Chapter Text
“Ignorance is bliss.”
Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College
I go to bed in the stuffy corner of Cabin Eleven, full of sticky smores and nymph cooked barbecue, content to all heavens.
“Bianca!”
Double dream? Dream inside a dream? Dream inception? Cool.
In the dream, I roam around the streets of Venice with an older girl. She grabs my hand and pulls me away when I peer too closely over the canal bridges. The baby blue skies barely have any clouds, so the sun reflects golden upon the crisp waters of Venice, my reflection staring earnestly back at me. I speak in rapid-fire Italian, but for some reason I understand all of it, from the girl’s scolding of my childish recklessness to the fruit vendor sneaking the freshest apple of the season into my “growing boy” hands.
The dream shifts in and out to a new scene: at a cosy café in a disturbingly familiar neighbourhood, with the same girl from before and a twenty-something year old woman sipping coffee and eating pastries. The woman – Maria , something tells me – is gorgeous, with silky black hair falling in curls around her shoulders, honey-brown eyes, and a splash of freckles mimicking a miniature galaxy on her smooth, olive-toned skin. She’s an arrogant sort of pretty, almost unreal.
“Mamma, mamma! Un caffè per favore?”
The scene shifts again, and the beautiful serenity breaks at the onset of war. My brain floods with new information, and suddenly I know everything about that woman named Maria, that older girl named Bianca, and our simple little lives in a tiny apartment in northern Venice. The war sends the entire country into a panic, men enlisted, children abandoned, and minorities hidden. I feel the panic too, so closely and so real, my heart beating in my chest faster than a horse’s hooves on the racetrack. Everything hurts to the point where I suspect this double-dream might come to an end, but then the ache subsides to a dull, numb sort of pain when I end up at a scene of Mamma’s funeral.
“Venga con me,” a tall, dark man says, wearing a rich coat and the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.
Come with me.
Bianca immediately doesn’t trust him, or the scary looking woman who escorts us to a fancy hotel in a weird part of the states, but I don’t mind at all, looking for any excuse to just not think about the pain.
The scene shifts one last time.
There’s a tall boy, a little older than me, with eyes like the sea. He’s friendly, nice, and so overwhelmingly comforting in the midst of hostile terror that I can’t help but look at him like he’s the most beautiful person in the world.
“Big collection.”
“I’ve got almost all of them, plus their holographic cards!”
Then I hear his voice along with a few others’, all warm smiles and easy stances.
“We’ll protect her.”
I’m filled with indescribable rage when Bianca wants to abandon me, and I pretend I don’t understand it. Ever since mamma died, she’s had to step up to be a parent to me. She wanted to go out and have fun with her friends, but she had to tend to her silly little brother, take him to school on the other side of the Venetian neighbourhood, drag him to the neighbours for a hot meal when times were tough, make sure he didn’t wander into the adults section of the arcades in the hotel, and more. Bianca wanted a real family, not a little brother who looked too much like mamma. Bianca wanted a few sisters this time, not a brother. Bianca wanted guidance, people to rely on, people to look up to, instead of being a role model all the time. Really, I’m furious at Artemis’ blatant manipulations of a twelve year old’s biggest insecurities, wants, and dreams more than anything else.
Twelve year olds don’t understand consequences all that well. Twelve year olds just want a break from all the responsibilities thrust upon them at an early age.
“We’ll protect –.”
I wake up slightly disoriented from the intense dreams, still in the stuffy corner of Hermes’ cabin. Because it’s winter, most of the summer campers disappeared back to their own homes, so Travis and Connor Stoll had the glorious honour of allowing me to sleep in an actual bed instead of a guest sleeping bag on the floor.
I shuffle out of bed and into the boy’s bathroom, staring long and hard at the toothpaste splattered mirror.
A ten year old boy stares back, mamma’s face reflected in his every feature.
Am I still dreaming? When do I wake up? How long has it been?
I briefly entertain the idea that I’m stuck in a coma and this is some wild fantasy my brain is playing with to distract me from the randomly sustained brain injury, but the thought fades when someone else barges in to pee. I’m reminded of how lucid this dream has been, from the bruising rock climbing games and introduction to sword fighting yesterday, but the weird thoughts erase themselves as I get ready for the morning, excited for the adventure to never end.
I tidy up my mythomagic cards and figurines before breakfast as part of a habitual ritual, ignoring Travis and Connor silently teasing me from the door.
Then a fist of ice squeezes my heart and tears away a piece of me I hadn’t realised was there.
Something in my mind drops down, down into an eternal abyss, and it feels as though I’ve lost something forever. A memory? A dream?
No.
How do I know Bianca is dead?
She’s gone. Why is she gone? Where did she go? How do I innately know this, with more surety than I’ve ever had? I don’t see, hear, smell, touch, or taste her death, but I know that she’s disappeared from the mortal realm with a surety I’ve never known to be humanly possible, so deep and true in my bones that I’d simply perish on the spot for thinking about anything else. Lightning shoots down my spine, electricity raises the hair on the back of my neck, cold water pulls my face into the darkest of lakes, and I can’t breathe despite the clarity of my mind.
This isn’t a dream.
My name is Nico di Angelo and the last thing I remember from my previous life was dying in a car crash.
I’ve died before. Maybe I’m still dead. But here, right now, I’m a child of the God of the Underworld. The God of the Dead.
“ Bianca ,” I say, choked and silent.
Two warm pairs of hands rest on my back. I hear the twins say something but I don’t digest their words, too busy clenching the straps of my backpack – where I keep my game sets in – and observing every line of stitching, every thread, every patch of colour.
She arrives at the River Styx, scared and alone.
Connor cracks a joke about homesickness whilst Travis assures me that I’ll grow out of it. Out of what? What’s–?
“Bianca,” I say again to no one in particular. She boards Charon’s ferry. “She’s gone.”
Travis stares uneasily, his hands back in his own personal space. He says something again, but I don’t hear him. I don’t hear anything except for the sound of my own uselessly beating heart, a heart that Bianca doesn’t have because she’s dead.
It’s time to go.
I have to… I have to–
Connor says something this time, and I finally start to hear. “Nico? Are you… good?”
No, of course not. She’s dead, I’m a new person, and I want nothing more than to curl into a ball and cry.
“I have to go,” I whisper absently. “Good bye.”
I have to see her one last time. I have to hold her hand, smell her hair, and hear her chiding voice one last time. I feel her soul, so intensely, wade along through the River Styx, shuttering and shivering in nervous fear and regret. Bianca’s never died before – she doesn’t know how pervasively empty the road ahead can be. She died alone in a metal contraption, burnt and crushed and torn apart and–.
–the horn honks, the engine explodes, the windshield shatters into a million pieces–
“The hunters are supposed to come back tomorrow, Nico! What are you doing? Hey, hey!”
The outside world is cool and crisp in the early morning, gentle enough to not need a jacket yet brisk enough that I have to walk at an uncomfortable pace in order to feel all my fingers and toes. My nose itches, presumably turning a bright cherry-red to match my cheeks and ears, and I’d laugh at myself if it were any other day. A light shimmer of snow sprinkles the cabin roofs and surrounding evergreen trees, and I crunch through the frosted tips of eternally viridescent grass to the centre hearth of the horseshoe-shaped pavilion.
Right. Only twelve cabins. Percy hasn’t had to literally win a war for Olympus yet for them to consider building cabins for the “lesser gods.”
Curious hunters and demigods alike peer at me storming towards the hearth, the Stoll brothers causing a ruckus by calling my name. I think I see Charon from somewhere in the forest, but I solely focus on the shade of the limestone piece, the way the sun hasn’t fully reached parts of the granite and cement.
If there’s any shadow blessed enough to lead me to family, it has to be Hestia’s hearth.
I stand in the shadow, pulling up an icy-cold energy that flows into my veins surprisingly naturally, and I let myself fall.
I hear the remnants of a scream when I disappear into the shadow.
The Shadow feels empty.
It’s empty, grey, and nothing; it’s The Inbetween.
If I stay too long in The Shadow I’ll likely lose myself to nothingness, so I pull and pull with an imaginary force I can’t describe and think about the layout of the Greek Underworld. There’s the main gate, the five main rivers, the fields of asphodel, the fields of punishment, elysium, the isle of the blest, the groves of Persephone, Hades’ Palace, and… the judgement pavilion.
My knowledge of true mythology can be dodgy at best, but with the combination of mythomagic lore and whatever I remember about my days of lounging about with fictional novels, I pull the shadow of the judgement pavilion and plunge right back into the frozen black void.
Shadowtravel requires an energy I don’t have an abundance of, so I stay flat on the ground behind a cracked limestone column for an indeterminate amount of time before feeling returns to my body in pins and needles.
So, I think, shadowtravelling. Not fun. And really weird.
How am I doing this?
As much as it pains me to admit, I can’t help but just know what I’m doing innately. The power has been hardwired into my very soul. I know how The Shadow feels, cold and slimy yet dry and numb, how I have to hold on to my previous shadow before being sucked into the next one or else I’ll lose the thread connecting me to the realm of the living (or dead) – because The Shadow is neither alive or dead. It’s just The Inbetween. It’s closely tied to the Underworld’s shadow threads, however, which is how I presume I have a close enough relationship through my blood to be able to access The Inbetween without being torn into shreds or floating away, lost forever.
I finally rise, shaking the blood back through my limbs, crouching around the ancient statues and columns of the extensive pavilion. I realise the statue I hide behind isn’t a statue but a skeleton far too late, and I trip backwards with an embarrassingly loud yelp.
The skeleton turns around, stares at me with eyes that don’t exist, and turns back around, its neck vertebrae clack-clack-clacking with every movement.
Oh. Okay. It knows I belong here.
Cool.
I find the hall of judgement, crowded by skeletons, floating silver orbs, and white-green torches mounted onto the lining columns. A long line of ghosts stretch from the entrance to the centre of the hall, where they await before three very old men with silly office placards nailed onto their shared podium.
The three kings: Minos, Aeacus, and Radamanthus.
I watch them judge souls with their old, raspy drones, clinking the jewels of an abacus to count each person’s life deeds as part of the determination of their underworld destination. My legs fall asleep from standing behind skeletons, so I slink down by a column onto the cold marble floor, waiting, waiting, waiting.
Bianca’s here somewhere. I have to be here for her.
“Are you waiting for someone?”
I most definitely do not startle at the new voice, the tall man who suddenly appears on my right, or flinch when he tries reaching out with a hand to help me up off the ground. I stand up quickly and dizzyingly, scooting away like a jittery rabbit and staring up at him with wide eyes.
“Oh,” he says, his hand wavering back down. His eyes are dark and glassy, lost in memory. “You look just like her.”
“Papà?”
He gazes at me for an uncomfortable amount of time. “You remember me.”
It’s not a question, but I nod anyway.
“You’ve died before,” he states, eyes glazing over again. “But you’re here now. A true child of the underworld. Of the dead. You’ve washed the Lethe away.”
I suppose if anyone could tell if I’d died before, it’d be Hades.
He sighs, waves a hand in the air, and three skeletons vibrate and disassemble into a horrible bastardisation of a bench. I sit down because it’s probably the polite thing to do when someone literally snaps a bench into creation for me.
“You’re waiting for your sister.”
My throat remains clamped, so I simply nod again and try not to be rude about staring at his face. His ghostly complexion and sharp features allows for shadows to underline every aspect of his face, with the tumble of dark curls adding onto the depth. He looks a bit like a Sicilian mafia leader, and I realise an immortal god purposefully changing his features to be closer to my own racial characteristics must be for my perceived comfort – for my benefit.
He’s trying to show kindness.
And the words tumble out. “She’s going to choose rebirth,” I tell my father with that sick, sick sort of knowing blooming in my mind. “I know she’s going to choose rebirth instead of elysium because she wants a new family, because she doesn’t think she deserves to be with the heroes, and all she ever wanted was a simple, happy life. I won’t get to see her again.”
Hades looks faraway, off into the line of souls awaiting judgement, as if he’s also known about Bianca’s future decision since the day she was born.
“I won’t get to see her again,” I echo.
He stays still as a statue. “My children never live very long lives. Barely any of my children live long enough to see adulthood.”
And he tells me about how he met Maria, the kindest and most beautiful woman he’d ever met. Him and Persephone had never really fallen in love, instead married for convenience and friendship, and the slightest bit of compassion aimed at him, the desolate god of the underworld, had led him astray despite knowing the ugly consequences of children and spiteful gods. I learn about his other children throughout the centuries, the oldest demigod living to be nineteen before being murdered in cold blood by one of Zeus’ offspring. Hades begins to sound almost childish, in the context of his siblings “taking his children away from him,” but I sit there and listen without saying a word.
I don’t know how long we stay there, in the awkward corner of the pavilion, but he looks up when a small ghost girl is at the centre stage and says, “It’s Bianca’s time, now.”
I don’t realise it’s Bianca until a full second later; the girl looks like someone else completely, with tied back hair showing off her face and a semi-confident arch to her shoulders. Must’ve been some of Hunters’ powers leaking into even the afterlife.
Hades grabs onto my shoulder when I leap up to run to her side.
“We cannot interfere with the judging,” he says wearily. “It is not in my power, nor my realm.”
Because he’s the god of the dead, not the god of death.
There’s a difference, apparently.
And whatever influence he has over the judges, probably vast as is, cannot be allowed to sway their minds or the person being judged without dire consequences to the natural order of things. Neither of us are dead, so–.
Wait.
“I’ve died before,” I protest, writhing away. “I can, I can–!”
We both feel her choose rebirth before I can escape Hades’ grasp, and Bianca disappears through a pathway neither of us can enter, to the Isle of the Blest.
She’s gone.
Hades holds my soft, puny child hand and takes me to his palace. I feel a little too old to be treated this way, but I suppose to an ancient primordial god, I’m all but an infant. He doubtlessly doesn’t have many chances to show off possessive familial love anyway, from what he tells me about Persephone and the countless number of demigod children who died before he was allowed by Olympic rule to claim them as his.
I don’t understand what’s going on until we explore the upper levels of the gothic palace halls and he leads me to a wing obviously meant for a child, with a twin-sized bed and a selection of weapons built for a smaller frame.
“Am I to live with you?” I ask, possibly ruder than I mean to sound.
“Do you want to stay at Camp Half-blood?”
Rock climbing. Kayaking. Capture the Flag. Weekly campfires festivities. Satyrs, nymphs, centaurs, harpies, and eternal strawberry fields. Peers. Disgustingly orange t-shirts, apples-to-apples game nights, chariot racing. As long as I keep my parentage under wraps, I’m likely to make several friends, bonding together in times of desperation and loneliness.
“There’s no Hades cabin,” I say instead.
He guides me into the wing of intricately carved stone walls and obsidian designs. “No, there isn’t. You’re welcome to stay here, Nico, but I won’t keep you here if you don’t want to. What do you want?”
The question echoes in my ears.
What do I want to do now?