Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There were so many wars Percy had fought in his life, and so few individual battles he could remember in any detail. This was the nature of trauma, as he understood it: a slow, flattening pressure applied to the mind, like a geologic force, so that all the peaks and valleys were, eventually, smoothed into a numb plain. That was why, more often than not, what stuck in his mind was not the logic of the battlefield-the sequence of blows exchanged, the calculus of tactical positioning-but the sensation, the specific pain, that a particular fight had left in its wake. The memory of a broken rib or a gashed thigh or a bruised knuckle lasted longer, outliving the reason for which it had been earned.

Now, as Percy plummeted through the featureless dark, ears ringing, skin prickling, he was grimly aware that this was going to be one of those moments: the kind of pain he'd never forget, because it was fundamentally new, and therefore memorable. The air around him grew heavier, or maybe it was the gravity, He wasn't sure. He knew that he'd lost Annabeth’s hand somewhere in the descent, and he thrashed about, violently, uselessly, trying to recapture it. He couldn't see her. He couldn’t even see his own hands in front of his face. It was as if the darkness here was a physical substance pressed against his eyeballs. He tried to call for her, but the pressure in his head made the sound die in his throat, like a shriek shouted into a vacuum.

The pain in his ears increased, then abruptly changed from ringing, to popping, to a raw, burning sensation-as if molten lead had been poured into his skull. Percy gritted his teeth and told himself to focus. Even if Annabeth could answer, he wouldn't be able to hear her. That was a sick joke, His stomach lurched, flipping over, and for a moment he had the irrational certainty that he was no longer falling down, but up, Thankfully the spatial anomaly did not last long, with a shudder, gravity reorganized itself, and he began freefalling in the correct direction.

Somewhere down in the endless dark, a dull, pulsing red began to shine. Percy almost missed it at first, distracted as he was by the pain and the vertigo and the nagging, ever-present certainty that he was about to die in a very embarrassing way. But the crimson haze grew steadily brighter, like the world’s slowest sunrise, until he could distinguish his own body, limbs akimbo, and-most importantly-Annabeth, limbs spread in proper skydiving fashion. She caught up to him quickly, he knew Annabeth was trying to say something; he could see the whites of her eyes, wide with both panic and a mathematical clarity that always appeared when she was working out a plan. She fought to keep them level and loop the shredded remains of her hoodie around his waist. At first, Percy didn't understand what she was doing-his brain was still stuck in the mode where it processed only pain-but then she yanked the sleeves tight and cinched them with a hard knot, lashing their bodies together. Now, when they hit, they'd hit as a single unit, and not as two separate projectiles. It was a small comfort.

The red light flickered, then grew in intensity, and for the first time, Percy could see the distant contours of Tartarus itself. The terrain below was a black, rippling mass, interrupted by periodic bolts of scarlet lightning that illuminated the world in lurid, otherworldly flashes. With each illumination, he caught glimpses of impossible things. Mountain ranges that moved, as if flexing their stony shoulders; valleys that yawned open, revealing bottomless chasms lined with teeth; and, worst of all, a single, cyclopean eye, the size of a football field, opening lazily as if awakened from some million-year nap. The eye rolled, surveyed the plain, then slowly closed again, as if nothing here was worth the trouble of seeing. Percy wanted to believe he’d imagined it, but the next lightning flash revealed an even larger presence on the opposite horizon: another mountain, or perhaps a living being so vast that mountain was the only metaphor the mortal brain could use to comprehend its scale. He didn’t have time to consider this. A river was below them, now-a sickly gray, visible only because it seemed to suck the red light out of the air and turn it into dull, dead air.

Percy tried to will himself to control the liquid, but the river was too far. He could sense almost nothing from it, as if the water wasn’t water at all, but a parody of the element, stripped of all the features that made it familiar and friendly. Desperation is a hell of a motivator, though. Percy gritted his teeth against the pain in his ears, the tinnitus that screamed at him, and reached out with every scrap of power he could muster. The river responded, sluggishly. He felt it just enough to pull up a column of liquid, a geyser that met their fall head-on. It wasn’t a perfect landing, but it was less fatal than the alternative.

He hit the surface and entered a world of cold so complete that it scoured the thoughts from his head. The water was thick, viscous-halfway between blood and concrete. Instead of air, his mouth filled with a freezing, brackish syrup that stung his teeth and tongue. He inhaled it, coughed it, tasted the bitterness of ancient, undiluted grief. The river was alive, and it hated him. The impact, miraculously, didn’t liquefy his internal organs, but it did shatter both of his ankles in a way that was unmistakable and unforgettable. That was what he’d remember: the unique, personalized agony of his own body, mashed up and churned by the most malevolent water in all of existence.

He knew, immediately, that the river was not like any river he’d ever encountered. It didn’t just drag him down; it pulled at his mind, yanking loose old regrets and failures. The river’s song was an accusation, a choir of voices reminding him, in excruciating detail, of every mistake he’d ever made. People he’d failed to save. Promises he’d broken. Deaths he’d caused, directly or indirectly, through action or inaction. The voices were all around him, inescapable and precise, and their words were more painful than the water in his lungs.

He could sense Annabeth beside him, though she was limp and unresponsive. He forced himself to close his mind to the voices-to focus, instead, on the only thing that mattered, getting them both to the surface. He braced his broken feet in the mud, hooked Annabeth’s onto his hip, and trudged against the current, moving not with strength but with a blind, stubborn refusal to let this place win. Every step brought a new white-hot flash of pain, but it was preferable to the alternative: sinking, succumbing, joining the chorus of the damned. He did not consider them.

When he tried to look up, the sludgy water worked its way behind his eyeballs, distorting his vision and projecting grotesque hallucinations onto the riverbank. He saw his mother, standing on the shore, shaking her head in pity. He saw Grover, shredded by monsters. He saw Chiron, dying at Percy’s own hand. He knew, intellectually, that none of it was real, but the water was good at its job. He blinked the images away and trudged on.

Eventually his head broke the surface. The air was bitterly humid and tasted of rust and old blood, but it was air. Percy collapsed onto the bank, dragging Annabeth’s body with him. He tried to lay her down gently, but his arms were too weak, and she toppled over, face-first, onto the gritty shore. He wanted to apologize, but he couldn’t make his lips work. He could only lie there, lungs aflame, and shudder helplessly as his body rebelled.

Annabeth was not breathing, which was a problem. Percy’s mind, between spasms of agony, realized that he had only seconds to act. He reached for the bond he shared with water and did something he’d done before: he drew the river out of her lungs, siphoning it through her mouth and nose in a single, violent, wrenching pull. The force of the withdrawal obliterated her sinuses he was sure. and he could only hope it was enough to save her as the darkness claimed his consciousness.

-----

For several long, indistinct minutes, the world presented itself to Annabeth as a jumble of disconnected facts. There was no overarching narrative, no sense of sequence, just the wet, swollen sensation of her tongue against her teeth, the dull percussion of her heart hammering against her ribs, and the flicker of consciousness that sometimes drifted towards lucidity. She was aware of the taste in her mouth-a cousin, maybe, of stagnant seawater, but richer, more complex, briefly cut by the coppery sting of blood. There was pain, too, in the persistent ache of her bones and the odd, numb tingling of her extremities. Her arms and legs felt as though they had been packed with sand, or perhaps shattered and then reassembled carelessly.

Somewhere between the first inhalation of Tartarus' rotting air and the third burst blood vessel in her right eye, the analytical part of her brain finally rallied enough strength to seize control. Annabeth blinked, hard, clearing away the river's residue and the black motes that danced at the edge of her vision. The world resolved, slowly, into a sequence of priorities. First: she was alive. Second: she was no longer falling. Third: Percy was lying motionless beside her on the shore, head twisted at an odd angle, limbs splayed in the graceless fashion of a discarded doll.

Annabeth did not allow fear to enter the equation. Fear was a luxury, or at least a distraction, and she was operating on the kind of borrowed time that demanded nothing less than perfect triage. She levered herself upright, fighting off a wave of nausea that threatened to pitch her back into the river, then crawled to Percy’s side and performed, by rote, the sequence of checks she’d memorized in the infirmary at Camp Half-Blood.

His mouth was open, lips tinged blue, the tongue swollen and slick with residual river gunk. She swept two fingers into his mouth, ignoring the way her own hands trembled, and scraped out the worst of it. Next, she checked for breathing, barley. His pulse, when she found it-at the carotid, because the wrist was buried under his torso-was rapid and fluttery, shallow. He was drowning while still breathing, not on the liquid itself, but on the distilled sorrow it made. She pinched his nose, tilted his chin, and gave a rescue breath, hard enough to inflate his lungs but not so hard that it would rupture them. He did not respond, not at first, but she had expected this; the river had filled his airways with thick cursed water, he would not be able to cough it up on his own.

She began compressions. Her hands were cold and raw, knuckles abraded from the riverbank, but the mechanics were the same. Thirty compressions, two breaths, repeat. Percy's chest was broad, muscular, but it yielded under her palms with a sickening give, and on the third cycle she felt something pop-maybe a rib, maybe cartilage. She didn't pause. She didn't let herself feel the wetness sliding down her cheeks, whether it was tears or river water. She pumped, and pumped, and with every downward press she thought of a reason he could not die-not after what they'd done, not after what they'd survived, not when she was the one who had drug them both into Tartarus.

The darkness around them was oppressive, the only light provided by the faint, red haze in the air, and the occasional, hellish flash from the distant horizon. She could not measure the passage of seconds, only the number of times she pressed down into Percy's sternum, only the growing exhaustion in her shoulders and arms, only the mounting certainty that she was doing it wrong, that she was too weak, that she would fail him in the most humiliatingly literal sense of the word.

At some point, Percy coughed. It was a tiny, almost imperceptible spasm of his diaphragm, but it was enough. She rolled him onto his side (recovery position, good, good) and heaved with him as a thick, viscous sludge poured from his mouth and nose, carrying with it flecks of blood and what looked like black, congealed tar. It was revolting, but she didn’t care. She slapped his back, hard, and he coughed again, this time so violently that his body arched off the ground. More river came up. More blood. She kept him on his side, kept thumping, and when he finally opened his eyes-dilated, glassy, unfocused-she let herself breathe.

He tried to speak, but only managed a wet, choking noise. She gave him a few seconds to clear his throat, then leaned in so close that her hair brushed his cheek. “You’re okay,” she said, not sure whether she was lying or not. “You’re okay.” She repeated it, to make it feel real.

Percy twitched, like an electric current had passed through him, and then he was retching again, retching so hard it sounded like he was trying to vomit up his own stomach. She held him steady, one arm wrapped around his shoulders, and let him expel everything the river had forced into him. When he finished, he slumped against her, trembling. Bodies stitched together at the shoulder, hips, and knees by shared injury and a mutual, unspoken commitment to not dying just yet.

The ground below them was neither earth nor rock nor sand, but rather a kind of dense, pockmarked scab that had formed over the land’s wounds. It was not exactly soft, but after the river, it felt like a featherbed. Annabeth lay half on her back, half on her left side, and for a long, exquisite minute, she did nothing but stare upward, watching the sky.

There was a sky, in Tartarus. She would have expected a ceiling of black lava, or an endless cavern, or something else appropriately infernal and oppressive. Instead, there was a sky, and it was very much alive, a churning vortex of red and purple clouds, with occasional lightning that arced from one horizon to another, leaving afterimages that seared her retinas. It was beautiful in the same way a cancer was beautiful, intricate and alive and entirely devoted to its own violent propagation.

The rain started as a whisper. Annabeth’s first warning was the sensation of something cold flicking her cheek, a pinprick so delicate that she almost ignored it. Then another drop landed on the bridge of her nose. Another on her eyelid. She blinked and saw the droplet explode on her lashes, leaving a crimson smear that trickled towards her temple. The rain didn’t fall so much as ooze from the atmosphere, each drop descending at its own pace, lazily, as if gravity was a suggestion rather than a law.

Within seconds, her clothes were soaked. The water was cold, shockingly so, and the initial relief of its touch faded quickly, replaced by a deeper, bone-penetrating chill. It flowed over her body in thin rivulets, pooling in the hollows of her neck and at the bend of her elbow, seeping into every crack and bruise and open wound. It felt oddly medical, as if she were being disinfected by the realm itself, scrubbed clean in preparation for whatever fresh horror the next day would bring.

She let her head loll towards Percy, who was staring at the sky in the same dazed, blank way she was. For a while, neither of them spoke, and the silence was not awkward but necessary, the only possible response to the experience of almost dying and then not dying, barely. She watched his chest rise and fall, shallow but regular, and she decided that qualified as a victory.

It was only after several minutes that she noticed the color of the rain. It was not clear, not really. The longer she looked, the more she realized that each drop left a rust-colored trace on her skin, a faint suggestion of residue that refused to be wiped away. It did not sting, but it smelled faintly of iron, like a dentist’s office or a nosebleed. She tasted it on her lips and found it almost sweet, which seemed wrong, somehow, but she accepted it.

Percy was the first to speak. “You ever wonder if the monsters down here just, like, drown?” His voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper, but it cut through the silence like a knife.

Annabeth considered the question. “I think maybe they do, sometimes. But i don’t think even the cursed rivers kill them forever, they probably come back.”

Percy nodded, as if this was exactly the answer he’d expected. He closed his eyes and let the rain wash over his face. She watched the droplets gather on his eyelashes and then roll down, leaving twin streaks of red along his cheekbones. He looked ridiculous, and beautiful, and so tired that she wanted to shake him awake just to make sure he was still there.

She closed her own eyes, briefly, and tried to remember a time before all of this. Not just Tartarus, but the wars, the quests, the cycle of violence. She tried to conjure up the taste of normal rain, the kind that fell on Camp Half-Blood’s strawberry fields in late spring, or the gentle mist that sometimes rolled off the river in the mornings before classes. She tried, but the memories were slippery, and the details kept getting replaced by what she saw and smelled and felt now: rust, blood, grit, and the constant, low-grade ache of having survived something that should have killed her.

She opened her eyes again. The sky had darkened, and the rain was falling harder, the drops thicker, heavier, each one a tiny hammer that pounded at her resolve. The ground around them was forming shallow puddles, and in the surface of each one, she could see little red drops drifting, coalescing, then breaking apart. Percy shifted beside her, and she realized he was shivering, though whether from cold or trauma, she couldn’t say. She reached over and threaded her fingers through his, squeezing once, hard, to let him know she was still there.

He squeezed back, but did not look at her. “We should go,” he said, though he sounded like he didn’t really believe it. “Before something finds us.”

Annabeth nodded, though she made no move to get up. The rain had plastered her hair to her scalp, and she could feel the weight of it pulling her head downward, sinking her into the mud. She liked the feeling. It was grounding, in a literal way, and she needed something to keep her anchored. She was afraid, not of the monsters or the darkness or even the prospect of dying, but of letting go, of relaxing for even a second and letting herself be swept away by the current of whatever river they’d just crawled out of.

She was not ready to move. Not yet.

The rain lessened after a time, the drops thinning out until they became a mere mist, a faint suggestion of precipitation. Annabeth rolled onto her side and pressed her cheek against Percy’s chest, finding comfort in the steady, if irregular, beat of his heart. He put an arm around her, and she let herself laugh, a small, broken sound that was swallowed up by the thick air.

They stayed like that for a while, letting the quiet fill the cracks between them.

“I think I broke a rib,” Percy said, eventually. “Got tinnitus now too”

Annabeth gave a noncommittal grunt.

“What if it’s a floating rib? Those don’t do much anyway, right?”

“that’s hopeful” Annabeth said “Besides I broke your ribs, not you, dummy”

“Yeah, well, if I’m going to die, I’d like it to be in a more heroic way than drowning in Tartarus,” Percy replied, his tone light but his eyes revealing the dull sheen of pain. Annabeth recognized the shape of the silence that had sprung up between them. It was not the comfortable kind, the sort that grew in sun-dappled corners of the Athena cabin’s library with two trusted friends reading side by side. It was something brittle, braced by unsaid things. She let it stretch, breathing in and out. But her mind, ever the architect’s, could not keep from mapping out every reason Percy’s offhand comment had felt like a seismic shift.

He had never really talked about it, not in words, he was terrible about that sort of thing. But she had seen the way he would flinch at the sound of rushing water, or how his expression darkened when they passed muddy banks, or even how he would sometimes hesitate before diving into a pool-even when they’d been, by all rights, safe. She had pieced together the story: the dark, the mud, the memory of air crushed out of lungs by the weight of earth and fear. Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, terrified of drowning-not by water, but by suffocation, by loss of control, by being forced under and held there, motionless and helpless. Tartarus, it seemed, had made a point of honing in on that most private terror.

She had always admired his resilience. She wondered what it would feel like to be allowed to break, to not have to rise again and again. But she could never give herself that permission, and so she instead watched Percy as he lay beside her in the aftermath of his own near-drowning, body shivering and eyes half-closed, every muscle caught between collapse and readiness.

She tried not to think about it, but in Tartarus, not thinking was an act of violence against one’s own mind. She catalogued every sensation: the feel of the rain receding into vapor, the weight of her sodden clothes, the way her fingers still trembled slightly as she clung to Percy’s hand. She measured the distance to the next outcropping, the next possible shelter. She planned the route in her head, then scrapped it, then planned again.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden, subtle tremor in the ground. At first she assumed it was just her own jittery nerves, the way the body sometimes shivered even after the cold had passed. But the rhythm was too regular, too persistent. She stilled herself, pressed her palm flat against the ground, and felt it: a quick tapping rhythm.

She shifted her weight, craning her neck to check on Percy. He’d noticed it, too. His eyes were open now, alert, scanning the horizon. He tensed as if ready to fight or run, but there was nowhere to go-not yet.

The ground thumped again, stronger this time, and with it came a strange, skittering sound. It was faint, at first-a barely audible ticking, like the collective click of a thousand beetle legs on glass. Annabeth sat up, ignoring the protest from her battered body, and tried to pinpoint its source.

She didn’t have to wait long. A few meters away, a stone the size of her fist shuddered, then tilted onto its edge, then sprouted a delicate framework of black, spindly legs from beneath its hard shell. It scuttled forward, moving in an awkward, stop-motion lurch toward the nearest puddle of rainwater. Another stone followed, then another, until the ground around them became a shifting mosaic of animate rocks, each sprouting insectile limbs and crawling with a single-minded determination toward the pools of rainwater.

Annabeth watched, transfixed, as the phenomenon accelerated. Some of the stones tipped over as they moved, revealing glistening interiors that looked disturbingly like exposed bone marrow. Others shed their outer crusts entirely, leaving behind pulpy, wriggling masses that flopped and floundered before finally making it to their target or reclaiming their rocky shell. The air filled with a wet, clicking chorus as stone after stone migrated toward the water, plopping in with soft, almost gleeful splashes.

She looked to Percy, expecting disgust or alarm, but found instead a look of numb resignation. He caught her gaze and managed a weak, crooked smile. "It’s like they enjoy the water" he said, voice thin but steady. "Or maybe the blood in the water"

She found herself oddly comforted by this idea. The logic of Tartarus was alien, but it had its own consistency, its own strange ecology. Even the most grotesque sights could become familiar, even beautiful, if she chose to see them that way. She watched the migrations, the way the stones clustered together in the pools, some floating, some sinking.

The skittering increased, became a tide. The land, once so desolate and still, was suddenly alive with movement. The smaller stones led the way, but soon the larger rocks began to shift as well. Boulders the size of office chairs trembled, then lurched forward in ungainly hops, their legs thick and segmented like the limbs of ancient crabs. Annabeth watched one particularly massive boulder fall over and struggle to right itself, like a turtle.

The spectacle was equal parts grotesque and mesmerizing. It reminded her of migration patterns she’d studied in animal behavior lectures, or the time she’d watched a colony of ants relocate their queen after a rainstorm. There was a purpose to it, a pattern, and she felt an irrational urge to name it, to classify it, to turn the horror into data. It was the only way she knew to keep fear at bay.

She glanced at Percy again, but he had closed his eyes, as if refusing to watch anymore. She let him be. She knew the exhaustion in his bones, the way trauma could fold a person’s consciousness inward, turning the world outside into white noise.

She let the world move around her, the ticking of the rocks, the distant rumble of a shifting sky, the scent of iron and wet stone. She let herself be still, just this once, and allowed the landscape to change without her interference. She felt oddly calm, as if the discovery of a new, terrible ecosystem was a privilege and not a punishment. Maybe, she thought, that was the secret of surviving here: not to fight every horror, but to understand them.

She watched the last of the rocks disappear into the puddles, the final stragglers twitching and folding their legs back in before giving themselves over to the crimson water. She watched until the skittering faded, until the only sound was the dull thunder of Tartarus’s heart beating somewhere beneath them.

Then, and only then, did she allow herself to relax. She let her body sag against Percy’s side, feeling the warmth of his presence, the comforting solidity of another person in a world that wanted to dissolve everything. She let herself watch, and for a moment, that was enough.

Chapter Text

Annabeth watched the river in the distance, its surface a mirror of lead. “In the distance” was a lie, though. They had made it, limping and half-clawing their way, only a football field’s length from the riverbank before Percy could go no further. but it wasn’t simple exhaustion or pain that finally stopped them.

It was Percy’s feet. More specifically: both of Percy’s ankles, which had shattered on contact with the river. The break had been obvious-impossible to ignore, even for Percy, who had tried to hide it by gritting his teeth and insisting that he could “walk it off.” She’d watched his face drain of color as he attempted to stand, and then, when he failed, the mask dropped and he allowed himself to collapse. She’d seen plenty of injuries in her life, seen bones pierce skin and blood leak out in the slow, sticky way it did when the wound was deep. This was different: the skin around Percy’s ankles had blackened, ballooned, like a gout victim.

They’d hobbled as far as they could, Annabeth supporting most of his weight, and then she made an executive decision: Percy was not going to die of sepsis here, or worse, lose the use of his legs. She let him down as gently as she could, and then, with all the detachment her mother had taught her to wield like a scalpel, began to set up a field hospital in Hell. Tartarus, as one might imagine, was not an ideal location for first aid. Every surface was either too sharp or too slick, and the ambient light seemed determined to never quite let her see the injuries well.

Annabeth found a cave that was, in her best estimation, structurally sound-or at the very least, less likely to collapse on their heads than the alternatives. It was half composed of basalt columns and half of the old shell of a massive rock crab. She noted the skull-sized cavities in the shell’s surface and wondered what had killed it, and whether it would stay dead.

Before she left Percy to scavenge, she took inventory of his injuries. She fished a few strips of cloth from her ruined shirt, tied them tight above the ankles, and used a couple of broken crab legs as makeshift splints. Percy bore it stoically, only occasionally making a sound that was not quite a whimper, not quite a curse. She admired him for that-admired, too, the way he tried to crack a joke about how, “at least now we match,” and then immediately winced as the words jostled his broken ribs.

She poked her head out into the world, the terrain around them a sprawling mosaic of glass-black rock and strange, scuttling life. She could see the shapes of other biomes in the distance-an endless sandstorm of razor-dust on one horizon, a forest of spines and writhing tendrils on another. Their original plan had been to head straight for the Doors of Death, to descend as quickly and directly as possible. Now, their only heading was “survive the next few hours.”

Annabeth prioritized: water, food, medicine. Percy had regenerative powers, sure, but he needed hydration for his body to even think about healing. The river itself was a death sentence-she’d seen enough to know that even a splash could cripple the mind, or worse, mutate them into something unrecognizable. That left the scavenger’s option, rainwater.

She kicked rocks as she scouted, wary of anything that moved of its own volition. Most of the terrain was littered with the rock crabs, some the size of her thumb, others as big as a helmet. They blended almost perfectly into the landscape, their shells disguised as clumps of basalt, but Annabeth was already adept at spotting the subtle shimmer in their wet, mineralized flesh. The first time she tried to pry one loose, it nearly took her finger-the thing’s legs suctioned to the ground with terrifying force, and the body was much heavier than it looked. She quickly learned to target only the smaller ones, those the size and weight of a soup bowl.

The dead ones were easier. She found several, hollowed out and desiccated, their insides already picked clean by whatever scavenger dared to exist at the bottom of the food chain here. She could use these to carry water. But she also needed something fresh, and, revolting as it was, she would have to kill it herself.

Annabeth found a promising candidate: a crab wedged into a crack in the rock, small as a coconut. She crouched, braced herself on one knee, and used her knife like a crowbar. The crab resisted, its legs digging in, but with a well-timed twist and a grunt of effort, she levered it free. It let out a burst of red fluid as it popped off the stone, and she gagged as the smell hit her-ammonia, rot, iron, and something so viscerally wrong that her stomach flipped itself inside out.

The body was heavier than it looked. She inspected it: no mouth, no eyes, just a dense tangle of suckers and spines on its underbelly. She drove the knife in, expecting a shriek, but it only twitched-then bled, bright and red as any mammal. The blood was too thick, like syrup, and stank of chemical, clotting quickly on the blade.

When the crab stopped moving, Annabeth hesitated. The task had been simple-kill, harvest, cook-but now she was left with a corpse in her hand and a growing sense of nausea at what she was about to do, she tried to push the discomfort aside. Annabeth carried her crab back to the cave, pausing every few paces to check for pursuit. The landscape was constantly in motion, but nothing seemed immediately interested in her. She passed a cluster of crabs gathered around a damp spot on the rock, each taking turns pressing their suckers to the stain. She wondered if they fed on blood, if there was anything in Tartarus that did not.

-----

Percy was excited to announce first, Annabeth Chase was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and second, rock crab soup, in the hands of Annabeth, was not just edible, but actually phenomenal.

He wanted to laugh, but the sound would have come out as a cough or a whimper. Still, the joke played out in his head, over and over. Annabeth, her hair stringy and wild, hands caked with crab viscera, crouched over the makeshift fire pit she’d built from fist-sized stones and a clutch of dried, desiccated moss. A goddess of war and wisdom, forced to moonlight as a demonic sous-chef in the kitchen from hell. And somehow, even in the pit, she still looked like she belonged more to the world above than to this one: the curve of her neck, the intent focus of her eyes, the way she’d furrow her brow at the soup as if daring it to be anything less than perfect. Whatever that ruined world tried to do to her, it never quite stuck. She remained herself, and that was beautiful.

After the first meal-delivered to him with a flourish, the bowl scraped hollow from the inside of a crab carapace-he’d tried to tease her, tried to say something clever about the presentation, but ended up crying instead. He pretended it was the soup, the way it singed the back of his tongue and hit the roof of his mouth with a flavor so sharp and strange he couldn’t even pretend it was just seafood. Annabeth didn’t call him out on it. She sat beside him, back pressed to the cold stone, and told him about what she was learning about the pit.

They fell into a rhythm that could only be called survival by the most generous of standards. Annabeth would venture out in careful increments, scavenging for anything edible or useful, always circling back to him on a loop that never left him alone for more than an hour. They would eat together, legs stretched out and ankles elevated, and share whatever passed for stories when you’d both seen too much and couldn’t risk thinking about the future.

The light cycles were the worst part. There was no sun, no moon, just a slow hemorrhage of color that faded from red to black in unpredictable bursts. Sometimes the darkness would last for hours, sometimes for a day. They learned to measure the passage by the interval between Annabeth’s scavenging trips, by the number of crab shells piling up against the cave wall, by the way his wounds healed-a little each time, never quite enough.

He could feel the healing, like a thousand hot needles crawling under his skin. The water helped-a different water, this time, not the clean stuff from home, but thick, mineral, alive in a way that left him queasy and jittery. If only he had seawater he could be healed and done in an hour. Instead Annabeth made him soak his feet in tainted water whenever he could bear the sensation of flesh slowly stitching itself back together. And the swelling would ebb, the bruises would pale, the bones gritted into place a little more solidly with every dunk.

He’d hallucinate sometimes, after effects of the river rippling across his vision, voices that sounded almost like his mom or Tyson or Grover, calling to him from the riverbank. He never mentioned it to Annabeth. She had enough to worry about, and anyway, he liked those voices, even if they made him cry sometimes.

He spent the time between her returns watching the cave’s other residents. The rock crabs came out in droves as the light dimmed, swarming the walls in silent gradients. They had no eyes, but they seemed to sense him, clustering in loose, watchful constellations a few feet from his head and then scurrying away as soon as he made a noise. If he flicked a pebble, they’d freeze. When he hummed-quiet, low, just for himself-they’d gather and lift their claws in unison, as if he were conducting an orchestra of sharp, many-legged marionettes.

Sometimes, in the near-dark, he dreamed he was one of them. A creature with perfect purpose: move, feed, avoid predation, multiply, die. No history, no shame, no memory of New York or the color of his mother’s eyes or the taste of real salt on his tongue. Nothing but the endless, churning need. It was tempting, that kind of oblivion. Annabeth had said once that monsters reformed in Tartarus because it was their natural state, their home. Maybe, in time, he’d go the same way.

The third night-if it was a night-he woke to find Annabeth gone. She’d left a note, a charcoal symbol on the wall. It looked like a capital A, but the crossbar was twisted, bent into something like a snake or a wave. He spent an hour puzzling over it.

When she came back, she found him sitting bolt upright, sweating, the crab shells arranged around him in a perfect spiral.

“You’re getting weird,” she said, flopping down beside him.

“I was already weird,” he shot back, but the words tasted hollow.

She wiped his forehead with a rag of her ruined shirt. “You were a different kind of weird.”

He wanted to say something else, something important, but all he could do was look at her hands, the blood caked under her nails, the little cut on the side of her thumb that she hadn’t bothered to patch up. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

“It’s fine.” She held up the thumb, studied it for a second, then shrugged. “It’s not infection I’m worried about.”

He nodded, not understanding, but not needing to. They ate in silence. The soup was better this time-thicker, richer, with a tang of something wild and numbing. He wondered if he was imagining it, or if it was just the way the flavors built up over time, layering on top of each other until they became something new.

By the fourth day-assuming the notion of a “day” had any meaning in this unlit pit-they agreed without speaking that the cave which had half-healed them would soon half-destroy them if they stayed.

His ankles were, by the standards of Tartarus, “healed.” He could stand and walk and even run for a few desperate seconds before the pain outpaced the shame of collapsing. The wounds had closed, pink and shiny. And while the ache never really faded, it became just one more engine of suffering in the background noise. He wondered if desperation had honed his skills. Or if he was adapting to the water itself, contaminated as it was; he didn’t like to think about the implications.

He and Annabeth scavenged everything worth carrying: a clutch of dried moss for tinder, a few crab shells to serve as bowls, and a length of sinew Annabeth had harvested from one of the larger crabs, which she claimed would make “improvised rope” if they needed it. Percy didn’t ask what else it could be used for; he trusted her, and if she needed a garrote, he’d assume she knew what she was doing. They left behind the spiral pile of rock carapaces as the only proof they had been there.

Annabeth led the way out, her eyes scanning everywhere at once, her knife held in a reverse grip as if she expected attack from below. The world outside the cave was not brighter, but it was bigger, and the sense of space made Percy’s chest ache. The river ran on as before, gray and glassy and toxic to their existence.

They crossed the boulder field, moving in a zigzag to avoid the slick patches where the crabs congregated. Every so often, a distant thunderclap reverberated through the stone.

Beyond the river, the ground sloped upward, a series of ridges and switchbacks carved by a hand that did not care for symmetry or safety. The first hundred yards were dominated by a forest-if you could call it that-of petrified trees, their trunks twisted and etched with faces frozen mid-scream. Percy averted his eyes. He didn’t want to risk recognizing anyone. The smell in the forest was different, too: sweet, almost floral, but masking a rot so deep it turned his stomach after a few breaths.

Above the treeline, the mountain began in earnest. Annabeth called it “the spine,” and it looked the part, each vertebra a slab of razor-sharp obsidian stacked for miles. The higher they climbed, the more the air vibrated with monster movement. At first, Percy thought it was just his nerves, but then he spotted them-empousai, dozens of them, clinging to the cliff faces like goats. Occasionally, one would detach, dropping a dozen feet to land on the rocks below and then trot off into the shadows.

Farther up, harpies had claimed the highest peaks, their nests visible even from a quarter-mile out: a tangle of bones and shredded wings, clustered in the wind-exposed crooks. At one point, a pair of them locked talons midair and tumbled, shrieking and biting as they fell past the ledge where Percy and Annabeth crouched. The impact below was shockingly loud, like a sack of bowling balls hitting a concrete slab. Neither harpy survived, but within moments, scavengers-smaller, wingless things-had swarmed the bodies, stripping them to bone.

It was not a food chain so much as a food spiral. Kill, devour, reform, repeat.

Annabeth moved with a confidence Percy envied. She rarely hesitated, always picking the next handhold or foothold with precision. Once, when a loose stone gave way and nearly took both of them tumbling, she didn’t even curse; she just pivoted, found a new line, and kept moving. Percy realized he was relying on her completely, letting her chart the route and set the pace. He tried to help, but his focus was shot-every few minutes, he’d catch a flicker in the corner of his eye, or hear a voice that wasn’t Annabeth’s, and he’d have to clench his fists until the hallucination faded. He kept it to himself. He didn’t want her to worry, or worse, pity him.

They spent that first ascent mostly in silence, speaking only when absolutely necessary-“left,” “duck,” “wait”-and conserving breath for the climb. Once, Annabeth pointed out a pit scorpion lurking in a crack, its tail arched and glistening with venom. Percy dealt with it by blasting it with a surge of water, the force enough to splatter it across the rocks. The water that emerged was tinged with black, and it steamed where it hit the ground.

When they finally reached a plateau, Percy collapsed, breathing hard. Annabeth joined him, not quite as winded, and for a minute they just sat back to back, looking in opposite directions. The view was… not beautiful, but at least different. A chain of mountains, each more jagged and impossible than the last, stretched on into the distance. Every peak bore evidence of habitation: nests, burrows, the leavings of a thousand generations of monsters.

“We’re not even close,” Percy muttered.

They rested for ten minutes, then pressed on. The next stretch was flatter, but the monster density increased. There was a logic to it, Annabeth explained: the plateau acted as a crossroads, a place where different species overlapped and competed for dominance. Percy just saw it as a deathtrap.

They moved quickly, keeping to the shadows and using the terrain for cover. Twice, they had to double back to avoid getting caught in a feeding frenzy. The first time, a pack of hellhounds-these smaller than MS O'Leary, but still the size of motorcycles-tore apart a fallen monster with such ferocity that the air filled with a gold mist. The second time, a band of dracaena marched past, spears glinting. Annabeth flattened herself against the rock, barely daring to breathe. Percy did the same, and for a minute he felt like a kid again, hiding from monsters in the dark.

Around the next bend, they encountered the first direct challenge: a telekhine, one of the ancient dog-headed sea-demons, blocking the path with a pair of jagged obsidian axes. It grinned, and shouted something.

It felt so good not to hesitate.

Percy didn’t remember closing the gap, or even drawing breath; all sensation was compressed to the white-hot line of his blade and the black eyes of the telekhine. The monster’s grin split wider in anticipation, baring tar-slathered canines, and then Percy’s sword was arcing, fast and merciless. The first swing canted the axe out of the telekhine’s grasp; the second, delivered with both hands, snapped shaft of the second axe. The third was a pure predatory lunge: Percy drove forward as the telekhine backpedaled, and his blade punched through the creature’s throat, nearly severing its head. The telekhine collapsed with a wet gurgle, ichor pulsing from its neck in rhythmic jets. Percy’s foot slipped in the dark spatter as he wrenched his sword free.

For a moment the dead telekhine’s head was not its own but his mother’s, the jaw slack, hair matted with blood, eyes glassy and accusing. He staggered back. The world stuttered, and Annabeth’s hand snapped around his wrist, yanking him from the brink.

“Percy,” she hissed. Her face was set, voice tight with something beyond fear. “We have to go, now. The body’s not dissolving.”

Of course it wasn’t. Tartarus played by its own rules. He’d forgotten, in the rush. Everything was food here. Even humanoids-especially humanoids-had a place in the food chain.

The reek of that knowledge filled the air before the scavengers even arrived. Percy and Annabeth ran.

It was not a graceful escape. His wounds, so forgotten in the adrenaline of the kill, returned with vindictive clarity. Every stride sent a shockwave through the still-mending bones in his feet and a razor of agony through his side. Behind them, a dozen distinct clicks and slithers echoed off the rock; the things that ate telekhine were already closing in. Annabeth led, and Percy followed, barely able to keep up as she zigged through canyons, across slopes, past pillars of stone crusted with the residue of a thousand monster deaths.

He was so focused on the pain, on not letting Annabeth down, that he almost missed the next threat. His only warning an overhead shadow, Out of that blotched void came a beast that might have been a distant cousin to Bigfoot-if Bigfoot had been bred for war and then drowned in a vat of mutagenic sewage.

The monster was hunched, all knotted muscle and matted black fur, but its limbs were too long, too quick. Its face was a nightmare of eyes, at least eight, each a different size and hue, all locked on Percy and Annabeth. It charged with a bellow that rattled his teeth.

Annabeth made the first move, ducking under the beast’s forearm and jabbing her knife into the exposed flesh between wrist and paw. The blade stuck, and she yanked it sideways, severing tendons in a familiar tactic against larger foes. The monster howled and swiped its good hand, catching Annabeth full across the cheek. The impact lifted her off her feet and into the rock wall, where she crumpled and lay still.

For half a second Percy’s mind blanked, all color and context bleached from the world but the shape of the beast looming over Annabeth’s crumpled form. Then the tunnel vision collapsed into a raw, Hate. He hurled himself at the thing with a ferocity that felt not his own.

The monster’s arms swept in a cross-slash meant to decapitate. Percy ducked, felt greasy fur graze his scalp, and stabbed upward, the blade of Riptide sinking deep into the meat of the thing’s undamaged arm. It bellowed, a sound that shook rocks from the overhang and sent nearby bugs scuttling for cover. Percy yanked his sword free, barely pivoting aside as the beast hammered a fist the size of a fire hydrant into the gravel, caving in a miniature crater where he had been.

The beast was bleeding from both arms, if you could call the syrupy ichor ooze that-pulsed from the creature’s wounds that. but if the pain registered, it only made the monster meaner. It lashed out again, and Percy’s already-bruised ribs screamed as he twisted away. He landed a kick to the beast’s kneecap, enough to stagger it, then rolled to the side, coming up between the thing’s legs. He slashed at its hamstring, feeling the blade catch, feeling the jolt of resistance travel up his arm like an electric shock.

The monster shrieked, flailing, one pawed hand raking lines of stone and the other clutching at its useless thigh. Percy saw an opening and took it, bounding up its hunched back, hacking at the knots of muscle and sinew that cabled its spine together.

For a glorious, delusional second, he thought he could bring it down through sheer relentless violence. But monsters in Tartarus were different. They didn’t obey the old rules. This one, even eviscerated, simply refused to die.

It bucked backward, and Percy was thrown off it, the air whooshing out of him in a coughing gasp. Hot agony exploded through his ribs, and his vision sparkled at the edges. He fought to stay conscious. The beast reared up to crush him again, he limped desperately around it, buying space. His lungs burned; his ankles threatened collapse. He could barely hold Riptide steady. The monster turned, its eight eyes boiling with hate and hunger, ichor streaming from half a dozen wounds. It charged, this time with a speed and purpose that told Percy it had learned to account for him.

He realized, then, as the anger cleared; that this fight wasn’t about who was the strongest or the most desperate. It was about the ground beneath their feet, about leverage and gravity and the little tricks you picked up by surviving long enough to see another dawn.

Percy switched tactics. Instead of fighting the monster, he fought using the terrain. He let it chase him, let it get madder and faster, luring it closer and closer to the edge of the shelf they stood on. When it finally lunged, Percy planted his feet, called up every last ounce of earthshaker energy, and stomped. The rock shattered beneath the beast’s weight, and together they tumbled-Percy barely catching the lip, the monster plummeting into the darkness below.

There was a sickening crack as he watched it hit the stone hundreds of feet down. Then, heart pounding so loudly he could barely hear, he hauled himself back up to the ledge.

Annabeth. He scrambled to her side. She was on her knees, propped against the wall, one hand clamped to her face. Blood ran in sheets down her arm, soaking into the tattered remains of her shirt. He reached for her, and she tried to say something but only managed a low, animal moan.

He saw at once that it was bad. Her right cheekbone was smashed to powder, the skin split in a grisly chevron, her jaw dislocated and hanging wrong. But the worst part was her eye. Where there should have been a clear gray orb, there was only a socket, raw and gleaming, the eye itself nowhere to be seen.

Percy almost retched. The taste of bile mixed with the iron sting of her blood in the air. Something inside him tried to shut down, to back away, but he forced himself forward, cradling her head with trembling hands. She was conscious-her one good eye roved wildly, pupils blown wide-but she was somewhere else, locked inside the pain.

Behind him, a sound: the scrape of claw on stone, deliberate and hungry. The fight had been way too noisy, the scavengers were here. He turned, sword at the ready, and found himself staring into the burning red gaze of a hellhound. It was not as large as Mrs. O’Leary, but it had the same predatory elegance, all corded muscle and glossy black fur. Its mouth hung open, tongue lolling, each tooth a dagger. The hellhound’s eyes flicked past Percy, zeroing in on Annabeth’s prone form, the fresh blood, and its lips curled into a snarl.

Percy stepped between it and Annabeth, ignoring the way his knees wanted to give out. He bared his own teeth and, in a move that felt only half-human, growled right back.

The hellhound hesitated, taken aback by this display of idiotic bravado. It paced to one side, testing the perimeter, then threw its head back and howled-a deep, resonant note that vibrated in Percy’s bones.

Immediately, another hellhound emerged from the shadow of the first, then a third, then four more. They moved with uncanny synchronization, flanking him in a semicircle. Hellhounds were shadow travelers, and always hunted in packs. Percy shuffled back until he was over Annabeth, ready to defend her with his own body if it came to that. He could feel the heat of her blood soaking through his pant leg, hear her ragged, wheezing breaths behind him.

Seven sets of eyes locked onto him, waiting for the first mistake, the first falter.

He gripped his sword with both hands, set his feet, and did not look away.

Chapter Text

Percy was a half decent liar. Even before he’d known he was Poseidon’s son, the knack for bluster and bravado had been his only real weapon-second only to the actual weapons he’d gotten since. In the past, when confronted by the impossible and the monstrous, he’d defaulted to brash threats, jokes, or wild gambles. Now, face to face with a snarling semicircle of seven hellhounds, each the size of a compact car and built like a bad dream, he realized immediately that none of his usual tricks would work.

If the monsters had a sense of humor, it would not be compatible with his. These hounds communicated in a different key: all teeth, hackles, and a paralyzing stench thick as rot. No wisecrack or rage bait would get him through. But then, as his mind raced for any edge, Percy thought of something crazy. He did not speak hellhound, but he did speak wolf. It was a long shot, but if nothing else Percy was the champion of long shots.

He drew on those not so long-ago days of forced survival at the Wolf House, the way that the ancient goddess had barely tolerated him, testing and tempering him with every lesson. He remembered the wordless conversations, the way Lupa’s children-her pack-fought and played and decided who belonged and who didn’t. Percy had learned to read the language of wolves: not just bared teeth, but the subtle choreography of dominance and submission, of specific ear twitches and the meaning of different rumbles. With nothing left to lose-and, frankly, not much dignity to spare-Percy hunched his shoulders, squared his stance, and let his right arm dangle behind him, wrist loose, fingers curled just so, mimicking the sweep of a wolf’s tail.

Apparently they had never met a talking demigod before; because the hellhounds cocked their monstrous heads, creeped out and almost offended by this bipedal thing aping their ancestral tongue. The largest of them, the ringleader with a stripe of white along her carbon-black muzzle, bristled at the challenge, while the others stepped back allowing space for their leader. Percy channeled every scrap of memory from endless afternoons with Mrs. O’Leary, every trick he’d used to keep his massive, slobbery pet in check. He lowered his chin, met the alpha’s eyes, and then-against every human instinct-looked away, a show of cautious respect. He flicked his makeshift tail-his hand-up and to the left, exposing his side, a universal sign of ‘not here to start something, unless you make me.’ Then, he mimed one phrase he was sure of in the dog’s language.

‘Stop. Mine.’

If the moment hadn’t been so dire-if Annabeth hadn’t been collapsed on the wall behind him, Percy might have found it hilarious. Dancing like a chicken in some vain attempt to communicate with dogs. Instead, he braced for death. But it gods-dammed worked. The hellhounds stilled, jaws closing with a click that echoed through the burnt-out valley. The eyes of every monster followed the alpha’s, black and bottomless.

She tested him-no warning, just a blur of movement and a set of jaws snapping inches from his face. Percy didn’t flinch, not even a blink. Instinct, hardwired by months of brutal mentorship under the Wolf House’s ancient matriarch, froze every muscle in defiance. He was operating on muscle memory, everything Lupa had hammered into him: never yield, never break eye contact, never, ever turn away from a challenge. But even as he presented his best imitation of a wolf’s unbroken stare, his bones vibrated with a fear he hadn’t tasted since his most helpless days in Labyrinth, or maybe ever. Titans and giants had always played by a kind of sporting logic-loud threats, theatrical violence, they would let you talk. Here, in the charred kill box of Tartarus, he stood before a predator that owed no one any sense of drama. There was no honor, no script. Only hunger. he had never been more terrified.

He knew that if he showed even a flicker of fear, the whole hellish pack would descend, and their story would end in a single, efficient red blur. And so as the alpha’s fangs nearly grazed the tip of his nose, Percy forced every cell to hold steady. He made a calculated move: not to retreat, but to lean forward, chin tucked, shoulders squared, a silent dare to the universe and to this monster in front of him. The pain in his legs, the sledgehammer thud of his battered heart, the taste of copper and ash in the back of his throat-Percy logged these as secondary. Tertiary. Not important.

And then, the hellhound deigned to speak to him. Not in Greek, not in English, but in the guttural, ancient syntax of the pack. Percy’s wolf was rusty, and the hellhounds had a different ‘dialect’ if you will; but he got the gist.

‘Who are you? We hunger, Leave.’

Percy answered trembling just a little, but shot through with steel. ‘Mate. Mine. I die first.’ He hesitated, weighing the gamble, and introduced himself, in English “Percy Jackson.” For a moment, the monsters hesitated, noses twitching, exchanging glances in a conversation as old as their species. Then, with a motion so deliberate, the alpha took a single step forward. And sniffed him.

‘Demigod?’ The alpha’s jaws parted in a way that might have signaled the start of a threat display, but as Percy stared into the abyss of her fangs he realized, with a wave of gut-sick certainty, that this was something closer to a smirk. She was grinning at him. Not in the predatory, blood-flecked way one would expect from a denizen of Tartarus, but with a wry bemusement that suggested he’d just become the punchline to an ancient, ongoing joke at the expense of his entire species. She leaned in so close her mammoth nose poked his cheek, and Percy almost sneezed from the blast of sulfurous, rotted meat breath. She took another whiff, tickling the stubble on his chin, as if cataloging the precise flavor profile of this particular breed of idiot.

‘Join the pack,’ she growled, the vibration of her rumble rattling his teeth. For a split second, Percy’s battered brain tried to parse whether this was metaphorical or literal, but the look in her coal-pit eyes left no ambiguity.

Wait, he thought. That can’t be the right translation.

The Alpha's neck muscles bunched and flexed, every tendon standing out with clarity. Percy’s sword was halfway up when she struck; he was fast-years of monster battles and last-second improvisational violence had tuned his reflexes to a razor’s edge-but she was faster, a black blur studded with teeth. There was a moment, a single stuttering heartbeat, where his blade actually grazed the fur at the base of her throat. He might have even drawn blood. But then her jaws closed around his head like a bear trap. The sensation was not what Percy expected. There was no slow-motion, no montage of dying hero memories, no flash of Annabeth’s face. There was instead a soundless, all-consuming pressure, a sensation of his entire skull being smothered in a vise made of wet velvet and steel. He saw the cavernous red-black interior of a hellhounds maw, and then the world went black.

-----

Annabeth saw it all, not through the lens of a tactician or a hero, but as a bystander on the far side of a pane of glass, her vision fractured and unclear. Her body was a broken architecture: right cheek demolished, right eye socket burning in a new unique pain, leaking a slow trickle of something warm and sticky and decidedly not red down her cheek. She was weak, propped, crumpled at the base of a wall. Her right hand clutched her dagger like a child with a comfort blanket. Every time she blinked, the world dissolved in a fireworks display of agony.

And yet she couldn’t stop watching him. Percy. Wobbly, blood-streaked, holding the line against a tide of pit-born teeth. She watched her boyfriend, the only person in the world who could turn improvisational stupidity into a superpower, stand nose-to-jowl with monsters that should have ended him before he could finish his last wisecrack. He was performing, she realized, He was acting for the monsters, for the universe, and his gambit seemed to be working. The pack hesitated, unsettled, as if it had never considered that prey could talk back. This was an artifact of his entire life to this point: the accidental charm, the refusal to shut up, the dumb luck that taught him to speak wolf and gave him a pet hellhound.

Annabeth was watching a masterclass in whatever weird flavor of animal magic Percy specialized in, and she was proud. Hope-the sick, traitorous thing-curled up in her chest, and for a foolish second she allowed herself to believe that they might survive this, that she would get to tell him how he looked absurd, and brave, and how she loved him all over again with every breathless second he bought her.

Then Percy’s decapitated body hit the ground.

The alpha hellhound moved, a blur in the dying light, and Percy’s head disappeared inside its jaws in a single, fluid motion. His body hung suspended for a heartbeat, arms twitching, sword clattering uselessly to the ash. The pack set upon him as if they had been waiting for this cue all along, and Annabeth, in that moment, became a passenger inside her own skull. Every nerve in her body screamed, but the sound was far away, as if someone else were being murdered. A spray of red painted the valley floor, and the dogs fought over him, yelping and snapping and pulling him apart as if they were born to it. Which, of course, they were.

Annabeth wanted to shut her eyes, to scream, to crawl away and dig through the ash until she found a hole to die in. Instead, her body betrayed her-she just watched, locked in rigor, unable to even weep for him. it was a scene from her nightmares made real. Her hands, which could do nothing, trembled. Her mouth tasted of copper and defeat. She was a child again, frozen in fear unable to move or look away. If there was any mercy to be found in the moment, it was that Percy’s face was gone so quickly that there was no agony, no final pleading look for help. Only the sudden, feral end.

The pack fed badly. They did not eat in clean, methodical bites but in snatching, competitive jerks, ripping away hunks of him and swallowing them whole. One hellhound, smaller than the rest, missing an eye, seized Percy’s arm and shook it like a toy, refusing to give it up even as the others lunged and snapped for their own stake. There was a sick pop as the joint came apart.

The carnage did not last long. They grew bored once the meat stopped resisting. A few of them snapped at each other, vying for the largest bone or a scrap of blue fabric, but the mood was fractious. The alpha sat back on her haunches and licked her lips, watching with predatory patience as her underlings squabbled and feasted. Occasionally the great black head would turn in Annabeth’s direction, and the eyes would lock on her with a glacial, unnatural intelligence. The hound approached, and she might have tried to talk to Annabeth but between her inability to speak wolf, her blurry one-eyed vision, and the sense of unreality she found herself swimming in; she didn’t care. Annabeth dropped her head in shame as death approached, and did not resist.

Only to be picked up by the tattered remains of her shirt, like a belligerent cub being carried by their mother. Her battered mind could not understand the creatures actions. her body remained limp, and she was drug away. fresh agony bloomed in her head as it was jostled and moved, her knife clattered to the rocks as she blacked out.

-----

He was dead. Percy Jackson understood this with a clarity so total, so absolute, that the knowledge scoured every other sensation from existence. There was no confusion, no gentle moment of crossing over, no flicker of white light or warm embrace. He did not float above his body, nor did he tumble through a tunnel toward some mythic afterlife. Instead, Percy’s soul was dumped into a darkness so complete that the word “dark” became meaningless; it was a place where even the idea of color had never been born. He tried to shout, tried to call for Annabeth or for any of the gods, but there was no mouth, no sound, no hands or tongue or lungs to do the work. There was not even a sense of whether he had a shape at all. Percy was only thought, a knot of memory suspended in a void, flayed raw by the knowledge that there could never be a way out.

He screamed. He tried to scream, anyway-he would have shredded his vocal cords with the effort, if he’d had any. Instead, the lack of pain, of anything, rebounded endlessly inside the echo chamber of his skull, a psychic howl that expanded outward until it threatened to erase him entirely.

He remembered Everything.

he remembered tumbling into the Pit, the world above shrunk to a distant speck of sunlight. He remembered opening his eyes at the bottom and seeing Annabeth hovering over him in concern. He remembered the rock crabs, and the terrible soup he tried to convince himself he enjoyed.

He remembered the hellhound, her teeth, the way her jaws had closed around his head, and the moment when all sensation had folded inward to a single, crushing pressure. He remembered the heat of her breath, the sulfur and rot of it, and the blackness that came next.

But death did not erase these things. Death did not even blunt them. Instead, it tore away everything else-his body, his power, his connection to the mortal world-leaving only the memories behind, sharper and more painful than ever. Each thought was a splinter, a spike driven deeper with every cycle of recollection. Percy was a library of mental agony, an archive of every mistake and every scrap of hope he’d ever clung to.

He raged against the void, because what else was there to do? The futility of it only made him angrier. He tried to claw at the blackness, to bite it, to swim through it or scream it into submission, but his efforts dissipated like spit in a hurricane. The darkness did not push back, did not even acknowledge him as a thing worth noticing. It simply absorbed his every effort and left him emptier than before, a shrinking point of consciousness surrounded by infinite, shapeless night.

The part that killed him the most-if such a thing was possible, given the circumstances-was the thought of Annabeth. She would be dead now, and that failure felt like a fresh wound, infinitely more painful than claws or teeth. The memories he had were all he could hold onto. He replayed their time together, filtered through a lens that made even their smallest moments seem unbearably precious: the first time she’d called him Seaweed Brain, the way she rolled her eyes when she pretended not to care, the way she kissed him with a desperation that matched his own. He clung to these scraps as if they were the last pieces of himself, the only evidence that he had ever really lived.

Death was greedy. It wanted to take even those things from him. It pressed in with a cold, slow patience, swirling around each memory and sanding it down until the edges blurred. Percy fought back with every ounce of willpower he could muster, repeating her name, conjuring her face, refusing to let go. He had no hands, but he would not let her slip away. He had no mouth, but he would not stop screaming. He had no heart, but he could still feel it breaking.

Then, as he felt himself begin to unravel-his sense of self thinning out, one thread at a time-the darkness changed. It grew teeth. It grew eyes. It grew a voice that was not a voice, a soundless, wordless presence that filled the void with purpose. It was Tartarus itself, and it had noticed him at last.

<<You do not belong here,>> it seemed to say, though the words existed only in the negative space between atoms. <<You were meant to die in agony. You were meant to be devoured and forgotten.>>

Percy pushed back with the only thing he had left: his stubbornness. <<No,>> he insisted, his thought as ragged and bloody as any scream. <<I’m not done.>>

The void responded with an amusement so vast it was almost kind. <<You are nothing. You are only memory, fragile and fading. You will not last.>>

<<i have to, i will.>> Because how dare he, how dare they. Monsters, gods, titans, Primordials. all of them, how fucking dare they. he raged, screamed, refused to fade away. refused to be forgotten.

<<you took everything from me, ill gut you head to toe, you fucking hear me? ill kill you you bastard, ill tear you to fucking pieces!>>

Mostly, he raged at himself-for failing Annabeth, for letting her die, for not finding some way to cheat fate one last time. The hatred was a fire, a nuclear furnace that refused to burn out no matter how little fuel remained. He let it consume him, because the alternative was to dissolve into the background radiation of the void, another lost soul in a realm that counted its victims in infinities. But Percy was stubborn, stupidly so, and he clung to his own suffering like a life vest.

And the Pit, Tartarus itself-listened. Something immense and old smiled inside the black. It was less a visual than a metaphysical event, like the shudder of the deep ocean when two tectonic plates scrape together.

<<You would do anything to go back, wouldn’t you?>> The words uncoiled in his mind, not in a language but in the pure, pitiless logic of cosmic law.

If Percy had a voice, he would have laughed. Instead, he radiated hate, pure and undiluted. <<Anything.>>

<<Even if it meant becoming something else? Giving up whatever you thought you were?>>

He did not flinch. <<Try me.>>

The Pit was delighted. Percy could feel its attention focus, narrowing like the eye of a storm. <<Then arise, my child, and live again.>>

There was no warning. No gentle return of sensation. First there was nothing; then there was everything, all at once. Percy's hand exploded upward, through a membrane of cold and filth, shattering the skin of Tartarus itself. The world on the other side was wrong, warped, as if viewed through the bottom of a broken bottle. His arm was not his own: too long, too thin, the bones sharp beneath pale skin. But it was his, and as he flexed the familiar muscle, he felt the pulse of life-monstrous, yes, but life-surge through the new vessel.

He punched his way out of the cocoon, tearing wet flesh and stinking fibrous matter, and dragged himself up onto the surface of the Pit. The first thing he felt was pain. The second was freedom. He drew a breath so deep it nearly tore open his ribs, and then he screamed, a sound that belonged less to a man than to every hungry thing that had ever crawled out of the darkness.

Chapter Text

Annabeth wanted to die.

There was no rhetorical flourish or metaphor in the sentiment. There was no melodrama, not after what she had just survived. It was, at this moment, the only rational conclusion she could reach. It was not even a matter of escape, or of guilt, or any of the thousand other words she had once used as a student of the world to describe the longings of the self-destructive. Those were luxuries for other, less honest lives. The truth was that Annabeth Chase, favorite daughter of Athena, architect of Olympus and schemes, had awoken in the darkness below the world and found that the only thread still binding her to existence was the knowledge that she could not, in fact, will herself to die fast enough.

Her first awareness had been of the darkness, the cave, the way the air pressed down with the weight of centuries’ rot. She did not recognize the place, there was a distant, sickly light far up ahead. and the smell of the place was so powerfully foul that her nostrils had numbed to everything except the faint note of her own blood. She had not tried to move, not right away. She had not even tried to think beyond the first, howling urge to lose consciousness again. But her body, ever the traitor, refused her that mercy, and she had lain there, staring at the shadows flicker against the roof of the cave, until the shadows began to make sense.

There were seven of them. Hellhounds. The same ones, she assumed, that had... She tried to remember how she had gotten here, but the intervening moments were a wash of violence and blackness. The hounds were asleep now, sprawled across each other in a lazy tangle of muscle and bristled fur. Their breath steamed the air. One slept with its massive head nestled up against her own ruined skull, as if she were one more member of the pack. Occasionally, a hind leg would thump in a dream. The wet, coppery tang of drool slicked the stone beneath their jaws. Annabeth felt herself shrink into the space between their heaving ribcages and the cold floor, willing herself to disappear entirely before they woke again.

She did not consider escape. At least, not in the way she’d once been trained to. She was not Annabeth Chase, tactical prodigy, in this moment. She was not even a demigod. She was biomass. Spoil. A thing that had outlived its usefulness to the world above. Her mind, which had once built whole labyrinths in her sleep, had been reduced to following a dull, simplistic logic. stay still, stay small, hope they don’t notice you breathing. She was more scared of the hounds than of death.

She spent the hours cataloguing her injuries, not out of any hope but as a way to occupy the time. Her right cheek was ruined. The skin felt thick and alien; when she pressed her fingers to it, it did not respond. Nerve damage, she guessed, and then forced herself not to consider what that implied about the depth of the wound. Her left eye watered constantly, as if grieving for the rest of her face. Her jaw was misaligned. Every time she tried to swallow, her sinuses burned. Blood had crusted down her neck, congealing into an iron-colored bib.

As time stretched, Annabeth felt her sense of self begin to loosen. She began to see herself as a stranger might: a mangled girl, ash-blonde hair caked with blood, single eye sunken into its socket, one side of the face slack and grotesque. She wondered what Percy would have thought, seeing her now. And her heart ached, because she knew he would not have cared.

In time the hellhounds woke. Some grunted and rolled over, their sleep disturbed but not broken, while others rose to their haunches and began to nose at each other’s wounds, licking with a slow, almost bored tenderness. The smell of them was overwhelming: concentrated death, fur and rot and the sulfurous taint of the pit. Annabeth pressed her face into the crook of her elbow, wishing she could pass out, but the pain in her cheek and jaw became a live wire whenever she shifted, and her body would not let her drift.

For a time, she was ignored. She watched them through the curtain of her hair, taking note of how the pack arranged itself, how the biggest beasts got first bite at the charred remains of some forgotten carcass. It was almost a parody of the little anthropological case studies she used to love-hierarchies and rituals and the invisible currents that bound a family together. She could not help herself; even as she sat in the filth, choking on her own blood, her mind catalogued the differences in their scars, the way their ears twitched at different tones of sound. Her brain needed a pattern, any pattern, to fill the void.

It was only when the youngest of the hounds, a lean and bristling brute who’s missing eye felt like a personal insult to her own recent injury. started to creep her way that she realized she was not, in fact, safe from attention. It came with a strange, wavering gait-almost playful, if not for the size of its incisors and the way its eye bulged slightly from its skull. She wondered if she could make it past the pup, if she could maybe scramble for the cave wall and disappear into a crack, but her body responded with all the vigor of a sack of laundry, and she knew, in some clinical, abstract way, that she would not get far.

The hound stopped inches from her head. She could smell the rot on its breath, feel the heat of its exhale on her scalp. For a moment it just looked at her, the way a child might look at a beetle it is considering squishing, and then, with no warning, it snapped its jaws an inch from her nose.

She was not proud of the sound that came out of her, a high, mewling yelp that even her own mangled mind recognized as pathetic. Her arms flew up to shield her face, even though she knew they would not help. The hound recoiled, amused. It flopped its head side to side, as if laughing, and then lunged again, this time nipping just close enough to graze the ruined flesh of her cheek. The pain was sudden, jagged, and a new gush of blood ran hot down her neck. She gasped, curled tighter, and waited for the kill.

But it did not come. Instead, the largest of the hounds-the alpha-gave a low, rumbling growl and moved with a speed that was almost invisible to the eye. It clamped its jaws around the younger one’s neck, not biting to kill but holding, as if to remind it of some unspoken rule. The pup whined, and slunk away. The alpha’s eyes flicked to her again, and for a moment she wondered if it would finish her off itself, but it simply turned away, dignified and cold, and resumed its post at the mouth of the den.

The logic of it was lost on her. She did not understand why they kept her alive, why they bothered to enforce discipline when the only law of this place was suffering. In a past life, she might have tried to analyze it, to find the pattern beneath the madness. A weakness to be exploited. But now her brain only shivered around the pain and the cold, and all she could do was press her back to the wall and make herself as small as she could.

She lost track of time. The wounds in her face closed and reopened with every breath. The numbness in her leg crept higher, colonizing her thigh and hip, until she could no longer feel her lower half except as a distant, thrumming ache. Her hands shook with a palsy she could not control. The cycle of pain, numbness, and cold became her world, and her thoughts shrank accordingly. She stopped thinking about the past, stopped thinking about Percy, and Athena, and all the people she had once been.

It was only when the hunger reached a crescendo, when her body could no longer ignore the pangs and the gnawing and the abject need, that she realized she must have been trapped in that cave for days. Lost in a haze of pain and fear of the beasts around. Curled in fetal position, unresponsive, for how long? it hadn’t felt like more than a day.

It began as a series of cramps, her insides twisting like wrung fabric, and then became an agony so total that it eclipsed even the pain of her wounds. She curled tight around her stomach, moaning, and tried to will herself into oblivion. But her body was cruel, too stubborn to die, and the spasms only intensified until she was rocking back and forth in the filth, sobbing with a voice that no longer sounded like her own.

It was then, in the depth of her misery and fatalism, that the alpha moved again. It approached with a deliberate slowness, every muscle in its body taut with purpose. Annabeth could not move, not even to cower, and so she simply watched as it drew closer and closer, its breath a furnace of rot and decay. It stopped, looming over her, and then-very carefully-reached down and took her by the collar of her shirt.

The shirt tore easily after its use as a multitool in hell, fabric parting along tired seams and unraveling at the collar. She barely registered the indignity, too exhausted and too empty to care. But then the grip changed-her hair was yanked, and the world whiplashed around her. Her eyelids fluttered open, and she was definitely awake now, her senses chemically shocked into lucidity by the sudden pain. The hellhound’s grip was neither gentle nor entirely cruel. It tugged just hard enough to drag her along, legs scaping the ground.

She was carried like that, scalp burning, across the den and deposited face-first into a heap of something wet and hot. The stench hit her before she could decipher the shape: it was meat, recently dead, and disturbingly human shaped, cyclops? the flesh marbled with yellow fat and scorched tendon. The hellhound’s teeth had scored it already, and Annabeth’s first instinct was to recoil, but she had no strength for recoil. Her nose pressed into the meat, and she gagged. The taste and texture of death flooded her mouth.

She lay limp, cheek mashed to the cooling flesh, her mind racing from humiliation to horror to abjection. She assumed this was the prelude to being eaten alive. But nothing happened. The hound that had dragged her over did not bite, only circled, its heavy breath stirring her hair. When she dared to open her one eye, she saw the rest of the pack watching from their mound of bones, not moving, not even blinking. It was as if she was part of some demonstration, the alpha showing the others how to handle a hopeless thing.

Seconds ticked by. Annabeth could not bring herself to move, so she simply turned her head the smallest possible amount, just enough to avoid inhaling the full bouquet of rotting monster. She drew shallow, careful breaths, and waited to die. Still nothing. The impasse stretched, and she wondered if this was some new form of torture, if these wretched beasts were doing this on purpose.

A wet plop, a new weight on the rocks inches from her nose. Another chunk of meat, fresher than the one she’d been mashed against. Smaller, this time-half the size of her fist, pink-gray and glistening and somehow obscene in its tidiness. She blinked at it, trying to make sense of its presence. Was it bait? A test? She did not understand.

The alpha came closer, crowding her space with its reeking body. It lowered its snout and nudged the meat toward her face, the gesture uncannily delicate for something so built for violence. Annabeth squeezed her eyes shut. No, she thought, no, no, no, surely not. She would not be made to do this. She would not. But the beast was insistent. It pawed the meat closer, then leaned down and, with a single smooth motion, tore the chunk in half. It ate one half-gulped it down, jaws snapping so close to her ear that she could feel the spatter of saliva-and then spat the other half at her feet. It was now a more manageable size. A treat, a training reward, the kind of thing you gave to a problematic puppy.

That was the final straw. Something inside her, some filament of pride that had survived the days of terror and humiliation, caught fire. Annabeth had been starved, battered, rendered almost animal herself, but she would not be made a PET. She was not a creature to be domesticated by monsters. She was not a beast to be trained. She was Annabeth Chase, and she had been a warrior since childhood. She would die before she would submit.

The offense was so total, so complete, that for one glorious second it overrode her pain and her fear and even the cold. She hissed, a sound feral and undignified but hers, and snapped her head away from the proffered meat with as much violence as her body could muster. The alpha blinked, surprised, and for a moment, Annabeth thought she saw something like amusement in the monster’s red eyes.

But she was not done. She summoned all her remaining will and spat, a gout of bloody saliva and bile, directly onto the beasts nose. The effort made her vision blur and her jaw scream, but the act itself was a tiny, perfect victory. She glared up at the alpha, silently daring it to make her try again. For a moment, the den was utterly silent, the pack frozen by her insolence.

She had never been especially vain about her hair. It was practical, always kept out of her face, more a matter of discipline than personal pride. But now, as the hellhound’s jaws closed around the sodden clump of blonde-matte with sweat, blood, and the stink of dog shit-Annabeth realized she had loved her hair more than she’d ever admitted. She'd spent hours braiding it to keep it from the wind, cursing every loose curl, but it was a piece of her. Now it was a leash.

The alpha’s grip was no longer gentle. Its intention was humiliation, punishment. It yanked her upright, jerking the full, slack weight of her body. Until her vision flashed white and vertigo spun the world in a sickening carousel. She was left dangling, feet helplessly scraping the cave floor, unable to draw breath through the agony singing down her spine. Her shriek was involuntary, mortifying-a thin, high keening that echoed off the stone and made the watching pack prick their ears in interest.

The beast began to walk. It moved with a measured, implacable gait, parading its captive along the perimeter of the cave’s interior, the way a wolf might demonstrate a kill to its pups, or a jailer might tour a shamed prisoner before a crowd. There was no ceremony in it, no cruelty beyond the simple mechanics of power; the hellhound merely wanted her to understand her place. Every step drove a new spike of agony through her scalp, and Annabeth felt her entire face stretch with each tug, the skin of her forehead threatening to peel away from bone. She did what she could to lessen the pain-twisting, craning her head, bracing with her hands-but the beast’s strength was absolute, and eventually her own strength gave out.

The circle completed. The pack’s eyes followed her procession, their attention neither hostile nor sympathetic, just interested, as if watching a new recruit undergo an initiation. At the end of the route, the alpha halted. Not yet satisfied, seized her hair again and resumed the walk, but this time the pace was quicker, the steps almost jaunty, as if the beast took pleasure in the display. The second lap was worse than the first. Nausea built with every jolt, and Annabeth’s skull felt like it was being peeled open, each follicle a separate nerve ending stretched to the limit. She began to make noises-nothing dignified, nothing warrior-like, just soft, broken sobs and the occasional wet gurgle. At some point, her left hand flew up to try and claw the beast’s muzzle away, but her fingers were too feeble, her nails too blunt. The hellhound ignored her completely.

Halfway through the third lap, she felt it: the dreadful, unmistakable sensation of skin beginning to separate from flesh, a warm, sticky trickle at her hairline that could only be blood. She gasped, tried to stand on her own feet to take the weight off. They buckled and dragged behind her, useless. The cave’s rough basalt ground abraded her ankles, slicing through the tattered remains of her jeans, and she could see the raw pink of her own flesh exposed beneath the rags.

It was when she became convinced that her scalp would tear clean off that her pride finally broke and she began to plead desperately, her voice trembling as she begged for mercy, shouting for it to stop, to release her, even to end her life if that was what it desired. The beast, with its fierce eyes glinting in the dim light, appeared to comprehend her frantic words, or at least sense the raw fear emanating from her.

the beast changed its pattern. It veered away from the perimeter, cutting a diagonal path back toward the mound of bones and meat at the cave’s corner. This time, it did not slow as it approached. It released her hair mid-stride, flinging her forward with such velocity that she skidded several feet across the stone, belly-first, until she fetched up against the cold, greasy pile of cyclops flesh. Her face mashed into the meat, and she tasted ash, rot, and the fatty tang of burned tendon.

Annabeth did not move. She lay still, dizzy with pain and shame, feeling nothing except the persistent, throbbing agony across her scalp and the bloom of a possible concussion at her temple. She listened to the pack’s panting, the click of their claws on basalt, the wet sounds of tongues lapping water from the drip. She could hear her own heartbeat, frantic and arrhythmic. The alpha stood over her, breathing deep, the heat of its chest radiating through the air.

She waited for death, or for the next round of torture, whichever came first. Instead, the hellhound bent its head and nosed her shoulder, nudging her with the careful precision of a mother urging a reluctant pup to its feet. When she refused to move, it snorted and pawed at the meat beside her. Another hunk-the smaller piece from before was no where to be seen, filthy muts-rolled against her cheek, smearing her jawline with dark, coagulated blood.

The message was obvious, even to her battered brain.

Annabeth pressed her eyes shut. She remembered the taste of food-real food-so dimly it may as well have belonged to another person. She remembered baklava, fresh strawberries, the greasy cafeteria pizza at Camp Half-Blood. She remembered the peanut butter and honey sandwiches she used to make for breakfast, each layer spread with geometric perfection. Now, all she could taste was the metallic tang of her own blood and the reek of burnt cyclops.

She opened her mouth, and bit down. The flesh was lukewarm, stringy, more tendon than muscle. Her teeth slid off a sinew, and she nearly choked on the first attempt. The hound nudged again, insistent, and she managed to rip free a bite the size of a grape. She chewed, forcing herself to swallow, gagging as the flavor hit the back of her tongue.

She managed a second bite, and then immediately retched, doubling over as her stomach rebelled. She vomited onto the meat, the acid burning her throat, and for a moment wished she could just suffocate on it and be done. But the alpha was merciless. It pawed her again, pressed her face back into the meat, and waited. She sobbed, barely able to breathe, and willed herself to try again.

This time, the meat went down and stayed down.

Chapter Text

Percy was starting to understand it, the way death worked down here.

Tartarus had a system. Not the bureaucratic shuffle of Hades’ afterlife, no Elysium, no Asphodel, not even the joke of the Fields of Punishment. Down here, your soul just… dropped. No ferry ride, no Charon, no coins on your eyes. If you died in Tartarus, you fell through the cracks, past the world’s end, into the pit beneath the pit, where you dissolved and your memories peeled away. No judgment. No second acts. Just a clean, absolute erasure.

It was the efficiency that got him. The Underworld was a recycling plant, a landfill for souls. Tartarus, though, was an incinerator. And the only thing that could pull you out of that void, the only thing that could save you from nonexistence, was if Tartarus itself-trawling net of the void, the source of monster immortality-decided you were worth keeping.

No wonder the gods were terrified. Immortality meant nothing here. Down here, “eternity” was a joke. Down here, gods could die for real. They had, too. Percy remembered the stories been told, half warning, half bedtime story, about the primordial gods that had vanished-not dead, just “lost in the void.” He’d thought it was a metaphor. Now he got it: the abyss below Tartarus wasn’t emptiness, but anti-memory, a grave that didn’t even bother with a headstone.

He would have laughed, but his new body made the sound come out as a wet, hacking cough. The process of becoming whatever he was now changed his lungs. Maybe that was what the gills were for. He touched them, felt the slick ridges along his neck hiding partially behind the jaw, how they opened and close with each ragged breath. They were a deep, bruised red, almost purple, pulsing under his fingers. He stared at his hands. The first time he noticed the claws, right after he woke up, he’d thought it was a trick of the shadows. But no, they were real. Not shiny, superhero talons, but something out of a fisherman’s nightmare: curved, translucent. Built to grip, to tear, to never let go.

His skin was thankfully normal, just pale, never exposed to sun. And he was taller, his torso felt small, arms hanging just slightly low, hands almost to his knees. His legs were longer, thighs corded with new muscle. But it was his face he avoided, even with the limited reflections down here. He’d caught glimpses in puddles: jaw sharp as a blade, cheekbones jutting, eyes too big, irises glowing faintly green even in pitch dark. He looked like the bastard child of a deep-sea predator and a Greek statue left to rot underwater.

He was also naked. It took him a weirdly long time to register it, though maybe that was because his brain was busy making topographical maps of the newly monstrous expanse of his own body. His junk was gone-just a smooth patch of pale, almost featureless skin, as if the power that rebirthed him here decided genitals were unnecessary for the sort of existence he was expected to lead. He catalogued that for later, a minor footnote compared to the other revelations. In this place, in this flesh, nothing about him belonged to the world he'd left behind. He still looked like Percy Jackson, until you noticed the details-the wrongness.

He hated it, not with the tongue-in-cheek revulsion he'd once felt toward the stereotypical “monster” label, but with a gnawing, marrow-deep self-loathing that bordered on the hysterical. Everything about this body felt fundamentally hostile: the skin that should have been his familiar barrier was instead a tunic two sizes too small, prickling, hypersensitive, the air's temperature stinging at every new patch of exposed flesh as if the molecules themselves sought to exfoliate him into submission. The ridged, pulsating gills along his neck itched with every breath. His new muscles tensed and shivered in unpredictable spasms, as if each fiber were independently rebelling against his command. Even the bones beneath his skin-longer, denser, threaded with something that felt less like calcium and more like petrified coral-creaked when he shifted his weight. His brain reeled at the wrongness of it, the way his limbs felt fractionally out of phase, a split-second lag between intent and motion.

And then the senses. Whatever adaptation had been grafted to him, it had not been designed for comfort. Every sound was agony: the distant grind of tectonic plates, the whisper of monsters crawling through the stone, the subsonic thrum of the pit itself, all slamming into his ears with no hope of filtering or tuning out. His vision cut through the dark, every surface outlined in acidic green, every edge jittering with afterimages, night vision. Hunger, thirst, and rage boiled in his gut, undifferentiated and urgent.

The sum of it was disgust-not only at the body he’d been handed but at the mind now forced to operate it. He was a patchwork thing, a vessel for drives and perceptions never meant for a demigod. There were blanks in his memory-conscious, deliberate erasures, the process of dying and reforming had scraped away the parts of him that weren’t strictly necessary. Names, places, birthdays; they faded in and out, replaced by new instincts, new senses. He could catalogue sounds with the precision of an oscilloscope, could map temperature gradients from the heat on his skin, could taste metal and blood in the dust with a tongue that had grown rougher. The world was a palimpsest of overlapping information, most of it meaningless, all of it urgent.

He was, as far as he could tell, an abomination. There was a kind of logic to it. If the universe was going to spit him back out, it wouldn’t be as anything so mundane as a corpse or a memory. No, he was meant to be a weapon, an escalation, something more perfectly suited to the endless, predatory game the Pit liked to play. Percy could almost respect the efficiency. The gods tinkered with bloodlines, made heroes and horrors in equal measure, but Tartarus didn’t bother with finesse. It smashed what it hated together, waited for the dust to settle, and then reanimated whatever died.

There was no point standing still. He wiped his hands on his legs-he had no clothes, so nothing to stain-and started walking. The new body felt wrong, legs striding too far, arms swinging low, head forward like a beast on the trail. But the wrongness faded with every step, replaced by a predatory sort of grace, the way a shark might forget it ever had fins and just learn to swim. The landscape did not help: obsidian glass stretched into infinity, broken only by the knife-edge ridges of rock salt and the occasional bubble of sulfurous fog. There were no sun or stars, only the faint green glow of his own eyes, reflected in the obsidian glass.

The air was so thick with mineral tang that every breath felt like inhaling a mouthful of blood. Salt crystals erupted from the ground in great, fractal blooms, some as small as a child’s fist, others the size of houses, all of them glittering with the kind of beauty that promised only suffering. He wondered if this is what the bottom of the sea looked like, after everything alive had died and only the bones remained. It was fitting, in a way. He didn’t belong on the surface anymore.

It was impossible to orient himself. No sun, no stars, no landmarks except the shifting, hungry dark in every direction. He tried to make a plan-recite the steps, the promises, the mission-but every avenue of logic bent back to the same point: Annabeth. The thought triggered an ache in his chest, a pressure that felt almost physical, and he curled his monstrous hands into fists. He wanted to scream, but the air was so dry it felt like his throat would tear open.

How dare they touch her. How dare they hurt her. She was alive. She had to be. There could be no other outcome, not for him, not now.

He remembered what Hera had once told him, in that awful, clipped voice she used when she thought she was being generous: your fatal flaw will be the thing that destroys you. You’ll tear the world apart for the one you love. She’d said it like an accusation, like a warning. He’d laughed it off, then, but now it rang in his head like a prophecy. He’d tear Tartarus down to its bones, even if it took the last of him to do it.

He didn’t remember starting to run, but suddenly the whole world was a blur of motion: limbs pumping, claws digging into glass. The new instincts took over. He realized, only dimly, that he was no longer thinking about the mission. He was hunting. The thought should’ve scared him, but it felt right, even righteous. He convinced himself he was looking for Annabeth, he convinced himself there was a chance she was still alive. He’d follow the trail, kill anything that got between him and his goal, and worry about the morality of it later-if there was a later.

He felt the change in the air long before anything else-a ribbon of sulfur, subtle at first, tangled with an undertone of burnt protein. It slithered past the salt stink and the ozone of shattered glass, wrapped around his nasal passages new intensity. Percy inhaled, chest swelling, lungs and gills both working together to strain every possible clue from the fetid atmosphere. The flavor profile was new, he didn’t know what to make of it, but it was alive.

He had been born with an empty stomach, he was starving. His mouth overflowed with saliva. His stomach, a shriveled ball of acid, twisted with ravenous anticipation. The compulsion was so intense it nearly blanked out coherent thought-which, he supposed, was the point of a body like this. The senses led, the mind followed, and the rest of him was just a delivery system for violence.

It was a basilisk. he could see it now, the shimmer of heat bleeding from its scales. Percy closed his eyes for safety, and saw it anyway: in the way it displaced the moisture in the air, in the way the blood pumped through its veins.

He didn’t break stride. There was no need for cleverness, not when the target broadcast its own death so recklessly. He felt the basilisk taste him, the way its tongue darted out.

Percy opened himself to the water in the air. There wasn’t much-this was Tartarus, not the Mediterranean-but he could harvest it, atom by atom, force it into a hardened, pressurized ball. He visualized the vector, the moment of impact. At the edge of his senses, the basilisk’s heart fluttered.

He launched the condensed bolt. It struck with a thunderclap, smashing the snake’s head into the ground. The basilisk convulsed, tail lashing, teeth flashing, venom misting the air in a wide, lethal spray. Percy hit it again, this time with a fistful of water whipped into a blade, slicing through the muscle along its spine.

He watched. The basilisk recovered faster than expected, reared back, and hissed, the sound like a thousand razors scraping glass. It lunged straight at him, mouth open, fangs like ivory daggers. Percy sidestepped, ducked under the strike, and caught the snake behind the jaw. His new muscles responded with terrifying efficiency: in one motion, he drove its head into the ground with enough force to crater the rock, then levered his body weight down until the vertebrae snapped. He held the writhing form for a moment, his hand sunk into the things flesh burned as it touched venom. The head twitched, then stilled.

He used his claws to hack the head from the body, and tossed the skull aside. He tore open the trunk, steam pouring out, and bit into the first coil of flesh he could reach. The taste detonated on his tongue, a harmony of salt and umami, blood and tang, pure, living protein. He ate greedily, stuffing handfuls of raw basilisk into his mouth and hardly chewing. The kill had been necessary. The feeding was something else. He was aware, distantly, of how grotesque he must look, hunkered over a still-warm carcass, ichor smeared across his face and chest.

It was only when the hunger began to recede-when the gnawing compulsion in his belly was replaced by a dull, animal satisfaction-that Percy noticed the pain in his right hand. To call it pain was misleading. It was more like a pressure, not entirely his, a persistent intrusion at the base of his thumb where a splash of venom had hit his palm in the chaos of the fight. He held up his hand, flexing the fingers experimentally, and stared. The wound was a pitted, raw and ugly, the tissue around it bruised and leaking slow, viscous drops of something that wasn’t blood.

Gold. He bled gold now.

Not the bright, gilded ichor he’d seen leaking from the gods or the occasional monster-this was more metallic, almost molten, and it smoked faintly when it touched the air. He watched, weirdly captivated, as a droplet rolled down the back of his hand, leaving a streak that stung as it ran, like it was etching itself through the dermis. The edges of the wound puckered, skin and muscle pulling tight, and then-if you watched closely, if you could bear to watch at all-the rent flesh began to seal itself. It happened strand by strand, like time-lapse footage of a wound healing. The hand closing up until there was nothing left but a pale, ridged scar, a golden seam glimmering in the red half-light that seemed to radiate from nowhere.

He remembered, with a jolt of disgust, the way monsters often regenerated. how you could chop off a hydra’s head only to see two sprout in its place, how earthborn wounds closed up in seconds, how even the stupidest of Tartarus’s children refused to die properly unless you used godly metals, or burned or dissolved them down to atoms. Monsters never stopped coming. Now, neither would he.

The realization scraped through him, a cold arterial horror mingled with something darker-a grudging, mechanical excitement. He was supposed to hate this, all of it, and he did, he really did. But the part of him that remembered the power of the Styx, recognized the temptation of it. Maybe that’s how the monsters felt, growing back their wounds and scars, always returning, never permitted the dignity of a real death. Immortality wasn’t a gift, but the cruelest imaginable defect. He had a sudden vision of himself as a self-healing engine, a perpetual motion machine of violence, eating and repairing, repairing and eating, forever and ever. The thought was so bleakly funny he almost laughed.

He hated it. He hated how it made every other pain feel irrelevant, how it erased the human scale of injury and recovery and replaced it with something monstrous and predatory. He hated that the only thing keeping him upright, keeping him moving, was the very power he despised. But the real horror, the one he couldn’t admit even to himself, was how much easier everything was now. Every step, every breath, every act of violence was more efficient. He was becoming the thing he’d spent his whole life fighting, and he couldn’t even slow it down.

He would have traded anything-a decade of freedom, every sword he'd ever called his own, maybe even that last thin thread of hope-for a single cool drink of water. Even a lukewarm, three-day-old Gatorade from the bottom of his gym bag would have done the trick. But the body he inhabited now was relentless, a cruel parody of his old self, all angles and armor and gnashing hunger. Every nerve ending felt flayed, stripped of the skin that once shielded him from the world. Every muscle twitched with an electric anxiety he couldn’t control, a bolt of energy that demanded not just movement, but violence.

Like a fever dream with no escape, it was all he could do to keep moving.

So he did.

Percy launched himself forward, claws scraping over the crystalline crusts, the new limb geometry already more familiar than his own handwriting, his own signature. The salt in the air was heavier now, a powdery fog that clung to his face and blistered the inside of his nose. With each stride, lances of white shot up in slow-motion billows, catching the light and refracting it in strange ways.

But all around him, in every direction, was nothing. Just the endless, dead sea. He needed elevation. He needed to see, to orient, to build some kind of mental map that wasn’t just a blur of black and white and the taste of blood. But the ground only ever sloped downward, deeper into the nothing. Even when he found a jagged shelf or the lip of a chasm, it was always leading him further from the idea of up, like the world itself wanted him to spiral straight toward its core.

He ran until the edges of his vision turned red with hypoxia. His lungs burned, a familiar sensation, but they’d been replaced now with something more efficient, more monstrous. He could feel the ribcage expand and contract, the new gills on his neck fluttering open to scavenge every molecule of oxygen from the thin air.

He discovered a secondary eyelid, a thin nictitating membrane that blinked across his eyeballs in sync with his pulse. It was a fish thing, or maybe a reptilian thing, but it worked: the salt didn’t blind him, though it still stung. Begrudgingly he admitted to himself that that one was pretty cool.

He ran past the remains of a hundred battles, each one less recent than the last. Clotted stains of golden ichor on white salt, splintered bones, the odd hunk of rusted metal that gleamed dully in the twilight. In some places, the carnage was so thick it became part of the environment-a reef of failed violence, commemorated by the fossilized teeth and claws of things that had lost. Monsters had died here, and Tartarus had not bothered to reanimate them. That felt important, though Percy struggled to parse together why. He picked his way over the rubble, sparing not a single glance for the dead. He had killed, and been killed, and would do both again. That was the only law down here.

He ran until the horizon blurred, and then further, until the horizon disappeared altogether. The only thing that changed was the color of the sky: from black, to red, to a sickly orange. He lost count of the hours. Maybe he ran for days, or maybe it was just minutes stretched out by the geometry of the pit. He could have run longer, if not for the thing that finally stopped him.

It was a shrine. Or the remains of one, battered and half-drowned in a drift of salt. The outline was unmistakable: columns, now toppled; a plinth, cracked down the center; the remnants of a statue, faded and unidentifiable. The way the salt had crusted over it, it almost looked like it had grown there, as if the shrine had always belonged to the landscape and not the other way around. Percy slowed, heart thumping in his throat, and approached the ruins.

Percy circled the plinth, he looked for an inscription-a dedication, a message, a prayer. Here, there was only a hollow where the plaque should have been, and a single ugly gouge carved into the base. He ran his fingers along it. The mark was deliberate, not a wound but an erasure. Someone-something-had wanted to wipe the memory of what had been worshiped here from this place.

The profanity fell from Percy’s lips before he could leash it: “Fuck.” It rang off the stone with impact far greater than its syllable count, the moment had just felt right.

He drew in one deep, shuddering breath, then another, forcing the need to move into a tight box somewhere behind his sternum. He willed his senses back into a soldiers edge. check the exits, check the threats, breathe. Percy scanned the battered room, eyes darting from broken plinth to shattered statue, trying to wrench his thoughts away from the instinct to simply run. He saw, at last, the thing he’d overlooked: the statue’s hand, not empty, but gripping a slim, corroded spear; He really wanted a weapon.

His approach was less cautious than it should have been. Percy’s movements were swift, as he reached for the relic. The moment his fingers closed around the shaft, the stone fingers yielded with unnatural pliability, as if the statue itself had been holding out for someone, anyone, to take it. The spear came loose with a shriek of friction, ancient mineral grinding against rusted metal as the weapon broke free. Percy staggered back, the spear’s weight shocking in its insubstantiality: it was more corrosion than iron, its surface pitted and flaking, a relic.

He ran his finger along the spearpoint. It left behind a trail of red-brown dust, barely rougher than sand. Useless. Infuriatingly so. The impulse that seized Percy was both childish and inevitable. He raised the spear above his head and slammed it down onto the statue’s chest. The impact was catastrophic. The iron shattered instantly, shards skittering across the floor. The statue’s torso exploded in a spume of chipped marble and old, compacted brine. For a heartbeat, the head of the statue remained balanced atop the ruin, then, as if in slow motion, it tipped forward, striking the plinth and splitting open like a dropped egg.

The sound echoed in the chamber, Percy felt very much like a child who had thrown a temper tantrum. He was panting, he realized, and the fingers of his left hand were curled into a fist so tight that the new, golden ichor had begun to bead along his palms, where the flesh split against the pressure. He hated that this felt good. That the violence had spread through him like a narcotic and now every cell in his body was vibrating with relief.

He was still staring at the heap of destruction, chest heaving, when a voice cleaved the silence.

“That was the very last statue dedicated to me, you know. Despite its age.”

Percy spun, ready to tear the world itself down if that’s what it took to survive the next five seconds. What faced him was not a monster. Or not, at least, the kind he was used to.

The man was old. Not old in the way gods chose to present themselves-venerable, majestic, all silver hair and noble suffering-but genuinely, irreparably aged, as if the years had been drawn over his body like a shroud and then left to mildew. His hair was a cloud of white, wild and unkempt, and his beard cascaded to his gut in a torrent of yellowed gray. Every wrinkle on his face looked like it had been personally carved by a different decade, and his eyes-gods, his eyes-were the cold, bright blue of winter days that never ended. He wore nothing but a ragged cloak, crusted with salt and stained in ways that suggested decades of squalor.

Percy’s mind tried to develop a strategy, to assess the threat. His first instinct was to leap, to crush the old man’s windpipe before he could speak another word. The second, equally violent, was to smash his own skull against the plinth to stop himself from hurting the old man. Percy did neither. He stood, muscles trembling, unable to unclench his jaw or even blink.

“Hello? Can you speak?” said the old man, with the brittle patience of someone who’d spent millennia talking to things that never answered. The voice was hoarse, but not weak. “Oh, bother. Just when I thought something intelligent had wandered in.” The disappointment in his tone was heavy. The old man eyed Percy with a mixture of contempt and curiosity. He gave a theatrical sniff, as if the air itself offended him. In fact, the man seemed bored. He wandered around the ruin, prodding at the statue’s debris with his feet, humming a tuneless melody under his breath. The old man had fixed his gaze on him with an unblinking predatory attentiveness, waiting for Percy to remember how to speak, or perhaps to flee. The way he leaned on the crumbled shrine, fingers drumming idly on the brittle stone, made it clear that he had nothing but time.

Percy let the silence hang a second longer than was comfortable. He wrestled his jaws apart and managed to get the words out, voice raw and hostile from disuse. “What are you?” His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, dry with salt and the taste of anger.

The old man’s reaction was instantaneous: a bark of laughter, more incredulous than amused, as if Percy had just asked a dog whether it could read. “What am I?” he repeated, savoring the syllables as if rolling a rare morsel on his tongue. His lips curled, showing cracked yellow teeth and a hint of something that might have once been charm. “has all monster kind become so lacking in decorum in recent centuries or is it just you.” The old man’s face was a tangle of lines, but his eyes were bright and sharp, blue as a glacier, scouring Percy for cracks.

Percy’s temper-never buried very deep-flared. He bristled, shoulders hunching, claws flexing at his sides, but the old man didn’t even flinch. He just kept watching, the way a biologist might watch a specimen in a dish, waiting to see if it would adapt or expire. For a moment Percy was certain this man could read every thought in his head, the whole ugly tangle of need and confusion and hunger. It felt like being pinned to a table.

He wanted to say something, anything, but the words tangled up behind his teeth. The old man drew himself up with a theatrical sigh, as if the conversation was a particularly dull play. “You meant ‘who,’ of course,” he said. “Who am I. Because names have power, and power is the only language anyone speaks here.” He gestured vaguely at the ruined plinth, the dead wastes, the endless skyless ceiling above them. “Though I confess I’ve never quite understood why mortals fixate so on the proper designation of their destroyers.”

Percy hesitated, “So who are you, then?”

The question seemed to please the old man, if only because he’d baited Percy into asking it. His lips twisted into a half-smile, one part warmth to three parts mockery. “Nobody,” he said, and for a moment Percy thought that was the real answer, that he was dealing with some trickster spirit or self-loathing ghost. But the old man went on, voice growing softer, almost reverent. “Nobody, for purposes of this conversation. Just a piece of flotsam, washed up on the last tide, waiting for the end like everything else.”

Percy tried to puzzle this out, brain still running two steps behind the conversation. It wasn’t the answer he’d expected, and his mind scrambled for another angle of attack. “You’re not a monster,” he observed, though it came out as more accusation than inquiry. “Not like the others.”

The old man’s eyes flickered. “Neither are you,” he said, with a pointed glance at Percy’s gills, his claws, the glitter of ichor still drying on his cracked knuckles. There was no judgment in his tone, only the dry amusement of someone who’d seen every permutation of suffering and found them all equally unremarkable.

Percy flushed gold, which was a new and unpleasant sensation. He fought the urge to hide his hands behind his back. “I’m-” he started, then cut himself off. It occurred to him, with a sudden chill, that he didn’t actually know what he was anymore. The old man smiled, as if he’d seen the thought flicker across Percy’s face and was delighted by the confusion it caused.

“See?” said the old man. “It’s not as easy as it looks, being a ‘who.’”

Percy blinked, and stared at the old man over the drifting dust and salt haze. The man was still there, gazing at him with those cold, abyssal eyes, waiting for Percy to remember who he was, or at least to pretend. The words caught in his throat,

“I’m Percy Jackson.”

“Oh,” said the old man. “Is that all? No titles? No heritage?”

Percy bristled, feeling the old defensive anger surge up, but he kept his tone flat. “You didn’t give me any of yours,” he said, voice steady, almost bored.

That seemed to catch the old man off guard for a half heartbeat. He tilted his head, as if weighing Percy’s words against some invisible scale. Then, with a heavy sigh, he nodded. “Yes. All right. Fair is fair.”

He straightened, brushing the dust from his ragged tunic, and for a moment there was something regal about him, like a king exiled for so long even he had forgotten what it meant to rule. He drew in a deep, slow breath, and let the silence grow heavy and thick before speaking.

“I am Oceanus,” he said, and the syllables vibrated in the air, resonant not with pride but with the weight of a funeral bell. “Firstborn of Gaea and Ouranos. The eldest of the Titans. Former ruler of the endless sea, consort of Tethys, and, once upon a time, a god of some small consequence. Now.” He paused, searching for the right phrase. “Now, I am just another wretch in Tartarus.”

Oceanus watched Percy process this, his blue eyes sharp as ever. For the first time, a hint of real animosity bled through the old man’s voice. “No need to act impressed. Those days are extinct.” Oceanus’s tone shifted, gentler now, but persistent. “Now, please. Who are you?”

Percy was silent for a full minute, the words dammed behind his teeth by a surge of shame so intense it made him want to claw his own throat raw. He looked up at the king of the dead sea. The titan’s gaze was patient, not expectant, as if he had all the eons in Tartarus to wait for Percy to crack. The silence stretched out until it became a third thing in the room.

Percy studied the lines of his own hands, the way the gold and red ichor had dried in thin webwork along the scars. The words he wanted to say were simple, but they stuck to him, heavy as lead shot. In the end, he forced them out, one by one, like teeth.

“I am Perseus Jackson,” he said, voice flat, unvarnished by any attempt at dignity. “I am the son of Poseidon.” He swallowed, and the effort hurt. “I once bore the sky. I the defeater of titans, and giants, gods and other things. I’m a failure, a monster.” He stopped. The next words were a jagged stone in his mouth. “I watched them die. I let them die. And I lost-” His breath hitched, and a film of tears blurred out the world. “I lost the only person who ever made me believe I was anything other than a weapon. And I couldn’t save her. And now I’m lost, so horribly lost.”

Oceanus’s face changed, the mask of brittle indifference cracking to reveal something older, softer, deeper. The ancient man regarded Percy for a long time, as if measuring the weight of his words against the cumulative mass of all the sorrows that had ever been spoken in this place. His blue eyes, once so sharp and calculating, softened. He came forward, step deliberate, and placed a hand on Percy’s shoulder. For a heartbeat, Percy tensed, ready to rip the elder’s arm off at the socket, but there was no malice in the grip. The titan’s hand was strong, but not in a way that threatened. It was the strength of a riverbed, the endurance that underpinned all things. Percy’s anger flickered, guttered, and died.

“You are of the sea,” Oceanus said, his voice rough with awe and something like joy. “A child of the old tide-how did I not see it before?” His grip tightened, a paternal gesture Percy had forgotten could even exist. Despite himself, Percy collapsed into the titan’s embrace. There was no resistance left in him, only the hollow echo of a boy who had given up every last thing he loved. He buried his face in Oceanus’s tunic and wept for the life he’d lost, for the friend and the lover and the future that would never be.

“What a gift fate has given me,” Oceanus murmured, his voice hoarse, “to embrace the ocean one more time. The world above has forgotten us. Here, there is no tide, no wind, no rain. Only the stillness of a tomb.” He stepped back, steadying Percy with a touch. “I have been trapped in this dead sea for so long, I have forgotten what it means to be alive.”

Percy wiped his face with the back of his hand, smearing salt and ichor in streaks across his cheek. There was something about the titan’s sadness-its vast, unashamed scale-that made Percy feel less monstrous for his own.

Oceanus broke the silence. “The sea is dead here,” he said, voice heavy. “All water in Tartarus has been locked away, devoured, or corrupted beyond recognition. I have tried for centuries to summon rain, to conjure even a drop. But the air here is parched, poisoned by the hatred of the pit. Even I, whose veins once circled the world, am denied my own domain.”

“My boy, I must ask of you one thing-the request of a dying god.” Oceanus’s tone was fragile, almost bashful, as if he expected to be denied. “I want to see rain one more time. Just once. I want to remember what it felt like to be alive, before Tartarus swallowed us all.”

Percy did not ask why the titan could not do it himself. He understood without needing it explained. It was the same reason Percy could not bring Annabeth back, the same reason he could not forgive himself for surviving when so many better people had not. Kinship in Tartarus was a strange thing. In that moment, Percy’s entire soul-what was left of it-latched onto the request as if it were a lifeline.

He closed his eyes, and for the first time since waking in the pit, let himself reach outward with his power. Not to kill, not to hurt, but to give.

He closed his eyes. In the world above, water was everywhere, woven into the bones of the earth, the breath of the wind, the sap in every green thing. Here, there was nothing: not a drop, not a wisp, not even the pretense of humidity. Tartarus had sucked the wetness out of every shadow and left only the dry, metallic taste of hate behind.

But he was a child of the sea. Oceanus had said it with such certainty, such ancient reverence, that Percy believed it too. He reached with the part of himself that remembered the ocean: the pulse of tides, the slow dance of currents, the cold, impossible blue of the trenches. There was nothing to call on here, no reservoir or river, but he reached anyway, pressing his will forward until it cut his mind raw.

But a child of Poseidon never really learned to accept “no.” He pressed harder, scraping against the stone-thick boundaries of the dead sea, shouting into the void for something-anything-to flow. The effort nearly snapped him in half. He dug his fingernails into his ruined palms, felt the hot sting of ichor, and used the pain like an anchor. Somewhere deep in the pit, something shivered loose: a molecule of water clinging to a buried fossil, a single drop of dew secreted in a seam of rock, a memory of storm lodged in the black memory of the dirt. He found it. He demanded more. He would not be denied.

When Percy opened his eyes, it was raining.

At first, it was nothing: a prickling dampness, fine as static, beading on the ends of his eyelashes. Then the air above the ruined plinth shimmered, grew milky, and thickened into mist. The first drop struck Percy’s brow and rolled down the slope of his nose, cool, refreshing. Then another. Another. The drops gathered into rivulets, and the rivulets into a curtain, and then the curtain became a torrent.

It was not rain like he remembered. The water was heavy, thick with minerals and metallic tang of the pit, and it burned wherever it touched open wounds. But it was pure uncursed water, and it hammered the dust and salt into mud, streaked the ancient plinths with new rivers, and spattered the two miserable figures on the altar with life.

Percy stood in the storm, letting himself be drenched, feeling the water claw at his wounds and heal them at the same time. He looked at Oceanus, expecting exultation, or at least the smug pleasure of a king who’d gotten what he demanded. Instead, the old man was staring upward, mouth open, eyes alight with a raw, childlike awe. Oceanus’s lips trembled. At first, Percy thought the titan was laughing, but then the sound twisted and sharpened, and he realized the old man was weeping. The tears ran clean tracks through the dust on Oceanus’s cheeks, mingling with the rain, indistinguishable from it.

“I can almost imagine,” Oceanus whispered, head thrown back to let the water soak him, “that it will keep going. That it will refill the entire sea. That the world above is still out there.” A deep shudder ran through his body, as if the rain were reanimating him, waking him from a thousand-year coma. “You have no idea what you’ve done, Perseus. You’ve ended a drought older than civilization itself.”

Percy wanted to say something grand or comforting, but his tongue was swollen with grief. Instead, he let the rain speak for him, pelting their shoulders, pooling in the prints of their feet, sluicing away the grime and blood of endless war. They stood together in silence, two relics drowned in a miracle they hadn’t known they needed.

“I cannot repay you in any way that matters, my boy,” said Oceanus, shivering with cold. “I cannot help you in your journey or direct you anywhere. I am without power, without purpose, a ghost in a world that has forgotten me.” He reached up, fumbled with the sodden fabric at his shoulders, and shrugged off his battered cloak. The gesture was awkward, almost apologetic, but Oceanus managed to hold it out with trembling dignity. “But please take this. It’s all I have. Use it well.”

Percy stared at the offered cloak, unsure whether to laugh or cry. It was ancient, moth-eaten, and as heavy as a wet blanket. The color had faded from blue to something the shade of storm clouds, and the salt stains had eaten holes through every hem. But the weight of it-the memory-made Percy’s heart stutter.

“It’s my final wish,” Oceanus said, his voice as thin and brittle as a wave about to shatter on rocks.

“Wait,” he said. “What?”

Oceanus smiled, and the lines on his face seemed to smooth, as if the rain was washing him away from the inside out. “The world above is gone,” the titan said gently. “But for a moment, you brought it back. For me, that is enough.” His voice faded, growing softer with each syllable. “You will survive. You always survive.” His eyes, once so sharp and blue, went flat and cloudy, like deep water under a storm.

This is what had happened to Pan, a final wish fulfilled, an old deity put to rest. Percy lunged, grabbing Oceanus by the wrist. “Don’t go,” he said, and the plea was so raw it barely sounded like his own voice. “Don’t leave. I-” The words jammed in his throat. He didn’t know what he was, but he knew what he didn’t want to be: alone.

Oceanus’s fingers curled around Percy’s, ancient and cold. “You’re not alone,” he said, voice so faint it was nearly lost in the hiss of the rain. “You have always carried us with you. All the sea. All the old gods.” He squeezed Percy’s hand, and then, with a sigh, let go. “I am sorry, Perseus.” And just like that, he faded.

One moment, Oceanus was there-hunched and waterlogged, but alive-and the next he was simply gone. The only thing that remained was the sodden cloak, draped over Percy’s shoulders like a burial shroud.

Percy sat alone in the ruins, the rain now a whisper, the world leached of everything except the taste of loss. He could not stop himself: he howled. The sound ricocheted off the ancient stones and came back to him, a child’s sob rebounding in an empty tomb. He fell to his knees, clutching the cloak to his chest, hunched over by the weight of everything he had ever failed to save. The world shrank to the shape of his own misery. He buried his face in the folds of the cloak, expecting it to be cold, but instead it was warm with the scent of ocean storms and old, vanished summers. He pulled it tighter, and as he did, his fingers brushed against something embedded in the lining: a stiff, jagged lump, sharp as bone.

Percy didn’t want to hope. He’d been through that cycle before-the bait and switch, the promise of salvation snatched away at the final second. But the old instincts, battered but undefeated, took over. He dug his hand into the tattered pocket and closed it around the object inside. The old titan had given him more than he could have known.

It was a pen.

Chapter Text

Annabeth had a plan, and suddenly she felt okay again.

She almost laughed aloud at the absurdity: she was still trapped in Tartarus. Her bones still ached from the beating she’d taken; Percy was a red smear somewhere deeper in the Pit, and she had absolutely no reason to believe she would survive the day, let alone ever see sunlight again. But she had a plan, and now the fatalism and self-loathing receded to a tolerable numbness, like a migraine dissolving under a wash of endorphins. She knew it would return. It always did, like the tides pulling back on the shore to reveal glistening rot. But for now, she had a mission.

She understood now, why she was being kept alive: She was bait. She was entertainment. The demigod scent, so pungent to the children of the Pit, had been distilled to an almost narcotic pungency after days marinating in her own fear and sweat. She was irresistible, a gourmet for the legions that prowled the endless midnight of Tartarus. Now, she noticed, there were three hounds stationed at the cave’s mouth. Hulking, shadow-wreathed shapes, their sinews rippling under pelts woven from obsidian and matted with filth. They’d been placed as sentries, as a perimeter to capture any curious predators that followed the irresistible trail of her demigod essence. In a sense, she was the worm on a hook, but the hook was baited for everything down here.

The realization came with an almost mathematical precision: This wasn’t a random pack. This was a managed social structure, engineered or at least curated by the unnaturally intelligent matriarch. The hellhounds were operating at a higher tier of predation. They were smart, even by wolf standards, but not this smart. Not unless they had help. The alpha had to go.

She assessed her own resources. Her body was in shambles but functional. She had lost her knife, but she still had her mind. That was enough. The mission, now, would be to invert the power structure-train the subordinate dogs to obey her, to love her, to see her as pack rather than pet. She would become indispensable. She would make the alpha irrelevant.

She set to work.

Annabeth always had a theory about dogs. She’d once read that domestic canines hadn’t simply been forced into loyalty over millennia, but had cunningly manipulated their way into the human heart: a shared evolutionary wager, a transactional relationship, every tail wag and whimper a calculated move. In Tartarus, the hypothesis became essential. The hellhounds she studied were bred from shadow and pain, their minds both sharper and crueler than any terrier’s, but the fundamentals of social intelligence still applied: hierarchy, affection, resource control, mimicry. She would exploit it all.

The first phase required her to survive the pack’s amusements. Morning began with a round of “Who can scare the mortal most?”-unpleasant, but Annabeth learned to anticipate the feints, to shriek at the right moment, to sell her agony so convincingly that the hounds would pause to savor her terror before resuming their games. Never the same twice: some days they’d pile on her, weighing her down beneath a mat of greasy pelts and sulfurous breath, and other days they’d circle her restlessly, nipping at her heels to herd her around the cave as if she were a particularly recalcitrant sheep. She made a point of never lashing out, no matter how much a bite hurt or how humiliating the ritual. Instead, she let them smell her fear and then, subtly, her compliance.

But she also adapted. The brute games evolved, as she knew they would. Annabeth introduced her own variation on “chase”-rather than simply fleeing in terror, she’d duck into the warren of narrow cracks hiding in a nook only the smallest could reach. The first time she tried, two of the hounds howled and pawed at the stone for hours, unable to comprehend her disappearance. When she re-emerged, she made a show of “surrender,” rolling over with hands raised and eyes wide, letting the pack “find” her, as if by accident. They fell for it. Soon it became routine: she’d let herself be cornered, then vanish, then return, always slightly more disheveled and abashed, always the good sport. The hounds began to anticipate the game, waiting at the usual dead-ends, tails thrashing with impatience. it was a strange bastardization of hide and seek, hide and chase? She rewarded them with pantomimes of defeat, elaborate and theatrical, and the pack responded with excitement.

The alpha female never participated in these games, not directly. She watched, always, from the cave’s highest shelf. The others deferred to her with ritual deference: heads lowered, hackles flat, eyes averted. When a younger male once tried to ascend the shelf uninvited, the alpha knocked him down with a single, calculated swipe, then marked the ledge with a pungent arc of piss that stank up the cave. Annabeth took note. This, too, was theater: a constant reinforcement of authority.

Annabeth to claimed a chunk of basalt that jutted from the wall like a miniature dais. It was too narrow for a full-grown hound, but just wide enough to sit cross-legged and survey the chamber. On her first night up there, the pack tried to drag her down, but she clung to the rock, hissing and swatting like an alley cat. Eventually, the novelty wore off, and the hounds left her alone. The shelf became hers. She decorated it with whatever detritus she could scavenge: a few broken bones, a rectangle of obsidian, a handful of gravel arranged in geometric patterns only she understood. It wasn’t a fortress, but it was a start.

Next, she set about learning the pack’s preferences. Every hound had its own quirks: one favored gnawing on bones, another stealing scraps from the others, a third liked to curl up in others space for warmth. Annabeth cataloged each trait, storing the data like she once cataloged the architectural styles of Athens or the fighting techniques of Roman legionaries. She experimented, too-offering her tiny chunk of raw food to the lowest-ranking hound, watching how the others reacted. The pack’s social order was more fluid than she’d expected. Alliances formed and dissolved with every meal, every squabble. The alpha ruled by fear, but the lower ranks jockeyed for status, and Annabeth exploited those cracks.

She quickly discovered that submission brought rewards. If she groveled before the alpha, baring her neck and making herself small, she’d be allowed first lick at the water seep. If she whimpered at just the right pitch, the betas would bring her scraps of gristle instead of stealing her ration. On the rare occasion that she resisted-clenched her jaw, glared back-the pack would escalate, not in anger but in curiosity, as if testing the boundaries of this new creature in their midst. She realized that her value lay not in defiance, but in adaptability. She played the role of omega, but never so convincingly as to become invisible. She made herself indispensable.

The second phase was empathy, or at least the simulation of it. She groomed the hounds-picking burrs and parasites from their ears, running her fingers through their greasy fur, soothing them with a stream of soft, nonsense syllables. The first time she did this, the hound nearly bit her thumb off. They weren’t used to gentleness, Annabeth suspected. She remembered stories of feral dogs rescued from the wild: how a single act of kindness could recalibrate their entire worldview. She didn’t know if hellhounds were capable of love, but she set about manufacturing the illusion of it.

The trick was to be consistent. Every time a hound tolerated her touch, she rewarded it with a gentle scratch behind the ear or a whispered compliment: “Good monster, best monster, absolute terror of the Underworld.” Soon, the smallest of the pack started to follow her around the room, trailing behind like a grotesque puppy. It was missing an eye just like her, and its tongue lolled permanently from one side of its mouth, but it wagged its tail when Annabeth called. She named him “Socket.” The others learned jealousy. If Socket got more attention, they would try to one-up it with their own displays: jumping higher, growling louder, even attempting crude mimicries of Annabeth’s gestures.

The affection was reciprocal, in a way. Annabeth found herself comforted by the mindless routine: the rhythmic scratching, the warmth of fur against her palm, the steady thrum of monstrous hearts. She still hated them-she was not a masochist, despite what the Fates might think- but now her anger was turning away from the puppies, toward the alpha. She learned to appreciate their company, to lose herself in the mechanical repetition. It was easier than thinking about what awaited her outside the cave, or what had become of Percy. The pack was a system, and systems could be analyzed, predicted, gamed.

The third phase was technology, or as close as Tartarus would allow. Annabeth spent hours scrounging for materials: dry moss, splinters of bone, a frayed length of rope that might once have been sinew. She hoarded them on her shelf, arranging and rearranging the pieces, testing their properties. The key was friction. Without being able to leave the cave to scavenge It took her more than a day, but eventually she coaxed a spark into flame, using the edge of a jagged rock as a makeshift striker.

They approached warily, hackles raised, ready to attack. Annabeth kept her movements slow, deliberate. She fed the flame with careful increments-first moss, then a knuckle of bone with exposed marrow that burned with a ghastly, rancid smoke. The pack circled her, drawn by the novelty, then by the warmth. They settled around the fire in a rough semicircle, eyes reflecting red in the glow, their bodies pressed so close to Annabeth’s that she could feel their muscles twitch with every pulse of the flame. Socket got a little too close and singed his snout on the flames.

It was time for the next phase.

She made a ceremony of begging for her supper, crawling to the edge of the pack with her hands cupped, eyes wide, the picture of need. She let the hounds see her hunger, the practiced hunger of someone who’d been trained to starve. She let them believe it was their choice to feed her. When they dropped the grisly monster scraps at her feet, she recoiled at first (for show), then forced herself to choke down each morsel. She exaggerated her gratitude, panting and wiggling in imitation of the hounds’ own displays.

Then, when the pack’s interest had faded and the scraps lay abandoned, she made her move: she brought the meat to the fire. She cooked it, letting the smoke rise thick and pungent, letting the scent carry through the den. The transformation was immediate. The smell was intoxicating, different from anything the hellhounds had ever known. Even the alpha noticed, her nostrils flaring from her high perch; the rest of the pack slid closer, eyes wide, drool stringing from their jaws. Annabeth tasted the first bite herself, let the others watch her savor it, then “accidentally” dropped a chunk in front of Socket. He yelped in delight, and the rest joined in, each one vying for a taste.

She let the ritual repeat over several days. Sometimes she let herself fumble, letting the food fall so the betas could fight over it. Sometimes she pretended to resist, clutching the last bit to her chest until a jealous hound snatched it away. Always she cried out, exaggerated her loss, made a spectacle of being outsmarted. The hounds grew addicted-not just to the taste, but to the game itself. Cooked meat became currency, a prize. The pack’s hierarchy rippled and buckled as the weakest hounds, suddenly empowered by proximity to Annabeth and her fire, found themselves in possession of something the others wanted. Fights broke out. Alliances shifted as the thrill of cooked food proved more compelling than any threat of violence from the alpha.

Annabeth watched it all unfold. She didn’t just want acceptance; she wanted instability. She wanted the hounds to hunger for more and to doubt the authority that had once been absolute.

Every night, she lay awake on her shelf, planning her next move. Sometimes Socket would curl up below and snore, the burned patch on his snout still warm to the touch. Sometimes she’d hear the alpha growling in the dark, pacing the perimeter, she was agitated, it was working.

Annabeth had not, until this moment, fully understood the extent of her own capacity for manipulation. But now, as she watched the firelight flicker off dozens of black, glassy eyes, she realized with something close to awe that she could shape these monsters as readily as any social system-provided she applied the same ruthless logic she once reserved for architectural blueprints and battle plans.

Tonight, the air inside the cave vibrated with a tension so thick it might as well have been a living thing. They circled the fire with exaggerated casualness, each pretending not to watch the others, but every muscle taut with anticipation. Even the omega, Socket, had begun to swagger a little, emboldened. Annabeth, perched atop her basalt dais, let her gaze wander over the pack, making note of which hounds gravitated toward her, which bristled at the scent of cooked food, which remained steadfastly loyal to the aging, increasingly irritable alpha.

The alpha female had not taken kindly to this disruption. Where once she’d ruled through a simple calculus of fear and violence, she now found her authority constantly undermined by the sight of her subordinates drooling over strange, smoky morsels. She’d begun to pace, a ceaseless back-and-forth that wore a deep trench in the volcanic floor. Annabeth watched her with the same detached curiosity she’d once reserved for predatory teachers or captors; she understood, intuitively, that absolute authority was always one bad day from collapsing into chaos.

The embers of rebellion smoldered in the cave for three nights before Annabeth put her final plan in motion. She waited until the pack had finished their mock-hunt-a pantomime in which she played the part of prey, letting herself be “caught” and then wriggling free so the hounds could chase her anew-and then, when the energy in the chamber was at its most electric, she ignited the next stage.

She dragged a chunk of half-charred gorgon arm from the fire and let the scent permeate the air. The hounds froze, their heads snapping to attention, every eye locked on her. Even the alpha, perched on her ledge, bristled with unease. Annabeth broke the meat into pieces, tossing a scrap to Socket, then another to the lowest-ranking female in the pack. she no longer pretended to drop the food, no longer pretended it was being stolen from her, no longer bothered with pretense. She waited, counting the seconds, feeling the alpha’s resentment curdle into open hostility.

The moment came as she’d predicted: the alpha leapt from her perch in a parabola of fury, jaws wide and ears back with rage. She landed between Annabeth and the fire, scattering the other hounds with a single, guttural bark. She advanced on Annabeth, hackles raised so high they made her appear twice as large, her breath coming in ragged, sulfurous bursts.

Annabeth felt her own adrenaline surge, but she kept her body loose, her expression neutral, her mind running three steps ahead. She had no illusions about her odds in a direct confrontation. The alpha was faster, stronger, and had killed for less. But the beautiful thing about social animals, she reflected, was that their every action was a performance for their peers.

She made a show of baring her neck, flattening herself to the basalt shelf, even letting her hands tremble. The alpha lunged-and Annabeth, drawing on every muscle memory left from a thousand sparring matches, rolled to the side. The hound’s teeth grazed her shoulder, tearing the fabric and scoring the flesh beneath, but Annabeth had prepared for pain. She screamed, letting the sound echo off the cavern walls, a cry so sharp and primal that the entire pack recoiled, startled. Blood welled instantly, hot and slick. The alpha, triumphant, planted one foot atop Annabeth’s chest and howled, a long, triumphant ululation that should have cemented her dominance for another year.

But Annabeth had been counting on the spectacle. She thrashed in terror, flailing sideways, dislodging the hound’s grip just enough to scramble upright. Annabeth howled, a poorly mimicked sound that she had only heard once before. The same howl that the alpha had used to summon reinforcements and kill Percy. Annabeth was, in their own language, asking for help. Socket responded first, sprinting across the cave in a blur of muscle and desperation. The smallest hound slammed into the alpha’s hind leg, teeth sinking deep into the tendon. The others hesitated-a single, collective intake of breath-then surged forward as a mob.

The cave erupted into chaos. Hounds collided in a flurry of claws and teeth, the boundaries of allegiance dissolving in a heartbeat. Annabeth, still bleeding, crawled backward to her shelf, heart hammering as she watched the carnage unfold. She saw Socket clamped onto the alpha’s throat, saw the beta males battering her flanks, saw the rest of the pack wait at the periphery, uncertain whether to join the fray or simply bear witness.

She could have left it there, let the hounds settle their own hierarchy with blood and violence. But Annabeth wanted revenge. So she reached for her Firestarter-a chunk of rock she’d spent days now striking for sparks, its edge now keen enough to split hair. A weapon made in secret, She waited for the fight to roll closer.

When the moment came, Annabeth didn’t hesitate. She launched herself from the shelf, driving the sharpened stone into the base of the alpha’s neck with all her weight behind it. There was a wet, crunching sound, and the hound collapsed instantly, its body twitching for only a second before falling still.

The air was thick with blood and burning hair. The pack froze, stunned into silence by the abruptness of it all. Annabeth, panting and lightheaded, rose unsteadily to her feet. She stared down at the corpse of the alpha, then turned slowly to face the rest of the pack.

For one long, disorienting moment, Annabeth felt as if she’d been doused in cold water: the world contracted to a single point of silence, the only sound her own blood thundering in her ears. She stood over the corpse of the alpha, still holding the rock that had ended her, but the impulse that had driven her to violence-rage, hunger, the desperate need for revenge against the beast that had killed her love-had already begun to dissipate, leaving only the raw aftertaste of power and exhaustion. The pack milled before her, five black shapes, each barely distinct from the shadows clinging to the walls. They stared at her, their heads tilted in an uncanny unison, eyes wide and glassy.

Annabeth had spent her life surrounded by monsters, but she’d never seen such an honest bewilderment on the face of a predator. She looked into their eyes and saw-momentarily, impossibly-not the glint of violence or vengeance, but the wary, wincing hope of orphans. It was a feeling she recognized with the same ache she felt when she glimpsed her own reflection in the surface of the camp lake: a kind of battered longing, cruelly persistent, that neither time nor trauma could ever quite stamp out. For a moment, she pitied the hounds, hated the way that pity made her feel kin to them.

And then she realized something was off.

There were only five. There should have been six hounds in the circle, including Socket- missing an eye, the smallest, the one marked with a singed muzzle, the one who slept closest to her fire, who’d once dragged her a strip of raw meat as a gift and then spent the night curled protectively at the base of her stone shelf. Socket was gone.

The vertigo of victory dissolved into panic. Annabeth scanned the chaos of the cavern, her gaze catching on a smear of blood leading away from the fire. She called out his name, voice raw. There was a shuffling noise from beyond the edge of the torchlight, followed by a soft, helpless whine.

She found Socket in a shallow alcove near the den’s mouth, half-hidden behind a pile of scavenged bones. He had dragged himself away from the melee, leaving a bright trail on the obsidian. His sides rose and fell, shallow and frantic, and his back legs splayed at wrong angles from gouges that had nearly severed muscle from bone. His fur, always the softest and least mangy of the pack, was now so matted with blood and volcanic grit that it seemed the color of rust. He licked the wound on his forelimb, tongue flickering, but each movement made him whimper anew. The sound was so pitiful-so small, so unguarded-that Annabeth’s composure nearly splintered.

She dropped the killing stone and knelt beside Socket, heedless of the sharp pebbles biting into her knees. He turned his head toward her, and for a moment she saw not the hellbeast of Greek legend, but the trembling, wounded thing beneath. He tried to wag his tail, but the effort made his entire body spasm. A line of drool, pink with blood, thread from his lip. Annabeth reached out, unsure if the hound would bite in his agony, but Socket only scooted closer, nuzzling his muzzle into the crook of her arm, searching her face with frantic, questioning eyes.

It was grotesque, she supposed, the way she cared. She had spent days telling herself that her affection was nothing but a tool, a calculated adaptation to win the trust of the pack. But there was no calculation left in her now, no room for games or strategies. She had killed their alpha, but the spoils of her revolution felt suddenly and sickeningly hollow.

Annabeth pressed her hand to Socket’s side, feeling the flutter of his heartbeat against her palm. She murmured to him softly, words in Greek and English alike, hoping the music of her voice might dull the pain. She stroked his ears, wiped the blood from his snout, and when he shuddered uncontrollably, she wrapped her arms around his neck and held him as tightly as she dared. She didn’t know what else to do except bear witness.

The other hounds gathered in a loose semicircle around her, keeping their distance. Their hackles were flat now, their eyes dimmed with exhaustion. Every so often, one would whine, low and mournful. Above them all, the corpse of the alpha lay cooling in a pool of its own blood, the firelight painting the black fur with a sickly orange sheen.

Annabeth rocked back and forth, clutching Socket with both hands, and let herself sob. The sound echoed off the domed basalt, mixing with the hounds’ whimpers, a broken melody of loss and imperfect triumph. She didn’t try to stop the tears, didn’t try to tell herself it was weakness. She knew now that love and violence were just two faces of the same coin, and that some debts could never be settled cleanly.

The hound’s breathing slowed, each inhale shallower than the last. Annabeth smoothed the fur behind his ears and whispered a steady litany of apologies and promises: that it wouldn’t hurt for long, that he’d done well, that she was proud of him. She said it for herself as much as for the hound.

When Socket’s chest stopped moving, she laid his head gently on her lap and closed his eye with her thumb. The moment hung suspended, quiet. She had to keep moving. She had a pack to lead now.

Chapter Text

Grover Underwood, immortal Lord of the Wild, had pictured the position as an epic, sprawling burden-weighty, yes, but with grandeur. The reality was more tedious, less Greek epic and more local government, complete with endless squabbles, mountains of paperwork, and a client base both immortal and impossibly petty. It was as if, in the aftermath of Pan’s passing, wildness had elected to manage itself in the style of the world’s worst Homeowners’ Association, with Grover as its frazzled, perpetually over-caffeinated president. Every dryad, naiad, satyr, karpas, centaur, wood sprite, and river goddess in the Western Hemisphere seemed to know precisely where to find him: in their own backyards, on the wind, through a knot in the trunk of any old growth redwood, or-most reliably-via a cacophony of psychic complaints he now had access to as an immortal.

The petty disputes of minor spirits had no business interfering with a cosmic war for the fate of the wild, but Grover’s inbox overflowed with them nonetheless. According to the latest count, nearly five hundred nymphs across the Pacific Northwest were locked in a cold war over root boundaries; a family of muskrat river daemons was demanding reparations for a beaver dam collapse, which, they insisted, had been the result of “malicious construction negligence”; a selkie collective had staged a hunger strike in protest of “human caused insufficient kelp coverage,” which Grover had to admit sounded pretty dire once he’d read the attached, thousand-page environmental impact statement. The denizens of the wild were frustratingly literate, the paperwork was incredible. He tried not to resent the magnitude of the task. After all, Pan had entrusted the Wild to him for a reason. But gods, monsters, mortals, and spirits all had a way of testing boundaries.

Grover did his best. He split his days between minor crises and existential threats. If a wildfire raged, he was there, conjuring thunderheads to drown the flames and ferrying the panicked tree spirits to safety. If a new highway threatened to cleave the last old growth groves, he appeared at town council meetings as a combative, alarmingly well-informed conservation lawyer, filibustering the zoning commission until they fled in tears. If a monster reared its head and threatened the sanctity of the wild, he was there, too. There was never an off day, never a moment to himself.

He learned to multitask the way only an immortal could. One day, as he was mediating a centuries-old land dispute between a pair of doomsday-obsessed mole spirits deep beneath the Willamette Valley, he simultaneously spearheaded a reforestation campaign in Patagonia. It was then that he realized something had changed in him, something both exhilarating and a little bit terrifying: he was literally in two places at once.

Splitting consciousness was usually the power of major gods-Poseidon, Artemis, the like. Not mere satyrs, no matter how many centuries they’d aged or how many titles they’d inherited. But when he tested it, he found the split wasn’t just once. He could be one Grover in Portland, testifying before the city council on behalf of the new urban wetlands, while a second Grover was deep in the Redwood National Park, soothing a traumatized redwood dryad whose best friend had been clear-cut by an illegal timber operation. If he concentrated, he could have a third, perhaps even a fourth Grover mediating an interspecies summit in the Everglades, or infiltrating the boardroom of a multinational logging consortium, sowing confusion and guilt in the hearts of their executive team.

It was exhilarating. It was exhausting. And it was, frankly, a little bit addictive.

It was one of those situations that he considered abusing such powers to escape a meeting. A high-profile summit, not the sort of informal, mossy under-the-log gathering satyrs prefer, but an affair of dazzlingly complex politics and even more dazzling egos. They’d commandeered a college amphitheater for the occasion-and seeing the menagerie of woodland creatures in a modern school was a sight- Grover perched on the edge of his metal folding chair seat along with a hundred-odd minor immortals, nymphs, a storm spirit delegation, and at least two attendees who had not yet been identified as animal, vegetable, mineral, or otherwise. At the podium stood Notus, god of the south wind, decorated in linen and bronze, haloed by a humid corona that made sitting near him unpleasant.

Supposedly, the agenda covered topics of immense consequence: the encroachment of mortals into wetlands, the persistent problem of microplastics, the specific movements of Gaea’s forces, of an entire tributary becoming suddenly sentient and refusing to flow downstream. There were position statements. There were translation staff. There was a stack of environmental impact studies taller than Grover himself, even with the horns. Grover was meant to be paying attention, meant to be wrangling the room, he was hardly listening.

That was when it hit, a rupture of pain, a spike of such intensity that for an instant, Grover’s awareness was simply annihilated. His consciousness buckled and doubled, like a tree split by a lightning bolt. The agony was total, all-consuming, the kind of pain that would’ve killed a mortal. It was an unmistakable sensation, his empathy link with Percy had broken. This pain was his soul trying to tear free from his skin and follow his friend downward.

But Grover was not mortal. Not anymore. He survived, and remembered, in fragments, what happened next.

He convulsed, knees buckling against the carpet. The river nymphs seated nearby recoiled as he toppled forward, a great ungainly crash, scattering papers, pencils, and a three-ring binder of annotated wetland restoration projects. He tried to compartmentalize the sensation, to split off the agony. He managed, barely, to twist the pain into a shell and wrap it around an auxiliary copy of himself. It was like pulling a sick twin out of your own ribcage; the process was rough, imprecise, shattering.

The new Grover was born not into the world, but into his grave, wailing and writhing, a thing of pure, undiluted suffering. The assembly stopped dead. Notus’s threat trailed into silence, the wind god’s mouth still open in shock. The selkie delegation huddled together. spirits looked away, faces green with shared horror.

Grover, the original, slumped against his seat, shivering, the pain in his mind reduced to a manageable, if still spectacular, migraine. He could sense the second Grover-the one now curled on the floor, clutching at his head, blood trickling from nose and ears and the corners of his wide, terrified eyes.

As his vision cleared, and sound seeped back in, slow and uncertain. He looked down and saw this version of himself sprawled on the floor, writhing, each movement jagged and wild. Screaming, hoarse and raw, tearing at his own fur, blood streaming from his eyes, twin lines drawn by gravity, thick and red leaving a sticky arc across his cheek and seeping into the carpet. The two Grovers-one slumped, one writhing-were now the axis of the assembly’s attention. Grover could feel the way the second him vibrated along the same psychic latticework, singing a note of pure anguish that only he could hear. Something was deeply, cosmically wrong.

Tentatively, Grover reached out. His hand moved through the stilled air, fingertips trembling, and made contact with his counterpart’s arm. The skin was feverish, slick with sweat and blood, and the touch triggered a reaction. The fallen Grover’s hand shot out and clamped around his wrist, icy and impossibly strong. Grover’s breath stopped in his chest. The two of them, the original and the echo-stared into each other’s eyes.

For a single moment, the doubles eyes gleamed with an uncanny lucidity. “Listen,” he croaked, words catching on every ragged breath. “The great miracle-it’s coming. We have to be ready, you hear me?” The last word was a gurgle. His teeth were stained in red. “The great miracle. The death of gods, immortals-I, do you see it? I see it now. The miracle. I can see it-”

The rest was lost in low, pained mumbles. The assembly’s silence had become a void, Grovers death rattles heard by many present. The echoes bounced off Grover’s skull, each time a little duller, a little more final. He felt the impossible weight of fate pressing on him. The Great Miracle?

Grover held himself as he died, the fallen body finally went limp. The fingers unclenched from Grover’s wrist with a twitch and fell away. The eyes rolled up, pupils dilated and unseeing. he watched himself die, the corpse was still, an object now, leaking blood from every orifice. A piece of Grovers soul gone along with it.

Grover’s own breathing came in shallow gasps. He was aware of Notus straightening at the podium, of the selkies shivering in their plastic chairs, of dryads weeping softly behind their hands. No one moved. No one dared. The air was charged with the electric terror of the supernatural violation they had just witnessed. Grover knew he should say something, anything, but he had no words.

Somebody finally spoke-a voice lost in the crowd. “What the fuck.”

He turned then, facing the crowd, and when he spoke, his voice was as official as he could make it. “I-we’ve lost the empathy bond. he’s dead.”

“Percy Jackson is dead.”

Chapter Text

Annabeth had never forgotten about the doors of death, but their importance had been put on the backburner in the face of more immediate terrors. The memory returned as a humiliation, a slap across the face, the memory of her own collapse of purpose like a fever dream she’d permitted to linger too long. how ridiculous it seemed, now, to have spent hours-or was it days?-in abject personal mourning, as if Percy’s death meant the death of her mission. She scolded herself for her weakness, then, in the next breath, felt a kind of startled self-disgust for being so clinical. Was she just a machine, a creature of plans and failure protocols? Shouldn’t Percy’s death have reduced her to ruin, at least for a little while? Wasn’t it expected, wasn’t it even necessary, to break down after a loss like that?

She found she had no patience for the debate. She let out a long, audible sigh that startled the hellhounds at her feet. Enough. She would keep moving. She would put one foot in front of the other. Arguing with herself about duty and feeling was a luxury.

But first things first: Annabeth needed a haircut. She scavenged her striking rock-the same one she’d used to pierce the alpha’s neck only a day before-finding it crusted with dried blood she tried and failed to scrape off. She felt, in a strange way, sentimental about it now. She would keep it, maybe shape it into a spearhead, if she ever found something worthy of a haft. She went to the little seep of water, washing the stone and her hands, and with a few quick, rough hacks, rid herself of the matted, filth-caked hair. It was a literal and metaphorical weight off her head. it felt silly to be this relieved by a haircut but, well…

The dogs, now that they actually listened to her, were surprisingly easy to train. Easier than Annabeth would have ever dared hope. Progress through the pit came fast-too fast, in fact, or so her memory and instincts kept whispering. They learned at an unnatural speed, or maybe she did-she wasn’t sure anymore if the pack was adapting to her, or if she was adapting to them. It was more than teaching them to heel, to follow, to sit or stay; she trained them to flank, to herd, to drive prey into choke points, to circle back and ambush from behind. She taught them to read her gestures, attune to her voice, to execute on plans without hesitation. The previous alpha had them half trained already, but Annabeth finished the job.

They made steady progress through the mountains. How long had she been in Tartarus? days, at least. weeks if she was unlucky, the timeline was fuzzy in her head. they were supposed to meet their friends on the other end, was that even possible now? she tried not to linger on those thoughts, they left a heavy weight in her gut that sat unpleasantly for hours. The ridges gave way, eventually, to a new wasteland: a forest of petrified trees, their trunks warped and blackened, some etched with faces twisted in agony. Annabeth swore the faces moved when she wasn’t looking, the expressions shifting, eyes following her as she passed. She kept her gaze forward, knife in hand.

They picked up a companion on the border of the twisted forest. A cat, small and black, sometimes an actual skeleton, sometimes a regular purring thing. It trotted up to their fire one night, utterly unafraid, and took a hunk of meat right out from under their hands. The kitten stayed.

She held the kitten up to her face, studying it. “I’ll name you Robert” she told the kitten.

the cat gave her the stink eye and tried to wiggle out of her grip, maybe he disapproved of the name, oh well.

Rob was no help at all, but sweet as sugar. Wild, impossible to train, but he fit in with them from the first moment, as if he’d always belonged. The dogs would even lick the cat clean, their tongues careful and slow. Annabeth didn't know why she trusted the thing so much. She definitely shouldn't, but it felt right to have it. Fated.

But the cost of forward motion was steep. Every step demanded payment in flesh. Five hellhounds to feed, and herself to keep alive. The sheer volume of food required to keep the pack healthy meant that, though she led them, she was reliant on them, and was still very much their captive. The pack liked her, maybe even trusted her, but their loyalty was transactional. She fed them, and they followed. That was the bone-deep truth of their arrangement.

The most recent of many corpses had been a dracnae-a serpent-woman, the kind Annabeth had fought a dozen times before on the surface. She didn’t realize what she was doing until after the first cut, her obsidian knife already splitting the torso open from collarbone to navel. Only then did the horror hit her: monster or not, snake tail and fangs included, the torso and face were human. Staring down at her own hands, buried in the woman’s chest, stained gold, Annabeth didn’t see a monster at all.

She jerked away from the body, cold shivers running through her, nausea rising. She’d been so hungry she hadn’t hesitated. Was she really that far gone? She whistled sharply, a simple command to eat. She would not be cooking today. She stumbled to a puddle, scrubbing at her hands to wash off the golden ichor. She scrubbed until her skin was angry red, but the jaundiced yellow stains on her hands and forearms wouldn’t come out-not after so many monster corpses. She caught her reflection in the water: an angry red scar tracing her hairline, the ruined right half of her face and empty eye socket, the yellow-stained hands, the pale withered limbs, dressed in only pants torn off at the thigh, and a filthy slowly disintegrating bra. She hardly looked human. She hardly felt it. Panic closed in, tight and suffocating.

The sounds of the hounds eating-the wet tearing, the splinter of monster bone-hammered at Annabeth’s already fraying composure. She pressed her hands tight over her ears, but it did nothing to muffle the abhorrent, greedy snarl and slurp of the pack devouring their kill. Each crunch sent a spike of revulsion through her. Why did they never just turn to dust down here? On the surface, monsters died and mercifully disintegrated, leaving only a memory, a bad story to be retold at the campfire. Down here, in Tartarus, the simple horror of hunger ruled.

She missed Percy with such force it tried to suffocated her. The ache was sharp, it almost felt like a physical attack-a spear through the ribs, a knife in the kidney. She could picture his face with painful clarity. the lopsided grin, the dimple in his smile, the wild, dark hair always in his eyes. The way he would have tried to make her laugh, even in a nightmare like this. But she was alone, and the silence of his absence was more terrible than anything.

She wiped her face, furious to find it wet, and rose to her feet, able to breathe better as her panic attack-she acknowledged it as such-slowly ebbed away. She watched the hounds finish their meal. She counted their heads, plus rob, made sure none were lagging behind, that all were sated. She was the only one going hungry today. Setting her sights on the barely visible path ahead, she would keep moving. She would put one foot in front of the other. She would not let herself be destroyed by what she’d already survived.

It was time to hunt again, unfortunately. At first, it was just as it always was: she sent her two best hounds ahead, their bodies low, their eyes fixed, to flush out the wounded harpy. The thing could not fly, could barely run, and the hounds pressed it forward, relentless, until it was cornered, wings scraping the dirt, nowhere left to go. The rest of the pack closed in, silent and sure, hemming it in from all sides.

But then the thing began to beg for its life. Annabeth froze. Monsters didn’t beg. Not here. Not in Tartarus, where dying was just a miserable, agonizing pause before the next round. It was unheard of.

The harpy’s voice was piercing, frantic, scraping at her ears. There was terror in it, real terror, and that was almost worse. Annabeth gave the command, “Sit.” and stepped forward alone.

Up close, the harpy was a ruin: hands twisted and useless, wings torn through with holes, its body shaking. It wept, loud and wet, snot streaming, words tumbling out in a desperate, broken plea to be spared.

Annabeth had no patience for pretense, not here, not now. She leveled her makeshift spear-made with the striking stone and a petrified branch-and fixed the harpy with a flat, unblinking stare. “Why?” she demanded.

The harpy froze. Its wings trembled, eyes wide and black and unreadable, breath coming in sharp, shallow bursts. Annabeth guessed it had never made it this far before. Probably, every other time, it had been killed outright. She let the silence stretch, then asked again, voice low and cold: “Why should I spare your life? My dogs are hungry.” Somewhere, deep down, Annabeth flinched. The words sounded cruel, even to her.

“I can be useful!” the harpy insisted. “I know how to find things!”

Annabeth eyed the creature’s ruined wings and mangled hands, skepticism prickling beneath her exhaustion. Those injuries looked debilitating. “Can you find the Doors of Death?”

“Oh, that one’s easy. Just follow any of the rivers downstream. They all lead to the heart of Tartarus eventually.”

“…”

“…”

“Can you find edible plants?”

“Yeah, I know of a couple.”

“You’re on the team.”

So, apparently, Annabeth had acquired two new party members while slogging through the forest: the sometimes-skeleton cat, Robert, and a disabled harpy who introduced herself as Carla. Annabeth watched the harpy walk between the two dogs, stiff as a corpse, sweating bullets, eyes darting sideways. Carla was terrified. She probably felt like a captive. Annabeth hadn’t had anyone to talk to in ages; the temptation was too much.

“Why don’t you just bite the bullet and let yourself die? Those injuries seem worth regenerating for.”

The harpy gave her a look, confused by the question. Then squinted, then sniffed the air, testing it. “you do have an odd scent… Are you… a goddess? You have your own immortality? You don’t have to rely on him?”

Annabeth was surprised by the assumption, but played along. “Uh, something like that. What do you mean, rely on him?”

“For us normal folk, we rely on HIM for our immortality. If I wanted to die to regenerate injuries like you said, that would be risky. The big man does not like when you waste your life. You don’t want to risk him deciding you don’t need to be reborn because you didn’t fight for it hard enough last time.”

“You mean Tartarus,” Annabeth clarified.

“Don’t say his name,” Carla hissed, glancing around as if he might materialize out of the shadows.

A small smirk tugged at Annabeth’s mouth. “Tartarus,” she said again.

Carla flinched. “Don’t say that!” she despaired.

“Tartarus,” Annabeth stage-whispered.

The harpy stomped her foot, feathers bristling. “STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!” she demanded, voice cracking with childish panic.

Annabeth couldn’t help it-the laugh burst out of her, sharp and bright, the first since she’d landed in this hellhole.

Apparently, her party was destined to grow. Carla did know how to find things, just as she’d claimed. She led them to cleaner water, to edible plants the dogs ignored. A surprising boon: Carla’s knowledge for turning bramble thorns into sewing needles. Cloth, as Carla explained, was rare and precious in Tartarus; the ability to mend it was just as valuable. If Carla had entertained any thoughts of escape, she’d lost them in recent days. Safety in numbers was a novelty here, and once she realized the dogs wouldn’t eat her-in fact, one let her ride on its back for a while-she seemed content to stick with them, heading toward the Doors of Death.

Monsters usually stuck to their own kind. That was the rule, and it made their little procession-a pair of cripples, a skeleton cat, and five shaggy hellhounds-a spectacle as they pushed deeper into the thickening woods of Tartarus. The forest pressed close, trunks twisted and faces in the bark more animated now, eyes flickering open, mouths groaning low and miserable as the group passed. The air was heavy with white fog, pooling around the petrified branches, so the trees seemed crowned with clouds instead of leaves. And the silence, broken only by the distant moans, suggested that prey was growing scarce. Other monsters were smart enough to keep away.

Then a sickly green glow began to seep through the fog ahead, as if the place needed to be any more unsettling. There was no way to sneak up on whatever was waiting. The dogs fanned out, simple and direct, forming a V and stalking toward the light. The source was a clearing, carpeted with flowers. Not normal flowers, but dozens of bizarre, garish blooms: petals striped or polka-dotted, some shaped like skulls, all oozing glowing green nectar. In the center, hunched and shuddering, was a figure swaddled in a heavy cloak, clutching a shield to its chest and sobbing like a child with a teddy bear.

Every instinct in Annabeth screamed at her to stop. Danger. Enemy. Do not approach. like a neon sign pinned above its head. She didn’t ignore warnings like that. “Heel,” she hissed, sharp and low, to the three dogs closest to her. None of them so much as flicked an ear. They just kept prowling, low and silent, toward the clearing. “Heel,” she tried again, louder, panic rising like bile at her sudden loss on control. The dogs didn’t even pause. Annabeth’s eyes darted from the hounds to the weeping figure, then back again. She needed the dogs. She couldn’t run alone. She wouldn’t last in. But jumping a humanoid generating toxic localized floral phenomena, would surely get also get her killed. oh damn it all.

“HEEL!” she shouted, voice cracking.

The dogs didn’t stop. They instead took her yell as a signal, and lunged.

Everything went wrong at once. The first dog lunged, and got a snout full of shield for its trouble. It recoiled, whining, paws scrambling for purchase as it tumbled backward, landing hard. It clawed at its own skull, desperate, raking furrows down its face as if it could dig something out of its head. Then it went still. Breathing, but unmoving. Whining, blind, lost in pain. Slowly bleeding to death.

The flowers responded instantly. They pulsed, spewing clouds of glowing green and yellow poison that hissed and sizzled on contact, sending up plumes of sulfuric smoke. Visibility dropped to nothing. Breathing became a struggle. Pools of acid formed, fast, turning the battlefield into a marsh of burning liquid. The second dog went down next. It landed in an ankle-deep puddle after its lunge was dodged, and the scream that followed was pure agony. The dog tried to move, but when it lifted its front paws, the fur was gone, burned away, flesh exposed and sloughing off in strips. It toppled forward, collapsing into the acid, howling until its throat dissolved. What was left was a steaming, stinking pile of matter, impossible to recognize.

This can’t be happening. No, no, no. She clutched her spear tighter, the jagged obsidian point suddenly useless in her grip.

“You damn mutts!” The old woman shrieked at the three remaining hounds, waving her shield wildly. “What on Gaea made you do that!?” Her head snapped, sharp and unnatural, toward Annabeth’s position at the edge of the clearing. The grin that spread across her face was pure malice. even as her eyes continue to weep. “Ooooh hoooh,” she trilled, voice wobbling with sick delight. “The sweet taste of misery. Of loss.”

“Come on out, little girl~” The ancient monster stalked forward, eyes fixed on Annabeth. “Come meet Akhlys! All that misery you radiate just makes me want to eat you up!”

Annabeth tried to stumble back, but there was nowhere to go. No sign of Carla, no sign of the cat. Akhlys was closing in, gliding over the ground, and Annabeth could feel the goddess’s presence like a cold, wet shroud. From the corner of her eye, a red glint: hellhound. She whistled, sharp and low-one of the only command she’d had time to teach them. Eat.

Three hellhounds hit at once. The first lunged for Akhlys’s throat, but Misery’s claws ripped it open before it could clamp down. The other two didn’t hesitate. Jaws locked on arm and hip, dragging the goddess down. Annabeth moved, spear ready, already calculating the angle for a killing thrust. She was almost on top of Akhlys when the shield came up-a gorgon’s face, warped and perfect. Fear, cold and halting, slammed into her.

She saw her worst fears. Luke’s betrayal. The endless fall into Tartarus. Percy’s death, more vivid than any nightmare. The moment she’d given up, accepted death in that cave, done everything except finish the job. The first taste of monster flesh, the horror of it. The whole waking hell of Tartarus, flashing behind her eyes at impossible speed.

Was that it? Was this all? Her worst fears, her secrets? But these were old wounds, not new ones. She’d survived them. She was still here. Not whole, not okay, but alive. These fears hadn’t stopped her before. She wouldn’t let them now. The ground steadied under her feet as the fear ebbed. She looked at Akhlys again: goddess of misery, pinned by two tons of black muscle. How do you kill misery? Not with bliss. Misery could snuff out joy like water on a flame. No, you had to keep moving, keep pushing, even when it hurt. You needed hope. Even if it was delusional, even if it was just a story you told yourself, you had to believe you could make it out, free the doors, get back to the surface. Alright then, for Percy.

Akhlys tore free of one hound, losing her right arm in the process. She didn’t even flinch. She was already turning on the next hound when Annabeth struck. The spear drove straight through Akhlys’s chest, deep and true. For a moment, they both stared at the ichor leaking out, thick and black. Then Akhlys started to laugh, wet and ragged, flecks of blood on her teeth.

“You need-guh-to do better to kill a goddess,” she rasped.

Annabeth whistled again. The hound lunged, and this time Akhlys lost her head. The body hung for a second on the end of the spear, then toppled to the ground. Annabeth stood over it, chest heaving, her one good eye watering from the fumes. Three bodies lay scattered across the clearing. The price of victory was steep.

She looked down at the corpse, raised her spear, and stabbed it again. “Stupid.” Another thrust. “Fucking.” A new wound, ichor spraying hot and fresh. “GODDESS!” She kept stabbing, wishing misery could feel every blow.

Chapter Text

Irene was a telekhine of rare accomplishment, which was not to say she was rare, or even that she was especially accomplished, only that she had survived longer and learned more than most of her kind. Her people had been bred for utility, hammered into their roles by cruel gods and the even less forgiving traditions of their bloodlines. She was a Smith by trade, and learned from her father, who wore his pride openly and loved to brag of her accomplishments.

Under his careful tutelage, she had been the youngest smith selected for a great honor-she was to be a part of the team tasked with reforging Kronos’s scythe. Irene remembered the anticipation, the disgusted thrill of working with materials banned for eons. She remembered the smell, sharp and metal-rich. She remembered her father’s hand closing over hers as they set the crucible, his grip too tight, hiding his trembling. She remembered the shape of the blade before the disaster.

Things had gone spectacularly wrong, spectacularly quickly, when Percy Jackson had shown up. The memory of him was a blur of lava and rage. Even now, Irene could not say with certainty if he had meant to kill everyone, or if the killing was just a byproduct of his real objective, which was to survive. The last moments of her first life were agony, as the eruption of Mt. St. Helens atomized her flesh, and left her bones ash.

After death, there was nothing, or at least nothing she could remember. Her rebirth had been slow and undignified, her atoms condensing drop by excruciating drop in some backwater of Tartarus, away from her home and her people. When at last she pieced herself together, she felt only the ache of incomplete regeneration and the low, gnawing anxiety of not knowing if she would ever be whole again. Her father, when he found her, had been visibly relieved-though he disguised it with a string of curses, berating her for taking so long, as if she had been running errands and not dead.

There had been no guarantee that she would regenerate close to their home on the edge of the Dead Sea, which in Tartarus was not a sea at all, but a vast concavity filled with the mineral runoff of a thousand failed civilizations. To call it “home” was to be generous. The telekhine settlement was more like a hive: clusters of cave-homes carved into the sides of cliffs, each with a single heavy stone door that could withstand a battering ram. Interiors devoid of light because windows were a luxury for the suicidal.

But Irene hated the indoors. She had always yearned for the surface, for the horizon and the cool open air. Here, on the outskirts, there were no such amenities. There were fifteen such homes, bound together by the shared use of a single forge. The settlement was a quaint, a relic of a time when they had been sponsored by more powerful beings.

That morning, Irene had woken up to the sound of her father arguing with a neighbor over a portion of iron that had gone missing. The quarrel was pointless-there was plenty of iron. But telekhine love to argue, and her father was the loudest of all. She could hear his voice echoing through the tunnels even after he’d left for the blacksmith’s hall, a sort of communal forge.

Irene spent the morning cataloguing the new inventory, counting ingots and listing their impurities. She thought often about escaping to the surface, but she knew it was pointless. Outside of Tartarus, every god, demigod, and hero wanted her kind dead. Inside, the only careers open to her were smithing or being eaten by something larger. But somehow it was still safer.

It was just as she was finishing that she heard a commotion outside. Yelling, then a wet, organic noise that she recognized instantly as the sound of a body hitting stone. Irene set down her tools and moved to the door, her heart pounding not with fear but with a kind of sick curiosity. She knew she shouldn’t go outside, that her father would not approve. “You are a Smith! Not a warrior! It is not safe for you!” he would say-and she chuckled, because even in her mind his voice bellowed.

She thought he was being ridiculous. She was a Smith, yes, untrained in combat, yes, but it wasn’t like she was helpless. She’d survived Tartarus, survived death itself. She just wanted to take a look at what was going on, to see if the day’s violence was of the ordinary or extraordinary kind.

With effort she pushed aside the large stone boulder acting as a door and peered out. The air outside was thick with smoke and the coppery tang of blood. The settlement’s plaza was a jagged expanse of bare rock with a few crude benches arrayed around the perimeter. In the center of the plaza was a body, cut open at the waist. Irene recognized it immediately: her neighbor, the one her father had been arguing with that morning. The corpse was perfectly bisected, the guts still steaming where the cool air hit them. Ichor had gushed from the two halves freely, and now formed a deep puddle around the body. One hand still clutching a spear, the hilt glistening with fresh blood.

Irene grimaced. She had seen worse, but not often. She considered going back inside and pretending not to have seen, but she was already halfway out the door before the thought finished forming. She needed to understand what was happening, needed to know if this was a targeted attack or just a random act of predation. She skirted the perimeter of the plaza, keeping to the shadows.

A little further on, around a blind curve, she saw the enemy. And for an instant, her mind simply refused to accept the evidence of her eyes. No, she thought, not possible. Couldn’t be. It was literally impossible. But the mind is a poor fortress against reality, and as she watched, she realized with mounting horror that it was true: the attacker was Percy Jackson. The boy who had ended her life in fire. The boy who was supposed to be a hero, but who killed as efficiently and without remorse as any monster she had ever met.

He was half-surrounded by telekhine’s, outnumbered six to one. Yet he moved like water, like hunger, like the idea of death made manifest. A trail of corpses already led toward him, and in the time it took Irene to blink, another body joined the pile. Irene felt a surge of something-fear, or hatred, or both-and knew she had to do something. She had to help.

She scanned the melee for her father and spotted him at the edge of the fray, his snout gray with stress, his claws gripping a smith’s hammer as if it could stand against a demigod’s blade. Irene’s heart clenched. In the time it took her to scramble down the rocks, three more of her people fell, their bodies collapsing in pools of ichor that steadily grew larger.

No, she thought, not again.

Her father fought his way to the front, launching a flurry of blows that would have pulverized any normal opponent. Percy blocked each one with fluid ease, his sword a blur of wet bronze.

No no no no, please, she was almost there.

Her father fell, Riptide driven through his skull in a single, precise thrust. She screamed-a raw, jagged sound, all horror and rage-and lunged, spear leveled at the boy’s heart. But the cry destroyed her advantage. He twisted, just enough, and the point plunged off-target, not into the heart, but slamming through ribs, shredding lung. Close, but not enough.

There was a heartbeat of satisfaction: the way he howled, the jolt of the spear biting deep into living flesh. That should have slowed him. It didn’t. Without a second’s hesitation, he slashed the spear shaft in half, like it was nothing, leaving the blade buried in his own chest. The follow-up cut was so fast it nearly took her head clean off her shoulders. She scrambled back, cold fear crawling up her spine, staring at this boy, this monster, because how in Hades was he still moving that fast with a spear in his chest?

She turned to run. Two strides, maybe. She thought she could make space, find another weapon, breathe. Instead her muscles seized involuntarily, locking up in an agony that sent her sprawling, face-first, into a golden pool of blood. The taste of it flooded her mouth and nose, stifling her; she gasped, choking on Ichor as her body convulsed, half-submerged in someone else’s life. For a split second she registered a new, sharp agony at her neck-and then the world flickered out. Blackness, final and absolute. Irene died.

-----

Even by Tartarus standards, Percy Jackson was having a miserable day. The trek out of the dead sea had been long, itchy, and lonely. He needed to reach the doors of death, wherever they might be, but the dead sea offered nothing: no guidance, no intelligence, only endless stillness. So when he glimpsed the jagged edge of that desolation, and a lone telekhine scavenging along the perimeter, relief flickered through him-a pale, stubborn spark in the gloom. Pinning the creature had been almost laughably simple. His sword, always glowing faintly in the dim Tartarus light, made a convincing argument; the monster had agreed, nodding frantically, to lead him to the doors.

But of course it was a lie. Of course the beast had led him straight into a trap. Percy should have seen it-the boulders set like awkward sentries along the cliff face, the way the telekhine’s hackles rose as they drew near-but he didn’t, not until his captive started to run, barking, and more telekhine spilled from behind the stones. The fight was swift, brutal. Now Percy glared down, almost absently, at the spear lodged in his chest-a cold, perfect pain-and then at the corpse of the telekhine that had managed the lucky strike. Unusual, how they’d tried to run from him. The attempt to run had flared his temper, and it caught inside him, burning. So he reached out-not with his hands (he was still several paces away), but with something colder, deeper. He seized them with his will, grabbing the life force in their veins and the body locked, collapsed into a pool of ichor with a small, final splash.

The power ran through him, icy and absolute. Percy shivered, tasting the edge of what he could do; he could have pressed further, he knew, could have twisted the force tighter. Instead, he finished it the old way: sword to the neck, clean and silent, and everything was still again.

He scanned the perimeter, and the act of standing still was itself an effort of will, a deliberate throttling of instinct. He’d been chasing the urge again, muscle memory and animal drive overruling any higher reasoning, and now the spear lodged in his chest was the result. The pain was real enough, but the urge to move, to run or strike or react, was stronger. He caged it, forced his breathing into long, even cycles, and let logic claw its way back to the surface. Start simple: deal with the spear. The fact that it was disturbingly easy to ignore-that his mind could push it aside in favor of the next task-should have worried him, but he had no time to untangle it.

He could sense nearby water but there was no direct path, just a boulder blocking the way. He put his shoulder into it, bracing against the stone, and pain flared in his chest as he exerted himself. He expected the usual emptiness behind-a cave, perhaps dripping with water, but what waited was not a cave at all. It was a furnace, a forge, the air warped and quivering with the heat of a lava vat. The lava itself sat placid, domesticated and wholly unnatural, refusing to spill from its primitive stone basin. On a slab of rock-a sorry excuse for an anvil-a blade had been abandoned, half-forged, as if its maker had been called away mid-blow. The walls were lined with swords, beautiful things, their shapes at odds with the roughness of their creation. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care about the logic of it, or the tricks that birthed such weapons. All that mattered was the basin of water: opaque, choked with rust and slag, the cast-off dregs of a hundred quenched blades.

He went to his knees in front of it. The pain was sharpening, acid-bright now as the adrenaline ran thin, and he knew what needed to happen. This would be nothing like healing a broken ankle with rainwater. There would be no patience, no slow mending. He would have to rip the spearhead free, bleed, and try to coax life from this filth-all at once, alone, no safety net. It was a terrible plan, but better than dying slow.

He yanked the spear from his chest. Gold ichor gushed out, burning and thick, and the shock of it nearly folded him in half. The blood hit the surface of the pool, staining it, and he cursed under his breath, twisting away so no more would mix in. One hand clamped over the wound; the other plunged into the water. The liquid crawled up, hungry and cold, tracing veins, moving toward the breach.

What followed was not relief, but a riot-a thousand sensations colliding, raw and electric. It healed, yes, but it also burned, left him shivering and hollowed out. The rust in the water settled beneath his new skin, a constant itch, a memory of corrosion just below the surface. His own ichor fought the process, rushing to the wound, insistent and wild. The cursed gold blood wanted to heal, but all it did was sit and seethe and fail, leaving the real work to the water, which scoured the wound clean and rebuilt him, cell by cell. Blood and ichor kept him alive, but they were useless for healing. He was patched together by contamination and willpower, and nothing else.

He watched the process, shaking and sweating, until finally there was only a scar where the hole had been. He pressed a hand to it, marveled that the spear hadn’t gone clean through. An exit wound would have been the end; even he wasn’t arrogant enough to think otherwise. Reckless. The word echoed in his skull, but it didn’t matter. He was alive, at least for now.

Percy didn’t even glance around the forge. The place might have bristled with strange weaponry, but he felt nothing for any of it-not with Riptide in his grip. He turned, instead, to the unforgiving geometry of the landscape. Where there was a forge, there would be more. His gaze swept the field: boulders, hunched and uniform, squatted across the stone like sentinels. He remembered the telekhine slinking from behind them, had assumed they’d been lying in wait for him, teeth bared and eyes glittering. But now, uncertainty gnawed at the edges of certainty. He shoved aside another boulder, half-expecting another ambush, and found instead-a home.

It looked as if it had been gouged straight from the bones of the earth. The furniture barely qualified as such, all hacked from the same unyielding rock. A pelt hung limp over a slab of stone that passed for a bed. In one corner: a heap of iron tools, tossed aside with the carelessness of exhaustion or defeat. On the wall, a charcoal scrawl: maybe a moose, maybe a deer, antlers tangled in a guess at memory. He moved forward, footsteps scraping, into the only other room. Darkness pooled here, thick and heavy. He uncapped his sword. The blade’s dim glow bled into the walls, casting gentle shadows.

There-a chair, a stone crib, and within it, a telekhine infant. Wide, wet eyes blinked up at him, pupils dilating in the sudden light. For a moment, it seemed to weigh him, stranger or kin, and then its face crumpled. The cry that erupted was raw and immediate, a needle of panic jabbing straight through Percy’s chest. He whipped around, waiting for footsteps, for the pounding of claws on stone. Nothing. The open door gaped behind him. The wailing went on, echoing in a chamber already emptied of life.

There had never been an ambush. He’d been led, not into a killing ground, but home. The village was gone-the only thing left was this. A child, orphaned by his own hand.

He could leave. Pretend none of it existed, let the world erase what he’d done. The baby would die, starved or torn apart, unless by some miracle its parent reformed in time. Not likely. He could take the child, but the thought curdled in his stomach: he’d be ripping it from whatever it had left. He didn’t even know what it ate, much less how to keep it alive. Or, there was the third option. Quick, clean, almost an act of mercy. If its parents came back to life, maybe it would, too. Maybe its parents would find it again. Maybe they wouldn’t bother.

He gritted his teeth. Mercy. The word was a blade in his mind.

He’d always fought to survive, defended his own, but this was different. Here, he was the invader, the monster at the door. No fangs or claws necessary: just a sword, and a willingness to use it. The evidence of his violence lay outside, but the real consequence stared up at him, voice hoarse with fear.

Why should he care? Why should this matter, when nothing else did? The thought burned, acid and sharp, and Tyson’s name flickered through the haze. The baby howled on, and the sound was unbearable.

Mercy. That was all that was left.

He raised his sword above the crib, let the cold light settle on the stone, and brought it down.

Chapter Text

Irene opened her eyes, bracing for something-a shape, a color, even pain-but there was nothing. She closed them again, reflexively. Still nothing, the same blank, unyielding void. Where were her eyes? She tried to lift her hand, reach up, touch her face. Nothing happened. No sensation. No hand, no face. Just a command sent from the mind to a nonexistent appendage. Something had gone terribly, horribly wrong.

She’d died, again. That was not new; she knew the routine-the dissolution, the slow, gritty reconstruction, dust and ichor and memory crawling back into form. She waited. Waited for the familiar pull, for the first twinge of returning nerve or sinew. Nothing came. The absence was complete, total. Panic began to fizz and curdle at the edges of her mind: where was she? Was was going on?

She tried to scream, to move, to do anything at all, but her mind’s commands went nowhere, bounced off the emptiness and dissolved. The failure itched, burned, threatened to spiral into terror. Was she dead? Truly dead, not just broken and waiting for the dust to gather, but lost in this absolute void? Impossible. Death was a pause, a setback, a locked door to be battered down-not this, this weightless silence, this annihilating nothing.

Panic crashed through her now, swift and brutal, scattering her mind into a thousand fractured, terrified thoughts. Where was her father? Was he lost in this emptiness, caught and drifting somewhere in the same cold void? Would she ever see him again? No, no, no-that wasn’t fair, none of this was right. She deserved more than this. She needed another chance. Her whole being shrieked against the darkness; her spirit hammered at the silence, desperate to be heard.

«please don’t forget me»

The void grew, or split, and something-not a voice, but a presence that pressed in on all sides, heavy and deliberate. She could see nothing, but she felt it, she was no longer alone here. The emptiness had found a name, a gravity, and it was watching her now.

«Hello child»

hope sparked like lightning in her mind

«please i need to go back, i don’t deserve this»

The presence laughed, a sound that didn’t vocalize so much as detonate, a deep, full-chested bellow that shook the empty dark. Power pulsed from him in waves, each surge rippling through the void, warping its nothingness into something raw and electric. Every peal of laughter hooked into her, pain threading through her soul, peeling away fragments of memory, unraveling her bit by bit. The rhythm of his laughter forced a jagged logic into the perfect emptiness, and in those moments she glimpsed him: not a person, not truly, but a terrible enormity, impossible to comprehend, a soul mangled and stitched together from a thousand others. His face became a whirling vortex, a place where immortality dissolved-a thing never meant to be seen.

«Tartarus» She whimpered in realization

«And what kind of being are you to have such a claim on life? little thing lost in the void»

Irene knew what she was, even as her memories fuzzed around the edges, and her soul was slowly dissolved, she was still confident in who she was.

«I am a smith, daughter, and artist; And i have just as much claim on life as everyone else.» She would have declared it with a stomp of her foot and a dirty look, if she still had a body

Tartarus sighed. The force of it rolled over her, immense as his laughter had been, enough to make her want to curl inwards and vanish, to shrink from the cold that threaded every syllable he spoke.

«You, Irene, are a coward. A victim. A failure. Your life’s work amounted to nothing. You and your people were reduced to ash and bloody bits twice by the same boy. You squandered my gift of immortality shivering in caves hiding from your failures»

The words landed like blows. Shame and horror pressed down with the weight of a world, and it was nothing short of miraculous that she found any reply at all.

«You… you knew who I was the whole time.»

«I know every monster gifted a piece of my immortality. I knew you at your birth, and at your death. Your Achievements and failures, your life’s story laid bare at my feet. Judgement day has come, Irene. Why would you ever deserve a third chance at life.» Tartarus’ words remained icy and accusatory, void of any true emotion.

«Vengeance!» Irene cried desperately «I deserve the chance to find that boy, and, and…» The rest of the thought fell short, useless; and do what? She could not defeat him, not in her next life, or in her next dozen. What else could she possibly offer Tartarus?

He watched her struggle and could not help the twisted grin that grew in the vortex of his face. The first break in his composure-a hint of something hungry and dark. «He broke you» he thrummed with a sort of sick satisfaction. The first true emotion to color his soul rattling voice. «Isn’t he wonderful? Perseus is exactly what a monster should be. A being that kills with such terror and brutality that its victims don’t just die, they question their will to live.»

«Perseus took everything from me» She spat back, and that was the truth of it. Tartarus, savoring the moment, made it worse «Oh yes. Twice, even. Destroyed everything you ever loved. And the best part? He doesn’t even know who you are. Not your name, not your voice, not your face. Nothing.» The voice circled slowly, taunting her.

«Please. Why are you doing this? I didn’t do anything wrong.» Irene’s plea was threadbare, her mind was barely holding together.

«No», Tartarus agreed, the word falling heavy. «You haven’t done anything wrong. You were a smith, a daughter, an artist… But you were not a monster.» The words coiled in the void, heavy with contempt. «You disappoint me. Monster kind disappoints me. The gods have been creating such beautiful abominations that you scum can’t keep up with. I’ve been far too liberal with the continued rebirth of the weak. I played with the rules of natural selection, allowed you to cheat death for far too long. Goodbye, Irene. You are among the first of so, so many.»

Tartarus turned away, and the last fragile strand of memory-the only thing left of Irene in that endless dark-unraveled, dissolving to nothing. He did not look back. His attention shifted, hungry and restless, to Perseus.

«My little destroyer» he murmured. «Cull the weak. Spread the fear of death. I have such plans for you.»

-----

Percy was running, lungs raw and gills open wide, but it wasn’t enough; every breath stung like salt poured straight onto his wounds. The Arai were behind him, above him, everywhere, a circling, cackling doom. He hadn’t recognized what they were until they’d screamed it at him, voices like metal scraping bone: ‘WE ARE THE ARAI, OUR DEATHS WILL BRING CURSES OPUN YOU’ and blah blah blah. He had never understood less, nor appreciated more, the apparent villainous instinct to monologue and explain your plans and abilities.

He’d been completely surrounded and forced to kill an Arai in his initial escape. The curse levied on him reopened his newest scar, and the spear wound in his chest had begun to bleed anew; as if he had only just been stabbed. He cursed the telekhine who’d put the hole in him, cursed them again as the pain made his knees unsteady, his vision float. The timing couldn’t have been worse.

He tried to slow down, tried to heal himself-maybe he could use sweat?-but the Arai were already closing in. Picking up speed felt nearly impossible; every step sent gold fountaining out, pressurized and bright whenever his hand Jostled. He nearly pitched forward when the pain spiked, head swimming, the world going hazy and gold-edged.

Before he saw the Arai diving for him, he sensed the ichor. It tugged at him, insistent and electric, and Percy lunged, vision still swimming, trusting the raw pull to guide his strike. He didn’t aim; he just moved, straight for the heart of that power. The blade found its mark. The Arai was pierced in a blink, its body falling gracelessly from the sky with a wet, final thud that startled Percy back to movement.

Ichor. Blood. He could sense it all, like threads tangled around his bones. He’d never done more than grab it. But now it was spilling out of him, and he was running out of time.

He sucked in the deepest breath his battered lungs could handle, kept his palm to the bloody hole in his chest, feeling the sticky warmth pulse between his fingers. The Arai circled, their wings slicing the air, swooping in one after another, and he batted them away with his sword, careful to sever limbs, to not quite kill the things. All the while, he kept moving, never stopping, legs pumping in a steady, desperate rhythm to keep from being boxed in. No opening, no help, no hope of patching the wound for real.

So he let go. Pulled his hand away. Felt his powers surge up and compliment the pain, and the blood stopped pouring from his chest.

He felt intense heartburn as his veins pressurized, the damage was immediate even as he adjusted his grip on the Ichor, fine tuned it. The skin around the wound was horribly bruised now, pockets of ichor left lumps under the skin, and the vision in his left eye went gold as the veins there too, failed. There was no gentle way to force blood back into the body.

He looked up, and was surrounded by Arai again. Shit, he had stopped jogging at some point during his ‘healing’. Ichor flowed through the hole in his chest unnaturally, no longer spilling from it freely. He must have been a sight because the previously boastful Arai were silent, surrounding him from a distance.

He would have to kill another to get free, he still didn’t know what curse he got from the second one. And then what would he do? keep running until he was forced to kill another? No. Somehow, someway, this had to end. He was sorely tempted to just summon a storm and turn the entire area to golden ash and rubble. And though death may not exactly stick to him anymore, curses certainly would.

They still hadn’t attacked, why? where they… scared? oh. OH. Percy knew exactly how to get rid of these monsters. He didn’t need to kill all of them, he only needed to kill one more.

Percy found his balance, locked eyes with the nearest winged hag, and sprinted forward. He covered the distance with impossible speed, and materialized before the Arai, already coiled to strike. His kick landed, brutal and precise, slamming into her sternum and sending her careening backward, several meters from the flock.

Percy was gambling, as always. The Arai wanted him dead, but they had no fear of sacrifice; they would throw away their own without hesitation if it meant hurting him. So Percy singled her out, pressed the advantage, and closed in again. Unable to hide the lethal intent radiating from him. The hag, rattled but ready, brought her arms up in a feeble shield, bracing for the next assault.

Percy saw the hands brought up to weakly protect herself, and used riptide to relieve her of the filthy appendages. The scream that tore out of the monster was the kind that clawed the air, raw with horror and pain. She reeled backward, scrabbling, and crashed to the ground, her severed hands still twitching beside her. Percy did not pause. He brought his knee up, braced his core, and drove his heel down on her chest with all the force he could muster.

The ribs gave way with a wet, caving crunch beneath his bare foot, and her screech shuddered into a thin, unsteady wheeze, the sound of someone who would never draw breath properly again. She was done. Marked for death, her body too ruined to rise. But Percy was not done with her yet. He already had control of his own Ichor, and it was so EASY. It tickled at the edge of his senses, as it always did, and this time he did not hesitate to reach for it.

The Arai rose with a grotesque, puppet-like shuddering-the limbs jerking in sharp, unnatural spasms, as if some invisible string yanked the body upright and suspended it, floating a meter above the ground. Her eyes could not bear the pressure. At once, they ruptured, collapsing inward, fluid leaking down her ruined cheeks, and the hollow orbits fixed on him-a gaze emptied of everything but horror, a mask that echoed Annabeth, that impossible memory he could never quite shake. The love he had failed to save. And now this wretched shade had the audacity to remind him of her, to wear that look, to drag her ghost back into the light.

“Pick a VERY good curse for me,” he said, his voice dropping to a growl. Then a grin split his face, wolfish and involuntary. “You’ve earned it.” The next breath was nothing, barely a flicker of will, and it was enough: the corpse’s golden Ichor ripped itself free of the veins, streaks blooming beneath the skin like bruises, each blotch surfacing one after another. The stumps at her wrists, which ought to bleed, simply sealed; the blood was held captive, denied even that escape. The skin writhed, rising in uneven bubbles, as though something alive pressed relentlessly from beneath, desperate to claw its way out. Bruises hardened and swelled, becoming cysts, each one ballooning until the flesh sloshed, bulging and sagging, the body transformed into a patchwork of straining, grotesque sacs.

The first cyst ruptured, and the ichor burst forth as a pressurized torrent, not so much pouring as being wrenched upward. Blood spilling from the broken body and streamed through hazy air, gathering into an orb that hovered above the victim like a small, burning sun. A heartbeat later, another cyst gave way, and another stream joined the first, twisting upward. The body, battered past recognition, could do nothing but sag forward as its lifeblood was stripped away. There was no resistance; nothing left to hold it upright. When the corpse finally dropped from the air, it landed as something unmade-a shriveled, shredded thing, no longer anything that could be called Arai. And above the ruin, suspended, the orb of golden ichor hovered.

He turned, slow and deliberate, to face the flock. The hot air clawed at the open wound in his chest, setting every nerve alight. He scanned the crowd-a shifting sea of claws and averted eyes, feathers shuffling, no one daring to meet his gaze. His plan had teeth. The gamble was holding, at least for now: he didn’t have to kill the Arai, not really, just make them question their own will to live.

And they did. He saw it catch, that spark of fear, the way one monster flinched and bolted, then another broke ranks, then another. The spell shattered. In a storm of wings and panic, the flock scattered, bodies crashing into each other in their rush to escape. A stubborn few hung back, desperate or angry enough to fight, but without bodies to throw away they were very little threat. So when their numbers thinned and the odds flipped, even they turned tail, fleeing rather than waste themselves in a lost cause.

…

It was quiet.

…

Gods. What was he doing? Six years of gods and monsters, six years of blood and ash and the endless grind of war, and all it had bought him was this. Body collapsing under the weight of a struggle that never ended. Percy fell hard. His knees slammed the ground and he slumped, drug down by the raw weight of exhaustion.

Why? Why was he still clawing for breath, still fighting so desperately when the war had been lost the moment Annabeth slipped through his fingers? The truth gnawed at him: he’d been defeated then, hollowed and emptied, and should have let himself crumble long ago.

But he hadn’t. He was still here, battered and kneeling, unable to surrender even when it seemed like the only option left.

The golden orb drifted in front of him, flawless and indifferent, its surface mirroring the ruin of his face. The streaks of gold seeping from his bloodshot left eye, the ragged wound in his chest where his heart had been inches from oblivion. His bare feet were sticky with gold and viscera, but the orb didn’t care. It just hung there, catching the light, reflecting his defeat back at him, in all its useless, ugly detail.

He didn’t recognize himself anymore. What even was he? No. That wasn’t the question. Who was he? He’d told Oceanus he was a fighter, a failure, a monster.

At his knees, the half-mummified corpse of what once had been an Arai sagged against the stone, its mouth frozen open from its final pained cry. Percy’s eyes darted away from the thing he had made; he could not bear the sight.

A fighter. Velvet jaws. A monster.

He didn’t want that. Didn’t want to be that. Percy blinked, vision swimming, and only then realized his eyes had shut of their own accord. He stared down at his own torso, streaked and stippled with gold-

A golden orb. A failure. A monster.

He never wanted this. Never wanted any of it.

A fighter, a failure, a stone crib.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the corpse. The words snagged in his throat, and he thought he might choke on the tears that pressed, hot and insistent, behind his eyes. “I didn’t mean it.”

Destroyer. Failure. Monster.

“I just wanted them to stop.” The words escaped in a stuttering rush, voice raw, cracked open by the weight of it. “I wasn’t thinking straight.”

Perseus. Destroyer. Monster.

“I didn’t mean it,” he whimpered, clutching the emptiness in his chest, shaking and desperate, the ache in his heart a molten thing. “I’m sorry.”

Golden orb. Velvet jaws. Stone crib.

“I didn’t mean it,” Percy rasped, hardly audible through the scalding churn in his throat. The words tasted like bile, sharp and hopeless. His heart spasmed, throbbing with a fire that threatened to eat him alive, cold shivers wracking his body. “Just- just GO AWAY!” He exploded upward, every muscle tense, Riptide materializing in his hand, slicing a furious crescent through the empty air. The blade sang its hunger, but there was nothing to feed it. He spun left, nearly overbalancing, vision smudged at the edges, hunting for a target that wasn’t there. Right side: empty. Only the ghost-prickle of breath on his neck, hot and close, and he reacted without thinking, a second strike cleaving the nothingness behind him.

Sweat stung his eyes. He turned, checked, checked again. The world pressed in, thick with static, everything coated in a sickly gold haze that wouldn’t let him focus. There was nothing to see, nothing but the corpse, flayed and wrong, and the orb floating above it. The ichor that should have fallen, his control broken, but it hovered, indifferent to him, severed from his will.

Percy stared, paralyzed, and very slowly, almost trembling, he reached out-not physically, but with his power-to loosen his grip, to let the blood drain back into the stone, burying the evidence, trying to make it disappear.

‘Destroyer, Velv-’

The voice hit him like cold water. Percy recoiled, horror lancing through him. What had he done? He couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again, voice shredded.

He tore himself away from the anomaly, and fled.

Chapter Text

They pushed through the last of the petrified forest, and Annabeth kept waiting for a tree to come alive and try to eat them, but the faces in the trunks stayed frozen, gray-black and only letting out the occasional mournful wail. They made it to the edge without incident. She had driven the group hard, with barely any breaks, the four of them-a pair of dogs, two humanoids (and the cat that kept disappearing and reappearing)-locked into a marching rhythm that she demanded.

She knew why she was doing it. There was a point to the relentless pace; for once, she had a compass. Carla had spotted something on the horizon, a landmark that made sense, something solid enough to pull their path into shape. That was how Tartarus worked, apparently. If you could hold a destination and a landmark in your mind, keep it fixed, you could force the landscape to keep its shape, to stop melting and twisting and trying to swallow you up. Otherwise, you just drifted, the entire geometry of the place shifting and sending you in random directions, spinning you toward whatever nightmare pit Tartarus wanted.

Knowing that changed everything. It was the kind of secret you didn’t just survive on-you owed your life to it. Annabeth almost laughed, thinking how close she’d come to turning Carla into lunch instead of recruiting her. That would have been a mistake.

The river Acheron was their next target. Annabeth dreaded it, meaner, older, deeper than the Cocytus that had nearly unmade her. They’d follow it downstream, tracing its path until it vanished underground. That, Carla said, would drop them as close as anyone could get to the Heart of Tartarus-the Doors of Death. The finish line.

If she ever saw daylight again, someone could sue her for being so predictable, so laser-focused on her objectives. But that was her: give her a goal and a map, and she’d burn through Tartarus itself to get there. She was grateful, if a little surprised, that the rest of the group could keep up. No one complained. They did not understand what was at stake, but they followed all the same.

But now, at the edge of the forest, she forced herself to stop. The trees had been more than scenery-they offered cover, water, even food if you knew where to look. Ahead, the land was raw, exposed, stripped of anything that might help them survive. Annabeth knew they needed to rest, to gather what they could before stepping out into that emptiness. She wanted to press forward with all haste, but logic held her back. Stock up now, or regret it every step after.

She breathed, and let the silence fill her.

“Annabeth!” Carla’s cry, thin and high, carried over the underbrush, and Annabeth was up in one smooth motion, spear leveled, Hound bristling at her heel, lip curled in silent warning. Instinctively, Annabeth scanned the trees, every nerve taut. Carla had been dispatched with hound number two for resource scouting. Now Annabeth’s pulse hammered, dread already sketching out the loss-the possibility that she’d sent another dog to its death.

Again: “Annabeth!” Louder this time, desperation or excitement blurring the edge. Both hound and girl pivoted, eyes narrowing on the source. Annabeth’s legs tensed, ready to launch herself into the brush, when Number Two exploded from the shadows, Carla clinging to its back, wings fluttering.

“Look! Look! Guess what I found!” Carla tumbled from the hound’s haunches, landing in a tangle of limbs and feathers, and thrust her balled fists straight at Annabeth’s face.

What? The threat vanished, replaced by a sudden, awkward silence. Annabeth’s mind stuttered, tripped, scrambled to reboot.

“Hades’ underpants, Carla-you nearly gave me a heart attack.” The words came out sharper than she meant. “Don’t scream like that unless you’re actually dying.” She snapped it out, the adrenaline making her voice brittle.

Carla’s wings drooped, her whole body folding inward. “Sorry. You… you don’t have to guess. I found this for you.” She uncurled trembling fingers, each joint crooked and birdlike, palms trembling with effort.

An eyepatch. Annabeth’s chest tightened, a pang of guilt flickering through the adrenaline’s afterburn. Carefully, as if handling something sacred, she reached for it.

“Where did you get this?” Annabeth’s voice was thin, disbelieving.

“Found it on a dead cyclops!” Carla’s face brightened instantly, embarrassment dissolving into pride.

“An eyepatch… on a cyclops,” Annabeth echoed in confusion.

“Yup.” was Carla’s chirped reply, seemingly finding nothing odd about this.

Annabeth exhaled-a sound halfway between a laugh and a sigh. She was not going to question the logic of how that worked. Not now. “Thank you,” she said at last, the words heavy with everything she couldn’t explain.

Carla’s smile-it was all monstrous teeth and too many angles, a little bit uncanny, a little bit adorable, and it lingered in the air even after she said, “Try it on.”

Annabeth obeyed. The thing barely touched her head before it slid right off, nowhere close to the correct size.

In that instant, Carla lost her excitement, her body slumping, her features crumpling down into something small and wounded and ruined. All that hope, gone.

Annabeth felt the smile twist up behind her own lips, sly and sudden and irrepressible. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a single thorn, one Carla had taught her how to hollow at the base, so it could pierce like a needle. Carla’s handiwork, her lesson, now wielded deftly in Annabeth’s hand.

She was good at this. Needles and thread, scraps and patches, the weaving and the mending and the delicate surgery of cloth and hide. The hellhound fur, properly washed and teased apart until it was a cloud, made a twine so soft it almost vanished to the touch. With her spear, Annabeth trimmed the band of the eyepatch; then, with the thorn, she stitched, quick and certain. The whole process took less than a minute-a blur of motion, a flex of skill.

Carla watched, transfixed. Didn’t blink or breathe. When Annabeth finally set the new eyepatch securely in place she felt a strange relief. An ache she hadn’t noticed before, but now it was gone-the burning, the grit, the endless scouring of wind through open flesh, all replaced by a gentle hush, a shield, a relief as clean as a breath of fresh spring air. It was-

“Sooo,” Carla said, drawing the word out, “now that I’ve given you the good news, there’s also the bad.” There was a current of nervous energy in her tone, a twitch under the surface, but Annabeth only lifted an eyebrow and waited.

Carla fidgeted, claws tracing uneasy patterns in the dust. “I know you wanted to stock up on water before we went into the wastes,” she said, the words tumbling out in a hurry, “but I haven’t found any. Not a drop. Fluffy thinks she smells mud or something, but we’ve been circling the same ground for ages. Nothing. And, uh, yeah.” Her voice deflated, trailing off into the dry air.

“The dog’s name isn’t Fluffy.” Annabeth’s reply landed sharp, an obsidian knife through the silence. She was snapping more lately, she realized, but she didn’t pull back. “Just show me where she smelled the water. I’ll see if there’s something you missed.” She looked to her dogs, sprawled and panting in the dust like living shadows, and roused them with a gesture. Time to move.

“It’s better than ‘dog number one,’” Carla pushed back, stiff and flat, but with steel, not quite looking up.

Annabeth wasn’t prepared for that. The answer was a strange thing, and she couldn’t quite decipher the emotions behind it. She softened, just a fraction. “Fluffy’s not a bad name,” she said, voice careful now, “It’s just-I don’t name the dogs. It makes it harder when they die.” She pressed the words between them, thinking of Socket, cold and gone back in the cave. Hoping, stupidly, to spare Carla from that kind of loss.

But Carla was trembling now, every feather shivering with something she couldn’t disguise. For once, she didn’t let it roll off her with a nervous laugh. She clung to her silence, knuckles white, staring at the ground as if it might swallow her.

“That’s not fair,” Carla whispered. “She doesn’t deserve to be forgotten just because she won’t live as long.”

The words sliced through Annabeth, clean and deep. She remembered saying almost the same thing, once, to her mother, to the gods: Claim your children, see them, love them, don’t ignore them, don’t forget about them. Suddenly the logic behind her own choices felt thin and brittle. Was this what she’d been doing, after all? Treating monsters like their lives were measured out in smaller worth? because they could be reborn-or because they burned out so much faster? She hated the feeling, hated being on the other side of the question; being reminded of mortality.

“You’re right,” she managed, voice raw with the effort. Admitting it always left a sting, a scratch in her flaw of pride.

Maybe that was what Carla needed to hear. The little harpy broke, just crumpled, tears spilling down her cheeks, and she scrubbed at her face fiercely, as if embarrassed to be crying.

“Fluffy is a great name,” Annabeth reaffirmed. Awkwardly placing a hand on the harpy’s shoulder in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. and readjusting her new eyepatch. “What do you want to name the other hellhound?”

The way Carla looked up at her, with watery eyes, ought to have been a warm thing-a gentle glow in Annabeth’s chest. Instead, it hollowed her out. The more she watched this little harpy, the more she felt the old dread: attachment, a slow buildup of longing for things she could never have. Still, she manufactured a smile and nudged Carla, featherlight, back onto the matted tufts of Fluffy’s neck. Carla’s voice rose up, quiet but excited, thinking of names, barely touching Annabeth’s awareness as she let herself drift forward, the dogs’ noses leading her over the sharp rocks toward the faint promise of water.

The fixation with naming, Annabeth guessed, went deeper than affection for two battered hellhounds. signs were written all over Carla-the skittishness, the way her eyes darted away from any gaze, the instinct to vanish at the first possibility of threat, she would beg, whimper, collapse, anything but fight back. And worst of all, the ceaseless agreement, nodding along to whatever Annabeth said, regardless of how much sense it made.

So when Carla insisted that something “didn’t deserve to be forgotten,” Annabeth felt the words burrow into her mind, was it about the dog, or the girl herself? Maybe, if she tried, she could get Carla to talk, to peel away the layers of whatever had left her this raw. But what was she doing? This was the kind of thing she did for her siblings in the Athena cabin: gentle prodding, untangling knots, teaching traumatized children to live in an unfair world. Not for monsters dredged from Tartarus. She didn’t need to pick apart her companions’ minds, not here, not with natives of the Pit. They could fend for themselves.

Hardening her resolve was a process, not a switch; she told herself this as they reached the place the hounds had been steering toward. She trailed after them, as the dogs closed in on a massive, jagged formation of obsidian that thrust itself from the earth. The rock made a clearing, almost a crater, free of the petrified trees that were growing everywhere else. And yes, petrified trees certainly grew here. They grew hard and stone-faced from the instant their seeds split, saplings already shot through with mineral veins, already carrying tiny screaming faces: baby-fat features on the youngest, wrinkled agony for the elders. The effect was unsettling, but not the point. The point was the dogs: they circled the black spire three times, then settled, silent and expectant, staring.

There was water in the rock. Or at least, the hounds believed so-the scent of water’s aftermath, iron traces, wet-dirt petrichor, murky bacterial chemistry clinging to every surface. It might have been a false alarm, a ghost of something long vanished, or maybe the precious moisture was locked deep inside the stone.

She started circling too, letting suspicion drive her, mapping the perimeter with her own keen eye. The first lap convinced her there was something wrong, but it was only on the second that she glimpsed the oddity: the ground seemed to shift, a shimmer that made her double back, squinting. Not the ground, no-the dust she kicked up drifted straight through what should have been solid obsidian. A false wall. Magic. Rotten luck, but at least she’d found their target.

Time to call the others-a sharp, two-syllable “HEEEL!” torn from Annabeth’s lungs. At once, the pounding of paws, heavy and deliberate, echoed beyond the jagged rise of rock. Two beasts the size of compact cars came barreling around the stone, pelts bristling, eyes fixed. They thundered up in perfect unison, followed moments later by Carla, trailing behind and pumping her legs for all she was worth. Ungraceful, but determined. Not bad, Annabeth thought; they’d come a long way since the last time she’d tried that command and everything had gone straight to hell.

A flush of heat crept across Annabeth’s cheeks as she caught sight of Carla, darting over with all the desperation and sincerity of an obedient hound. She hadn’t intended for the girl to bolt every time she used that word, but of course Carla had learned it-the command always meant something urgent, always meant danger or food or both. Worse, the harpy had started watching Annabeth’s training signals, miming them with uncanny accuracy. Carla knew the whistle that had come to mean ‘eat’ or ‘attack’ respectively, and she too would hover, tense and expectant, waiting for Annabeth’s whistle before tearing into a meal. So now, every time Annabeth cooked up the latest monster carcass, everyone-beast and girl alike-sat ringed around the fire in perfect, silent anticipation. No chaos, no squabbling, no needless lunging for scraps. Just patience. Efficiency. Annabeth hadn’t had the nerve to tell Carla she didn’t actually need anyone’s permission to eat; she didn’t have to wait for a dog’s release command. But the system worked, and Annabeth wasn’t about to break it now.

Annabeth took several slow, deliberate breaths, fighting down the heat in her face, and made the hand sign, two fingers to Fluffy, then two to the stretch of wall she wanted checked. The dogs-they always got it, always sharper than she expected, every single time-moved in at once. They pressed their noses to the wall, sniffing for threat, for magic, for anything that didn’t belong. Their snouts actually dipped into the stone, vanishing up to the whiskers, they inhaled, steady and deep, until they found whatever they were looking for. Eventually they drew back, locking eyes with her, and shook their heads together as if to clear out the dust. Some magical thing had come through here, or maybe lived here once, but it was gone now. Dead or moved on. Whatever the answer, the message was clear: nothing waiting to jump them. They’d be in and out, if luck held.

And past the rock, the cavern opened up all at once, startling, breathtaking-a kind of beauty that made you forget everything else. There, in the middle, stood a living version of the petrified trees outside, unmistakable against the dark stone. The white bark and leaves caught a single hazy red beam of light and reflected it along the walls. causing the effect of red-silver streaks glinting and dancing along the ceiling. The tree stood alone on a mound of earth, surrounded by a ring of water, a small green island inside a doughnut of a crystal clear pond. Dozens of white leaves drifted on the water, little boats circling in silence.

“woooow,” Carla breathed, and honestly that about covered it.

The blue face came out of nowhere, inches from hers-a shock of color, so close she could see the ripples in its cheek. Annabeth jerked backward, spear raised, the hellhounds dropping instinctively into mirrored crouches, their hackles bristling and teeth bared in warning. For a moment, the air held: nymph and demigod and beasts, all ready to attack. She recognized the thing in front of her-a water nymph, common enough on the living side of the world, but here, in Tartarus? Its strength would be chained to whatever water source it guarded-the impossible pond at their feet. She measured the odds, not liking what she found.

“Normally,” the nymph said, voice sharp and cool, “I would obliterate anything that found its way into our sanctuary.” The word obliterate hung in the damp air, heavy with threat.

“You are very lucky, Annabeth Chase, that your boyfriend recently did a big favor for us water spirits.”

Annabeth’s jaw clenched. “My boyfriend?” she muttered, the syllables bitter. “What did Percy do?” The words came out rough, edged with demand, but the nymph only narrowed her eyes.

“Do not test my hospitality,” the woman snapped. “You are welcome here for now. Don’t make too much noise.” With that, she spun on herself and dove, dissolving into the pond in a whorl of spray, droplets flinging outward to splash Annabeth’s cheeks and eyelids.

Annabeth stood there, wet and stinging. “rude” she grumbled, mopping her face with the back of her hand. Carla stared up at her, eyes glittering with curiosity. “Who’s Percy?” she asked.

Annabeth’s throat tightened. “Don’t-” she started, but the word died. She’d been fraying at the seams lately, snapping at every tug. She forced a breath. “I don’t want to talk about that right now. Besides, don’t you three have an entire pond of water to go play in?”

Carla’s eyes went round as coins. She looked at the dogs, who looked at her, then at each other, then back to Annabeth, a silent committee of confusion. “Play?” Carla squeaked. “In water?” She sounded scandalized, as if Annabeth had suggested leaping into fire.

“There’s plenty of it,” Annabeth said, sharp-edged, her gratitude curdled by the nymph’s vanishing act. “And we were just invited in by our most gracious host.” The words dripped with sarcasm, but she couldn’t help herself. The nymph had dropped Percy’s name like a lure and then vanished, leaving Annabeth frustrated, staring at the still surface of the pond.

The dogs looked to Carla; Carla looked to the dogs. For a heartbeat, all three were caught back in their silent disbelief. Then, as if pulled by invisible strings, they swung their gazes to Annabeth, the shock in the air so thick it could have been carved with a knife. Annabeth did the only thing that made sense: she gave both hound a good thump on the hindquarters, sending them hurtling toward the pond, all barking teeth and joy and noise. Carla gave a squeal and bolted after them, her laughter tumbling out behind her. “And keep the noise down!” Annabeth called, her voice sharper than she meant. “We were specifically told to keep the noise down.” There was a distant, “Sorry!” from Carla, already half-lost. The noise did lower, but only a little.

Annabeth followed, but her steps were careful, deliberate, holding back from the chaos at the water’s edge. She could see them-the dogs flinging up spray, Carla already soaked and wild-and though their energy was infectious, she felt hollowed out, a shell picking its way along the shore. She went to strip down for the water, only to realize there was almost nothing left to shed. Her pants had been reduced to shorts long ago, four battered pockets bulging with thorn-needles, hellhound twine, sharp rocks, all the little fragments she’d scavenged and saved. Her shirt was gone, torn into pieces and left behind in the hellhound cave. What clung to her now was a bra, ragged and threadbare, barely more than a whisper of fabric.

Last time she had seen her reflection it had sent her spiraling into a panic attack. This time she only felt a bit nauseous and turned away. Progress.

Annabeth would murder a man for a pair of jeans and a CHB t-shirt, no hesitation, not even a flicker of remorse. She could hide the body, lie about it in court, hold her ground for thirty years if needed. Hell, she’d settle for a thrifted unwashed hoodie. But at least here, in this pond-she could let herself relax. She could wash away the sweat and grime, submerge herself in a bath somehow sponsored by her dead boyfriend.

It was getting easier to admit. She hated that; the words came with less resistance every time.

Her dead boyfriend.

It still hurts.

She eased her toes into the pond, and the water was a shock-a razor of cold that made her shiver in spite of herself. Annabeth kept her gaze fixed on the tree. It wasn’t doing much, thankfully. Just the occasional ‘oh-ho’ laugh bubbling up from its trunk, a shudder of branches that could have been laughter or simply the wind.

The water, at its deepest, didn’t quite reach her ribs. She settled in, letting herself sink along the gentle bank until only her head broke the surface. Above, the cavern ceiling shimmered-the single shaft of light caught by the snow-white leaves, ricocheting off every surface until the whole cavern filled with flickering brilliance.

Behind the tree, the splashing continued. That was her pack, safe and loud, their yips and happy cries echoing in the hollow space. She let the sounds wash over her, a lullaby with the promise that everyone was safe, accounted for. She let her eyes drift shut, not to sleep, but to listen. The music of water striking water, the low rumble of animal contentment.

For a while, she let herself drift, determined not to think at all. She let her body sink and soak, the water slowly stripping away the grit and grime. Overhead, the lights shimmered across the ceiling in lazy, shifting patterns-a mirage of peace. It was quiet. Too quiet.

It was not supposed to be quiet.

Annabeth startled upright, her pulse hammering suddenly against her ribs. She scanned the cavern, searching for her companions. There they were, just left of her: half-dried, chests steady, safe, and no longer playing in the water. The cavern had grown darker in her inattention; the lights no longer skipped across the stone, but had sulked away. Had she fallen asleep? No. She had barley even closed her eyes, certainly not long enough to get any real rest.

But now, when she blinked, her eyelid dragged, gummy with residue. Her joints throbbed with a dull, persistent ache; every movement coaxed out a chorus of pops and creaks as she hauled herself free of the water. Her skin had gone wrinkled and pale at her hands and feet, the rest of her only vaguely clean.

Normally, Annabeth would be bothered by all that stubborn residue-an unfinished task, the grime clinging just beneath the surface. But now, she found herself unable to muster even a flicker of irritation; it was all she could do to drag herself out of the pond before the overwhelming pull of exhaustion threatened to drag her straight back under. The fleeting moment of sleep she’d managed, if it even counted, was as hollow and unrestful as every other desperate blackout in Tartarus. She would have surrendered to it, let herself slip under again, if not for the shivering that abruptly overtook her: a tremor that started deep in her core and radiated outward, setting her battered arms and legs to tremble uncontrollably. It was so cold.

Fluffy collapsed at her side heavily (so smart, always so smart) and sudden warmth enveloped her-a cocoon of dry, clean fur, dense and comforting. The heat took time to seep in. Annabeth shifted, maneuvering herself upright, until she was propped against the hound’s massive flank where it curled protectively around her. This, she realized, was… shockingly pleasant. It made her regret all the times she’d kept Ms. O'Leary at a wary distance, though, in fairness, that particular hellhound’s idea of a greeting involved enough slobber to drown a demigod. Who could blame her?

A sharp pang: Ms. O'Leary. Percy’s dog. Who would be there for her now? Annabeth forced herself to steady her thoughts; hellhounds were, by and large, self-sufficient, but Ms. O'Leary would need to understand that Percy wasn’t coming back. Someone would have to tell his mother, too. And Grover. Gods, how had she overlooked that? She was one of the precious few who knew the truth of Percy and Grover’s empathy bond, who was trusted with its secret. Grover would feel it, sudden and devastating, the instant the connection broke-

“Ms. Annabeth, are you okay?” Carla’s question cut through the room-a harpy’s voice, hesitant, awkward, afraid to be heard. Annabeth wiped at her face, furious to find tears still there. She looked up, found Carla watching her, uncertain, feathers ruffled by embarrassment or concern, maybe both. “You were crying again,” Carla said, softer now. “Um, is it that Percy guy the spirit mentioned?”

She absolutely did not want to get into this. “I–yeah. I guess it’s him again.” The words tumbled out, unwanted

She wasn’t about to rip open a fresh wound, not here, not now. “He died and i-” how was she supposed to explain what Percy meant to her? Why was she trying?

There was no point in facing this, she needed to keep moving forward, toward the doors of death. “I just–hic–really hate it here.”

She needed… “And I miss my friends.” She needed help, and the admission tasted bitter.

Carla’s hand found hers, the fingers sharp and bent at odd angles, curling around her own. The touch was unexpectedly gentle. She sobbed, the world turning blurry again.

“I don’t hate it here.” Carla’s words were low, the sound strange, older than she’d ever heard from her before. “Sometimes there are scary things. Monsters can be cruel and dangerous, but…” Carla trailed off, searching for the right words. “Recently things haven’t been so bad. I’ve been learning a lot about hunting and cooking. I’m getting three meals a day, and I don’t even have to w-work for it.” She hitched on that last word, something raw flickering through. “My legs hurt pretty bad from all the walking, but usually it’s my whole body, so I guess that’s a step up.”

Carla tried for a smile, a fragile, off-kilter thing, eyes darting away almost immediately back to her hands. “It’s just… nicer to be here with you.”

Annabeth had been trying so hard to fool herself, to deny that she cared. To deny that she had any responsibility here at all. But she did not see any monsters here, this was the same as every new Athena kid she coached. Just more traumatized children forced to survive in an unfair world.

Annabeth pulled the harpy-girl into her lap and hugged her. Healing would not be an easy process, but for Annabeth it started with helping others. And she had finally seen one too many red flags on this child, one too many signs of abuse that she could not stand face to face with and ignore.

It was not easy, getting the full story out of the little harpy. But Annabeth was clever and patient, and the emotions were just right. She coaxed out a story that went something like this.

Carla had told a little fib. Just one small lie, but a necessary one. Her twisted claws and ragged wings weren’t scars from some battle, or even accidents; they were birth defects, nothing more, and rebirth did nothing to fix them. They were hers, permanently, no matter how many times her immortal dust reassembled.

She’d come into the world in a bone-nest clinging to a peak among the wind-scoured crags of the Mountainous Spine. The others had noticed the moment she was born: the strange angles of her claws, the shreds at the edge of her wings. She was last at feeding time, picking over scraps or nothing at all, forever last, because she was “defective,” not worth the meat it took to keep her alive.

Her siblings soared early, carving wild, perfect arcs above the peaks. Carla had watched them, and her mother had watched her, silent and stony. Then, finally, her mother turned to her, voice flat: “You will either learn to fly, or you will meet our lord early and I won’t have to deal with you again.” No pleading, no second chance, just those words-and then a shove. Carla tumbled from the nest, over the edge, down through empty air, and into her first death.

Surviving alone after her first rebirth was not easy. Carla couldn’t fly, couldn’t fight, couldn’t even bluff her way past anything with real teeth. She spent days pressed flat in the shadows, living off whatever she could grab and swallowing pride with every scrap, begging for mercy when something found her. The cyclops group had been like that-a cornered animal, a bargain struck. Work for food, they told her, and Carla never spelled out what it meant; she never had to. Annabeth could fill in the blank spaces. The way Carla said ‘escaping’ instead of leaving, the way she wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. Annabeth saw it for what it was, and she hated the shape of it.

It was some time after she slipped free that Carla risked foraging again, convinced she was invisible. She hadn’t factored in the way a hellhound could scent blood across a wasteland. When Annabeth and the pack found her, Carla braced herself for the worst-a repeat of all her deaths, or maybe something less forgiving. The first thing Annabeth said after she joined the group had terrified her “Why don’t you just die and regenerate those wounds? They look pretty bad.” In that instant, Carla was sure she’d been found out, and she prayed then for a clean, quick end.

Then she had ridden on a hellhound, and the beast didn’t eat her.

They had a quiet dinner, and she was given a full portion.

And then they slept in a hidden alcove, and Carla sat awake the entire time wondering if she should run for it.

When the goddess Misery appeared, she had bolted, intent to run and never look back, to vanish in the cracks of the world and never be found again. But then it had been a skeleton cat that gave chase: bones clattering as it ran, the empty sockets fixed on her, meowing over and over with the persistence of a curse.

The story about how Robert the skeleton cat got Carla back to the pack ended there, as the girl had curled up in Annabeth’s arms and finally slipped into sleep, limp with exhaustion, the rest of her story locked behind her eyelids. Annabeth let her be.

Come to think of it, where was that cat? it really does keep wandering off. Annabeth looked around but the thing was nowhere in sight. Then looked back down at the harpy in her lap. fast asleep and still clinging to her like a bat, no, not like a bat. Annabeth brushed some of the girl's hair out of her face gently, an Owl, she decided, a little burrowing owl. That's what she looked like.

Annabeth looked up at the dogs peacefully sleeping curled around them like large sentinels, at the tree creaking gently, the serene moment. Maybe, they could stay just a bit longer. The doors of death were (probably) not going anywhere without her. She could slow down, just a little bit.

Chapter Text

Drip, 

drip,

In every direction, extends a silent expanse. Perfectly white fog hanging heavy and thick in the air. 

Drip,

Drip.

The obsidian ground is unnaturally smooth and flat, Not a crack nor divot nor flaw in sight, like walking across the surface of a dark mirror.

Drip.

Something bright hangs high in the air, a harsh white light that diffuses through the fog and causes the source to be impossible to pinpoint.

Drip.

Drip..

Drops of ichor splatter across the smooth obsidian, a glittering golden trail leading into the dense blinding fog.

Drip.

Thud.

A solitary figure collapses to the ground. landing heavily, the sound is muffled; stolen by the empty expanse around with no surface to echo it back

Slowly, it rises back to its feet with shaky movements. Its hands, with fingers unnaturally long ending in sharp, hooked claws, gouge into the otherwise perfect ground as it rises... And then, slowly, painfully, it resumes its unsteady march into the haze, gradually disappearing from view.

—————

Percy was certain he was being followed, though he couldn't explain why. The unnatural terrain had his paranoia at an all-time high, and he really hoped he wasn't just going crazy. Because try as he might, he could find no evidence of a pursuer. Only the infinite emptiness in every direction.

He'd chosen to go this way, of course, because of the liquid. With such dense fog hanging in the air, anyone who decided to ambush him would get a very unpleasant welcome. He regretted that decision now, because as soon as he had stepped into the mist, it had enveloped him, and turning around showed only more of the infinite emptiness despite having only just entered.

He was trapped. By Tartarus itself, some unknown magical creature, or his own insanity, he was not sure. But now all that could be done was to place one foot in front of the other and keep marching to his death. 

Yes, his death. He was dying. 

It came to his attention as he tried to heal the hole in his chest, and it simply refused to close. He siphoned water from the fog, and the wound constantly healed, and yet it remained a hole in his chest. Thankfully, now the diameter of a pencil and not a gaping spear wound. But that was only because of his conscious effort to constantly heal the wound. If his attention lapsed, if he broke concentration, the wound began to reopen, cursed as it was, and would spill blood freely.

It was yet another reminder of exactly what he was becoming. Just like his taloned claws or his ragged breathing through salt-crusted gills, it all only served as an infinite, painful reminder that he would never be welcome on the surface again. That this was what he was now, who he was now. A monster, a failure. Fuck, he was doing it again, trapped in his own thoughts, ruminating on the worst parts of this damned place.

just… one foot in front of the other..

His paranoia did not abate as he pressed deeper into the fog. He was certain that someone, something, was watching him, following him. But there was nothing.

He reached out with his senses. He could feel the disruption in the air clearly. Every particle of water, an extension of his own senses. If there were ichor nearby, he would know. If there was mass nearby, he would know. There was not.

He had not however, gotten this far by ignoring his gut instincts. And frankly, despite his power, despite the clarity at which he saw the world, he could not trust those senses because he could not trust his own mind. So he kept vigilant, constantly. He walked, he healed, he bled, and he walked some more. His only destination being away from this twice-damned place.

With such profound silence all around him, even the smallest sounds echoed in his head. Heart beating in his ears with a steady ba-bum ba-bum. The strike of his taloned feet hitting the ground gracelessly, thud-tack thud-tack. The wheezing sound of every struggled breath complimenting the throb of agony around the hole in his lung. The only reason the organ hadn't collapsed completely was the constant burning healing that he was forced to subject himself to.

And one other sound that his enhanced hearing could pick up on. Just behind his own steps, Thud-tack thud-tack, he paused his strides. Thud. Another footstep, just behind his. Hesitation had got him killed once already, it would not happen again. In an instant he had riptide uncapped twirling in a deadly arc behind him. Cutting through empty air.

Damn this place straight into the void. He really was losing it. He couldn't even trust his own hearing. Just to be sure he reached out with his power. And sure enough, nothing there. No blood, no displaced mist, no trace of anything living nearby.

He trudged on, the slow drip of blood from his chest never stopping, leaving a clear trail to follow if one wanted to find him. Percy almost wanted them to show up, if only so that he would have something to stab, something to kill, some way to ease this paranoia, this feeling of being followed. He wanted to hurt something. It was not a pleasant feeling.

He tried once again to focus on escaping, and not the boiling anger just beneath his skin. He reached out with his power, straining further and further, but just like every other time he tried, no matter how hard he pushed, no matter how far he sensed, there was no end to this sickening fog. An infinite well of power all around him; all useless without a target to crush or a direction to follow.

His agitation grew rapidly, and the environment around him responded to his emotion, fog swirling around him in large, looping and swirling patterns, trailing after him for many meters before settling back. It parted before him as he walked, as if scared to be close to him. Forming a sphere of brilliant patterns around him that he might have admired as beautiful in any other situation.

Percy kept his eyes affixed to the ground just in front of his feet. Away from the harsh, blinding light that diffused through the fog, it was one foot in front of the other. He could occasionally still hear the sound of footsteps behind him, and he did his best to ignore them. His shadow flickered and wobbled as the light was unsteady at times. Really, there was not much to focus on at all.

He stumbled, again, twisting his wrist painfully when he tried to break his fall. He cursed, screamed, raged, and this time stayed down. He just… he really… he just… Gods, fuck. There were no words to describe the depths of his emotion right now, the depths of his failure. He didn't want to move, he didn't want to breathe. He... He should've stayed dead the first time he was taken out. There would never be rest for him now. There would never be an end, an escape from this pain.

He didn't want to keep doing this, keep struggling. He didn't want to keep fighting these wars. He just... he just wanted to sleep. No more monsters, no more gods, no more anything. The pain in his chest was growing. When had he stopped healing? it didn't matter. He was doomed anyway. It was always going to happen.

“But your friends need you,” whispered a little, traitorous voice in his mind.

No, they didn't. They never needed him. He only got people killed. Just like he got Annabeth killed. He was no hero of Olympus; he had always hated the title. 

He was a victim of a thousand battles and a thousand wounds, but he was never a hero. A survivor, perhaps, but he just couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't be what people wanted him to be. He couldn't be who people thought he was. He didn't want to be. Not anymore. Not after everything. He didn't want to fight. Not for the gods. Not for Tartarus. Not for anyone. He didn't want to be loyal anymore. 

He didn't want to live anymore.

The blood was still dripping from his chest

That was fine

He was starting to feel lightheaded

That was good

He lay on his back, staring upward into the bright fog. And… were those lights moving?

He reached upward with his power, and yes, there was something there. Not just one, but several. Giant anglerfish swimming, flying? so incredibly high in the sky that he hadn't noticed. That was cool.

His eyelids were so heavy, and he was so tired. Slowly, he let them close. 

…

…

…

…

…

Percy struggled to remember the specifics of his battles. What he remembered was the pain. The unique torture of each struggled experience to survive. The River Styx was a million needles in every inch of his body. The weight of the sky was something so crushing and oppressive it made you believe that you couldn't move at all. A cut or a sword wound was something that burned, something that tore, something that was too hot and wet. This, perhaps, was the most unique of all.

He had expected, maybe hoped, to awaken in the void. An end, a blissful nonexistence that would carry him away. Instead, he found himself torn from the skin of Tartarus. A hand, too large, too calloused, wrapped around what acted as his body. But it was too soon, too early, like a butterfly taken from its cocoon before its time.

He could not move, but not because he had no limbs. Rather, those limbs were only faint shapes, suggestions of what should be his body. His eyes were formed, but sat too deep in his skull. Skin, half-made, slowly sagged and melted off of him. He was being jostled terribly, carried by something, though the pain of this incomplete form would not let him focus more than that.

His legs were simply non-existent. Seemingly, he was being reborn head to toe. As his hearing, his eyes, even a part of his nose were functioning well enough. Well enough to understand the terrible pain of flayed nerves at every part. The tips of his fingers exposed bones as the melted flesh there dripped away. And if his lungs had been properly formed, he would be screaming bloody murder, raging against what dared to interrupt his rest.

Please, please, not again. Not more of this. Why? Why? Why?

You won, please, just let me die.

If the universe heard the tortured plea of his mind, it did not care.

Finally, blessedly, he was dropped from the grip of whatever being carried him. The pain did not recede, but lucidity returned slowly as his mind stopped spinning from the torturous movement. He was finally able to focus his blurry vision on the domed ceiling above him, and on the giant with a crooked nose grinning hatefully down at him.

“Well, well, Perseus Jackson,” the giant rumbled. His voice carried such a weight that it felt as if Percy’s whole world were shaking, though that was probably just the fragility of whatever pile of sludge he now was.

“You’ve left quite the trail of bodies, you know,” the giant continued in his harsh, too-loud voice. “Quite the easy path to follow. Much easier to find than that pretty little girl of yours.”

Percy’s sluggish mind finally was able to put the pieces together. This was Polybotes. A crooked nose from where Percy had smashed the god of boundaries into his face and killed him. That specific wound, it seemed, had followed him even after rebirth.

“Nothing to say, little hero?” he asked mockingly, enjoying far too much Percy’s immobile, pained silence. 

My fault, of course," he continued. "I would have loved to give you a little longer to regenerate so that I could hear every pained scream you made." He sighed deeply. "But alas, time is short. I have to catch up to that delicious little girlfriend of yours before she makes it to the doors of death.”

…what?

Polybotes continued, gesturing with his arms and speaking loudly, but nothing made it to his ears anymore. He had only one thought now: she was alive.

Alive, Alive. ALIVE.

The word pounded like a drumbeat in his mind, drowning out any other coherent thought that might have happened. He hadn't considered, he hadn't dared hope, but to hear confirmation of it, thrown around so wantonly, so freely—he, she, they, Annabeth was alive!

ALIVE! 

He… he had to live! He had to escape, he had to find her! He wouldnt even be here if not for her. He hadn't fallen into Tartarus for the gods. He hadn't done it for the world. He had done it for her.

This was his second chance, and he… He had no legs.

A massive, chipped blade leveled at his throat. "Are you listening to me at all?" Polybotes growled. "Are you broken?" He pinched the bridge of his crooked nose irritably. “Gods, could there be a less satisfying way to finally kill the Hero of Olympus?”

Good luck with that, Percy thought bitterly. I’ve already tried. And, unable to properly taunt the giant due to his state, Percy simply rolled his eyes at the giants constant posturing.

Polybotes, who had been watching Percy carefully, only smiled wider at Percy's tiny, rebellious action.

“Oh,” he paused, “you don’t believe me? Do you not recognize where you are?”

Percy did, actually, now that the giant mentioned it. The domed, broken marble ceiling, the crumbled ruined statue to his side, the taste of salt unmistakable in the air. He was back near the start, at Oceanus's shrine.

“It is very difficult to find anywhere beyond the sight of Tartarus.” The giant's words contained a barely suppressed, sick glee. "A place where the soul can drop into the void and be dissolved unnoticed. You, child, happened to have provided me with just the spot. A miracle of a rain in a place our lord declared it would never happen again. A Titan, a very, very elder one at that. Faded. Such residual power, such holy ground, well, I think you'll find creates a wonderful little smokescreen for what I have planned."

No, no, no, no. How did he know that? How the hell did the giant even find his him? Percy struggled fiercely, despite the pain that flared. Despite the sludge that was his body, despite the inaction, the separation of will from movement, he could do nothing. He could move nothing.

“There,” the giant barked, a sharp, harsh laugh. “That’s the panic I was looking for, the terror I wanted. Finally, you understand, boy” he sneered. “You are nothing. You have always been nothing. You will die here alone and forgotten, and i will savor every second of it”

Percy had never understood less, nor appreciated more, the apparent villainous instinct to monolouge your plans and abilities. Because with that time, he had found within himself, buried so incredibly deep, a gentle pull in his gut, a sense of the world around him that extended past his ruin of a body. He didn't need legs, he didn't need skin, he didn't even need to move his face. He pulled hard on that feeling of power in his gut.

The sound of thunder booming outside startled the giant, who turned away from Percy. He took only a single step away from him to look at the rain that had started pouring heavily outside. After a brief moment of confusion, the giant’s eyes widened in surprise and understanding. He hastily turned back to Percy, raising his sword to finish the job without any more preamble.

Only to be thrown violently backward, smashing straight through the fragile, crumbling wall as a hurricane destroyed what was left of Oceanus's shrine. Percy rose from his sacrificial spot on the central altar, carried by a whirling tornado of water.

The skin was torn from his body by the torrential currents, weak as it had been, barely attached to the newly formed muscle underneath. Percy screamed in total agony. The water was working quickly. His lungs were back.

Percy, skinless, lacking legs, and in more pain than he had ever thought possible, yet somehow, impossibly, still conscious and still angry-furious-advanced on the stunned giant.

He still could not move his limbs, and instead puppeteered them with the water. Polybotes, to his credit, did not flinch at the horrific sight of Percy's flayed form, only grabbing control of what meager water he could from Percy to fight back.

Percy caught the water flung at him, discolored and probably poisonous. And after a brief battle of will, one that the giant lost terribly, the murky water was sent right back at him, once again sending the giant flying backward, this time slamming back-first into a massive salt crystal, head thudding against it and bouncing off with a sharp crack.

The storm tore through the landscape, disintegrating what was left of the shrine, leaving only a circular foundation standing. Debris hurtled through the air wildly. Salt crystals shattered and joined the fray, whipping about, slamming into other crystals and leveling the landscape.

"Where is she!?" Percy roared, and his voice was no longer anything human, almost like multiple screeches layered together, rattling in a way that hurt the ears.

Polybotes was already back on his feet, unafraid, glaring at Percy. Snakes fell from his hair, but were instantly caught away by the wind and dashed against nearby rocks and crystals. The general chaos of the storm did not hurt the giant. He struggled to take control of any of it, but the water was still his domain, and it whipped across him harmlessly.

Polybotes dashed forward quickly with his oversized sword, intent to simply cleave Percy's weakened body in two since a battle of powers was clearly not in his favor.

Percy however, had no intention of fighting fair. He had no time for swordplay or simple water manipulation. He was physically and emotionally shattered to pieces, and this brute in front of him dared to threaten his love.

Polybotes’ ichor was thicker, richer, filled with more power than anything else he had touched so far. More difficult to grab hold of with his power, and at the same time far more intoxicating. The giant was yanked off the ground by that terrible, invisible force. Each limb pulled away from the torso to its limit, displaying him star-shaped in front of Percy, who advanced.

He could move again, and as he closed the distance, his body rebuilt itself. The hurricane around him healed and repaired his body with incredible, horrifying speed. The bone tips of his fingers sealed shut, skin crawling quickly to cover his hands.

Percy began to lower himself to the ground, new legs sprouting from the bottom of his torso. First the bones, then the muscle, coiling around his skeleton in real time, before he touched the ground, new, powerful, perfect legs were there to support him. He reached up with delicate, uncalloused hands and wiped away the last detritus from his face, touching exposed nerves and fresh muscle, revealing new skin as his hand pulled away. He pushed his jaw back into place from where it sagged, and new muscle grabbed it, holding it where it should be. 

With every step towards his foe a new peice of him returned. Not the way tartarus had remade him, but through his own power. He stopped in front of Polybotes, and looked down at his hands, unscathed, clean, and without claws. With wide, hopeful eyes he reached up to touch his neck, and he almost couldn't believe it. No gills. He marveled at his new, perfect body, feet without talons, even his junk was back! Dangling between his legs like it had never left.

Only two pieces of the bastardized form tartarus has squeezed him into remained. The peices that regenerated before he was pulled from his cocoon. His vision still pierced the dark, eyes glowing a sickly green. And he could pick out every nearby sound, even among the defeaning roar of the storm. Including the pained struggling of the giant only an arms length in front of him.

He raised his eyes slowly to see his victim. Despite his earlier fury he felt… strangely calm while observing the way Polybotes struggled. That constant urge to move that sat in his spine was gone. Replaced by a gentle drumbeat, a steady ba-dum, ba-dum. Similar to a heartbeat but distinct from his own.

Percy met polybotes gaze directly, calmly. There was still no fear in the giants eyes, only a deep, burning hate. Ichor pooled at his lips and dripped slowly down his chin. Small suppressed grunts of pain bubbled ichor on his lips, the faint sound of cracking told him the giant would rather break teeth then show weakness. Such pride, such foolish arrogant pride.

“Where is Annabeth” Percy asked again, smoothly. “Speak, and i will kill you quickly”

Polybotes let out a small pained gurgle before replying “you… ha- sound just like us now, monster”

Percy frowned, “your right, I'm not the hero people think I am. I kill without remorse, I can destroy entire ecosystems in a fit of rage” he gestured vaguely in every direction, at the storm raging around them.

“I've done unspeakable things to save the people I love. I once even told a old friend of mine…” He glanced back where Oceanus's shrine had once stood, and bowed his head mornfully. “I once even told him that i was a monster, a failure, a fighter. I reject that now.”

Percy took another step toward Polybotes bringing them so close he could feel the giants hot, heavy breath. “I finally know, who i am now. I am no Hero, I do not fight for justice, and I have no allegiance except those I choose.” Percy paused for a breath, this was it then. “I am Executioner, I am the one who hunts monsters, I am the thing that gods fear. I am Perseus Jackson, and you too will learn to fear my name”

Ah, there it was. The first sparkle of unceartinty in the giants eyes. “You cannot kill me!” Polybotes spat “I dont care who you are, you have no god with you!” He yelled, but his panic gave away his uncertainty, his fear.

Perseus only smiled ruefully. “Goodbye, Polybotes, I'm afraid there is no one who will mourn your death”

Perseus grabbed his own Ichor and floated gently off the ground. Ah, that hurt quite a lot, no wonder Polybotes was breaking teeth in his pain. The storm around them raged even harder now, and only the largest and strongest of the terrain around had survived. It will be a shame to see even those peices destroyed. This old dead sea did have its own strange beauty.

Perseus reached out with an older, more ancient power. And the world began to shake. Giant boulders the size of houses broke free from cliffsides and crashed into the ground far below. Massive salt crystals taller than polybotes broke into peices and scattered across the earth. Being vibrated there even further and turned to dust that kicked up and clogged the air. 

Polybotes began to cough violently as his lungs were clogged and torn apart by the dust. And finally, worst of all, a fissure opened beneath where the giant still hung suspended in the air. A great scar in the ground that broke with a deafening boom, and continued to widen and deepen even as the world fell apart around them.

Down, down, down. Deeper, until finally Perseus felt it. Something familiar, something he had yearned for at times, and raged against at others. The call of the void. He released his hold on Polybotes, and watched coldly, dispassionately as the giant fell ever downward, right into the gaping maw of the void. 

Chapter Text

Piper sat in the dining hall of the Argo II, staring quietly at the curved magical wall that showed the current goings-on of Camp Half-Blood.

It was storming, both outside the ship and over the camp she had briefly called home. It had been like that for the past week, an endless downpour that stretched, presumably, across the globe. Anywhere close to a body of water was constantly buffeted by powerful rainstorms.

It was petty, Piper thought, the way that Lord Poseidon reacted to Percy's brief vacation in Tartarus. How many mortals would die? How many demigods would be unable to train for the upcoming battle? Just like always, it seemed the gods did not care for the consequences of their actions.

Instead, it was up to them. If all went well, they would pick up Annabeth and Percy in Epirus, stop Gaea from rising, and return the Athena Parthenos to stop the camps from fighting. Then maybe, just maybe, after all of that, the poor little gods would get over their headaches and decide to help them.

Piper sighed deeply, shaking her head free of such blasphemous thoughts, and went back to studying her siblings and cousins at Camp Half-Blood.

Many dashed from cover to cover, sprinting quickly through the mud and trying to stay dry. Others, the more physically capable, or those born with powers, ran sword-fighting drills in the rain, soaked head to toe. Many were caked in mud and bruises from where they had been pushed or fallen to the ground. There was a strange formality to the way drills were being run, to the way these kids acted. It was not a normal sight for the normally informal and rambunctious way the geeks ran their camp.

The lava wall, now just the wall; Was usually easy to spot in her panoramic view of the area due to its hot red glow and the buzz of activity that surrounded it, sitting desolate now. The streams of molten rock were solidified and still, not a single demigod testing their athletic prowess against the beast.

Wasn't the camp supposed to be protected from the weather? The barrier did more than just keep out monsters, Piper remembered. It also regulated temperature and kept the area proper for training. Was the barrier weak, or was Poseidon's anger able to pierce it somehow?

She was pulled from her musings by the soft click of a door opening. Hazel shuffled in sleepily, still rubbing at her eyes and wearing her pajamas. "Mornin', Piper," she mumbled, quiet enough that it was almost unheard. She grabbed a magical plate from where they sat neatly in the cupboards and slumped down heavily into a chair just next to her. Piper couldn't help the soft smile on her face at how cute the girl looked when frazzled like this. "Afternoon, Hazel," she replied.

If the girl heard her gentle correction, she did not acknowledge it, only nibbling slowly at the edge of a magically conjured pop tart, looking as if she were about to fall asleep face-first on her plate.

"Nightmares again?" Piper asked.

Hazel nodded.

“Do you want to talk about it?"

She shook her head.

Piper hummed in acknowledgment and let the topic drop. It was a common enough conversation aboard the Argo II, and she knew better than to pry into dreams that could be so personal.

“I was looking at the calendar,” Piper continued, still trying to make small talk, “and it looks like my birthday's gonna be the day before we arrive in Epirus.”

It was Hazel’s turn to hum in acknowledgment, still not lifting her head from where it drooped. Piper had hoped for more of a response than that, but they all carried the literal fate of the world on their shoulders, so she tried not to let it get to her.

"Where are the boys?" Hazel asked.

"They are already up top."

Hazel frowned. "In the storm?"

Piper nodded, and then after a moment, decided to elaborate. "Yeah, there was another griffin attack. Fifth one in two days. Leo's having real trouble repairing the masts with the rain going on, so it's all hands on deck up there."

"Except us," Hazel noted. Finally looking a little more awake.

Piper just shrugged. "A fat lot of good charm speak does in a storm when nothing can hear you. And unless you can start pulling gems out of the sky as well as the earth, well, just let the boys do their thing."

Hazel gave the smallest of nods in acknowledgment and went back to nibbling away her pop tart like a hamster.

Piper tried a couple more times to pick up conversation with her, but was met with dispassionate shrugs or mute nods, so she eventually excused herself and made her way back to her room. Locking the door with a click and falling backwards into her plush, almost too soft bed.

Despite the assurances that Jason had given her, and she in turn had given Hazel, Piper did not like sitting around with nothing to do, waiting to be useful. Her hand trailed down to the holster at her side, and the dagger within. Well, not nothing to do. But recently unsheathing Katoptris had become more and more difficult. Ever since Annabeth and Percy had fallen into Tartarus, the visions it showed her were increasingly nonsensical and grotesque.

Eventually, her boredom and shame overpowered her fear, and she sat up cross-legged in her bed and unsheathed the dagger. Staring deeply into its metallic surface, it took only a moment for the reflection of her own eyes to disappear, a landscape beginning to take form in the blade. Hopefully this time the vision will be something useful.

The details were hard to make out. The blade was small, and the perspective was from high above, looking down at an alien landscape. Black rocks extended as far as the eye could see in every direction, occasionally forming hills or crevices in the ground, but otherwise flat and barren. Not a hint of vegetation or life in sight. The only oddity in the terrain was a golden shimmer far below, a single pinprick of… something.

How unhelpful. She wished to get closer and see exactly what it was down there, but that wasn't how these visions worked. If the image ever changed, it would only be to show something new: a separate, probably equally confusing scene.

It was just as Piper was about to sheathe and redraw the blade to reset the vision and show her something else that the scene suddenly zoomed in. In only a brief second, it went from a bird's-eye view to standing right in front of the golden orb. That was strange. That had never happened before. It was almost as if the dagger was responding to her wants, but it was a coincidence, surely. She stared intently at the strange, perfect orb. If the dagger was acting differently, then clearly this was something important.

Although it had looked like a perfect sphere at first glance, studying it revealed that it did warp and bubble ever so slightly. Was it ichor? It certainly looked that way, but Piper was at a loss for how the immortal golden blood could be suspended here like this, alone in an empty wasteland. Frustratingly, seeing it closer had not, in fact, made the vision any less confusing.

“Destroyer. Monster. Failure.” The dagger hissed at her in a sharp whisper. Piper dropped Katoptris in shock, scrambling off the bed and away from the blade, pressing her back into the opposite corner of the room, heart hammering hard in her chest. Instantly, she was sweating. What the actual fuck?

That had not been her imagination. It had not been a telepathic whisper in her mind. It had come from the blade.

Was it safe? Piper took deep, even breaths, forcing the pounding in her chest to subside, forcing the adrenaline to calm down. She stared, unblinking, at the dagger sitting quietly, innocently on her bed. Something was horribly wrong. And Piper was still no closer to figuring out what in Hades was going on.

A pounding at the door spiked her already frayed nerves, and she jumped in fear. "What?" she demanded of the unknown intruder. "Hey, uh," came Leo's voice, "there's kind of an important Iris message in the dining room, and we need you there posthaste, which means uh, now."

Leo did not wait for a response, footsteps already receding from her doorway. Piper took another few deep breaths to calm herself and went to retrieve her dagger, but hesitated. She left Katoptris on the bed and ventured out to see which god had decided to derail their quest to save the world this time.

To her surprise, it was not a god's head that floated in the misty message above the dining table, but rather a satyr. In fact, a satyr she recognized, and she racked her brain to figure out where from. "Grover?" she asked, "as in Percy's best friend Grover?"

Grover smiled sadly at her. "Hello, Piper. Percy told me a bit about you. It's nice to finally meet you."

Piper nodded respectfully and glanced at her friends sitting around the table. The mood was quiet and somber, and the demigods were…sitting still? That was definitely not normal for her friends. Even Leo, who would normally be tinkering with a machine or digging in his tool belt, sat still with his hands folded in his lap.

"Alright," Piper started, "I'm here. What's going on?"

Jason, as usual, was the first to speak. "We're not gonna make it to Epirus anymore, because-"

"That's all right, Jason," Grover cut him off. To the boy's visible displeasure. "I'll go over it again."

Grover took a moment to steady himself and then spoke.

“Back in the Sea of Monsters, I was kidnapped by a particularly nasty cyclops, and in order to survive, I formed a magical bond called an empathy link with Percy. It's complicated, but the short version is that it allows us to read emotions and communicate to some degree. I was able to use it to track Percy's progress through Tartarus, but a week ago, well… I'm sorry Piper, there's no easy way to say this, but Percy died down there.”

“A week ago?” Piper whispered in horror. “He… he never even got close?”

“Yeah a week ago, apparently half the immortal world knew about this before us,” Leo remarked bitterly.

Grover grimaced but didn't deny it. “I’m afraid my… Reaction to his death was rather public. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it sooner.”

"The gods were hiding it from us," Hazel said, her voice empty of emotion. "Just like this prophecy we're all a part of. It's apparently too dangerous to give us all the information."

"I did have to drop an entire pouch of drachma into the Rainbow to get a message through to you guys," Grover said, sounding unconvinced.

"That can't be true!" Piper protested. "If the doors can't be closed from both sides, that's information we need to know. Surely they would have told us... something, right?"

The air was uneasy, and a hush fell over the table. No one was quite sure how to respond, and the silence spoke for itself.

Jason once again tried to take control of the situation. "Like I said, Epirus is a lost cause, so we should be heading straight to the Acrop-", "Like hell we are," Piper interrupted hotly, for the second time. "Have you forgotten the prophecy? ‘Foes bear arms to the Doors of Death.’ Someone is bearing arms to the Doors of Death. We need to be there!”

Piper's brief glaring match with Jason was ended by Frank, who spoke up for the first time. "It's Annabeth, obviously. Percy's death is not the end of that mission. It's clearly Annabeth who will be bearing arms, or whatever the prophecy says."

“No offense, Frank,” Jason said, “but Annabeth doesn’t have powers, and Percy was kind of the only guy able to go toe-to-toe with me. If something managed to take him out th-”, “Frank’s right,” Grover interrupted Jason for the third time. “Annabeth is more than capable of surviving without Percy, definitely more able to get enemies to fight with her.”

Jason's patience finally ran out, and he snapped. “THEY ARE FUCKING DEAD, OKAY? YOUR PERFECT LITTLE GOLDEN BOY AND HIS PERFECT LITTLE GIRLFRIEND ARE DEAD, AND NOW IT'S UP TO US TO FINISH THIS DAMN PROPHECY. AND YOU NEED TO START BEING MORE REALISTIC!”

The silence was not just heavy now, it was suffocating. Five pairs of eyes all locked on Jason in varying ranges of horror, anger, and disbelief.

Jason did not back down, however. He had risen from his chair to yell, and stood, chest heaving, glaring right back at all of them.

“I think i will take my leave,” Grover spoke through gritted teeth. “If you hear anything about the great miracle, call me.” and just like that the satyr was gone.

The great miracle? Piper had missed that bit of conversation from earlier and filed it away to ask about later.

"I think," Frank spoke, calmly "that we all grieve in different ways." Before he could say anything more, Hazel broke down crying. She tried to stifle it behind her hand but failed miserably. Standing suddenly from her chair, sending it toppling backwards with a loud clatter, she fled from the room, sobbing loudly.

“Good job with that one Jason, real great leadership there” Leo's voice dripped with venom, and he was already halfway up the stairs leading to the deck. “If you'll excuse me, I'm charting a course to Epirus” the door slammed loudly leaving three demigods sitting silently around the table.

Frank seemed torn between following Hazel or starting his own yelling match with Jason. Who was back in his seat, head held in his hands, taking deep, shuddering breaths.

Piper found herself staring at the magical wall showing Camp Half-Blood again.

The constant, destructive downpour made more sense now. Really, she felt silly for not picking up on it sooner.

"How many people has Poseidon killed over this?" she asked numbly.

“You shouldn’t say those things out loud, Piper,” Frank cautioned, his voice strained. “The gods may be incapacitated at the moment, but they’re not deaf.”

Piper's face pinched with controlled emotion. "Right, incapacitated. It certainly seems that way to me.” But, just like always, she let the topic drop, they still weren't ready for that conversation. Piper made her way over to Jason's side, placing a delicate hand on his broad shoulders. "You alright?" she asked gently.

Jason reached up and took her hand in his own calloused palm for some small measure of comfort. It took him a moment to respond. He was on the edge of tears himself. "I think I really fucked up."

“Yeah”

He was squeezing her hand a little too tight, but she ignored it. Right now, he needs that.

"I just," he continued, "I just don't want to lose anyone else. And... and we're running out of time. I don't think we can close the doors without them."

"That," she said, "would have been a much better way to phrase it."

Jason grimaced, but chuckled lowly. "Yeah, it really would have been."

Piper hummed quietly, unsure what else to say, and found herself again staring at Camp Half-Blood, this time quietly hand in hand with Jason. The sound of shuffling made her look up at Frank's receding back, going to comfort Hazel. He obviously didn't want to intrude on what had become a private moment.

"They are working so hard," Jason said. "Every last one of them. Doing so much for a camp that might not even exist in a week if we fail. Don't they realize how fragile it all is?”

That hit closer to home than Piper dared to admit. She murmured, “they're just… they're doing whatever they can. I'm sure if they were allowed to be here with us, they would be fighting just as hard as we are to save the world.”

“Allowed to” Jason repeated “of course, the prophecy” he sounded bitter, resentful. And Piper wished there was more she could do for him. There wasn't. She sat with him for a while, watching their cousins get ready for war. Watching the hustle and bustle of children preparing to die.

Piper spoke again, hesitantly. “my birthday is the day before we land” she looked up at him hopefully, then immediately felt guilty for being so self centered. “Sorry I know it's bad timing, forget i said anything. The fate of the world is on the line, our friends just died. I'm not trying-”

Jason cut her off with a gentle kiss. Pulling her close. “It's important” he told her with steel in his voice “we need to celebrate with each other now, because you never know… You never know when someone isn't coming back”

Piper could only blush furiously. Placing her hands on his chest, leaning in for another kiss.

BANG!

The sound came from the deck, startling both of them apart, Jason had his sword in hand quickly. And Piper fumbled for her dagger, only to realize it wasn't on her hip. Stupid, she berated herself.

Jason ran to help, but paused at the stairway, looking back at Piper.

"The answer is too many, by the way," he said.

"Huh?" she responded, blinking in confusion.

"You asked how many people Poseidon had murdered over Percy's death," he told her. "The answer is too many."

He left in a hurry, not even bothering to take the stairs, flying up and past them to help Leo. Piper began sprinting to her room to retrieve Katoptris. And came face to beak with a falcon flying through the hallway, she let out an undignified ‘eep!’ And barely managed to duck in time for Frank to fly overhead.

Curse this craft's claustrophobic corridors. She kicked her door open, snatched her dagger off the bed, and sprinted back to the stairs, taking them two at a time. Opening the door to the deck, she was buffeted by powerful winds, grabbing hold of the doorframe to steady herself and squinting her eyes to try and see into the storm.

The downpour was so rough that she could barely see five feet in front of her, the sun blocked out by darkened, dangerous clouds. Not-so-distant thunder rumbled constantly. A flash of lightning allowed her to see a dragon coiled around the main mast, which had broken in several places. That was Frank, right? Yeah, probably. Almost certainly that was Frank.

Jason flew about in his own personal bubble of protection, swirling the winds around him to protect him from the raging storm. Securing lines and keeping the ship flying.

Both were too far away to see or hear her over the deafening roar.

So instead she made her way up to the ship's controls where Leo stood, ablaze, his own personal inferno barely keeping him dry and safe. It was a struggle to push through the winds that threatened to knock her over, and the cold seeped into her bones quickly.

“Leo!” she screamed at him, and thankfully he heard, turning to her. “What's going on? What’s attacking us?” she screamed.

“Nothing!” Leo yelled back, also straining to be heard. “There’s a gods-damned hurricane trying to take us out of the sky!”

Piper’s heart dropped into her stomach. A hurricane? Was this… was this her fault?

CRACK!

Piper spun to see that the smallest of the three masts had snapped at the base and was falling right towards them. "Leo, watch out!" Piper screamed in terror, diving to the side, just barely avoiding the massive wooden pole that crushed where they had just been standing, obliterating the ship's controls and thankfully not breaking through the top deck.

The gentling of the winds around her and a thud nearby signaled Jason's arrival, who extended his control over the winds to cover both of them.

"What are you doing up here?" he snapped angrily.

"I'm here to help," Piper snapped right back.

"Well, you can't, okay? Go back below deck."

Piper gritted her teeth harshly, but didn't argue. He was right. She was a liability right now.

"Shit," Jason cursed under his breath and flew off again to take care of something. She hated it, but slowly and carefully, she looked around. She saw Leo's blaze on the other side of the pole, indicating he was fine, so she took a small, relieved exhale and braved her way back through the storm, heading below deck.

Closing the doors behind her left her in a room unnaturally still and quiet. If she weren't straining to listen, she almost wouldn't be able to tell that the ship was being torn apart by a vicious hurricane.

Leo really had done an incredible job building this thing.

The faint howling of wind still grated on her nerves, so she made her way deeper into the ship, slamming her door shut behind her and collapsing into her bed. Her sopping wet body soaks the delicate fabrics. For a moment, she lay, staring at the ceiling blankly, and then the tears began to prick at the edges of her eyes. Her chest tightened in a way that made it hard to breathe.

Sidelined, again.

She pressed her hands to her face and tried to suppress the emotion welling up in her chest. But the tears that came were not something that could be stopped. There were so many different reasons to be crying right now, and she wasn't sure which one had finally gotten to her. She sobbed uncontrollably, anger and fear and loss all swirling in her mind in equal measures.

If only Percy were here.

“Fuck!” she screamed, punching her wooden wall in anger, and then pulled her hand back with a wince, whining a high-pitched, pained, “ooooowwww.” Her knuckles were bloody, fresh red dripping down onto her already spoiled bedsheets. And she could only sob harder. She felt like she was suffocating, her breath coming in short, harsh gasps between outpourings of emotion that shook her body.

Her big, stupid mouth had ruined everything.

She didn't want to be alone.

She couldn't bear to face anyone.

Her emotions did not recede, but the tears did, eventually. Leaving her laying there, hollowed out and exhausted. Her mind raced a million miles an hour with too many thoughts. She didn't want to think about any of this. Piper pulled her dagger out of its sheath on her hip and glared at it angrily. Something to distract her, the only thing she could do, her only way to be helpful.

She wiped the tears from her eyes and the snot from her nose, doing her best to focus on the vision forming in the blade.

Oh, good gods, Piper thought, feeling horribly nauseous at the scene in front of her. Why did she think this was a good idea again?

A pile of monster bodies sat so close that she swore she could smell the stink of hot monster ichor. Each was brutalized in a horrific fashion, missing heads or caved-in chest cavities. It was a literal mound of bodies, piled high into the air, stacked one on top of another, with glazed-over eyes and limbs bent in the wrong direction.

Standing atop the pile was something vaguely human. Four great tentacles extended from its back, thrashing about violently, its head haloed by a fiery, burning crown. The monster turned around, its toxic green eyes staring right into hers, sending a shiver down her spine. She felt suddenly unsafe, but it shouldn't be possible. This thing couldn't see her, could it? Then again, the dagger wasn't supposed to be able to talk either.

"I see you" came the thing's ragged, corroded voice, and Piper slammed Katoptris desperately back into its sheath.

Never again, she told herself. Never again.

—————

They managed to land safely a great distance inland, and the repairs went slowly. Jason and Frank did the bulk of the heavy lifting and large work with the assistance of their powers, directed by Leo's constant micromanaging. Piper was relegated to cleanup duty, picking up scraps and broken fragments they wouldn't need and tossing them into a pile overboard. It was hard, laborious work, but it kept her mind off everything that had happened recently.

After the passing of the storm, they all appreciated the cloudless day they'd been blessed with. Working up a sweat with the sun beating down on her harshly. wearing a tank top and shorts while cleaning up the rubble.

Leo was both a stickler for safety and a massive hypocrite. He had her wearing thick gloves to protect her hands, which filled with sweat far too quickly, while he himself ran about with nothing. Piper was glad to finally haul the last unidentifiable piece of junk overboard and take the darned things off, shaking her hands out with a disgusted sniff.

With her portion of the work finally done, Piper was able to head below deck for a cool drink and to relax her aching muscles. This was perhaps the one time she wouldn't have minded being left out of all the fun. She groaned in relief, reclining in a padded chair at the dining table, sipping on a Sprite that magically topped itself off every time she set it down.

It took some time for the boys to finish up their work for the day and join her below deck, each collapsing in their own seats and following her lead by grabbing their own preferred beverages. It was quiet, None of the arguing or glaring from yesterday to be found in the group. Nothing like a near-death experience and a days hard work to smooth over those bubbling emotions.

The four of them caught their breath at the table. Hazel was still nowhere to be seen, and eventually, Leo spoke up. “I think I can get us airborne… maybe two days from now? but my controls were completely destroyed, I'll have to drive the ship manually the whole time.”

Jason grunted in acknowledgment. "How long until we get to Epirus?"

Leo hesitated. "I don't know if we can. After this delay, we have time to either save Annabeth, or save the world. I don't think we can do both anymore."

Jason let gravity pull him downward, his head hitting the table with a thunk loud enough to make Piper wince.

“I know what Percy would want,” she mumbled quietly, almost scared to be heard. “He would want us to save Annabeth, no matter the cost. Even if it meant sacrificing everything to do it.”

There was no easy answer, and Piper scanned the faces of her companions, judging their reactions. Leo sat fiddling with a white crystal in his hands, turning it over and studying it closely. "Maybe we should save her," he said softly.

Frank looked appalled. "You can't seriously be suggesting-I-look, I know what I said yesterday, but the camps will be destroyed if we fail. Our homes will be destroyed. Everything will be destroyed."

“So, we should just abandon Annabeth?” Piper asked, making pointed eye contact with Frank, who could not meet her gaze. “We should just leave her stuck behind those doors, waiting for them to open, while it slowly dawns on her that her friends never came, that they left her down there?” Piper knew she was being harsh, but she needed to test him. She needed to understand where Frank was at.

Frank clenched his fists in anger, glaring down at the table as if it were the thing that had insulted him. Shaking with frustration, it was rare to see the boy this angry. She knew this was a hard decision for him, but whatever conclusion they came to had to be unanimous.

Piper and Leo waited patiently for Frank to respond, with Jason face down on the table, silent but listening.

“Maybe,” Frank began, “we can split up. The boat can’t fly, but Jason and I can. We could head to the Doors of Death to pick up Annabeth, while Leo and the girls head to the Acropolis.”

Piper was disappointed. It was a fine response, a reasonable one even, and she wasn't sure why she expected anything different. Had hoped for something else.

Leo countered quickly, "It won't work. I need at least one of you here for repairs, otherwise this boat's never getting off the ground in time."

Jason also spoke up, his voice muffled from talking into the table and not at them, "And aren't we already spread a little bit thin? Things were a struggle with the seven of us. Now there's five. Do you think two of us can take on the army of monsters that's waiting at the doors of death?”

Frank looked incredulously between the three of them, searching for any support. "I - but, we..." he stuttered out. "What other choice do we have?"

He was starting to understand. He just needed one more little push.

"Hey Leo," Piper turned to him. "Is it hurricane season?" she asked.

Leo looked up from the crystal in his lap. He raised an eyebrow in question and responded, slowly, "No."

"And are we in an area that normally gets hit by hurricanes?"

Leo breathed in sharply. "I- no."

"Should there have been any weather at all?" she pressed.

Leo pressed his lips together. "No" he responded, this time gravely.

Jason finally lifted his head from the table, his eyebrows stitched together in worry. Piper was still not done. “We had the time to save both Annabeth and the world, Frank. Now we have time to save only one, and there is a reason for that. I just can't say his name, or we may never reach the Acropolis.”

The stares of the three demigods were as intense as they were unreadable. She began to think that maybe she had said too much this time. Maybe she had pushed a little bit too hard.

But Leo nodded his head in understanding, and Jason dropped his in defeat.

Frank did not look angry anymore. He looked... Sad? Concerned? He spoke quietly, but with weight. “That may be true, Piper. But we can't just let innocent people die. We can't be like them.”

Piper opened her mouth to respond, then closed it. She thought about how to respond and drew a blank, picking up her glass again and taking a drink, hiding her shame behind it.

“Then we split up,” Jason concluded. “Frank, you can take Hazel to Epirus. She'll be necessary while underground. And the rest of us will head for the Acropolis… It doesn't sound like enough damn it, but…” Jason sighed heavily “Only seven of us were even allowed to try”

—————

Piper waved goodbye at the dragon flying quickly away into the twinkling night sky, Hazel carried on its back. They left later than any of them had hoped. But apparently Hazel had been difficult to convince of their plan, certain that something was going to go wrong, that they wouldn't make it out of the House of Hades.

And, well, yeah, the poor girl had been in rough shape since Percy's death. Piper felt terrible for not including her in their earlier conversation, but what's done was done, and right now they needed to focus on making it to the Acropolis and keeping Gaia asleep.

The three of them pulled a double shift that night. Preparing the boat to hopefully take off the next day. By the time the sun was peeking over the nearby mountains, they were looking more zombie than half-blood

Leo stood at what remained of the helm and would stay there for the remainder of their trip. He'd set up a sleeping bag and somehow jerry-rigged a portable heater to keep him comfortable during his watch. Jason had, of course, offered to drive the boat in shifts, but Leo had turned him down with an uneasy laugh. Even the slightest misalignment in course could send them hundreds of miles off track.

Piper would have loved to spend this rare quiet opportunity with Jason. But the pounding in her head said she should have drank more water. And the aching of every limb had her trudging to her bed before her mind caught up.

When she awoke, it was dark again, and they were already flying. She barely even remembered falling asleep, much less... well, anything.

With a powerful stretch and a groan of relief, Piper threw on whatever was sitting next to her bed to keep herself modest and fumbled her way to the dining room. Pushing open the door made her pause because in the recent chaos, she'd forgotten today was her birthday, and she'd slept through the entire day. Jason, clearly, had not forgotten.

Simple streamers hung along the edges of the room, and the large table had been spread with a bright pink tablecloth. Where did that even come from? A cake with only one candle sat in the middle, and though magically conjured and not homemade, it still made her want to cry.

Jason himself was slumped forward on the table, head resting in one arm, fast asleep.

She didn't wake him up right away, instead picking up the single present that sat on the table and the note tied to its top. Unfolding it gently, it read, ‘To Piper, the most badass girl I know (and don't tell Annabeth I said that lol) - Leo.’

The top of the box was not secured, and she popped it open easily, revealing a pair of shining brass knuckles, beautifully engraved with the flowing image of a flower, a protea she thought it was. Piper wondered about the meaning of the flower, and if Leo had noticed her hesitance to use her dagger recently, or perhaps just a lucky guess.

She tried them on and they fit perfectly, of course. She didn't even question how Leo knew what size to make them. Yes, these would work wonderfully, she loved them.

Piper made her way around the table, and tapped Jason gently on the head with her new face crushing weapons. He awoke with a slight startle, blinking confusedly only a couple times before greeting her with a large, warm smile. "Mornin', Piper," he said, and she crushed him in a powerful hug. Jason ‘oofed’ as the air was squeezed out of him, and then hugged her back. "Thank you," she whispered in his ear, a few happy tears managing to escape.

"Happy birthday, Piper."

Chapter Text

PERCY had always been scared of flying. The largest of his worries that Zeus would turn his petty anger downwards and strike him dead on the spot, followed closely by just how unnatural it felt. He was a fish pulled out of the water, launched from a catapult, soaring through the sky at impossible speeds and told that it was perfectly normal and fine to do this. Indeed, The skys had always been out of reach for him.

PERSEUS however, had no such reservations. He was well beyond the sight of any gods here, and even if he wasn't, he would have dared them to try. He understood now the freedom that Jason had spoken of. Vast distances that had once taken him days to traverse now flew by below in mere hours. Hordes of monsters that he would have once needed to tear his way through now only glanced briefly upward at him. And anything with wings, anything that could float or fly or glide, would find that if they came close, their hearts would stop, and they would plummet from the sky, dead before they ever hit the ground.

The only limit to his speed now was the strength of his veins and the amount of pain he could endure. And Perseus had tasted every flavor of pain, had experienced its every exquisite variety, and found this particular style of torture lacking.

It was also incredible practice for fine-tuning his precision with these disgusting abilities. Pulling out enough power was no longer the issue; rather, it was applying just the right amount. Perseus found that he could achieve even greater speeds if he accelerated slowly, letting his own momentum be the thing that pulled him forward. He could use his power simply to hold himself in the air, accelerating only when necessary to minimize the strain on his body. It was dangerous business, since stopping suddenly was simply out of the question. The force applied to his internals would turn him into a golden water balloon.

It was a good thing, then, that Perseus cared little for his own safety. He had one goal and one goal only: Annabeth Chase was alive. And if he didn't find her before she died, he would throw himself into the void and be done with this whole charade.

The wasteland below was slowly become something mildly more hospitable. A biome where Tartarus's bloody rain found no cracks or pores to seep into, forming pools and lakes and supporting life and vegetation. A large, bloody bog with the largest variety of grotesque, twisted life he had seen in this hellhole yet. The movement of creatures down below, flitting back and forth between cover. The creaking and waving of old withered trees, blood red grasses grew along the banks of the polluted water.

All together, the place was entirely too monochrome, but perfect for his needs with the sheer variety of life it supported. Slowing his momentum sent his head into a dizzying spiral, black creeping in around the edges of his vision, but he managed to land safely without incident. Feet splashing into the thickened, bloody water, he instantly sensed the large beast lurking beneath its surface. The monster, too, sensed him, since it immediately tried to lunge at his ankle. It was exceptionally quick, and Perseus had to use the water to pull himself backwards out of range, then following through with a swift kick to the thing's head. The ridiculous amount of power he could produce just with his muscles at this point meant that he caved the creature's head in easily, crumpling it down like a car hood in a head on collision.

The murky red water obscured the thing's body, and it was impossible to see exactly what had tried to attack him, especially as more fresh red blood poured from its wound, darkening and thickening the water around it even further.

“Red blood?” Perseus mused. “That's certainly a rarity in Tartarus.” He knew of only one other creature that bled red in this place. Driven by simple curiosity, he reached out with his power and pulled the thing's carcass out of the water. That, oh wow, that was an honest-to-gods crocodile. Nothing monstrous or warped about it. It bled red. It was the normal size. No extra spikes, nor limbs, or any malformities to be seen, except for its caved in skull. It was just a normal crocodile. Or alligator? Perseus really didn't know the difference.

It was both amusing and strangely comforting to see a creature from the surface that needed no extra adaptations, no extra assistance from the dark god of the Pit. This magnificent beast was… Well, it was dead now, so it didn't matter. Perseus felt a little bad about that. He was here to kill monsters, not animals. Admittedly, this particular beast certainly blurred the line.

Extending his senses outward revealed plenty more crocodiles lurking in the waters, as well as a dozen other things that he was unsure of, only seeing their vague shapes. The heavy humidity in the air also gave him sonar vision of the surface, including several hundred meters away, something walking on two legs. Perseus couldn't help the small, sharp smile that grew on his face. He turned away from the poor animal's corpse to begin his hunt properly. For too long he had been wandering through Tartarus aimlessly, hoping for a scrap of information or guidance on where to go. He was done with that now. He would find the Doors of Death and Annabeth, no matter how many monsters he needed to… persuade, to get that information.

Knowing exactly where every creature around him was with pinpoint accuracy meant that while he did not take the most direct path to his quarry, he did take the most efficient one. Dodging and weaving around the edge of other creatures' senses to move forward unimpeded. He approached from behind, feet gliding silently across the ground as he closed the distance. He was close enough to recognize the monster now. A cyclops, fully grown, easily twelve feet tall, wielding one of the nearby red-barked trees as a club.

The thing did finally hear him, just as he was preparing to attack. The monster turned, but not fast enough, as Perseus leapt from the ground, delivering a swift, brutal jab to the base of its spine. The thing cried out in a voice not its own, mimicking the screamed pains of something higher pitched. It fell forward, face first into the muck, and its cries became muffled. Its arms spasmed at its sides, slamming into the ground repeatedly and twitching uncontrollably. Its legs did not move at all.

Good punch, Perseus thought to himself. Paralyzation on the first hit is very efficient. The monster continued to scream in agony, the high-pitched cries of whatever it was mimicking grating on his ears. He came around to its side and delivered a swift kick to the ribs. "Stop that," he scolded. And the cyclops did, thankfully, drop the impression, whimpering and sobbing in its own, deeper voice.

Since the cyclops could not move, its body still seizing lightly, Perseus decided to roll the thing over onto its back so they could speak face to face. The cyclops, when it laid its single giant eye on him, began blubbering incoherently between sobs.

“Hello,” Perseus greeted simply. As if talking to an acquaintance in the park.“I’m looking for the Doors of Death. Have you seen ‘em?”

It took a moment for the monster to stop hyperventilating, and Perseus waited patiently. Eventually it did manage to speak coherently, "Please don't kill me," it sobbed.

“The Doors of Death?” Perseus repeated, ignoring the monster's plea. “How do I get there?”

Still, the cyclops did not respond, whining in pain and blubbering, “Please, I can’t. It’s not- I don’t want to. Don’t kill me.”

Perseus sighed in annoyance. “Fine, fine. I won’t kill you, just as long as you tell me how the hell I get to the Doors.”

“Really?” the thing asked, hopefully. “You won’t?”

“Yes, really,” Perseus snapped, his patience quickly running thin. “But if you don’t speak quickly, I’ll tear your fucking eye out and feed it to the crocodiles.”

Another seizure wracked the cyclops' body, and for a moment it could not respond. It took a minute for the shaking to die down and the creature's hazy eye to finally refocus on him. “Downriver” it whimpered quietly. "Just go downriver and you'll find the heart of Tartarus."

Eh? Really? It was that easy? He could have just followed any of the cursed rivers downstream, and they would have taken him right where he needed to go? With a heavy sigh and feeling like a complete fool, Perseus raised his foot to crush the cyclops' skull and finish it off. "No, no, please!" it wheezed out, quietly. "You promised."

Perseus paused, looking down at the immobile cyclops. "I shattered your spine, friend," he said incredulously. "You're paralyzed from the waist down. This is mercy." "No," it whimpered, still quieter than last time. "I won't be able to come back. Your Perseus, the destroyer. Tartarus isn't bringing back anyone you kill. I don't want to fade away." Its voice was so quiet now that Perseus could barely make it out.

“Fascinating,” Perseus whispered, eyes twinkling with dark, gleeful emotion. Then brought his foot down on its forehead, crushing its skull, the top popping open and spilling blood, golden viscera and brain matter out in a small explosion. He pulled his foot out of the filth, trailing strands of gold, and picking out a small shard of skull that had lodged itself in the bottom of his foot. "Thanks for the information," he addressed the corpse as if it could hear him, and then turned away, already forgetting about the monster he had promised to spare as he began his hunt anew.

Annabeth's destination would be the Doors of Death, and that made it his destination.

He was vaguely aware that he should be concerned that he wasn't thinking of completing the mission, that he had stopped caring about freeing the Doors or returning to the surface to save anyone. He had friends there, he had family there, so many people he cared about, people he loved, and yet all he could think about, all he could care about, was one girl.

Hera's words came back to him again. "You would destroy the world to save the one you love."

Was that what he was doing? What he may have already done? Doomed the world to be reborn in Gaia's twisted image because he couldn't find the strength to care about anything past his own selfish desire for love?

Well, yes. Yes, it probably was. He'd abandoned the people he cared about, hadn't he? Had tried to send himself straight into the void to be dissolved. Only the knowledge that the person he was loyal to, the one who'd fallen with him, was alive, had brought him back with a vengeance.

He found, strangely, that it didn't bother him that much. Ah, loyalty. Twisted, warped, overwhelming loyalty. These repeated rebirths had taken something fundamental from him, and Perseus mourned the boy he used to be. The boy who would be torn apart by the knowledge that people were dying because of him, his failures, his shortcomings. He mourned the boy who cared, the boy who laughed, the boy who showed compassion, who showed mercy. He was none of those things anymore.

He had a different path now, had chosen a different path, had named himself Executioner.

And that cyclops had called him Destroyer.

Such dramatic titles.

Perseus had never wanted this kind of power, this kind of infamy.

Oh, how he craved it now.

The River Styx was closest, and it sang to him, distant yet unyielding-a chorus of voices screaming out in anger, each trying to be louder, more abrasive than the last. They cried to him as the only one who could understand, who had the power to hear.

Perseus felt no pity for oathbreakers. Once he may have been disturbed by those sounds, but now they represented freedom. Now he could follow them, and they would take him straight to his goal. How much easier this was once he gave up his morals, his mercy; weeks of dredging through Tartarus alone, trumped by a single brutal execution.

He rose gently from the ground again and began his flight towards the cursed river, his vision vanishing as he went. No, that wasn't quite right. His vision was fine; rather, it was his sonar sense of nearby liquid that became hazy, unclear. He was too inexperienced to keep up that specific power while in flight, but already it had become so second nature, so natural to him, that its disappearance felt just as significant as losing his eyesight.

It was not too long until the great river came into view in the distance, visible not because it shined with power but because it sucked the very soul out of the air. The dull red glow of Tartarus light vanishing nearby, replaced by a dead gray haze. It would certainly be safer to stay well away from this stream of anti-power, this wellspring of hatred and pollution.

Perseus already knew exactly what it was like to be touched by its terrible power. Almost nothing can survive even a few drops. He had no interest in taking a second dip.

…

Almost. Nothing. Can. Survive. Even. A. Few. Drops.

Not everything relied on Tartarus for their immortality, and he certainly couldn't be opening rifts to the Void every time he needed to kill one. Especially once he was back on the surface.

Perseus already controlled water, controlled blood and ichor. Why not the Styx? Why shouldn't he take this power for himself?

His landing was even smoother this time. Gently floating down to land near the riverbank without any black creeping in around the edges of his vision, or even displacing the dust at his feet. Perseus stared at the cursed river, listening to the chorus of screams. Thousands of overlapping voices, each with their own reason to cry out in fury, each clamoring for attention, begging for a savior, for revenge, screaming just to be heard.

Certainly, the river had not been this loud, this discordant, the last time he had visited. Was he able to hear the river better now, or did the river react more strongly to him?

It didn't matter. The voices were meaningless echoes of long-dead traitors, things who didn't deserve his attention. Perseus reached out with his powers to grab a hold of the river, to take a part of it for himself.

The river bulged and bubbled as he pulled at it, and then the voices appeared directly in his head, deafeningly loud, bouncing around the inside of his skull and reverberating with pure hatred. Touching the river with his abilities had opened him up to so much more than just its destructive capabilities. It also opened his mind, to every soul dissolved and spiraling away in its rapids.

His head pounded and ached in pain. He became deaf to anything except the screaming in his mind. But he continued to pull. This river would bend to him. His world spiraled, nausea rising up in his gut. A single, thin tendril of water reaching out to him slowly from the river. He would not break. He would not yield. The tendril reached out, creeping ever closer, and Perseus reached out his own hand to meet it.

“And just what do you think you're doing, mister?” snapped a voice, somehow piercing the cacophony in his mind. It startled him enough that he lost control of the river, the thin tendril splashing away just before meeting his hand. He collapsed forward onto one knee, breathing heavily, panting at the exertion of pulling just that much cursed water.

He looked up woozily to see a water nymph? No, the aura she radiated was far too much. This was Styx herself. She looked surprisingly average, not in an offensive way, just that she looked like any other river spirit. Translucent body made out of the Styx water itself, simple flowing garb. If Perseus didn’t know any better, he would say that this was simply a water nymph of a completely normal river from the surface, if slightly polluted.

"Uhhh," was his brilliant response, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

She stood with hands perched on her hips, lips pursed in anger, glaring down accusingly at him. "Well," she demanded, "I gave you my blessing once. And you wasted it, washed it away it that stinking roman Tiber. If you were hoping for my help again you are sorely mistaken”

"Well, not exactly," he began, rising wobbly to his feet and steadying his voice. "You see, I've got a date with the Doors of Death and an army of monsters. And I thought to myself, what better weapon than the River Styx? You know, chop up a few baddies, save the girl, go home." Perseus really didn't want to fight Styx. It was true that she had helped him once, though this Titaness’ version of help was incredibly painful, so he wasn't sure exactly if he was happy about it.

"Absolutely not," she replied immediately. "Go bully the Lethe if you absolutely must, but you are not using my river as a weapon."

Perseus's eye twitched in anger. He ground his teeth and glared down at the titaness. She was in his way.

It might be doable, he thought. To take her out. She’d already made the mistake of manifesting in front of him, separating herself from her source of power. He could control her very body. Not easily. He was struggling to pull a tendril from the Styx, but maybe it could be done. He could drag her with him high into the air, far away from the thing that empowered her. He could tear her to pieces. He could destroy her. He could take this river for himself. He could…

Perseus paused, hand unconsciously half-lifted towards her. he dropped it back to his side. What the hell was he doing? This girl was no threat to him. She clearly thought them at least decent acquaintances. Unafraid to manifest before him and have a casual, perhaps heated, chat. And his first thought was to murder her in cold blood? What was wrong with him?

Eventually, he managed to calm himself and grind out a few quiet words. “You’re right,” he grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

Styx’s hands dropped from her hips and she blinked, surprised. “Oh,” she intoned.

Perseus let himself drop to the ground in a tired slump, still drained from his small control exerted on the river. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed his temples lightly.

“Damn, those voices hurt,” he grumbled. Styx, surprisingly, came and sat nearby, lowering herself much more gracefully to half-kneel next to him.

“Yes, they certainly do,” she agreed. She was staring at him unblinkingly, studying him.

“I thought,” she started and then paused. “Forgive me, but I thought Tartarus had gotten to you. I thought you were, well, a monster now.”

Perseus winced at that comment. It wasn't so far from the truth. "He did," Perseus said. "I had claws and gills and this terrible, horrible urge to never stop moving. I thought I was a monster. I had to rebuild this body myself to wash away those terrible parts. I...” Gods, he really was starved for attention, wasn't he? About to spill his entire story just because someone asked nicely.

“But then I met Oceanus,” his voice choked up at the memory, “and he asked me a question, such a simple question. He asked, ‘Who are you?’ I didn't have an answer for him. Told him I was a monster, a fighter, a failure. If only. The question stuck with me, and it turns out that I'm something much, much worse.”

Styx gasped lightly, in shock. "My father? You saw him? When? Where? Is he okay?"

Perseus paused, looking down at her wide, hopeful eyes. "Your father? He's your father? I didn't... I didn't realize."

She blushed lightly, turning away from his gaze. “He wasn't always the best father, but he cared, and no one had seen him in at least a century. How? Where?” She pressed

How was he supposed to respond to that?

He couldn't crush her hope, couldn't destroy that spark in her eyes, but he couldn't lie to her either.

Perseus spoke hesitantly. "I met him in a vast dead sea by a crumbling alter. I think he was stuck there. Polybotes mentioned that Tartarus had cursed the place to never rain again. I don't think he could leave."

“Could?”

“He had a final wish when I got there: he wanted to see his daughters again.” A lie. A filthy, rotten lie. “I couldn’t help him there, but I broke the curse on the land. He faded away, staring up at his first rainfall in centuries. I'm sorry, he's gone.”

“I suspected, but I always thought… I hoped that…” Styx trailed off, unable to continue as tears began falling from her already watery eyes. She stifled them behind a hand, shaking her head in grief.

Perseus reached out hesitantly, wrapping an arm around her shoulder in comfort. The moment he touched her, a million poison-tipped needles jabbed into his arm. The searing, overwhelming pain that always came with touching the Styx's waters. And Styx, who had likely not been touched in a millennium, due to that, melted into his embrace, wrapping her arms around his neck and sobbing into his chest. Perseus's vision disappeared, his head pounding in incredible levels of pain. His entire awareness became the tactile sensation of each point where they touched, each torturous, all-consuming point.

It was all he could do just to stay upright, just to continue holding this poor, sobbing girl. The death of an immortal was a rare and powerful thing, and the grief that came with it was not something he fully understood, but it was something he could bear.

He was the strongest of them; he would be, he had to be. He had named himself as such. Whether that meant tearing an immortal to pieces and banishing them to the void, or simply comforting one who needed it, he would be strong enough. He would not fail again.

Eventually, after what felt like an age, but could have been only moments, Styx pulled away, wiping at her face over and over. Perseus gasped in relief, breath coming in heaving, desperate gasps. He'd survived, dear gods, he'd survived.

“O-oops,” the Styx hiccuped. “I know I said I wouldn't bless you again, but I just… I couldn't help myself. I really wanted a hug.”

“That’s fine,” Perseus wheezed out, painfully. “Just the one hug, though. I think I’m done.”

“Um… Your mortal point is above the heart this time” she told him bashfully

“cool”

…

…

“Your a good man Percy” she whispered

“I don't know anymore”

“You are” Styx insisted, “You may not be able to see it, but I do”

“I was going to kill you,” Perseus admitted shamefully. “I was gonna tear you away from your river and take its power for myself.”

Styx shrugged, unconcerned. “Yeah, well, I was going to kill you too. I thought Tartarus had gotten into your head. But you didn't. Instead, you risked your life just to comfort me.”

Her finger hovered in front of his mortal spot, just above the heart, jabbing at it without touching “You're a good man, Perseus,” she told him again. “That's why your mortal point is here.” She almost-poked it again. “Don't ever forget that. Your weakest point has always been your heart.”

“But-”

“No buts” she interrupted “You are a good man” She repeated again, daring him to contradict her.

“Thank you” Perseus choked out

“Anytime hun” Styx looked up at him hopefully “hug?”

Perseus blanched “no thank you”

“Damn, well it was worth a try”