

Percy leans closer to her and breathes in. It’s odd. She smells painfully mortal, but at the same time, not. Somehow. There’s something that reminds him of his mother, which makes sense since they’re both clear-sighted. But there’s something else. She almost smells like—

“Hi, Rachel. How are you, Rachel? Nice to meet you, Rachel,” she says, shoving Percy away from her. Her face shows irritation that only Mr. D could probably outdo. “At least take me on a date first.”

Nico snickers in the background through mouthfuls of fries. He can’t see Katie but he knows she’s pinching the bridge of her nose. There’s a hand on the collar of his shirt, and then Bianca is yanking him back away from Rachel.

“I’m gonna put you on a leash,” Bianca hisses, knocking him upside the head. “You can’t just smell people like that, especially when you don’t know them. Boundaries.”

Percy ignores Bianca entirely. He narrows his eyes at Rachel, struggling to hold back the hateful snarl he desperately wants to release. “Why do you smell like Apollo?”

“I what?” She asks before looking at Bianca in hopes of clarification.

At his sides, Percy’s fingers twitch. Her hair smells like laurels, and he hates it. He can taste the blood between his teeth as he grinds them together. He co*cks his head and stares at her, unblinking.

“No, I wanna know why you smell like Apollo, mortal,” Percy spits, his hands clenching into fists. Sirens are blaring in his mind, and he thinks back to their afternoons spent on the docks together. Somehow, it never occurred to him until now that all the kids in his cabin had to have come from somewhere—or if he had thought about it, he never fully processed the concept. Apollo talked with other people. With mortals, at that.

Was Apollo spending time with anyone else? Was he not enough for Apollo? Did Apollo not like him?

The idea of Apollo sitting on a dock with someone else hurts like a serrated blade dragging against the grain of his scales. That was their time, and despite their recent argument, Apollo was his first. He shouldn’t have to share with others just because—

“Will you calm down?” Bianca snaps at him. “She’s a prophet. Like one of Apollo’s oracles before they pledge themselves to him.”

Oh. That… That makes a lot more sense. Some of the tension in his body relaxes, but the wariness remains.

“We’re really sorry about him. I’d say he’s not normally like this, but I’d be lying. You just get used to it after a while,” Katie says, walking over to Rachel and holding her hand out. “It’s nice to meet you, I’m Katie.”

Rachel shakes her hand and smiles. “It’s nice to finally meet you. Bianca’s been telling me about you guys.”

“I’m taking her back to Camp. I want her to talk to Michael or maybe Clovis.”

“Is now the best time to be doing that? Kronos could attack Camp any day,” Katie says hesitantly. “Nothing against you, Rachel. It’s just that now is probably the worst time for a mortal to be there.”

“It’s more dangerous for her to be out there alone. Her Sight is strong. Honestly, it might be stronger than the Apollo kids.” Bianca’s face is grave. She won’t meet Percy’s eyes. “She dreamt about our quest to Mount Tam months before it happened.”

Percy exhales sharply.

“You saw… We could have—”

“No, you couldn’t have,” Rachel interrupts. “The things I dream about…They’re all confusing and completely out of context. I don’t know where, when, or if they’re going to happen. They’re impossible to interpret.”

“If she comes to camp, maybe she can learn to control the dreams,” Bianca says. “I’m afraid if Luke’s people find out about her, they’ll try to use her, and when they realize she can’t tell them anything helpful—”

“They’ll kill her,” Percy says, leaning back against the wall. He shuts his eyes and takes a deep breath. “You should ask the Ares kids to train her, too. Demigod or not, she should be able to protect—”

Something in the air shifts, and Bianca gasps raggedly. Behind the walls, there’s a deep grinding sound that vibrates straight through his bones. Percy looks up in time to see her turn white and pitch sideways, one hand to the wall of the Labyrinth. “Somethings wrong.”

She’s hardly finished speaking when there’s a series of clicks to their left. His head swivels towards the sound. Three giant scorpions exit the darkness.

“f*ck,” someone says. He hears a sword drawn from its scabbard.

His vision narrows. Everything around him falls away until all that remains are the three monsters threatening the lives of his family.

Percy steps forward. His claws extend a half-inch further.

The air is filled with a sharp scent he can practically taste in the back of his throat. The scorpions’ stingers drip with poison. They hiss and sizzle when they hit the floor, burning a hole into the stone.

It’s been a while since he’s manipulated poison, but after what happened at the arch, it’s a skill he’ll never forget. He twitches his fingers, and the next drop flicks into the left wall.

He considers it for a moment. He could tear them apart from the inside out if he wanted to, but right now, he’s annoyed, on edge, and really needs to hit something. The satisfaction just isn’t the same.

Percy smiles. His jaw unhinges. The corners of his mouth tear open as he bares all three rows of teeth. Then, with a feral, too-wide grin on his face, he lunges.

Chapter 28: Perseus "I swear I'm not a horse girl" Jackson

Chapter Text

Percy tears the metal grate straight off its hinges. Bianca and Rachel get pushed out first. Then Nico, then Katie, and finally, Percy is pulled through with some help of some vines Katie curls around his waist.

Rachel is wheezing so badly Percy thinks she might need an asthma inhaler. Gingerly, Percy pulls off his backpack, wincing at the sharp pain in his shoulder. He pulls out one of his water bottles and shoves it into Rachel’s hands. Another spare goes to Bianca, and the other he downs himself in seconds. Katie and Nico are doing the same with their own. The last two in his pack are left untouched. The fifth is the largest and filled to the brim with ocean water. It’s not explicitly labeled, but if it were, it would probably say “Use only if dying” in big red letters.

“I’m so—” Pant. “Glad.” Pant. “You.” Pant. “—shoes.” Pant. Bianca points at her new-looking shoes. Where they came from is a mystery to Percy, although it’s not one he has much interest in solving at the moment.

When his bottle is empty, Percy looks around. They’re sitting in the middle of a dirt road that cuts through an enormous pasture. Red cattle are all around them, which, if they aren’t frozen with fear, are running in whatever direction gets them away from the five demigods. Further down the road, there’s a large farmhouse.

“I vote we don’t go back down there,” Nico croaks, capping his water.

“What he said.”

Percy nods in agreement and carefully starts to pick out the variety of monster flesh stuck between the rows of his teeth. He grimaces, not at the taste but rather at the reminder of his entrapment in the Labyrinth several years prior. The memories never fail to strike a sharp pang of anxiety through his chest.

Distantly, Percy thinks he can hear neighing coming from up the hill. He turns to face the sound and sees what looks like a large stable. It is distraction enough to stave away the memories that threaten to overwhelm him now that the adrenaline of immediate danger is gone.

A smile breaks across his face, tugging at the corners of his lips, now half-healed by water.

“Horse!” Percy beams, pointing up the hill. He rips through his backpack to grab a square of ambrosia, takes a bite, and then practically shoves the rest into Nico’s mouth. They’d heal his cuts better and quicker than Percy could with water.

The monsters they met in the Labyrinth shouldn’t have been difficult to kill. Usually, Percy would have been able to take them out on his own without a problem. Down there, though, where the air was thin and the walls stifling, fighting had always been more difficult. The sheer amount they had run into today only made matters worse. With Bianca there, they should never have run into monsters at all—then again, the Labyrinth definitely has it out for Percy, so perhaps he shouldn’t be that surprised.

Then, there was the added fact that Bianca, sleep-deprived, was only armed with one of Katie’s knives, and they had to protect an even more sleep-deprived mortal on top of that.

“There’s more if you need it,” Percy says as he pushes the small bag of ambrosia into Katie’s hands. Then, he gestures in the direction of the stables. “Are you guys gonna be okay if I go up there for a minute?”

Katie nods between sips of water. “We’ll be fine. Rachel needs a breather, but we’ll come up and meet you if you haven’t come back by then.”

The second she agrees, Percy is off. He loves the Pegasi at camp, but they aren’t the same as horses. There are far less of the latter than he wishes there were. He has a kinship with them that—

The stench hits him not even halfway to the stables. Percy has to stop and take more than a few steps back to keep himself from throwing up. It’s like someone took the smell of the Central Park Zoo and multiplied it by a thousand.

Percy pulls his shirt collar up to try and block the smell. Unsurprisingly, it does nothing. Holding his breath, he takes out the last bottle of drinking water and draws half of it into the air.

He has never been this thankful to be able to breathe underwater. A bubble molds over his mouth and nose, blissfully keeping the rancid smell of manure away.

As he gets closer to the stables, Percy’s heart sinks more and more. He can hear flies buzzing in the distance and doesn’t even want to consider how bad the smell must be up close. Standing at the fence, he wants to scream.

About fifty horses are milling around in their own waste. They seem entirely unperturbed, but Percy is furious on their behalf. Who in their right mind would subject horses to this kind of treatment?

Percy gasps when he sees their teeth. Sharp and gleaming, and perfect for tearing apart meat. They only have one row, and he can’t help but coo at how adorable they are. They’re like an entire herd of little baby Arion’s. He knows his brother would be furious if he saw this.

Behind the fence, one of the stallions trots closer to him, and Percy walks forward as far as he can without stepping in the filth.

Who did this? Who’s letting you live like this? Percy speaks into his mind, practically snarling at the thought of their mistreatment. He looks closer at the horse, and his anger only grows when he sees the protruding ribs. He looks emaciated and half-starved. They all do. What are they feeding you here? When was the last time you ate?

The horse nickers at him and opens his mouth as if to show off his teeth. Tasty half-blood! Come inside! We will eat seafood!

If he weren’t so furious, Percy might have laughed at how cute the horse looked trying to threaten him. In the distance, he sees a river and considers how many trips it would take him to carry enough water to flush out the stables entirely. It doesn’t take long to decide he doesn’t really care. He’ll go back and forth as many times as he needs to. He’d be a horrible son if he allowed his father’s sacred animals to live like this.

Percy nods to himself, decision made.

Don’t worry, we’ll get this place clean, he says to the horse. And then we’ll get some good food for you and your friends. Something that’s filling and helps keep your teeth sharp.

He takes off, running down the hill towards the river, considering whether or not the horses would appreciate sinking their teeth into their former owner, whoever they are. Percy’s deep in his thoughts when he reaches the bank, so he doesn’t notice the naiad until she screeches in terror and tumbles back into her river.

She stares at him from behind the rock for a few seconds, looks over his shoulder at the stables, sits up, and then proceeds to give him the tongue-lashing of a lifetime. His friends are a mile or so back, but Percy’s pretty sure they can hear his shouting match with the naiad, word for word.

They argue for a good ten minutes before simmering down. Percy leaves with a handful of petrified seashells and a newfound respect for naiads, who, he learns, are fiercely protective over their rivers.

The poor horses have grown so used to living in their own filth that the idea of a bath utterly terrifies them. It’s for your own good, Percy tells them as they barrel back and forth, trying to escape the purifying salt water. You’ll feel so much better once you’re clean!

They beg him to stop and plead with him, We won’t eat you! No more salty baths, please!

Once there’s nothing but dirt left in the enclosure, he takes the water away from his face. There’s still a hint of the smell in the air, but it’s nothing like before. He doubts the others would even be able to smell it.

Percy blinks a few times in confusion and sniffs the air again. It smells like… barbecue? He turns to look down the road where his friends aren’t resting any longer. Percy curses, realizing it’s been way longer than the few minutes he promised Katie.

He apologizes quickly to the horses and takes off towards the ranch. He’ll come back for them after he finds his friends. Percy tells himself there’s nothing to be worried about. He’s already stressed enough from the horses, but the idea of his friends being in possible danger is the worst fear of all.

When he gets close, Percy rounds the house to the back deck, where the smell is coming from. It’s set up with colorful streamers and balloons, as though someone was preparing for a party.

To say the image that greets him is an odd one is the understatement of the year.

His friends, although wearing a few new superficial injuries, don’t seem to be in any active danger. Nico and Katie sit at a picnic table, Bianca is passed out on a large wicker sofa, and Rachel is… grilling? There’s a huge barbecue cooker on the deck, which she’s standing in front of, flipping burgers.

“…Hey?” He says, walking up the stairs.

Katie turns to him, wrinkling her nose as he gets closer. “Where have you been? You smell like sh*t.”

Percy groans in response. “Do you know how they’ve been treating their horses? Where’s the owner? I want to have a chat.”

Nico snorts, almost choking on his soda. He points to the lattice roof. A drop of blood falls, joining a larger pool on the decking. “I don’t think he’s feeling very talkative.”

Above them, a massive man is hanging from a tangle of thorny vines. Upon closer observation, he’s not wrapped in them as much as he is threaded through like a scrap piece of cloth. He’s still alive, but barely. Katie’s precision has gotten terrifyingly good in the last six months. As far as Percy can tell, she’s got vines wrapped around his still-beating heart, ready to kill him whenever she so likes.

“Percy, meet Geryon,” Katie says with a vicious smile. “Geryon, meet Uncle Percy.”

Nico snorts and bursts out laughing again. He has to put the soda down this time to keep himself from spilling it.

“Geryon…” Percy muses with furrowed eyebrows. Looking closer, he notices the three distinct masses. Three torsos. Three hearts. Two of them speared through, the third subject to Katie’s whim. “He’s the son of Chrysaor, isn’t he?”

Katie smiles and turns back to her drink. There’s a cut above her eyebrow like she was backhanded recently. Percy pushes down the anger. The wrath. The fury at the audacity he has to strike her. Who is he to lay a hand—a f*cking finger—on Katie?

He tore Echidna apart with nothing more than his thoughts when he was twelve. Now, he’s fifteen, and it would be child’s play to keep blood flowing to Geryon's heart and brain while he sits back and takes off one limb at a time. Alive and forced to endure his own slow death until Percy decides otherwise.

“Calm down before you start a hurricane over nothing,” Katie says, pulling him from his thoughts. She touches a finger to the cut. It’s not large, but its very existence makes murder the first thing on his mind. “It’s not even worth wasting ambrosia on.”

She pulls him towards the table and shoves a soda into his hand. “There are more important things to talk about. I've got no idea how Olympus doesn't know about this place. You'd think after the Hermes thing, Apollo would be more careful.”

Percy tries to sit on the bench facing Geryon, but Katie gives him a knowing look and makes him sit with his back to the monster. Rachel joins them with a plate of burgers she sets down on the table.

“They’re regular beef, don’t worry,” she says, taking one herself.

They smell okay, like barbecue nights at camp, but they look too well-done for him. He asks Rachel, “Any chance there’s something on the rarer side?”

She looks oddly at him, swallows a mouthful, and then says, “These are already pretty bloody. Medium-rare, I’d say.”

Percy has to hide a grimace when he bites into one of the burgers left on the plate. They’re practically torched. What a waste of perfectly good meat.

To the left of the grill, he notices a large cooler. He sends up a silent prayer to whoever is listening for there to be meat inside.

“Oh my gods, score,” Percy whispers when he flips the lid open. Beneath the packages of burgers are the most enormous, delicious-looking slabs of meat he’s ever seen. Their marbling is worthy of worship. They look tender and juicy and expensive. They never have anything like this at camp. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen meat like this in butcher’s shops. His mouth is salivating like nobody’s business and before he can stop himself, he’s tearing into the cut with his teeth.

Percy has met gods before. He’s been on Olympus. To him, it’s just another day. But this? This is the closest he’s ever come to having a true religious experience. To say it tastes divine is a criminal understatement.

He finishes it in record time and rips open the wrapping of a second one. This one is just as good as the last. His eyes flutter closed at the taste. Fresh, decadent, bloody—

“Percy!”

He turns around slowly to see his friends looking at him in shock and horror. He chews and swallows the chunk in his mouth. With bloody fingers, he pulls a paper plate from a small stack by the grill and walks back to the table.

“I know, I know. Manners,” he says sheepishly and wipes his chin with a couple of napkins. His mom would be so disappointed if she saw him eating like this. “Sorry, Katie. Anyway, you were saying something about Olympus and Apollo?”

She makes a choked sound. Her face is frozen, eyes wide with terror.

“You’re eating them,” Katie croaks, her eyes fixed on his plate. She points towards the pastures in the distance. It takes Percy a moment to realize where her reaction is coming from. His stomach drops when he processes what color the grazing cows are and why she had mentioned Hermes and Apollo.

“He’s gonna—f*ck. I don’t—” Percy stammers, unable to look away from the free-roaming sun cattle. He had seen them before and even acknowledged in his head that they were bright red, but somehow, he never put two and two together. “He’s gonna hate me. He’s never gonna talk to me again.”

His heart pounds in his chest, emotions torn between panic and embarrassment. It’s mortifying. He and Apollo reconciled just a few months back after what happened between them in Delos. He’s known Apollo longer than anyone else in his life, save his mother. Besides her, he—Fred—was the most consistent figure in Percy’s life. The idea of permanently driving Apollo away is soul-crushing.

His fingers feel numb. “Okay. Okay, I’m gonna—” He can barely breathe. It feels like his throat is closing up. His eyes burn with tears, and everything in his sight starts spinning. “I’m– Apologize. I can– I’m gonna—”

Percy hears someone yelling at him, but it’s all just a buzzing sound in his ears. He stumbles off the bench, holding onto the half-eaten cut of… of sun-cattle. Tunnel vision takes him to the industrial grill, which is still on, and throws open the cover.

He hardly registers the searing pain when he pushes the grate back with his bare hand. Percy tosses it into the flame, plate and all, and with every ounce of respect and regret he has, he prays.

My Lord Apollo, please hear my apology and accept—

“‘My Lord Apollo?’ That’s a new one. Not that I’m complaining at all. It sounds rather lovely coming from your lips, Perseus. I wouldn’t mind hearing it again.”

In front of him stands Apollo, and whatever coherency Percy might have had before goes right out the window.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Please don’t hate me!” Percy sobs, barely getting the words out past his heaving breaths. “It was an accident! I swear I didn’t know! I would never have—a ragged sob cuts him off—I’m so sorry! They were there, and no one told me, and I– I– Please don’t hate me!”

There’s a warm hand on his shoulder and another on his cheek, lifting his face upward. Apollo is nothing more than a blurry outline standing in front of him.

“Breathe for me, Percy. I need you to calm down before you break Texas’ earthquake records,” Apollo says, raking his fingers through Percy’s hair soothingly. There’s a brief moment when Apollo places two fingers on his forehead and goes still. However, it doesn’t last long, and he continues the soft motions.

“I think we can make an exception for today since you didn’t know,” Apollo tells him. “But I would appreciate it if you refrained from eating more of my sun cattle in the future. You won’t let it happen again, yes?”

“You– You’re not mad?”

Apollo hums softly before he responds. “Not at you, sweetheart. Geryon, on the other hand… I’ll deal with him later. But I know you won’t let it happen again, will you, Percy?”

He shakes his head back and forth violently enough to hurt, only stopping when Apollo takes Percy’s chin between his fingers.

“So– So we’re still friends?” Percy hiccups, trying to stem the tears that still won’t stop flowing.

Apollo stands up, taking the warmth with him. He sweeps his fingers under Percy’s eyes and does something to help calm him. His breathing slows, and relief sparks inside him when Apollo says, “Of course we are! You can’t get rid of me that easily.”

So close to Apollo—the sunshine burns his skin, and yet all Percy feels is overwhelming happiness.

“So– So we’re still friends?”

You’re mine, Apollo wants to say. Your heart is mine. Your soul is mine. You have always been mine, and you always will be.

Thanatos himself will not take you from me, Apollo wants to say. I will steal you back as Dionysus did Ariadne, and you will feast on golden apples until the mortality has burned from your blood—until nothing but ichor flows through your veins.

You will not die unless I allow it, Apollo wants to say.You will not die unless it is by my hand.

“Of course we are! You can’t get rid of me that easily,” Apollo tells Percy, beaming down at him.

Of course we are. You’re the most exquisite being I’ve laid eyes on in millennia, and you will never be rid of me.

Apollo smiles and brushes his fingers over the blood still staining Percy’s lips. His eyes, glassy with tears, are a beautiful emerald Apollo wants to keep forever. Flecks of gold shimmer in them, and under the light of his sun, the irises pale just so into the haunting shade of green that Apollo could never fall out of love with.

Chapter 29: She Said, "Be Careful With That One, Love"

Chapter Text

When Percy wakes, it’s to the feeling of water filling his lungs and oath-breaker ringing in his ears.

Again.

He looks around wearily in the early morning light. Katie and Bianca are already awake and talking softly on the patio. He’s careful not to wake Nico and Rachel as he pads over to the sliding glass door and joins his cousins outside. The pool of blood has dried, with Geryon having been taken by Apollo the day before. The air is thick with unspoken tension.

“Morning,” Percy grumbles, his voice tinged with sleep. Holding back a yawn, he flops onto the wicker chair across from the two girls and pretends not to notice the death glares being shot his way. His shoulders slump, and he avoids making eye contact.

“So…Hephestus,” he says hesitantly, referring to Apollo's suggestion to them before leaving the day before. “That should be fun.”

There’s a sharp pain across his ankle. He looks down to see a thorny vine quickly growing out from between the slats of the patio.

“You need to watch yourself,” Katie snaps at him. “If anyone else had done what you did yesterday, they’d be dead in an instant. Just because Apollo is lenient with you doesn’t mean the other gods will be. Don’t let your recklessness get you killed. Please.”

Percy looks away, guilt rising like bile in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper. He wants to say more, but the words refuse to come. All he can do is repeat his weak apology. “I’m sorry.”

Katie closes her eyes and breathes out slowly.

“Don’t. Just—Stop apologizing and learn to control your emotions,” she says quietly. “I’ll know you’re sorry when I see you think before you act.”

He looks over her shoulder to the sun slowly rising. There’s nothing left for him to say.

“No.”

Percy blinks, his very first words having been interrupted by the hunched-over god. “Huh?”

“No,” Hephaestus says gruffly. He doesn’t bother looking away from the pieces of scrap metal he’s trying to fit together.

Percy’s face flushes with frustration. “You didn’t even listen! What do you mean, no?” He demands, his voice quickly rising, the anger bubbling just beneath the surface.

“I mean, no,” Hephaestus repeats a third time. “Now, get out before I make you.”

“Can you at least hear us out? Apollo said—”

Hephaestus pulls out a soldering iron. “Do you think I can snap my fingers and pop my creations into existence?”

Before Percy can respond, Katie places a hand on his shoulder and squeezes tightly. A silent ‘let me do the talking.’

“Of course not, Lord Hephaestus. It’s just that—”

“She,” he says sharply, blindly pointing an oil-covered finger at Bianca, “...killed Talos. Do you know how long it took me to put him back together after Medea? His body? Bah—easy work. His mind, though? It took centuries to get a semblance of sanity into him…”

Hephaestus trails off into incoherent grumbling, with Bianca’s name audible every now and again between the hissing of the solder and the clinking of metal.

“Please,” Katie begs. She takes a step forward. “We need to find Daedalus—”

“What? To find the string? Don’t see the point of that when you’ve got her.” He points again, this time to Rachel, standing just behind Bianca.

Percy gives up on patience, wrenching his shoulder out of Katie’s grasp. “We’re gonna kill him. If he’s dead, no one gets the string. Problem solved.”

The god snorts, “Athena’ll love that, I bet.”

He turns to look at Percy. Fire burns in his eyes—not like the warm hearth of Hestia, though, nor the grenade flashes and green flames hiding behind Ares’ sunglasses or the sun's searing heat in Apollo’s.

It’s red-hot forges and white, molten steel. Percy’s nose flares. The air smells like the smoke of rapidly cooling metal, and the sharp clangs of a hammer pounding against celestial bronze echo in Percy’s head. He doesn’t bother closing his ears. He recognizes by now the familiar hum of a god's power making itself known.

Then, Hephaestus’ eyes widen momentarily before his booming laugh reverberates around the room. The scowl that once seemed permanently etched into his face is nowhere to be seen.

If Percy’s laugh is the sound of the earth moving, then Hephaestus’ is like the shrill screech of a sword being crudely sharpened. He winces, battling the urge to cry out, and squeezes his hands over his ears. It’s like a knife across a chalkboard amplified a thousand-fold, and there’s a sudden piercing sensation in his right ear. Percy blinks hard at the pain, his eyes watering, and Hephaestus only laughs louder.

Instinctively, Percy reaches up with two fingers. When he draws them back, they’re wet with blood.

“You?” His deafening laughter bounces around the metal walls of his workshop. He can barely get his words out. “You are going to kill Daedalus?”

Katie’s hand clamps down on Percy’s shoulder again, pushing her forearm against his back. With rose thorns being driven into his back, Katie hisses, “Calm. Down.”

As best as he can, Percy tampers down on his rage, pushing it down until he can speak with just the barest hint of a furious waver in his voice. “Can you tell us how to find him or not? Apollo said you could help.”

Hephaestus snorts, “Of course he did.” He looks Percy up and down, his eyes gleaming with mirth. “I’ll tell you what. There’s a forge. A favorite of mine.”

He goes on to tell them about Mount St. Helens and Typhon.

“Go there. They may not sense you coming,” he says to them. “You are not gods.”

The conversation ends with a promise of more information on Daedalus when they return. Percy is glad to leave. Apart from Apollo and his father, there are very few gods he can truly stand being in the presence of. Hephaestus, he now knows, is not included in these exceptions.

“Oh, and Jackson? One more thing.” Percy turns to look back at the god. “When you kill him, send me a quick prayer beforehand, would you? Prime entertainment to bring up the television ratings and all that.”

Percy nods without a word, and they leave, returning into the Labyrinth to the sound of laughter at a joke none of them understand.

Hephaestus is wrong because, of course, he is. Because nothing in Percy’s life ever goes as planned. Because the Telkhines sense them before they even enter the damn forge. And because the moment he crosses the border that divides the Labyrinth from the entire army of monsters gathered to fight them, a stone slides past his back, separating him from his friends.

He remembers snarling from both him and the Telkhines. He remembers the smell of blood—the taste. The golden dust blinding him and melting on his tongue like bitter cotton candy. He remembers smoke. Fire.

He burns.

(Then, he drowns.)

“Someone told me my eyes were pretty once. Back then, I wore just the iris blue. But he said he loved them gold—fully gold—and meant it. So, for the next council meeting, I decided to leave them like that. Completely gold.” His laugh is hollow. “My mistake.”

“Why do you hide them?”

“Hm?” Apollo pauses in his braiding. A breeze carries the sweet scent of wildflowers through the air. Yellow looks good against the black curls, he thinks.

“Your eyes,” his companion says softly. “The gold is beautiful.”

“Most would disagree with you,” Apollo hums in response.

The young man stays silent for a moment before turning to face Apollo. The flower falls from the god's hand as it's drawn towards a tan chest with a ragged scar over it. His fingers trace against the raised skin, feeling the steady heart beating beneath it. With a mortal hand wrapped around his wrist, Apollo presses harder.

His nails split skin, and blood spills down his knuckles as the scar is re-opened for what is perhaps the hundredth time. Save for the soft sigh that leaves his lover's lips, the only sound around them is the visceral tearing of flesh and the cracking of ribs as they’re pushed aside.

Apollo doesn’t ask if it hurts. Gods don’t feel fear, but here, with him, he’s too afraid to ask, lest the truth be a ‘no.’

No one else will ever have him like this. No one else will ever cradle his still-beating heart and burn their very essence into his soul—again, and again, and again—until no part is left untouched. Until he is Apollo’s entirely.

He wants it to hurt. He needs it to hurt. The pain and suffering is devotion that none other will ever offer him.

Apollo does not say, “I love you.” There is no need.

His lover's heartbeat is a symphony of prayers that thrum within the searing fingers. He is Apollo’s Elysium. If a day ever comes when Chaos reclaims the universe, this will be his last thought. Of this, he is sure.

The blue in his iris’ fades away, leaving behind only what he was born with.

“Don’t stare for too long. You might burn.” Green eyes meet gold, and Apollo feels himself falling in love all over again.

His eternal muse is here, held in the palm of Apollo's hand. He is adoration come alive. He is worship in its purest form. A faithful supplicant to whom no priest or lover will ever compare. Every word that falls from his lips is a prayer worthy of divine blessing.

“I’d burn for you.”

The field of flowers around them withers, and like the embers of a dying phoenix’s scorched feathers, they melt away into ashes, carried off by the wind and washed away into the sea.

Apollo does not look away.

“I know.”

(He burns.)

(Then, he drowns.)

Chapter 30: What Makes It Real?

Chapter Text

Apollo fell first.

In Delos, the god of the sun lies on one of the few beaches in existence that Poseidon has no power over. In one hand, he holds a pale arrow, in the other, a thread woven purely of green. He ignores Artemis's irritated huffs as she carries messages back and forth from Olympus, forced to play messenger now that Apollo has refused Hermes free entrance to their home.

They can all burn.

Until Percy is back where Apollo can see him, Demeter's crops will turn to ash, and humans dying of heat stroke will overwhelm Hades' realm. He doesn’t care.

His lyre sits discarded to the side, next to his gilded bow and quiver, wreathed in laurel and filled with an untold number of arrows. They are made of everything from gold, silver, copper, and platinum to solid mercury and arsenic, tipped in tetrodotoxin. Some are newer than others, carrying remnants of the Black Plague. Others are older, once used against the Achaeans during the Trojan War.

The arrow Apollo holds is unique—a work of art that no weapon of Hephaestus's could compare to. Carved with a chisel of pure sunlight, it is pale white and gleaming, made of solid bone. Some of its shavings sit in a glass box inside a room that not even Artemis is permitted to enter. The rest, he keeps on him at all times.

The balance is terrible, and it would be far too heavy to ever shoot, but this is not an arrow meant for flying. If Apollo ever uses it, it will be his own hand guiding it.

From flesh it came, to flesh it will return.

The pain Percy feels upon waking is indescribable. It’s reminiscent of the time Atlas scraped off a section of scales on his arm, except this time, it's his entire body screaming in agony.

Percy looks down, and the panic is immediate. He doesn’t stumble out of bed so much as he does fall inelegantly and sink to the floor, flailing while trying to untangle himself from the bedsheets. It’s considerably easier than he expects, although that’s likely due to the fact that instead of two legs, it’s a single tail he has to extricate from the softly woven kelp.

Percy curses upon hitting the floor as the pain burns across his entire upper body. His arms and chest are covered in layers of bandages. Thankfully, the tail is no more than a dull ache, like the pain from an overexerted muscle.

He examines the new appendage. Its scales are not the typical iridescent blue-green ones he’s come to love so much. From a short distance, it almost looks like there are no scales at all and that the tail is simply made of glass.

Beneath it, an enormous bone stretches all the way down to a pair of sleek fins, blood-red and almost glowing. Sinew and muscle wrap around it, flexing as he moves. Above Percy's waist, his anatomy turns more human. There, his skin is somewhat more opaque but still translucent enough to see into. The few glimpses he gets of his rib bones feel wrong. It's like something out of a mortal horror movie. Most of his chest is covered with bandages, but he can make out an old scar just above his solar plexus.

And then there are his veins...

The less said about those, the better. Percy's eyes shut almost involuntarily, burning, and he exhales shakily. He wonders if crying underwater is possible.

Willful blindness has always been one of his strengths, so when he goes back to looking at his new tail, he very expertly ignores the web of lustrous arteries spiraling down it.

Upon closer examination, Percy can see the faint outline of where each scale overlaps with the next. He presses down on one of them and gasps, wide-eyed, watching as it darkens with the pressure into a dark silvery blue. As he pushes harder, the surrounding scales join the first until there’s a small patch of hard, metallic scales within all the clear.

They’re layered so compactly that when he runs a finger in the opposite direction of their growth, he can barely feel the ridges. With a claw, he gently traces the edge of one of them before trying to push underneath to see if they’ll lift. He doesn’t get very far in his attempt at pulling one of them off.

“Incredible. Truly incredible.”

Percy whips his head towards the sudden voice.

“Father’s mortal children lend themselves to idiocy rather well, but you? You truly are amazing to watch, Perseus.” A tall, green-skinned merman leans against the wall, his split tails barely skimming the floor. “Let me give you a word of advice. Those are called death-scales for a reason—because they’re with you till you die. Break them or pull them out, and there’s no growing them back.”

Percy yanks his hand back and frowns. The scales shimmer for a moment before returning to transparency. The massive bone running down the length of the tail must be at least six feet long. “I was just looking,” he insists.

“No, you weren’t.” A laugh bubbles out from the merman. “I think you might actually beat out Kymopoleia for most self-destructive in this family.”

“What the f*ck do you know about Kym? You two haven’t talked in centuries,” Percy spits. He can’t say he’s as close to her as he is to Arion, but she likes his mom’s cookies, and her jellyfish hair is almost as cool as having sharp teeth. “The last time you saw each other was when you dragged her back to Briareus.”

The merman’s face twists. “I don’t know what kind of lies our sister has been spewing to you, but she agreed to the marriage.”

SISTER. MATE. HATE. KILL.

Triton pushes off the wall, and a spear made of water solidifies under Percy’s chin. His eyes are solid black and glassy, like marbles made of pure obsidian. Each one has a small, slitted opening behind it, like a pair of tiny gills.

“Don’t you dare take that tone with me, you ungrateful little urchin,” he hisses. “Father’s doing you a favor, letting you heal down here. You’re in proper company now, so at least have the decency to pretend like you’re civilized.”

Forcing himself to ignore the pain in his raw, scaleless skin, Percy grins and pushes further into the spear. The moment his skin breaks, he can taste the blood in the water. Quickly, Triton pulls it back, probably to save himself from the possibility of Poseidon getting upset at him for hurting Percy.

BRIAREUS. DIES.

As the words ripple forth, Percy stretches open his lips to show off the three gleaming rows of thin, razor-like teeth.

“Oh no. You’re terrifying. I’m so scared,” Triton says, his face completely deadpan. Then, casually, he opens his own mouth and scrapes his thumb against a tooth in the first of many, many rows. He rocks it back and forth several times until it loosens enough for him to pull it from the pale, ragged gums.

He carelessly flicks it towards Percy and stretches his jaw, showing off how his teeth—hundreds of them—start to shift around slowly to replace the one he lost. The inside of his mouth and throat is a massive cavern with slits that match the jagged gills on the sides of his neck. The mouth of a shark.

“Don’t worry, brother. I think you’ve got a bit of viperfish in you,” Triton snickers. A thin trail of golden ichor follows the tooth, floating to Percy through the water. “Be careful you don’t poke your eyes out when those little fangs of yours grow out.”

Percy bats the tooth away, and it floats gently to the abalone floor. Pulling away from the spear, he wriggles around, trying to pull himself up onto the bed while Triton cackles. It takes every bit of self-control Percy has not to try to bite him.

“Chaos, you swim worse than a newborn pup,” Triton says, laughing. “It would be adorable if you weren’t so pathetic.”

“Go f*ck yourself.” Percy rocks his tail back and forth, trying to balance himself on the edge of the bed.

Triton rolls his eyes. “Don’t be such a child.”

“I’m not a—f*ck!”

Being unused to his new tail means that when he lurches forward at Triton, he does not expect the sheer power that causes him to crash into the opposite wall. Percy cries out in pain as the bandages around his arms tear open, exposing the half-healed skin to salt water that does nothing to heal him.

“You absolute imbecile. How are you still alive?” Triton glides to him and lifts him by his underarms like he weighs nothing. He avoids touching any exposed skin. “You’re a hazard to yourself and everyone around you.”

Percy squirms in his brother’s grasp, choking at the pain radiating across the entirety of his upper body. “Don’t pick me up like I’m a f*cking kid.”

“If you don’t want to be treated like a child, then stop constantly acting like one,” Triton snaps, setting Percy firmly onto the bed. He opens the bedside table to pull out what looks like a container made from a massive, hollowed-out pearl, followed by a roll of new bandages. “Sit still. And stop cursing—it’s improper. Mother would be ashamed.”

He grinds his teeth and refuses to make a sound as Triton starts to fully unwrap the coverings that came undone. The old ones are placed to the side, and the fresh gauze-like material is dipped into the pearl, soaking them in a thin liquid that shines pale gold. It smells faintly of nectar.

The pain doesn't disappear entirely when the bandages touch his skin, but it does reduce it enough that, for a moment, he forgets why he was even angry in the first place. Close up, it smells like just the nectar they have at Camp—like laurel and blue cookies and lavender.

He moves closer, aiming to taste some while Triton is focused on the other arm. His head jerks suddenly, yanked back by his hair with a thin ring of water.

“Do not lick it,” Triton says sharply, wrapping the last bits of fabric around his shoulders.

“Am I not allowed to have nectar now?”

Triton gives him a very Katie-like glare in response. “This is medicinal. It will make you sick. We can get you some to drink from the kitchens.”

He jerks his head towards the door and starts swimming toward it. His tails swish side-to-side, scales flexing with each movement.

Unfortunately, when Percy tries to do the same, he immediately falls forward. He misses the floor, just barely, and only because Triton catches him.

Smug asshole.

“Stop moving your tail like that, idiot.”

Percy thrashes in his grip. “Then how the f*ck am I supposed to move it?”

Triton looks like he’s close to slapping Percy upside the head. “You’ve only got one. Sideways, all you’re doing is cutting through the water. Move front to back instead. Start from your hips. And not too hard, or you’ll crash into the wall again.”

It’s jerky when he tries to move this time, but with Triton helping him balance, he actually manages to swim forward—without sinking or crashing into the wall.

They make it out the door and to the end of the hallway before Percy has to stop to catch his breath. It takes them an eternity to make it to the kitchen, but the glass of nectar he gets to drain is absolutely worth it. It’s so good that he doesn’t even need to beg for a second glass. The stuff they get at camp will never match this.

The urge to sleep is almost immediate. It comes out of nowhere. His eyelids get heavy, and he feels himself swaying. He has to brace himself against the counter to keep himself from tipping out of his chair.

“Did… Did you drug me?” Percy slurs, stifling a yawn.

“Idiot,” Triton says, taking the glass back from Percy before he accidentally drops it. “You almost died. Healing takes energy. At least this time, you made it to the kitchen before passing out.”

“I don’t—” This time, the yawn is impossible to hold back. “I don’t remember waking up.”

Triton says something else that sounds vaguely like, “If I have to introduce myself to you one more time, I’m gonna f*cking strangle you in your sleep.”

“Y’ said f*ck,” Percy mumbles, his view of the kitchen swimming before his eyes.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yeah, you did.”

“It’s improper, and I would never. Curb the habit, or my mother will never let you come to court.”

Percy can’t even come up with a response—not that he even needs to, though. Triton brushes a finger over his forehead, and then there’s nothing but black.

His last thought is, ‘f*ck you. Only Apollo’s allowed to do that.’

“Percy.”

Percy doesn’t need to look to see whose voice it is. He keeps his gaze firmly on the barnacle-covered tower in the oldest corner of the castle. The abandoned balcony he sits on is covered in algae, long since forgotten by the keepers of the royal palace.

“You’re looking better,” Poseidon says, settling down next to him.

“The nectar helps.”

He makes no mention of Triton, refusing to admit that he’s actually been helpful these past few weeks.

They sit in silence for a while. Then, there’s a shift in the air—a heaviness of magic that had not been there before. He turns to face his father, scaled and fanged, his eyes deep with the ancient eldritch terrors that lie in the deepest chasms of the sea.

“You have been reckless, my son.”

Percy shifts away again.

“I do not say this to berate you.”

“Sounds like it,” Percy grumbles in the ancient language.

Posedawone sighs—it is not a gentle sound.

“I worry for you. You are destructive. Dangerous. The prophecy hangs over the heads of the Olympians, and they fear you shall be their ruin,” his father says. “Demeter would freeze the world for her daughter, just as I would drown it for you, but Zeus’s paranoia rules him, and there may come a day when he is willing to risk war with the oceans if it means freeing himself from the potential of your wrath.”

“I’m not afraid of dying,” Percy says, swinging his head to look his father in the eyes.

“No, you are not. Powerful demigods tend not to be. The daughter of Zeus certainly wasn’t,” Posedawone smiles crookedly. “You are cursed with a deathless sense of loyalty. You welcome Thanatos with open arms.”

“We all die eventually.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. There are things out there far worse than death. You have already bound yourself to the Styx. Break that oath, and the Moirai themselves could not save you.”

“Only if I take her blessing,” Percy says. “Everyone’s always telling me I’m too reckless. Don’t you think being invulnerable would only make that worse?”

The water between them ripples slightly.

“Reckless, you may be, but it is your loyalty that drives you to this. You do not fear death, but in risking your own life to protect your friends, you become blind to the danger you bring to them. It is paradoxical. Your wish to keep those you love safe may be the very thing that kills them. And to you, this is a fate worse than death.”

Percy breathes out and shudders, knowing the truth in his father's words.

“You are powerful, Perseus. Soon, there will be nothing but ichor left in your veins. You know this as well as I do. It is inevitable. Should you give in to your baser impulses, it will be those who surround you that will bear the burden of your fatal flaw.”

He freezes. It’s not the first time a god has said it to him, and he knows it won’t be the last. It hangs over him—the inevitably. He hates it.

The veins beneath his translucent skin glimmer like they're trying to mock him. There's more gold in them than there is red now. The explosion at Mount St. Helen's burned quite a bit more than just his scales.

As the healers told him, he was unconscious for over a week while his charred and blistered body tried to accustom itself to the sheer quantity of ichor, trying to strip what little humanity is still left among the monster.

What was once crimson with thin streaks of ichor has reversed entirely. With each show of power, the gold creeps closer and closer to drowning out the mortal in him. His humanity had always been sparse, but now what little is left feels like it's hanging on by a thread.

Posedawone’s words are not wrong, but that doesn’t mean Percy has to like them. He remains silent, and his father continues.

“The Moirai enjoy irony, don’t you think? A daughter of Zeus, willing to die for her friends. A son of Apollo, finding his end from a lack of foresight. You must come to terms with immortality. Cease these attempts at an early death, or it shall be your loved ones who suffer the consequences,” Posedawone tells him. “Learn to control your powers. Do not let them control you.”

They sit in silence for a while after this. Blue flames flicker around them, lighting up the sea, which is far too deep for Apollo to reach.

“I drown. Every night. In my dreams,” he says, switching away from the old tongue. “Is that the Fates’ liking irony?”

Posedawone sighs. “Do not dwell on these dreams, my son. Some things are better left in the past.”

He takes too long to search for a proper response, it seems, because after a moment, the aura surrounding them shifts and it is Poseidon sitting beside him once more.

“You should be getting back to Camp soon, but if you ever need my assistance, you need only pray, Percy. And give my love to your mother for me?” Poseidon grins and claps a hand over Percy’s shoulder. A crab crawling nearby pinches Poseidon’s ankle. He rolls his eyes. “And Amphitrite’s, I suppose.”

Percy groans. This is perhaps the only thing he and Triton will ever agree on. Whatever weirdness going on with their parents is disgusting, and they want nothing to do with it.

Poseidon just laughs at his plight.

“The Long Island Sound is due west. I trust you can find your way back,” he asks. “I’d offer a Hippocampus to take you, but it will be faster to swim back with your tail.”

“About that… how am I supposed to get my legs back?”

Poseidon frowns. “Triton didn’t tell you?”

Percy stares blankly at Poseidon. “Triton told me ‘they’ll come back on their own.’ Which isn’t helpful at all.”

“He’s not exactly wrong, Percy. Typically it’s manifesting legs that Merfolk have difficulty with, but they should come back as soon as you dry off since you were born with them. For you, it’s getting the tail back that’s going to take a bit of practice.”

“Dry off. Got it.” Percy nods.

Poseidon ruffles Percy’s hair gently. “Swim safely.”

It’s the last thing the god says before bursting into a brilliant cloud of golden ether and vanishing. Percy shuts his eyes. Willful blindness, indeed.

He takes a deep breath and pretends like he didn’t close them a few seconds after Poseidon had already disappeared.

He pretends it wasn’t painless.

The water of Delos laps gently over the sand, avoiding the swath of beach Apollo has carved out for himself here. Here, it is so hot that not even Artemis can approach it.

In one hand, Apollo holds an arrow, in the other, a string reaped from the Moirai's tapestry thousands of years ago. It's woven from an unforgettable shade of solid green and so short that it's barely the length of his pinky finger.

One end is knotted, as all strings are after being split by Atropos' shears. Unlike most, though, the other end doesn’t trace back to their enormous loom. Instead, it is cut.

Was cut.

Not by Atropos, though, but by Clotho, the youngest of the three Fates—the only one willing to bargain with Apollo for the short piece. There was no negotiation between them. No oath. The god came begging, and what Clotho offered him, he accepted without a second thought.

Apollo was handed a small knotted string to do with as he wished, and the part Clotho was left holding was neatly woven into a new string, this one a brighter green with flakes of gold here and there.

In return, Apollo watched as Atropos cut, and cut, and cut. There was no weaving or retying. Only the deafening snip snip snip as threads fell away, fraying.

Lives ended. Loves cursed. Possibilities torn away from existence. Potential cut away one by one until only golden green remained.

Tyrian purple. Watery blue. Silver-white. Sunlight yellow threads, one after the other, gone now. Mourning lovers and children alike, all doomed and marked for tragedy centuries before their births.

In return, Apollo was left with a green sliver of thread belonging to his first love, which he now uses to tie together a trio of arrows: one made of lead, another of gold, and the final one of bone. Painted by blood and ichor long ago, it’s become impossible to tell whose chest was pierced with which one.

It took Apollo a glance to fall in lust, years of sunlit afternoons together to fall in love, and half a second for it all to be erased by a single leaden arrow.

An eye for an eye. A betrayal for a betrayal. The Styx punishes her oathbreakers with the very promise they made, and if others are caught in the backlash, so be it. She has no quarrel with them, but a punishment must fit the crime.

The sun shines down on them, but the lead in his chest is colder than ice. Apollo looks down at the body he holds by nothing more than a rib. Blood drips down, staining the seafoam far below them red. Between his palm and the bone he holds lies a golden arrow, still puncturing mortal flesh, torn open further by Apollo’s own hand.

“You asked to be caught, didn't you?” Apollo asks. He feels nothing but revulsion.

This end is too kind for the one who is to blame for the death of one of his favored seers. Young and untrained, but the sheer potential she had was indescribable.

A granddaughter of Zeus, the daughter of Pasiphaë and granddaughter of Helios. Her prophecies had already shaken Olympus to its very core; she could have been his greatest piece of art yet. It took a worthless, infatuated mortal—a coward—to abandon her in the labyrinth and leave her to her death.

They couldn’t even find her bones. Whatever magic the girl had worked before her death made it impossible for him to see within it, let alone take a single step inside.

Apollo had his hand around this little wretch’s heart more times than he could count. He regrets never squeezing harder. It would have saved them all a lot of trouble.

The boy coughs, blood bubbling between his lips. Even dying, he still wears a smile. A perfect example of the idiocy of humanity.

Pathetic.

There’s a quick pinch in his chest, and the arrow is gone. Ichor rolls down the shaft, scorching the boy's fingertips where he holds it. He doesn’t so much as wince at the burn.

Apollo tightens his grip and feels the arrow and bone creak as one. The weight is too much, and then the wax-covered body is falling falling falling.

(“I forgive you,” he whispers and closes his eyes. If Apollo had watched, he would have seen the peace on the boy’s face, plummeting towards the sea, still clutching the arrow he pulled from Apollo’s chest.

But Apollo doesn’t watch.)

The rib cracks, and with the sudden lack of weight, Apollo’s hand snaps up just far enough for the golden arrow to graze his own chest.

It’s not love, but it’s enough.

Apollo looks down. There’s nothing left but red-tinged seafoam. Instinct and desperation drive him, and then there’s a golden arrow and a bloody rib bone buried so deep in his chest that they pierce his facsimile of a mortal heart—where he keeps his divinity most concentrated.

He wants to scream. He wants to hunt down Eros and tear him into a million pieces before throwing him into Tartarus. He wants to watch the world burn. If Demeter starved the world for her daughter, why can’t Apollo set fire to it for the only person in the world who has ever truly cared for him?

It’s love, and it’s not enough.

(Is it still love if one of Eros’s arrows pierces someone who never needed to be forced?

Is it the same love if one arrow steals it and another gives it back?)

The Moirai like irony. The Styx likes equivalence.

An eye for an eye. A betrayal for a betrayal. A heart for a heart.

One may be branded with handprints, but the other is speared through with bone now splintered into hundreds of pieces.

Apollo fell first.

Icarus fell.