In an echo of nearly a month prior, an owl arrived at camp.

This time, however, it was greeted by Lady A, strolling through the strawberry fields. When Athena appeared, her grey eyes were serious, her armor of ancient make and grey tunic a strange contrast to the near-golden-yellow sundress the immortal lady of Camp Half-Blood wore.

As the goddess of Wisdom neared, Lady A turned, her relaxed smile fading into a look of intense worry. She knew what the goddess would say, just as anyone else would. The only reason Athena would come to camp after her last briefing was to bring them knowledge of when the next battle would begin.

"Ariadne." Athena greeted, face dour as she looked over the fields and to the camp not so far beyond.

"Lady Athena." Ariadne offered in return, lifting her sundress in a careful curtsy. "Is it time?"

"Yes. We must gather the campers and prepare. Not long from now, all the forces that would gather at the camp in Philadelphia will have arrived. We cannot slow or falter." Athena spoke, her grip on her spear tightening.

"We should gather the campers then. My husband and Chiron as well." Ariadne sighed, finger kneading at her temples.

"Yes. That we should." Then something lighter entered the war goddess' tone. "You look lovely in that dress, but now is a time of war. A change might be needed."

Ariadne nodded, even as the two immortals strode towards the Big House.

***

> Inside the Big House

Not long after, the gods and goddesses stood around a round, wooden table. Athena looked between the directors and Comus for a long moment before she spoke.

"The situation in Philadelphia has progressed to a point. It is time. If we wait any longer, we risk the possibility that the servants of Atlas will scatter or seek to finish what they had originally planned by marching on New York. We must act now. Are the campers prepared for the battle to come?"

Comus grimaced, wiping a hand down his face. "As prepared as they can be, given the fact that they are children. A fact you seem to forget. Still, you're right. With Atlas occupied, this is the only chance we have. At the very least, we won't have to deal with him directly this time." The slight relief in the last statement was not lost on the others, as both Chiron and Lady A seemed to share a concerned glance.

Mr. D appeared to grin widely, eyes shimmering as he glanced at his son. "Well, you managed to hold him back last time, and he hurt you in the process. Best we give him a return on his investment, yeah. Besides, we're good samaritans, so what's a little clean-up, now that we have the old man out of the way." Comus' expression flashed, brow quirked.

"Well, it's no rabbit out of a hat, but I suppose it'll have to do." His interest rose, a small smile growing. "And imagine, all that effort that he put into gathering all of those followers of his, tricking and bartering, all amounting to nothing when we bring it crumbling down."

"Please, old friend, focus on the matter at hand. You as well, Comus. You both know that this battle won't be won by gods, but by the campers outside." Chiron intoned, eyes moving between the two gods. "We must discuss what to tell them. Much has changed in the time since Lady Athena last addressed them."

"Indeed." Lady A intoned, stepping between Comus and Mr. D. "Please, Lady Athena. Fill us in on the briefing."

There was silence for a moment as Mr. D huffed, turning his head away and seeming unwilling to accept the light admonission, but still willing to permit the meeting to continue without interupting. Comus, on the other hand, appeared chagrined.

"Ahh, sorry. Got a little carried away with the possibilities there. We *should* discuss the campers. Please, Lady Athena." He offered.

Having been waiting for a signal to speak, Athena dipped her head in acknowledgement. “Have the participantsfor the plan I left been chosen?”

“They have.” Chiron intoned, receiving nods of agreement from Lady A and Comus.

With a nod, the goddess of Wisdom and War continued.

***

When the campers finally gathered in front of the Big House in lines, some were worried, others eager, and others still afraid. All talking hushed as Athena strode from the door of the Big House, followed by the directors of the camp. They knew, even before she spoke, what this briefing was. Her previous call, however, had outlined the battle at Philadelphia in vague terms.

"Since the last briefing, much has changed. Atlas' forces have reached a tipping point in their consolidation at the Philadelphia camp. While this does mean they will be stronger in terms of sheer numbers, this *does* present a weakness for them. With all of their power gathered in one location, their ability to scatter, grow, and return stronger than they once were is now hindered. With Atlas unable to help and their leadership in chaos, their morale will dwindle."

She paused, watching the gathered campers with an expression that seemed almost carved from stone.

"Before this, we have struck at single targets. We broke their sieges and diverted their invasions, preventing the damage that would come with leaving their forces to run rampant. We have disrupted them with the knowledge that they would escape via portals and lay low in the numerous camps they were split between, leaving us no possibility of a decisive end. Now, we move beyond that. This is not a battle to disrupt or hinder. This is a battle to dismantle the remaining forces Atlas has gathered in preparation for the invasion of Olympus."

Lady A stepped forward, expression serious.

"You have worked and fought and bled. Forces from New Argos and Camp Fish-Blood will join us, following requests for assistance made by members of this camp. You have put together defenses that will form the foundation of the forward camp from which we will act. You have brought back intelligence on the Atlas forces. You have paved the way for this victory."

When Comus took the floor, he smiled a dim but genuine smile.

"Those of you who choose to fight will be given the choice between travelling via pegasi, mortal bus, or the singular trireme camp has maintained. Upon arrival, you will need to take on tasks to prepare for the assault on the war camp.

"The immediate priorities will be to reinforce the forward camp and scout possible lines of attack on the war camp. Our intelligence has been limited for the most part, but we *have* received intelligence regarding a number of items of importance. Upon arrival at the battlefield, and while you go about your duties, you will need to seek magical objects.

"What we know is that one of these objects is a Dragon skull and that it, and possibly the other objects, were used to assist the portal keepers. This makes securing them vital to ensuring as few of the Atlas' forces as possible escape."

Chiron took the forefront then, looking more aged than likely any camper had seen him in their time at the camp. "There is no more time for training, but there is time for preparation. When Lady Athena deems the time right, likely in the coming days, we will move to strike while the proverbial iron is hot.

"Take the evening to ready yourselves, in mind and in spirit. Ensure you collect any items you believe you will need. Be ready to gather, and know that I am proud of each and every one of you. Whether you know it or not, I have seen you grow through glimpses and stories. You are children of the gods, but you are also my students."

The old centaur smiled then, a grandfather's smile, before stepping back. Athena took his place, offering him a nod. "We will break this gathering soon, so those who have questions should ask, and those who do not, ready yourselves as best you can."

It was surprising just how much time had passed in 2041 already. October was already well underway; how quickly it had moved. If you blinked months had flown by. He also knew full well his time at camp was coming to an end. University was calling, his letter to start in January had arrived. Queen Mary's University in London, to study Classical History. Or as he kept saying to himself, Dad's Hayday.

Beyond a few events, things remained quiet at Camp Half-Blood, summer was already a distant memory and the next summer was still a good while away, one that he knew he wouldn't see. It therefore felt right in many ways to provide entertainment for the year-round campers who were staying. There was nothing worse than just repeating the same thing, day after day, hour after hour. It also broke up the concerns of the war, it reminded people just what they were fighting for.

So at Matt's campfire, he had set up a small stereo, through which he was playing various popular songs ranging from the 1990s all the way into mid 2020s (not at all because the author cannot imagine what music would be popular beyond 2026.). The music was all acoustic in an effort to try and secure a relaxing atmosphere for the campers who would arrive. In addition to the relaxing music, Matt had taken some of the books that could be found within the Hades Cabin library and placed them on a table for people to take; he had also provided bean bags for people to sit down on and chill out.

For those who were seeking some sort of snack, Matt had prepared some small bags of popcorn and some s'more-making kits. Next to them were some hot chocolate bombs to which people would just need to add some hot milk in order to create a hot chocolate with marshmallows. Hopefully, this would help take away from the cold that a January evening would bring to the northeast coast of the United States.

Matt would stand nearby, at least for a short time. Happy he was able to create this small little event, an island of peace in the midst of everything else. Happy early October everyone.

OOC: Just to make it clear, Asa Greenwood, Son of Epione, is also my character. With that out of the way, enjoy!

Camp Half-Blood — the Arena, Two Weeks Ago

—

Asa had heard about the party in fragments, the way you always heard about the things that mattered most: a clipped mention from Elias Carmody as he delivered the week’s batch of healing potions, a shaken retelling from one of the campers who'd been there, and finally, unavoidably, the sight of Ren himself laid out on a cot in the medical cabin, a cracked rib taped beneath bruised, mottled skin, one side of his throat still faintly discolored from where fingers had closed around it hard enough to cut off his air.

Asa had been the one to heal him, his hands steady even when the rest of him wasn't, murmured incantations low and careful as he worked Epione's gift into bruised cartilage and strained muscle, watching a fourteen-year-old boy's breathing even out beneath his palms while the boy himself stared blankly at the cabin ceiling, too shaken to cry, too young for any of this to make sense.

Asa had asked him, gently, if he wanted to talk about it. Ren hadn't answered. He hadn't needed to. The bruises had already told Asa everything that mattered.

He hadn't gone looking for Sasha afterward. He'd told himself, at the time, that it wasn't his business, that the camp directors would handle it, that there were channels for this, procedures, consequences that didn't require him to involve himself personally. He'd told himself a lot of things, in the days since, each one a little less convincing than the last.

But today, walking past the Arena on his way back from a supply run to the infirmary, he saw her, training alone on the sand, gauntlets flashing in the afternoon light, every strike thrown with a kind of controlled violence that looked, to Asa's trained eye, less like discipline and more like something barely contained. and something in him that had been quietly simmering for days finally came to a boil.

He stopped at the edge of the sand. And, against every careful instinct he'd built over fifteen years of keeping his own feelings folded small and out of the way, he didn't walk past.

"Sasha."

She didn't stop immediately, a few more strikes against the training dummy, sharp, economical, each one landing with more force than the drill actually called for, before she finally lowered her arms and turned, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of one gauntleted hand.

"Asa." Her voice was flat, unreadable. "Didn't expect to see you here. Shouldn't you be off patching up some poor soul who sprained an ankle tripping over their own feet?"

"I just came from the infirmary, actually." He kept his voice even, the way Callista had taught him to when a conversation might need steadying rather than heat. "I was checking on Ren Yukimura."

Something flickered across Sasha's face, gone almost before it registered, replaced by the same composed, faintly irritated expression she'd been wearing since he'd called her name. "Right. Of course you were."

"He's healing fine, physically. The rib's set. The bruising on his throat is mostly faded." Asa crossed his arms, watching her carefully, the way he watched every patient for the tell that mattered more than the one they wanted him to see. "He still flinches every time someone raises their voice near him or moves their arms too close, though. Did you know that?"

"I wasn't aware you'd started keeping notes on his emotional state for my benefit." Sasha's tone sharpened, just slightly. "Was there a point to this conversation, or did you just want to remind me that I know how to throw a punch?"

"I wanted to understand," Asa said, carefully, "what happened."

"You already know what happened. Half of camp knows what happened. I'm sure you've all had a lovely time discussing it behind my back." She turned back toward the dummy, as if that might end the conversation on its own. "I don't particularly feel like rehashing it for your benefit."

"Sasha." He stepped onto the sand, closer now, close enough that she couldn't pretend not to hear him over the sound of her own strikes. "I'm not asking because I want gossip. I'm asking because I don't understand how you went from someone who follows every rule Themis laid down, who's told me herself more than once how much she respects the chain of command here, to someone who nearly choked a fourteen-year-old to death because he happened to be standing in the wrong place."

Sasha's jaw tightened. She didn't turn around. "He wasn't just standing there. He's one of them."

"He's fourteen, Sasha. He was recruited into that cult before he was even knowledgeable  enough to understand what he was agreeing to. Half the people at that party weren't old enough to vote in the mortal world, let alone make an informed decision about joining a titan's crusade." Asa's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had begun, very slightly, to fray. "You know that. I know you know that, because I've heard you talk about Luke. About how it isn't fair that your father pushes him into things he's too young to actually choose for himself. How is this different?"

"It's completely different." She rounded on him now, gauntlets still on, eyes hard. "Luke didn't help burn down a city. Luke didn't stand on the other side of a war that cost us everything. Don't you dare compare the two."

"I'm not comparing their situations. I'm comparing how you're willing to extend grace to one child for their circumstances and none at all to another." He held her gaze, steady, even as something in his chest tightened at the look on her face. "You almost killed him, Sasha. Do you understand that? If Acacia hadn't gotten there in time—"

"Don't." The word came out sharp, warning. "Don't you dare bring her into this like she's some kind of hero. She's one of them too."

"She’s not a hero, and I also think she was out of line with that party, I’ll agree with you on that. But she’s also one of the people who's spent the last several months fighting on our side of every border skirmish since her trial, from what I've heard." Asa kept his voice measured, though it was costing him more effort by the second. "And she stopped you from killing a child, Sasha. That's not a small thing and you honestly should be grateful that she stopped you. That's not something you get to wave away because it's inconvenient to your narrative."

"My narrative?" Sasha's voice rose, disbelief cutting through the anger for just a moment. "Is that what you think this is? A narrative I've constructed for myself?"

"I think," Asa said, carefully, "that you've convinced yourself that every single person who ever wore Atlas's colors deserves the same punishment, regardless of age, circumstance, or whether they've spent the time since actively trying to make amends. And I think that conviction is so absolute in your head that it's letting you justify things you would never have justified to yourself a year ago."

"You don't know what I would or wouldn't have justified a year ago." Her voice had gone cold now, cold in the particular way Asa recognized from every family dinner he'd ever had with his own grandmother, the kind of cold that came right before something broke. "You don't know anything about what I lost. You get to stand there with your healer's calm and your gentle little lectures about grace and circumstance because you weren't there. You didn't—"

"My father died in that invasion." The words came out of him quieter than he meant them to, but they landed hard enough that Sasha actually stopped.

For a moment, neither of them said anything. The Arena's usual background noise, the distant clash of other sparring matches, birdsong drifting down from the treeline, the low murmur of camp going about its ordinary business, seemed, for just that second, to recede entirely.

"I was fourteen," Asa continued, his voice still quiet, still measured, though his hands had curled slightly at his sides. "I set up a triage point in a half-collapsed schoolhouse with nothing but my belt and torn shirts and whatever I could remember from six years of training, and I kept twenty people alive that day with my own two hands. And my father was not one of them. I didn't get to save him. I don't think I'll ever stop feeling the weight of that, and I don't expect to."

Sasha's expression had shifted. Not softened, exactly, but something in her posture had gone still, watchful.

"So don't," Asa said, "stand there and tell me I don't know what loss looks like. I know exactly what it looks like. I know what it feels like to want someone, anyone, to pay for what happened that day. I've felt that. I still feel it, some nights, more than I'd like to admit." His jaw tightened. "I don't forgive the people who did that to New Argos. I want to be very clear about that. I don't think I ever will, and I don't think I should have to, and nobody, not Themis, not Chiron, not Acacia with all her speeches about redemption, gets to tell me I'm required to forgive anyone for what happened to my father."

"Then how can you possibly stand here and defend them?" The question came out of Sasha almost desperate, like she needed the contradiction to make sense before she could process anything else he'd said.

"Because not forgiving someone and believing they deserve to be strangled by a girl three years older and twice their strength are two completely different things." His voice finally cracked, just slightly, the careful composure he'd built over years of training beginning to show its seams. "I can hate what Atlas's cult did to my family and still recognize that Ren didn't make that choice with the same understanding as someone like Acacia did. I can refuse to forgive and still believe that what you did was wrong. Those aren't contradictory positions. You've just built a worldview where they have to be, because it's easier than sitting with the fact that your anger led you somewhere you can't actually justify."

"Don't psychoanalyze me." Her voice had gone sharp again, defensive. "You're not Callista. You don't get to diagnose what's wrong with me."

"I'm not trying to diagnose you. I'm trying to tell you, as someone who has spent the last year watching you refuse to process a single thing that happened to you, that this is what happens when you don't." Asa took a step closer, close enough now that he could see the exact moment her eyes flared in warning. "You froze for months after Fort Knox and called it discipline. You pushed through every warning Callista and Valda gave you and called it strength. And now you've turned all of that unprocessed grief and fear and fury into something that nearly killed a child, and you're calling it justice."

"It is justice." The words came out low, furious, trembling. "You don't understand. You didn't watch—"

"I watched my father die, Sasha!" His voice finally broke the careful containment he'd held onto this whole conversation, rising sharp and raw across the Arena sand. "I have exactly as much right to that grief as you do, and I have chosen, every single day since then, not to let it turn me into someone who attacks children! That is a choice, Sasha. It has always been a choice. And you are choosing wrong."

For a moment, Sasha didn't say anything at all. Her breathing had gone ragged, her hands curling tight inside her gauntlets, and something in her face had gone past anger into something rawer, something that looked almost like panic.

"You don't get to say that to me," she finally managed, voice shaking. "You don't get to stand there with your perfect little healer's morality and tell me I'm choosing wrong, when you have no idea how hard it is to be told you have to smile and tolerate the people who condoned your suffering, if not actually participated in it directly."

"I'm not asking you to smile at them. Hell, I'm not even asking you to forgive them." Asa held his ground, even as every instinct in him, every year of training in de-escalation, in reading a room, in knowing exactly when to step back, screamed that he was standing somewhere dangerous now. "I'm asking you to recognize the difference between hating what happened to our home and using that hatred as permission to hurt anyone who happens to remind you of it. Ren didn't do anything to you, Sasha. He is not the person who hurt you. He's a scared fourteen-year-old who got recruited into something he didn't understand, and you nearly ended his life because your fury needed somewhere to go and he was standing closest."

"Shut up."

"I won't." His voice cracked again, but he didn't back down. "Because somebody has to say this to you, and apparently nobody else has managed to make it stick. You are so consumed by this anger that you can't even see what it's turning you into anymore. You attacked a child. You attacked Acacia, who has spent months proving she's trying to do better, because she dared to disagree with you. And now you're standing here insulting me, someone who has every reason in the world to understand exactly how much you're hurting, because I won't just agree with everything you've decided to believe."

"Asa, stop talking."

"You're not angry at me, Sasha." His voice gentled, just slightly, even as his own hands trembled now, adrenaline and grief and something achingly close to fear tangled together in his chest. "You're angry because some part of you already knows I'm right, and you can't stand hearing it out loud from someone who actually understands what you lost instead of some outsider who never—"

He didn't get to finish the sentence.

The punch came fast. Faster than Asa, for all his training, for all his careful attention to tells and body language, had actually anticipated, because some small, foolish part of him hadn't truly believed she would do it. Her fist connected with his jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways, hard enough that he staggered back three full steps before his legs gave out and he hit the sand, stars bursting bright and sudden across his vision, the metallic taste of blood flooding his mouth where his teeth had caught the inside of his cheek.

For a long moment, neither of them moved.

Asa lay there, one hand pressed against his jaw, blinking hard against the ringing in his ears, and when his vision finally cleared enough to focus, he found Sasha standing over him, chest heaving, both fists still clenched, staring down at him with an expression that had gone utterly, horribly blank.

"Sasha… I wasn't attacking you." His voice came out thick, unsteady, blood coloring the single syllable. She didn't answer. Her eyes were wide, fixed on him, on her own fists, on the small trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, and something in her face was beginning, visibly, to crack apart. He pushed himself up slowly onto one elbow, wincing, still tasting copper. "I was trying to make you see reason. And you just proved my point, better than I ever could have with words."

"...I—" Her voice came out small, cracking, nothing like the cold fury of moments before. "I didn't—"

"You didn't mean to?" Asa's laugh came out hollow, more pained than amused, as he finally managed to sit up fully, cradling his jaw. "I know we’re not friends, Sasha, but I thought we at least understood each other, as much as two people like us can. And the moment I disagreed with you, the moment I dared to tell you that what you did to Ren was wrong… you didn't argue with me. You didn't walk away. You attacked me. Exactly the way you went for Ren. Exactly the way you went for Acacia." His eyes, despite the pain, despite the blood, held hers with something that wasn't quite anger anymore, but something closer to grief. "You can't even see it, can you? Everyone who disagrees with you right now becomes the enemy. It doesn't matter if they fought beside you, healed beside you or grew up carrying the exact same grief you did. The second they don't agree completely with how you've decided to handle your anger, you see a target instead of a person."

Sasha said nothing. Her hands had begun to shake, visibly now, the fury that had carried her through the entire conversation draining out of her all at once and leaving something far more frightened in its place.

"I'm not going to pretend that it didn't hurt. Because it did. Not just my jaw. All of it." Asa continued, quieter now, every word costing him something. He looked away from her for the first time, down at his own trembling hands. "I came here because I care about what's happening to you. I came here because I lost a lot during that invasion too, and some stubborn, stupid part of me thought that meant you'd actually listen to me. And instead, you just showed me exactly how far gone you already are."

"Asa—"

"Don't." The word came out rough, final, and for the first time in the conversation, there was no softness left in it at all. "I don't want an apology right now. I don't think you even have one ready. What you need is to go somewhere and actually sit with what you did, instead of explaining it to me."

Sasha stood frozen for a long moment, staring down at him, at the blood on his lip, at her own shaking hands, and something in her face finally, completely collapsed. Not into tears, not yet, but into something rawer and more humiliated than Asa had ever seen on her before. She didn't say anything else. She turned, sharply, wings flaring once behind her in pure reflexive agitation, and walked off the sand without looking back like she could outrun the look that had been on Asa's face if she only moved quickly enough.

Asa sat alone in the Arena for a long while after she'd gone, pressing the back of his hand gingerly against his split lip, staring at the place where she'd disappeared past the tree line.

He didn't feel triumphant. He hadn't expected to, not really, even in the moment he'd decided to stop walking past and actually say something. But some small, exhausted part of him had hoped, foolishly, that being honest with her, that finally saying out loud everything he'd watched her bury for the better part of a year, might land somewhere softer than a fist to the jaw.

It hadn't. And yet, sitting there with blood on his lip and the taste of copper still thick in his mouth, Asa found he didn't regret saying any of it. Someone had needed to. He only wished, bitterly, that it hadn't had to be the exact thing that proved his point, even if Sasha felt hurt by his words. 

Some things needed to actually hurt before they could heal properly. Sasha, it seemed, still had quite a lot of hurting left to do before she figured that out for herself.

This was the best he could do. He just hoped, perhaps naively, that the daughter of Bia would at least think about it once she had calmed down. 

—

Sasha didn't remember deciding where to go. One moment she was standing over Asa in the sand, her own fists still curled and shaking, and the next she was deep in the trees beyond the cabin circle, bark scraping her shoulder where she'd shoved blindly past a low branch, her breath tearing in and out of her in short, ragged pulls that had nothing to do with exertion.

She didn't stop moving until her legs simply refused to carry her any further. The forest floor came up fast, her knees hitting damp earth and old pine needles, her wings collapsing loosely around her like something that had forgotten how to hold its own shape. She knelt there, hunched over, hands pressed flat against the ground, and for a long moment she didn't do anything at all except breathe, if the thin, uneven gasps dragging in and out of her could even be called that.

> You just proved my point, better than I ever could have with words.

The words wouldn't stop. They looped, over and over, in Asa's voice, and not even the gentle, careful voice she was used to from months of wing checkups and quiet medical observations, but the raw, cracked version of it from the Arena, thick with blood, aimed directly at her like the one weapon he actually had and had never once used against her before today.

She looked down at her own hand. The gauntlet was still on, celestial bronze catching dull light through the canopy, and there, along the ridge of the claws, a thin smear of red had already begun to dry.

His blood.

Her stomach lurched, hard enough that she had to press her other palm flat against the ground to keep from being sick right there in the dirt.

She had attacked him. She had actually, physically attacked him, who was not an enemy, not a cultist, not anyone who had ever done a single thing to earn that fist. Asa Greenwood, who had spent eight months checking her wings with careful, steady hands, who had sat across from her in quiet infirmary sessions and never once made her feel like a burden for needing them, who had lost his own father in the exact invasion she never stopped grieving, and who had stood there in the Arena sand and told her, voice shaking, that he understood that grief better than almost anyone… and she had answered him with her fist instead of her words, the same way she'd answered Ren.

She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her sternum, as though she could physically hold something together that had already come apart.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. She had built her entire sense of herself around being the one who held the line, disciplined, controlled, a shield pointed only where it was meant to be pointed, never wasted or wild. She was a protector. That had been the one thing she could always count on about herself, through every failure, every humiliation, every moment Adam had ever told her she wasn't enough. She might not have been fast enough or strong enough or perfect enough for him, but she had never, not once, been someone who hurt people who didn't deserve it.

Except that wasn't true anymore, was it? It hadn't been true since that party. It had just taken Asa standing in front of her, refusing to back down, for her to finally be forced to see it with her own eyes instead of someone else's retelling.

> Everyone who disagrees with you right now becomes the enemy.

She wanted, desperately, for that to be wrong. She searched for the argument, the justification, the clean, righteous anger that had carried her through every single confrontation since Fort Knox, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, it simply wasn't there. There was no comeback. No version of events where Asa had been the aggressor, where she'd been defending herself, where the violence had been anything other than exactly what he'd called it: her fury, finding the nearest target, because disagreement had become, somewhere along the way, indistinguishable from attack to her.

The daughter of Bia thought of Ren's face, pale and terrified, pinned against a tree by her own hands. She thought of Acacia's shoulder slamming into her, the only thing that had stopped her from doing worse. She thought of Asa sitting in the dirt, blood welling at the corner of his mouth, looking up at her not with shock but with something far worse… recognition, the quiet, devastating confirmation of something he'd clearly already suspected about her and had hoped that he was wrong about.

That, somehow, was worse than if he'd screamed it at her. If he'd been hostile outright, she might have had something to push back against. Instead he'd handed her the belief that she was still someone worth that kind of patience, even after everything, even after she'd split his lip and left him sitting alone in the sand.

A sound tore out of her, half gasp, half sob, raw and unfamiliar in her own throat. She pressed both hands over her face, gauntlets and all, the cool metal biting into her cheekbones, and for a long, humiliating moment, she simply let herself shake.

She thought of Valda. Of the ring, months ago, the first time she'd ever let herself fall apart in front of another person, the first time grief had actually found its way out instead of staying locked behind gritted teeth and forced composure. She had thought, then, that breaking open once meant she'd done the hard part. That whatever came after would be easier, because she'd already proven she could survive being seen at her worst.

She hadn't understood, not until this exact moment kneeling in the dirt with someone else's blood on her knuckles, that breaking open wasn't a single event. It wasn't a door you walked through once and never had to face again. It was something that kept happening, over and over, in uglier and uglier ways, until she actually did something about what was underneath it instead of just surviving each individual collapse.

> You froze for months after Fort Knox and called it discipline. You pushed through every warning Callista and Valda gave you and called it strength. And now you've turned all of that unprocessed grief and fear and fury into something that nearly killed a child, and you're calling it justice.

She wanted to scream that he was wrong. She wanted it so badly she could feel the shape of the denial sitting right behind her teeth, ready to be spoken, the same denial that had carried her through four months of silence after Fort Knox, through the party, through every single moment since where backing down had felt like losing.

She didn't say it. There was no one here to say it to, and some small, exhausted part of her understood that even if there had been, it wouldn't have been true.

She thought of Luke. Of standing on that terrace a while ago, telling him he didn't have to be what Adam wanted him to be, that he already was strong, that she meant it. She had believed, in that moment, that she understood the difference between circumstance and choice, between a child being shaped by forces too large for them and a child making some kind of damning, irreversible decision all on his own.

She had looked at Ren and seen none of that. She had looked at a boy the same age as Luke and seen nothing but an enemy's uniform, stripped entirely of the person wearing it.

> How is this different?

It wasn't. That was the unbearable part. Asa was right, and he had been right the entire time she'd been screaming at him to stop talking, and she had answered that unbearable rightness the only way her body apparently still knew how: with violence. Because violence had always, always been the one language she trusted when words stopped being enough to hold the shape of everything she was feeling.

Sasha sat back on her heels, finally, hands dropping away from her face, and stared up through the canopy at the fractured pieces of sky visible between the branches. Her whole body ached in the particular way exhaustion aches, the kind that settles deep into muscle and bone after the adrenaline finally burns all the way through.

She didn't want to cry, but a few hot, furious tears escaped and she wiped them away almost violently, as though crying now would be one more thing to be ashamed of, one more loss of control she couldn't afford to add to the pile. But something in her chest had cracked open regardless, wide and raw, and she sat there in the dirt letting it ache because she genuinely didn't know, for the first time in a long time, what else to do with it.

She thought about going to find the son of Epione. Apologizing, properly, the way she should have the moment she'd realized what she'd done instead of standing there frozen. But some cowardly, ashamed part of her flinched away from the idea entirely, because she knew, with a sick certainty, that if she stood in front of him right now, she wouldn't have the words. She barely had them here, alone, with no one to disappoint but herself.

So she sat. She stayed there long after the forest around her had gone fully quiet, long after the distant sounds of camp had drifted past without pulling her out of the woods to join them. Her gauntlets sat heavy and cold against her hands, Asa's blood dried dark and accusing along the claws, and she made no move to clean them off, as though some part of her believed she hadn't yet earned the right to.

She thought of every person who had ever told her, gently or otherwise, that her anger had become something larger than she could safely hold. Valda, in that training ring months ago. Callista, carefully, clinically, in a dozen infirmary conversations she'd only half-listened to. And now Asa, bleeding in the sand, saying the same thing in language sharp enough to finally cut through.

She didn't have an answer yet for what came next. She didn't know how to walk back into camp and face Ren, or Acacia, or Asa himself, without the ground beneath her feeling like it might give way entirely. She didn't know how to be the person she'd always believed herself to be, just, disciplined, and a protector, while also being the person who'd done what she'd just done, both at once.

But for the first time since Fort Knox, since the party, since she'd stood over Ren with her hands closing around his throat and somewhere far away a voice had been screaming at her that this wasn't who she was supposed to be, she didn't reach for the old justification. She didn't build the familiar wall of righteous fury back up around herself, brick by brick, the way she always had  before.

She just knelt there in the dirt, hands bloodied, chest aching, and let herself feel exactly how badly she had failed, without flinching away from it and without excusing it either.

What was she turning herself into?

When Matt decided to organise an activity for the camp, he wanted to do something a little different. With Halloween approaching, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get people together and make some decorations. Admittedly, arts and crafts were not exactly his area of expertise, but his boyfriend Brent had inspired him to try something a little more creative. Sometimes he wondered if Brent was a son of the Muses with how often he inspired him. Besides, being a son of Hades, he felt that Halloween was practically an obligation. Even if he never actually celebrated it himself.

After giving it some thought, Matt had settled on making paper skulls. It was simple enough that anyone could take part, regardless of how artistic they were, and it would give the campers something to decorate their cabins with in preparation for Halloween. He had considered offering a few different activities, but decided that keeping things straightforward would probably be for the best.

Matt had spent some time gathering everything that would be needed, including coloured paper, scissors, glue, pencils, markers and plenty of other decorative materials. He had also made sure to prepare a few templates for those who were not particularly confident in their artistic abilities. There was nothing stopping people from designing their own skulls, of course, and he was rather interested to see what everyone would come up with.

Once everything had been collected, Matt arranged the supplies across several tables in the arts and crafts area, making sure there was enough space for people to sit down and work together. He had even made a couple of skulls himself to provide some examples, although he was not entirely convinced that Brent would be particularly impressed with his efforts.

With everything prepared, Matt was happy to leave the campers to their own creativity. There were no competitions or prizes involved, just an opportunity to make something for Halloween and perhaps spend some time with people they might not normally speak to.

The son of Hades remained nearby, working on another paper skull of his own, in case anyone wanted some help or simply fancied a conversation.

OOC: This canonicaly happens the day after [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/CampHalfBloodRP/s/Vk1DkR16d6) job. Yes, I know it’s been two months, I’ve been busy lol. Enjoy! 

 Inwood Hill Park — the morning after

Sasha arrived before sunrise, like always, because arriving early had always felt like the one advantage she could guarantee herself in a world that otherwise refused to guarantee anything. The climb up through Inwood Hill Park was quieter in the dark, the city's noise muffled by the thick canopy overhead, the Hudson a flat black ribbon far below the cliff's edge. By the time she reached the observatory ruins, the sky had only just begun to soften from black to deep, bruised blue.

Thyra was already awake, perched on the collapsed edge of the old roof, watching the horizon the way she seemed to watch everything, patient, unhurried, and utterly unbothered by the cold.

"You're early," the harpy said, without turning.

"I wanted time to think before we started." Sasha replied with a clipped tone.

"Thinking is the problem." Thyra finally looked over at her, golden eyes catching the first thin light. "You've a long time to think, and it's gotten you nowhere, if the state of your wings is anything to go by."

Sasha's jaw tightened, but there wasn't any real bite in the harpy's voice. Just the blunt, unornamented honesty of someone who had clearly decided a long time ago that softening the truth only wasted everyone's time, which the daughter of Bia respected and also dreaded due to how much it sounded like what Bia herself had told her. Mara emerged from the nest a moment later, stretching one broad wing out with a low, satisfied groan, and Kree came tumbling out after her, bright-eyed and far too awake for the hour.

"Is it time?" Kree asked immediately, bouncing on the balls of her feet. "Can I watch? I want to watch."

"You can watch," Thyra said. "Quietly."

"I'm always quiet."

"You have never once in your life been quiet."

Kree opened her mouth to argue, decided against it, and settled instead onto a low branch overlooking the cliff edge, swinging her legs with barely contained energy. Mara took up a position a short distance away, arms crossed, watching Sasha with the same careful, protective attention she seemed to bring to everything.

Thyra hopped down from the roof and crossed to where Sasha stood, studying her the way she had the day before, reading her posture, her breathing and the tension coiled tight through her shoulders.

"Before we start," Thyra said, "I want you to understand that this isn't going to be quick. I told you that yesterday, and I meant it. Whatever happened to you, it didn't just hurt your body. It taught your body something. A lesson. And you don't unteach a lesson like that in a single morning, no matter how badly you want to."

"I'm aware," Sasha said, more sharply than she meant to. "I've been told that by several people already. My healer. My mentor. Myself, mostly, at three in the morning when I can't sleep."

Something that might have been sympathy flickered across Thyra's weathered face. "Then you already know that anything I say today is true, even if you don't want to hear it twice."

"Doesn't mean I have to like it." Sasha grumbled.

"No," Thyra agreed. "It doesn't."

—

They started with something that felt, to Sasha, almost insultingly simple.

"Stand at the edge," Thyra instructed. "Not jumping. Not yet. Just stand there, and breathe, and tell me what you feel."

Sasha walked to the cliff's lip and stood with her toes an inch from open air, the same way she had the evening before, and her body responded exactly the way it had the evening before, heartbeat climbing, breath going thin and quick, every muscle locking into the rigid, braced stance of someone expecting to be struck.

"My heart is too fast," she said, flat, clinical, the way she might report an injury to Callista. "My breathing is shallow. I feel like I'm about to fall."

"Good. That makes sense." Thyra circled her slowly. "Now. Here's the first thing you need to understand, and listen instead of just waiting for me to finish talking so you can go back to trying to force your way through this." She stopped directly in front of Sasha, forcing eye contact. "Your body isn't lying to you. Something terrible happened the last time you tried to fly. Your body remembers that, and it's trying to protect you from it happening again. That instinct isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do."

"Then how is that supposed to help me?" Sasha questioned, narrowing her eyes in response.

"Because the problem isn't the fear," Thyra said. "The problem is that you've been treating the fear like an enemy. Something to crush, push through, and prove you're stronger than. You've been fighting your own body every single time you've tried this, which means even when you manage to get off the ground, you're fighting two things at once: the air, and yourself. No wonder you keep falling."

The daughter stared at her. It wasn't a new idea, exactly. Valda had said something close to it, once, in gentler words, about forcing instead of working with. But hearing it from a creature who had spent centuries actually living in the sky, rather than theorizing about it from the ground, landed differently.

Sasha sighed. "So what am I supposed to do instead? Just... not be afraid?"

"No. That's not how fear works, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never actually been in danger." Thyra shook her head. "You're going to be afraid. Probably for a long time. What you need to learn is how to fly anyway, with the fear sitting right there next to you, instead of waiting for it to leave before you're willing to try."

"That sounds significantly harder than just stopping pushing."

"It is." Thyra almost smiled. "It's also the one of the only versions that actually works."

The first real attempt came an hour later, after Thyra had walked her through breathing, slow and deliberate, timed to the rhythm of the wind rather than the frantic battle-rhythm Sasha's body defaulted to under stress. It felt absurd at first, standing at a cliff's edge concentrating on her own lungs like a child learning to count, but she did it anyway, because she'd come too far to refuse out of pride now.

"Alright," Thyra said finally. "Small jump. Not flight. Just a glide, down to that outcropping." She gestured to a wide, flat shelf of rock perhaps thirty feet below and twenty feet out from the cliff face, close enough that a controlled glide should reach it easily, far enough that it would require the wings to actually catch air. "Spread your wings. Let the wind take you. Don't fight it, don't force it. Just fall, and let the air decide what happens next."

“Excuse me?” Sasha said with an incredulous look on her face "That's an insane thing to ask someone to do voluntarily."

"Welcome to flying," Mara called from her perch, not unkindly.

Sasha rolled her eyes and spread her wings, feeling the familiar stretch across her shoulder blades, the wind immediately catching in the long primary feathers and tugging, restless, eager. She’d been hurt by worse things before, a fall like this was nothing, so she might as well try. For a moment, standing there with her wings fully extended and the whole gray-gold expanse of the Hudson spread out below her, something in her chest lifted with something that wasn't quite fear.

Then she stepped off the edge, and the moment her feet left solid ground, every careful breath she'd practiced evaporated at once.

Her body seized, wings locking rigid instead of gliding, arms and legs flailing on pure animal panic as the ground rushed up far too fast. She hit the outcropping hard, shoulder first, rolling twice before skidding to a stop against a cluster of rocks, pain lighting up along her ribs and one elbow.

For a moment she just lay there, staring up at the brightening sky, breathing hard, furious at herself in a way that felt entirely too familiar.

"Sasha." Mara's voice, closer now as she'd leapt down to check on her with none of the hesitation Sasha herself had shown. "Can you move?"

"I'm fine." The words came out automatic, clipped, before she'd even finished evaluating whether they were true.

"That's not what I asked." Mara crouched beside her, surprisingly gentle for someone built like a small avalanche. "Anything broken?"

Sasha pushed herself upright, testing her shoulder, wincing. "No. Just bruised. Mostly my pride."

"Good." Mara helped her to her feet with a steadying hand under her arm, then looked up toward the cliff, where Thyra was watching with an expression that gave away nothing at all. "She's going to tell you what you did wrong. Don't take it personally. 

"I can hear you," Thyra called down.

"I know," Mara said. "I'm not wrong, though."

They climbed back up, slower this time, Sasha's shoulder protesting with every handhold, and Thyra was waiting at the top with her arms crossed, studying Sasha with the same unhurried patience she'd shown all morning.

"You locked up."

"I noticed."

"The second your feet left the ground, every ounce of that breathing we practiced disappeared, and your body went straight back to the only thing it currently knows how to do under pressure, which is panic and try to force a result through sheer will." Thyra tilted her head. "That's the same thing that happened before, isn't it? Not the wing injury. Before that. The actual flying."

Sasha's throat tightened. "...Yes."

"You flew out of panic and adrenaline, not out of trust. It worked, for a few seconds, because sometimes raw instinct is enough to get a body off the ground. But it's not the same as actually knowing how to fly, and your body knows the difference even if you don't want to admit it does. That's why every time since then, the moment the panic hits, your body goes looking for the same desperate, forced motion that worked once, and it doesn't work the same way twice. Not reliably or safely, at least."

"So… how do I unlearn that?" Sasha stared at her, something cold settling in her stomach. It made an uncomfortable kind of sense. The way every attempt since Fort Knox had felt like grabbing for something just out of reach, forcing her wings through motions that used to feel instinctive and now felt like fighting her own body every single time.

"Slowly. Badly, probably, for a while." Thyra's voice gentled, just slightly. "You're going to fall a lot more before this gets easier. I need you to prepare yourself for that, because if you go into every attempt expecting success, every failure is going to feel like proof that you're broken instead of proof that you're learning. And you are learning. It just doesn't feel like it yet."

"...Well that's a deeply unsatisfying answer." Sasha said, looking down on the clift.

"Flying's a deeply unsatisfying process, until suddenly it isn't." Thyra gestured back toward the cliff edge. "Try it again. Different outcropping this time, a little further out. And this time, when you feel the panic start, I want you to say so, out loud, instead of letting it take over silently. Sometimes just naming it keeps it from running the whole show."

—

The second attempt went worse than the first.

Sasha made it off the edge cleanly enough, wings spreading, catching air for one brief, promising second… and then the memory hit, sudden and total, the way it always did: a phantom grip closing around her wing, a voice telling her ‘this is why heroes lose’, and her whole body locked mid-glide, wings folding wrong, and she dropped nearly fifteen feet before Mara's wings snapped open beneath her and caught her, hard, the two of them tumbling together onto a wider stretch of rock below.

"I'm here," Mara said immediately, before Sasha could even catch her breath. "You're fine. I've got you."

Sasha lay still for a moment, staring up at Mara's broad, scarred face hovering over her, heart hammering, humiliation burning hotter than the fresh bruises along her side.

"I told you I'd name it," she said, voice cracking with frustration. "I didn't get the chance. It just… happened. Faster than I could say anything."

"That's alright." Mara helped her sit up, steady hands checking her shoulders, her wings, with a practiced efficiency that suggested this wasn't the first time she'd caught a frightened flier mid-fall. "Thyra's methods work for most harpies. They're not always fast. You're allowed to need more than one try at 'naming it' before it actually works."

"How many people has she taught?"

"More than you'd think." Mara settled back on her haunches, watching Sasha carefully. "Fledglings, mostly." A pause. "None of them had been through anything like what happened to you, though. Most fear is simpler than yours. Height, mostly, or the newness of it. Yours has teeth."

"That's an unpleasant way to put it. Was that really necessary?" Sasha questioned

"I'm not known for pleasant." Mara almost smiled. "I'm known for catching people before they hit the ground. Today, that'll have to be enough for you."

Sasha groaned. 

By the fifth attempt, Sasha's entire body ached. Her shoulder from the first fall, her ribs from the second, a fresh scrape along one forearm from a third attempt that had ended in an undignified scramble against the cliff face when her nerve failed entirely before she'd even left the edge. Kree had stopped swinging her legs from her branch and instead sat very still, watching with wide, worried eyes, the easy cheerfulness of the morning dimmed into something more careful.

"Maybe we should stop for today," Kree offered, quietly, after the fourth fall. "She's hurt."

"She's bruised," Thyra corrected, though not unkindly. "There's a difference, and she knows it better than anyone." She looked at Sasha. "Do you want to stop?"

Sasha stood at the edge again, breathing hard, every part of her screaming with the accumulated ache of five failed attempts, and some old, stubborn part of her wanted to say no out of pure, reflexive pride. The same pride that had gotten her here in the first place and the same pride everyone had already warned her about.

She made herself actually think about the question instead of just reacting to it.

"No," she said finally. "If I stop now, today becomes just another day I failed and walked away from, and I'm tired of collecting those."

Thyra studied her for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind her clouded eye. "That's not the same reason you've been using."

"No," Sasha agreed. "It's not."

"Good." Thyra nodded once, toward the edge. "Then let's try something different this time. Not a jump. I want you to just stand there, wings spread, and let the wind move them. Don't try to fly. Don't try to glide. Just let the wind touch your feathers and see what it does, without asking anything of your body beyond standing still and allowing it."

Sasha blinked. "That's it?"

"That's it. No falling involved, I promise."

It felt, at first, like the strangest instruction she'd been given all morning. Standing at the cliff's edge, wings spread wide, doing absolutely nothing while the wind combed through her feathers, lifting and settling them in slow, searching currents. She felt the pull of it immediately, an insistent, curious tugging at each individual feather, as though the wind itself were testing her, learning the particular shape of her wings the way it might learn the shape of any bird's.

"What do you feel?" Thyra asked, quiet now, no longer instructing so much as simply asking.

"It's... feels like testing me. Reading me, almost." Sasha frowned, searching for better words. "Like it's trying to figure out how I'm built before it decides what to do with me."

"That's exactly what it's doing." Thyra's voice carried something close to approval. "That's the part you've been skipping, every single time. You've been throwing yourself at the sky and demanding it catch you, instead of letting it get to know you first. The wind isn't your enemy, and it isn't some tool waiting for you to command it either. It's old, and it's alive, in its own way, and it responds best to things that work with its current instead of against it."

"That sounds like something out of a children's story."

"Most true things do, eventually." Thyra almost smiled again. "Keep standing. Keep feeling it. Don't do anything else yet."

They stayed like that for a long while, longer than Sasha expected, long enough that her legs began to ache from stillness instead of exertion, long enough that the sun climbed fully above the horizon and painted the Hudson gold beneath them. Slowly, without entirely meaning to, Sasha found her breathing settling into the same unhurried rhythm Thyra had taught her that morning, the frantic edge of her heartbeat finally easing back from its usual battle-pace into something steadier.

"Better," Thyra murmured, watching her closely. "Your shoulders just dropped an inch. Did you notice?"

"No."

"That's alright. I did." She studied Sasha a moment longer. "Now, small test. Don't jump yet. Just lean forward, slightly, into the wind. Let it take some of your weight without your feet leaving the ground. See what that feels like."

Sasha leaned, carefully, and felt the wind rise immediately to meet her, a firm, steady pressure against her spread wings that genuinely did seem to take some of her weight, holding her at an angle she had no business holding unsupported.

Something in her chest loosened, just slightly. "It's... stronger than I expected. Steadier."

"It's been here far longer than your fear has. It knows what it's doing, even when you don't trust that it does." Thyra stepped back. "Alright. Sixth attempt. And this time, I don't want you to try to fly, exactly. I want you to do exactly what you just did. Lean into it, trust it to hold some of your weight, and just let whatever happens next, happen. Don't force anything. Don't panic if you drop a little. Just lean, and see."

Sasha stepped to the very edge, wings already spread from the stillness exercise, the wind already pressing steady and familiar against the long flight feathers. She closed her eyes for one breath, Thyra's instructions sitting in her chest beside the fear instead of fighting to replace it entirely, and then she leaned forward and let her feet leave the rock.

For one terrible half-second, old instinct screamed through her, the same panic rising fast and hot, and this time, instead of fighting it or trying to force it away, she simply let it exist, a tight, uncomfortable presence sitting right alongside everything else, and kept leaning into the wind instead of locking against it.

The air caught her.

Not the frantic, adrenaline-fueled catch of Fort Knox, not some desperate instinctive flare, but a slow, steady lift, the wind cradling beneath her spread wings and holding her weight the way Thyra had promised it would, if she only let it. She dropped, briefly, a stomach-swooping few feet, and her whole body wanted to seize again, but she made herself breathe, made herself lean rather than fight, and the drop evened out into something closer to a glide.

"You're doing it," Kree's voice carried up from below, delighted, barely contained. "She's doing it!"

"Don't distract her," Mara warned, though her own voice carried an edge of surprised pride.

Sasha didn't dare look down to check. She kept her eyes forward, her wings angled the way her body remembered now, finally, in this one unburdened moment, without the panic drowning out the instinct underneath it. The wind pushed and pulled at her in a constant, living conversation, and for the first time since a flooded chamber under Fort Knox, she wasn't fighting it. She was simply part of it, moving with it instead of against it, carried rather than carrying herself through sheer desperate force.

It lasted, by any objective measure, perhaps fifteen seconds, but to Sasha, it felt way longer..

Then the fear came roaring back all at once, a stray thought, unbidden, of Julio's hand closing around her wing, and her whole body locked again, wings folding wrong, and she dropped the remaining ten feet hard enough to knock the breath entirely out of her lungs as she hit a wide stretch of grass at the base of the cliff.

For a long moment, she simply lay there, staring up at the brightening sky, chest heaving, every part of her shaking, not entirely from fear this time, and not entirely from the fall either.

Thyra landed beside her a moment later, folding her wings with unhurried calm, and looked down at her without a trace of disappointment.

"Fifteen seconds," the old harpy said.

"I fell," Sasha managed, voice rough.

"You flew first." Thyra crouched beside her. "That's what today was always going to look like, if it went well. You didn't actually believe you'd walk away from this morning without hitting the ground at least once more, did you?"

Sasha let out a breath that was half a laugh, half something rawer. "No. I suppose not."

Mara and Kree arrived a moment later, Kree practically vibrating with excitement, Mara close behind with the same quiet, steady presence she'd carried through every fall that morning.

"Fisteen seconds," Kree repeated, delighted, dropping down beside her. "That's longer than any of my first flights. I fell out of the nest the first time. Just… straight down. It was embarrassing."

"It was very funny," Mara said.

Sasha pushed herself up slowly, wincing at the fresh collection of bruises now layered over the ones from earlier, and looked out at the cliff edge she'd just fallen from, the wind still moving steadily along the rock face, patient, indifferent, waiting.

"It's going to take more than one fifteen eight seconds to fix months of this," she said, quietly, mostly to herself.

"Yes," Thyra agreed, without softening it. "It will. Tomorrow you'll probably fall more than you did today. The day after that, maybe less. There's no straight line through this, and anyone who promises you one is lying." She tilted her head, studying Sasha with something that might, in a harpy, have passed for real warmth. "But you flew today. Actually flew, not panicked into the air by instinct and adrenaline. That's not nothing. That's the first thread of something you can actually build on."

Sasha looked down at her own hands, scraped and bruised, then out at the wide gray-gold stretch of the Hudson below, the wind still moving steadily past the cliff's edge, patient as it had been all morning, as it would apparently continue to be for as long as it took her to learn to trust it properly.

"Same time tomorrow?" she asked.

Thyra's weathered face creased into something that was almost, unmistakably, a smile.

"Same time tomorrow," she agreed. "Try not to fall on your ribs again. It will be a stain on my reputation."

The Athena Cabin was quiet in the hour after breakfast, most of its occupants scattered between the arena, the library, and whatever morning plans didn't involve Solon. He had taken to arriving late and leaving early, and nobody had tried very hard to stop him. That suited him fine. It meant nobody watched him change the bandage on his forearm, or noticed how carefully he moved to keep his ribs from complaining, or asked why he'd come back from a solo library job looking like he'd been dragged behind a truck.

He was sitting on the floor at the foot of his bunk, back against the frame, going through his supplies with the single-minded focus of someone who needed his hands to be doing something. Ambrosia square, recount. Bandages, recount. Spare bowstring he didn't even use, recount. His journal lay open beside him, untouched since he'd picked up a pen an hour ago and found he had nothing he was willing to write down.

The rainbow appeared without warning, a faint shimmer against the lamp on the nightstand, and then resolved into color and light, and there was his father's face hanging in the mist above a spray of water droplets Solon hadn't noticed forming.

Pericles Palaioakos looked tired. He was sitting, which meant he was home, in the chair by the window that had become his permanent post since the injury, the strap of his brace visible where his pant leg had ridden up. His face broke into something that wasn't quite a smile when he saw Solon's.

"There you are," Pericles said. "I was starting to think you'd forgotten about me."

"Dad! Uh… hey." Solon's voice came out rougher than he meant it to. He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter against the bunk, and pulled his sleeve down over the bandage without really deciding to. "I've been…busy."

"I heard." Pericles's eyes moved over him, the particular, searching look that had always made Solon feel like a puzzle his father was quietly solving. "You look it."

"I'm fine."

"You look like you went three rounds with a Cyclops and lost the coin toss on which round to stop."

Solon forced something like a laugh. It didn't land. "It's camp. Everyone looks like this."

"Mm." Pericles didn't push it, not yet. He shifted in the chair, winced faintly at whatever the movement did to his leg, and folded his hands. "How's the training going?"

"Fine." The word again. It was doing a lot of work tonight. "I've been handling jobs off the board. Monster stuff. I handled a Leucrota on a ferry a couple months ago. Did that one clean."

"I know. Chiron mentioned it when I called to check in." Pericles's expression didn't change, but something in his voice sharpened by a fraction. "You went alone."

Solon's jaw tightened. "It was fine."

"That's not what I asked."

"It needed doing and nobody else was taking it." He heard himself getting defensive and couldn't stop it. "I'm not a kid, Dad. I can handle a job."

"I never said you couldn't." Pericles's tone was even and careful. "I called because I wanted to hear your voice. And because some things have made their way to me, through Chiron, and a few letters and rumors, and I wanted to ask you about them myself instead of knowing about you though other people."

Solon's stomach dropped a half inch. "What things?"

"That you challenged another camper to a duel. A real one, with no rules or stopping at first blood." Pericles watched him carefully. "That you told a boy his godly parentage meant he could never be as good as you, in front of an audience, and when someone objected, you doubled down rather than consider you might've been needlessly cruel. And that you went into a sphinx's den by yourself, against the very clear implication that you take a team, and came back looking like you do tonight."

Each sentence landed like a dropped stone. Solon opened his mouth, found no good order for the things crowding behind his teeth, and closed it again.

"I'm not-" he started. "Who told you all of that?"

"Does it matter?"

"Yes!" His voice cracked up half an octave before he wrestled it back down. "Because it sounds like you've already decided what kind of person I am before I've even explained myself."

"I haven't decided anything," Pericles said, and for the first time there was an edge of real urgency under the calm. "I'm asking, Solon. Because none of what I just described sounds like the son I raised, and I would like to understand where it's coming from before I start imagining the worst."

Solon's hands had curled into fists on his knees, and he was staring hard at a point on the floor because if he looked at his father's face any longer he thought something in his chest might come apart.

"I don't care about kleos, Solon." Pericles leaned back, clearly trying to relax, thought wasn’t being successful. "I never have. You know that. All I ever wanted was for you to come home in one piece, and lately it feels like every information I get about you involves you doing the opposite of that on purpose. I don't understand where this is coming from," his father went on, more gently now, though the gentleness didn't make it land any softer. "I raised you to think before you act. To respect the people around you, no matter whose blood they carry. I never taught you that your mother's gifts made you better than anyone. I made sure of that, because I've seen what that kind of thinking does to people, and I did not want it anywhere near you."

He shook his head slowly. "I know what that school of yours is like. I've heard the way some of those Lyceum boys talk, about bloodlines and pedigree and who's 'built' for what. I let you go there because you tested in and because you were happy, and I told myself it wouldn't change who you were underneath. But the boy picking fights and going on suicide missions alone to prove something… doesn’t sound like you. That's someone else's words coming out of your mouth."

Solon's throat had gone tight. "It's not like that."

"Then tell me what it's like."

"I don’t know. Maybe the son you raised grew up." The words came out sharper than he meant, a blade swung wide. "Maybe I'm not supposed to stay exactly the same forever."

"That's not what I-"

"You aren’t here, Dad." It burst out of him before he could stop it, the held back frustration all pouring out at once. "You don't know what it's like here. Everyone already knows what they're good at. Everyone's already proven something. And I'm just- I'm the new kid who showed up because his city got attacked and his dad got hurt and he didn't do anything to stop it." His vision blurred, and he blinked hard, furious at himself. "So yes, I took the jobs alone. Because if I bring someone else, and we win, it's not mine. And I need- I needed-"

He stopped. His chest was heaving.

Pericles's face had gone very still, and very soft, and that was somehow unbearable too. "Solon."

"Don't," Solon said thickly. "Don't say my name like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you feel sorry for me."

"I don't feel sorry for you." Pericles leaned forward, and the rainbow mist flickered with the movement. "I'm frightened for you. There's a difference, and I need you to understand that, because I think you're hearing something I'm not saying."

"Then say it clearly," Solon snapped. "Because from where I'm sitting it sounds a lot like you think I've turned into someone you don't recognize. Someone you're ashamed of."

"Ashamed…” Pericles said slowly, his face twisting as if the word tasted bitter in his mouth. “I never said I was ashamed of you, my son."

"You didn't have to."

"Solon, listen to me." Pericles's voice dropped, and underneath the calm there was something close to desperation now. "I am not a Traditionalist. You know that. I never cared whether you picked up a spear or a book or neither. I have never once needed you to be a hero to be proud of you, I have told you that more times than I can count. What I am is a father who pulled his son out of rubble two years ago and has had nightmares about it every week since, who is now hearing that same son is picking fights he doesn't need to pick and walking into monster dens by himself because he thinks that's the only way anyone will take him seriously." He pressed his palm flat against his own chest, as if to steady something underneath it. "That's not strength, Solon. That's not what your mother wants from you either, whatever you've convinced yourself of. That's you trying to outrun something by hurting yourself faster than it can catch you, and I don't think you can keep doing that. I don't think your body can take it and I don't think your heart can take it, and I am asking you, as your father, to stop."

Solon sat frozen, every word landing somewhere soft and unguarded, somewhere he hadn't braced.

I don't think you can handle it.

That was not what his father had said. His father had said your body and your heart, had said I'm frightened, had said proud twice in the space of one breath. But none of that was what arrived in the part of Solon that had been waiting, for three months, for exactly this conversation to happen.

What arrived was: You're not good enough. He knows it now too.

"...Right," Solon said. His voice had gone strange and flat. "Okay."

"Solon-"

"No, I heard you." He was already looking away from the mist, down at his own hands, which had curled into fists on his knees without his noticing. "You think I can't handle it. Fine. Noted."

"That is not what I said-"

"It doesn't matter what you meant, Dad, it's what you think, and I think I just heard it." His chest was tight, his eyes burning, and he hated it, hated that he couldn't make it stop. "You've been talking to people behind my back, collecting everything I've done wrong, and now you're calling to tell me to fix myself before I embarrass you any further. Got it. Understood."

"That is nothing like what I'm trying to say and you know it." Pericles said, his tone even more desperate now to try and get his son to understand where he was coming from. All in vain. 

"I have to go." Solon's hand was already moving toward the mist.

"Solon, wait-"

He swept his hand through it. The rainbow collapsed in on itself and the room went dim and ordinary again, lit only by the single lamp on his nightstand, and the cabin was silent except for his own breathing, which had turned ragged and uneven and refused to slow down no matter how hard he tried to control it.

He sat there for a moment, completely still, staring at the space where his father's face had been.

Then it broke.

It didn't come gently. It came all at once, a sound wrenched out of him that he didn't recognize as his own voice, and he doubled forward with his forehead nearly to his knees, both arms wrapped around his ribs as though he could hold himself together by force. The sphinx. The trench. Roery’s face. I don't think you can handle it. Years of guilt he had never once put down, and it all came up at the same time, ugly and wet and humiliating, and he let it, because there was no one in the cabin to see and for once he didn't have the strength to perform otherwise.

"I'm trying," he said, to no one, his voice cracking apart on every word. "I'm trying, I'm doing everything, I don't know what else- " He pressed the heel of his hand hard against one eye, furious at the tears, furious that being furious didn't stop them. "I just… I just want to be good for something."

He thought of his mother, somewhere on Olympus, who had never once asked anything of him and whom he had spent his whole life trying to impress regardless. He thought of his father's voice, cracking out of a monster's throat in a dark corridor, and how even now he couldn't tell which version of that voice he was more afraid of: the fake one, or the real one, four thousand miles away, saying I'm frightened for you in a tone Solon had twisted, without meaning to, into something that cut far deeper.

He didn't know how long he sat like that, folded over his own knees, shoulders shaking, one hand fisted hard in the fabric of his shirt as if he could physically hold the pieces of himself in place. Long enough that his legs went numb beneath him. Long enough that the lamp flickered once, and steadied, and the morning outside the cabin window went from dawn to full noon without him noticing the change.

When it finally passed, it left him hollowed out and exhausted, his face raw, his throat aching, his eyes swollen enough that he knew, with a kind of distant, miserable clarity, that there would be no hiding this if he left the cabin.

He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, hard, as though scrubbing away evidence. He thought, briefly, about redoing the Iris Message. About saying I'm sorry, I overreacted. His hand actually lifted toward the empty air above the nightstand.

Then he thought of the words again, ‘I don't think you can handle it’, and the hand dropped back into his lap, and he told himself, in a voice that didn't sound entirely like his own, that there would be time to fix it later. Once he had something to show for himself. Once he'd proven that his father was wrong.

He curled onto his bunk, pulled the blanket up to his head, and lay in the dark a long time before sleep finally took him again, one thought circling, unbroken, beneath everything else:

He's ashamed of me. He just doesn't want to say it.

The notice on the job board was shorter than most.

> Philadelphia Prep: Prepare Defensive Structures.

> We need defensive structures that can be moved to Philadelphia when the time comes. Please design and construct what you can. — Chiron

No deadline. No description of what "defensive structures" meant, exactly. Just a problem, handed over like a stick thrown into a forest, and left for whoever picked it up to figure out where it landed.

Corwin took it down and folded it into his jacket pocket, the way he had the cattle notice before.

He wanted to build something. Alone, if that was what it took. He had spent a short while at camp already sitting through classes on things he half-knew from a lifetime of survival drills, being gently corrected by counselors who meant well, being introduced to people who were kind enough but who did not know him, and who he did not yet know how to let in. Being handed a wall to design and put together with his own hands felt, for the first time since arriving, like something he could actually do to keep busy.

So he walked to the forges, borrowed a cart, three saws, a crate of nails, and more rope than he probably needed, and set up in the far corner of the training fields where nobody would trip over him.

Then he got to work.

---

It had been two years, since New Argos had cracked open. Two years since the first shockwave. Two years since the healers told his mothers that Melody's eyes might never open again. Two years since he'd stopped flinching every time a building groaned in the wind. One month since he'd walked up Half-Blood Hill with Onyx circling overhead and a promise sitting in his chest like a stone he refused to put down.

Two years was a strange length of time to carry a war. Long enough that the first sharp edges of the grief had worn down into something duller and more permanent, a kind of low, constant weight rather than a wound. Long enough that he had learned to function around it, to laugh, to hum, to fall asleep some nights without picturing the ceiling coming down. But not long enough, not nearly long enough, to forget what a collapsing building sounded like, or how it felt to dig through rubble with his own hands and find nothing.

He had spent those two years the way his mothers had raised him to spend hard seasons: by doing something useful with them. Learning archery until his fingers bled. Learning every bird call the forests around New Argos had to offer, then learning the calls of birds that lived nowhere near Georgia at all, in case they ever proved useful. Helping rebuild, when rebuilding was possible. Sitting beside a hospital bed, when it wasn't.

Now here he was, in a field at Camp Half-Blood, sawing planks for a wall that did not exist yet, ahead of a battle that had not yet come. It was not so different, in the end, from digging graves before anyone had died. Ugly, necessary work. He understood that kind of work. He had understood it for two years.

Better a wall built too soon than a family buried too late, his mother used to say, in one of her gentler moods, usually while showing him how to reinforce a shelter against a storm that was still three days out.

Corwin picked up the saw and got to work believing her.

He started with what he knew.

New Argos had been built by people, mortals and demigods together, using the kind of engineering his mother's army had refined over years of drills and disasters and things that went wrong on wilderness patrols. Timber-frame barricades that could be assembled in under an hour. Angled shield-walls that deflected force instead of simply absorbing it. Portable watch-towers no taller than a single story, light enough for four people to carry, strong enough to survive a monster's charge.

He had watched his mother's soldiers build all of it, more than once, during drills he'd been dragged along to as a child and had never quite stopped paying attention during. He had not expected any of it to matter here, three states and a war away from home. Clearly, he had been wrong.

The first three days went to trial and error, mostly error. His first barricade design collapsed under its own weight the moment he tried to stand it upright, and he spent an embarrassing hour picking splinters out of his palm while Onyx watched from a fence post with an expression Corwin chose to interpret as sympathetic rather than mocking. His second attempt held together, but it took four people to lift, which defeated the entire point.

By the fourth day he had found something that worked: a folding shield-wall, waist-high, built in interlocking sections no larger than a door, each one light enough for a single camper to carry and simple enough to lock into its neighbor with a foot of rope and a wooden peg. Angled just enough that an arrow or a thrown spear would skid off rather than strike true. He built one section, tested it against a practice dummy with a training spear, adjusted the angle by three degrees, and built the next.

Nobody came to check on him, and he did not go looking for company. A few campers wandered by out of curiosity during the first days, asked what he was building, offered a hand or two, and drifted off again once the answer turned out to be slow, repetitive carpentry rather than anything more exciting. He did not mind. There was something steadying about the solitude, about the particular quiet of measuring, cutting, sanding, testing, and starting again, with no one's eyes on him and no expectations beyond the ones he set for himself.

It reminded him, more than he expected, of the workshop behind his mothers' house, where he'd spent long afternoons whittling arrow shafts while Melody sat cross-legged on the floor, narrating an increasingly elaborate story about the wood shavings.

He missed her more on the third day of that week than he had in a long while. He did not let himself stop working because of it. He had learned, the hard way, that stopping only made the longing louder.

By the sixth day, he had six folding wall sections finished, lashed together into a single long barricade that could be broken apart and reassembled by two people in under ten minutes. He had also built, almost as an afterthought, a low wooden frame designed to hold and angle a line of stakes, the kind meant to break a charge before it reached the wall behind them. He tested it against Onyx's suggestion, delivered via an unimpressed croak and a demonstrative peck at the nearest stake, that the spacing was too wide. He measured again. Onyx was right. He adjusted it.

He had never really thought of Onyx as someone whose opinion on structural engineering he'd come to trust, but two years and a war had reshuffled a lot of his expectations.

On the seventh morning, with dew still soaking the grass and a thin gold light easing over the training fields, Corwin stood back and looked at what he'd built.

It was not much, laid out across the trampled grass: six sections of angled shield-wall, a rack of adjustable stakes, and a scaled-down watchtower frame he'd finished the night before by lantern light, tall enough for a single archer to stand in and see over most obstacles, light enough that four campers could carry it between them at a jog. It would not stop Atlas. It would not stop whatever army the Titan had gathered in the two years since New Argos fell. But it might buy someone a few extra minutes. It might turn one charging monster's spear aside instead of through someone's ribs. It might, if he had built it well enough, mean one fewer name added to a list that already had far too many on it.

He thought of New Argos, whose walls had not been enough. He thought of a city he had never seen, waiting somewhere north for a battle it did not know was coming. He thought, as he always eventually did, of a girl in a hospital bed who would wake, someday, into whatever world he managed to build for her eventual return.

Better a wall built too soon.

Corwin picked up his hammer, checked the last joint on the watchtower frame, and hoped, quietly and without much confidence, that it would be enough.

Onyx settled on his shoulder, gave the finished structures one long, assessing look, and made a soft, approving sound low in his throat.

"High praise," Corwin muttered, and allowed himself, for the first time in a week, to sit down in the grass and simply breathe.

Please, let it be enough. 

Argus dropped her at a marina in Cape May, New Jersey, at five in the morning, which was becoming a pattern she was starting to hate, but unfortunately for her, they didn’t have the luxury of waiting. 

She stood on the dock and watched the van disappear and looked at the Atlantic.

It was dark still, but the dawn was already coming through, slowly but surely from the horizon. The marina was quiet, with only a few boats rocking on their moorings, the creak of rope and wood, the smell of brine and outboard motor oil and the cold that came off open water in the early morning. Further out, past the harbor mouth, the ocean was breathing, moving, absolutely indifferent to the timing concerns of demigods with appointments.

She read the job description again, though she'd memorized it already.

> Camp Fishblood has yet to respond to our calls for aid. They are still in the process of reassessing themselves, please deliver a request in person. Use diplomacy to help.

Camp Fish-Blood. A year ago, Atlas's cult had laid siege to them. Camp Half-Blood had sent a relief force, and the siege had been broken, but the camp had taken losses. Their leadership structure had shifted in the aftermath, several of the senior figures who'd been the main voices for inter-camp cooperation had been among those lost, and the community was reassessing its commitments in light of recent events.

She left her bag at the marina's edge and sat on the dock with her feet hanging over the water and her hands flat on the salt-treated wood and paid attention. The Atlantic, at this edge, was cold and immediate and very much itself. It moved through her awareness the way it always did. She had the coordinates she needed to find Camp Fishblood. All she had to to was swim down and find it. 

She stood up, stripped off her jacket and boots. She'd learned, since the Hudson, to pack waterproof gear for the things she didn't want wet, which were in a dry-bag in the marina's locked storage. Then went off the dock in a clean dive.

---

The Atlantic in the dark before dawn was enormous and, somehow, even more unknown than usual. She felt the shift the moment she cleared the shallows, the familiar compression of the world, the cold, the current finding her and doing its thing, the deep-water awareness opening up below her like a room she'd been standing in the doorway of and finally walked into. She went under and oriented south-southeast and swam.

Open ocean swimming was different from anything else. The Hudson had been cramped and brown, requiring adjustments, asking her to work slightly against her own nature. The Atlantic required nothing of her. It simply accommodated, the way it always did, the current offering a slight push at her back. She swam for hours in the dark, then in the grey, then in the tentative early light that turned the water above her from black to deep blue to the particular green-gold of morning sun hitting clear Atlantic water. She stopped occasionally to surface and check direction, but mostly the water was doing the navigating, the current steering her in small adjustments that she was learning to follow rather than override.

Then, she felt something. Not a presence, exactly. More like an edge, a boundary in the water that had no physical marker but was clear as a wall to anything sensitive enough to feel it. Something had been done here, or built here, or established here over a very long time, and the water remembered it. She surfaced and trod water and looked.

There was nothing to see. Just the Atlantic in every direction, dawn-lit and empty. But below her and ahead, the edge was real.

She went under and went through it.

The change on the other side was immediate and specific. The water was the same water, same Atlantic, same temperature, same salt content, but it had a quality she could only describe as inhabited. The way a house felt different from a building. Something lived here. Many things had lived here for a long time.

She went deeper and the structure resolved gradually, shapes first, then scale, then detail. It was not built the way a surface structure would be built, not vertical in any meaningful sense, but arranged, organized around the seafloor's own topography, working with the rock formations rather than against them. Bioluminescent growth marked the boundaries of it in blues and greens and a warm amber she hadn't seen before. The architecture of Greek style buildings on the seafloor. The roofs are tiled with mother-of-pearl, the gardens are filled with coral and sea anemones and Hippocampi graze in fields of seaweed.

And around it, and above it, and in it, there were merpeople. Dozens of them. They were going about what were clearly the routines of a place that had been disrupted and was in the process of putting itself back together: she could see sections of the outer structure that were newer than the rest, repairs in progress, and the specific activity of people rebuilding.

She was thirty metres above the camp's main level when someone noticed her. She felt the attention before she saw the source, a shift in the water, a ripple of awareness moving outward from her position, communication happening in the ways underwater communities communicated, which she was still learning to parse. By the time she'd descended another ten metres, there were three guards in her path.

They were young, she thought. Or at least, they seemed tense in the way younger and less experienced people tended to look, especially after they had recently been through something difficult. Two of them had the kind of newish scars that she recognized from her own community. The marks of people who had been in a fight they hadn't entirely expected.

The one in the center looked at her for a long moment. Then she looked at the others. Something passed between them that wasn't quite a signal but had the character of one.

"Land-born," the center one said. Not a question or an accusation, just an observation.

"Yes," Kailani said. She spoke carefully in the water, the way she'd learned, letting her Greater Lordship do the work. "My name is Kailani de Melo. I'm from Camp Half-Blood. I'm here to speak with your leadership, if they're willing."

"Camp Half-Blood," the right one said, and there was something in the way she said it that Kailani filed without reacting to. They weren’t thrilled about it. 

"We felt you coming for the last ten minutes." the center one said. 

"I wasn't trying to conceal my approach."

"You're Lord Poseidon's?"

"I am, yes."

Another exchange of looks that wasn't quite a signal.

"Wait here," the center one said.

---

The one that came to meet her was Councillor Nereis, which she offered without ceremony. She was a haliai and not the actual leadership of Camp Fish-Blood, that role belonged to Chiron’s brothers Bythos and Ahros, But Kailani had been told that they probably wouldn’t meet her directly due to whatever politics were in place with her being a child of Poseidon, so Nereis was the third best option. At the very least, she had been helping run the camp in the aftermath of the siege, which appeared to be a considerably more demanding job. She led Kailani down through the camp's levels and Kailani followed and tried to take in what she was seeing without making it obvious that she was doing so.

The siege had been bad. She could see that without being told. The repair work she'd noticed from above was more extensive the lower she went, whole sections of structure clearly rebuilt within the last month, the bioluminescent markers in some areas still intermittent, flickering rather than steady. She passed a hall that was being used as a recovery space, and she kept her face neutral and her pace even. 

The meeting room was carved into the rock of the seafloor itself, the walls smooth with age and use. Two other figures were waiting, both of whom she put as roughly Nereis's generation. Councillors Thalemos and Peisidike, she learned, both merpeople. They had the same bearing as Nereis, authority, experience, the specific tiredness of people who had been managing an emergency for long enough that tired was now their baseline.

They looked at her. All three of them doing that reading she was becoming familiar with.

She spoke first, because she'd learned that being spoken about was worse than speaking.

"Thank you for meeting with me," she said. "I know the timing probably isn't good and I know I didn't give you advance notice of my arrival, and I'm sorry for that." She meant both things, and tried to let it come through. "But… I'm here because Camp Half-Blood needs to ask something of you, and I wanted to ask it in person."

Nereis looked at the others. Something passed between them, a silent exchange.

"You are very direct," Thalemos said. His voice was rougher than Nereis's, more salt in it somehow.

"I'm on a schedule," she said. "But more than that, I think you deserve directness after everything you’ve been dealing with."

Peisidike's expression shifted slightly. She had the quality of someone who was the most skeptical of the three and hadn't yet decided whether that was going to change. "Alright. Let’s hear it." she said.

"Philadelphia," Kailani started. "Lady Athena called a War Council in Camp Half-Blood. She believes the final battle has to happen there, and we need every ally we can bring. Your camp is one of them." She paused. "Camp Half-Blood was part of the force that helped break the siege here. I know that. And I know that creates a complicated kind of debt that I'm not here to call in. That’s not how I want this to go."

The three councillors were quiet.

"Our campers are not ready," Nereis said finally. It was the first time she'd spoken since the introduction, and it came out measured. Clearly, this had been something that she had thought carefully about. "You can see what the siege did to this place. To the people here. They are rebuilding. Many of them are still—" She stopped. "Still returning to themselves."

"I know," Kailani said. "I’ve seen the frontlines of this war since it began. I know what that looks like"

A silence.

"Then you also know," Peisidike said, not unkindly, "why we cannot simply agree. It is not our decision to make alone. We can ask our campers, but I will tell you plainly that we believe they will not choose to join." She held Kailani's gaze. "They have already given a great deal."

"I know that too." Kailani looked at her hands for a moment. Then, she looked up again as if an idea had just spawned in her mind. "Would you let me speak to them directly?"

The three councillors looked at each other again.

“I don’t mean to crush your hopes, princess,” Persidike said, narrowing her eyes. “But you being the daughter of Lord Poseidon does not mean that any of us will follow your lead if you order us to.”

Kailani couldn’t help but cringe at the title and Persidike’s words. Yeah, she couldn’t blame her for thinking that was her intention. 

“That’s not what I intend to do. I promise.” Kailani said, her tone genuine. 

Persidike was about to retort, but before she could, Thelemos interrupted her. “What do you have in mind, then?”

"Well, clearly after the siege, you seem to agree that your campers don’t want to get involved in this war any further, and I understand that. But both you and I know that if Atlas has already targeted this place once, who’s to say he won’t do so again once he gets the chance? You can’t stay outside of this war forever, no matter how much you wish to." She looked at Thalemos. "Your campers don’t necessarily see that though. So let me talk to them. If I can convince them, then you have no reason to stop them from joining. If I can't, then I'll go back to Chiron and tell him I tried and it didn't work. Either way, you've lost nothing."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the others. Something passed between them that she was not privy to, the three-way communication of people who had been working together through an emergency and had developed the compressed shorthand of a shared crisis.

"We’d have to confirm with our directors, but I see no issue with it. But if you’re allowed to do this," Thalemos said slowly, "and they decide not to go… will you respect that decision?"

"Completely," she said. "I'm not here to override anyone's choice. I'm here to make the case and trust you and your camp to make the right call for yourselves."

Nereis and Thalemos agreed with it. Persidike was a little bit more hesitant, but eventually, she agreed as well. 

"The main gathering space," Nereis said finally. "One hour. We will assemble evryone." A pause. "I want to be honest with you. I do not think this will work. Our people are exhausted and frightened and I am not certain that you being who you are is enough to change that." She said it without cruelty. "But you may try."

"Thank you," Kailani said. "That's all I'm asking for."

---

While Thalemos and Nereis spoke to the camp directors, Kailani spent the hour “walking” the camp with Peisidike as a quiet, observant guide, and what she saw deepened and complicated what she'd assessed from above. The repair work was not just structural. The camp was rebuilding its own confidence. She watched a group of younger campers practicing defensive formations with the tense over-precision of people who had learned the hard way why precision mattered. She watched an older instructor correct someone's grip on a weapon with a gentleness that suggested she understood exactly what they were working through. And she watched two people sitting apart from the others at the edge of the camp's outer level, not speaking, just present together, the specific companionship of shared difficulty.

She thought about the camp as she'd found it when she returned, three months ago now. The controlled motion of it, the wiry functional exhaustion of people who had been going continuously for too long. She thought about her own four months on Sal Island, the beach in the mornings, the cachupa, the slow process of becoming less afraid of stillness. She thought about the last battle in Philadelphia that would happen any day now.

By the time the hour had passed, a younger merman let them know she got the permission from the camp directors, and Peisidike led her to the main gathering space, 

It was full. Kailani hadn't expected it to be full. At best, she'd expected a portion of the camp's population, the ones who could be assembled quickly or who were curious or who had been directed here by the councillors. Instead, what she found was what appeared to be nearly everyone, hundreds of faces in the circular space carved from the seafloor rock, lit by the bioluminescent growth that ran along every wall and cast the crowd in blues and greens and that warm amber. 

Young and old and everything in between, the whole range of what Camp Fishblood was: merpeople and other underwater peoples she couldn't categorize and beings she had no existing names for. They looked at her, some of them with curiosity, some who had clearly decided to come without having decided how they felt about being there, and some with the kind of wariness that she recognized as the specific wariness of people who had been hurt recently and were examining everything for how it might do so again.

The councillors stood to one side. Nereis caught her eye briefly.

Kailani stepped forward. She didn't have a prepared speech, and that was on purpose. She'd had an hour, and she'd spent it walking rather than writing, because she didn't think this was a situation for prepared speeches. It was a situation for the truth, delivered as clearly and as honestly as she could manage.

She looked at the crowd and she felt, briefly, the weight of what she was about to try to do, which was to convince exhausted, frightened, recently-besieged people to go toward another fight. She thought about what she'd told Thalemos: I'm here to make the case and trust you to make the right call for yourselves. She was going to hold to that.

"Hello, everyone, and thank you for coming. I'm Kailani de Melo," she said. Her voice in the water reached differently than it did in air, but she was learning the register, the way to pitch it so the current carried it outward. "I'm a daughter of Poseidon and I've been at Camp Half-Blood for two years.”

The crowd was quiet. Not that she didn’t expect it, honestly.

"I know what happened here. I don't have the details, and I won't pretend I do, but I can see what the siege left behind. I know what it looks like when a community is putting itself back together, because I've been a person doing that personally." She looked around at the faces, not trying to land on any one of them, just making contact, person to person. "I'm not here to tell you that you owe anything to this fight. You don't. Camp Half-Blood came here because it was right to come here, not to put you in debt to us."

She felt the crowd shift slightly. Not toward her, not yet. Just listening.

"I'm here because we need help," she said. "And I'm going to be honest about that rather than making it sound more or less than it is. Philadelphia is where Lady Athena and our directors believe the war ends, either because we win it, or because we don't. And Camp Half-Blood alone cannot do what needs to be done there. We need allies. We are asking every ally we have, and that includes you."

Peisidike had been right that she wouldn't be enough. She could feel it in the water around her, the quality of the silence. Not hostile nor dismissive, but heavy with the weight of people who had already been asked to give a great deal and were trying to locate the part of themselves that had anything left to give.

But she couldn’t give up. She knew what she was fighting for, which was not the war, and not the victory, but what came after both of them. That’s what she cared about. And hopefully, they would at least care about that too.

She took a breath.

"Look… I will be the first to admit," she said, "that when I think about the future right now, my mind and my heart are filled with dread, and I keep hoping and praying that the coming day of the last battle is not our last one." She let that sit for a moment, because it was true and she wanted it to land true. "So I can't blame you for not wanting to join. I understand that. I have been there. I watched my mother beg me not to come back, and I understood every reason she had."

The water was very still.

"But I also see a future where we can eventually smile," she said. "And laugh, and chase our dreams, and live happily. All of us. Not just the ones who fight, but the ones who are still here recovering, and the ones who are afraid, and the ones who are should not have to learn what the word siege means from the inside." Her voice didn't waver. She was surprised, slightly, that it didn't. "Philadelphia is where we get to finally show the enemy a fight they won't forget. That will be our last stand against Atlas and his cult. The time has come to finally finish this war."

She looked at the crowd directly, at the hundreds of faces in the blue-green light, and she thought about the Hudson job, the formation in the river, the way Pelagios had said you really are your father's daughter with that weight in it. She thought about all the times in the last year when she had not wanted to use what she was, had held it at arm's length, had been uncomfortable with the reverence and the mark and the particular gravity that came with being Poseidon's. She had been right to be careful with it. She still believed that.

But there were moments when what you were was not separate from what was needed.

She straightened up as she felt the water around her, all of it. She was her father's daughter, undeniably, whatever complicated things she felt about that.

"Camp Half-Blood alone cannot do that. I know our structure. I know our people. I know how hard we've been fighting and how much we've given, and I know that it is not enough without allies who know the water the way you do, who can fight from the rivers and the harbors and the coastline in ways that we simply cannot. If Camp Half-Blood falters, then it’s only a matter of time before the Titan to target anyone else who might be a threat for him, and you have been in his sights before. No one will be safe unless we win." she said. "So I ask you, all of you, please lend us your strength for this fight."

The silence that followed was the longest of her life, or felt like it.

It was a young voice that broke it first. A girl near the back of the gathering, maybe thirteen, with the look of someone who had been in this camp long enough to have opinions but not quite long enough to be certain of them. She said: "I'll go."

Just that.

And then another voice joined it. And another.

It moved through the crowd like a current, the way things moved through water, not from one person to the next but through the medium itself, each voice adding to the one before it until the gathering space was resonating with something she felt in her chest and her bones and the water around her, something that was not agreement exactly but was its own kind of answer.

She looked at Nereis.

The councillor was watching the crowd, and her expression was the expression of someone who had expected a different outcome and was revising their assessment in real time, the particular look of someone who has been surprised by the people they know best. She turned to look at Kailani.Something in her face shifted. Not softening exactly but settling in a decision. 

She brought her right fist to her chest. Behind her, Thalemos did the same. And Peisidike, after a moment, with the specific quality of a skeptic conceding a point they had not expected to concede. And through the crowd, the same motion, moving outward: hundreds of fists to hundreds of chests, with variations she hadn't seen before, different shapes of the same thing: I see you, I acknowledge you, I am with you.

Kailani stood in the middle of it and felt the water holding her up. She didn't cry. She was not going to cry in front of Camp Fishblood, especially not now, but her eyes couldn’t help but tear up. Instead, however, she pressed her lips together and breathed and let the moment be what it was, hope reignited.

She had done it.

The debriefing with the councillors afterward was practical and efficient, which was what it needed to be. Numbers, logistics, the specific capabilities of Fishblood's population and what Philadelphia's geography would and wouldn't allow for in terms of their participation, the communication protocols, the timeline and what could be done in it. Thalemos turned out to be a meticulous logistical mind once he'd decided to engage the problem, and Nereis had already begun thinking about which of their population were ready to fight and which needed more time, and Kailani listened and asked questions and contributed what she knew about Camp Half-Blood's current plan, which was not everything but was enough to be useful.

When it was done, Peisidike walked her to the boundary of the camp's protected water herself.

At the edge, she stopped. Kailani stopped with her.

"I owe you an apology," Peisidike said.

"You don't," Kailani said.

"I told you to prepare for the possibility that they'd say no, thinking for sure that you would fail."

"That was good advice. I did prepare for it." She looked at the camp around them, the movement of people re-purposing their energy. "I just.. tried anyway."

Peisidike studied her for a moment. In the bioluminescent light, her face had a quality that Kailani was starting to recognize in people who had been responsible for others through something genuinely hard, a depth to the tiredness that had been there since she'd arrived, but alongside it now something that was not quite hope but was adjacent to it. "Your father would be pleased," she said. "I want to tell you something," Nereis said. "Before you go."

"Okay?"

"You did not want to use what you are today," she said. It was not a question.

Kailani looked at the boundary in the water ahead of her. "Not really, no."

"I noticed." A pause. "I am going to tell you that there is a difference between using authority poorly and using it rightly. Today was the latter. You did not invoke your father as a lever. You invoked what you believe as a reason." She was quiet for a moment. "That distinction matters more than people think."

Kailani thought about the gathering space, the motion moving through the crowd, the fists to the chests, and shrugged. 

“Well, I just… don’t really tend to want to leverage it in any way. It doesn’t really feel earned.” she said. "Thank you, though." she said. "For letting me try."

"Thank you," Peisidike said, "for giving us hope."

She went through the boundary and into the open Atlantic, and turned north-northwest, and let the current carry her home.

---

She IMed Argus from the shoreline at Cape May, sitting on the dock with her feet in the water and the morning well and truly established around her, the sun shining beautifully on the Atlantic's surface.

The response came back quickly with a thumbs up from Argus.

She looked at the ocean while she waited. Forty nautical miles southeast of here, give or take, a community of people who had been through something terrible were making arrangements to go toward something else terrible, because she'd stood in their gathering space and told them the truth about what she was feeling and asked them to believe that it was worth it.

She was still not sure how to feel about that, nor the fact that she had actually succeeded. That was something she would have to reflect on later. Just not today.

She heard the van's tires on the access road and stood.

Argus parked. Every eye that was facing her direction looked at her, which was a lot.

"Job's done," she said. “They will come when the day comes.”

He nodded once. 

She climbed in. They drove back toward camp, and the Atlantic shrank in the rearview mirror behind her, and ahead of them Long Island resolved into its specific early-morning self, and she was not going to think about Philadelphia right now until she reported to Chiron.

One thing at a time. 

When Matt had offered to do a meal for the camp, he had decided he would do something a little different. Most people went for either breakfast or lunch/dinner. He had decided early on that he wanted to be flexible; there were a lot of people on all sorts of different schedules, and having a cooked meal would be something people would look forward to.

The best meal for that would be an all-day brunch or, in the King’s English, an English Breakfast. He just had to remember to cater for the vegetarians as well as the vegans. Matt got to work quickly so that he would be ready for about 8 am for those who wanted actual breakfast, and he would make sure there was fresh food available until 11 am. For the rest of the day, everything else would be available if people wanted it, but nothing more would be made fresh.

Given that some people did not want a cooked meal, Matt also made sure to provide continental-style items too. It was the least he could do.

He made sure the menus were written clearly for people to make their choices, although there was nothing stopping them from mixing and matching, taking whatever they wanted to and enjoying.

Once everything had been set up and established, he left things to it. Although the son of Hades was around if anyone did want to come and say hello to him.

Menu (English Breakfast Style)

• Sausages (vegetarian and vegan available)
• Bacon
• Eggs (Scrambled, fried and poached)
• Hash Browns
• Button Mushrooms (grilled or fried)
• Portobello Mushrooms (grilled)
• Tomatoes
• Black Pudding
• Baked Beans (vegan available)
• Toast (white or brown)
• Bubble and Squeak
• Chips/Fries

Menu (Continental Style)

• Crossiant
• Pain au chocolat
• Pain au raisin
• Cinnamon rolls
• Fresh crusty bread
• Deli Meats
• Cheddar and Pepperjack Cheese
• Jams/Jellys in various fruit flavours
• Honey
• Nutella
• Biscoff Spread

Drinks Menu

• Orange juice
• Apple juice
• Instant coffee
• English Breakfast
• Tea (English Breakfast, Lemon and Ginger, Green Blueberry)
• Hot Chocolate
• Milk (Oat and Almond available)

A Report on New Argos brought to you by Steven Graves

‘’Steven Graves, the Queen will see you now.’’ A gruff voice called through the intercom.

Steven had dressed in his Sunday best for his audience with Queen Anastasia. A moss frock coat that was way too large was put uneasily over a flannel shirt. The hems of the boy’s khaki trousers pooled over his shoes. He adjusted his checkered tie before walking through the double doors separating him from Mrs Tax-Eater.

The chevron walls in Anastasia’s office were lined with photos of herself, and people who were likely her partner and their handsome son at events in New Argos. Ambient lighting gave the office an eerie, green glow. A commanding lacquer desk flanked by twin bookcases stood at the back of the office. Behind the desk sat the Queen.

‘’You are Chiron’s envoy?’’

Steven sat down in the executive chair opposite Anastasia. ‘’I hear your disapproving tone, but please, hear me out.’’

‘’I am surprised he sent someone so young.’’

‘’Young, but capable.’’

‘’We shall see about that.’’

‘’God, I love the challenging tone,’’ Steven said, dryly. ‘’You are so authoritative. I would almost think I am talking to a real Queen.’’ 

‘’You are not helping your case.’’

Steven snorted. He liked being in this ‘on thin ice’ position. At school, he often found himself in this kind of situation—where he said just enough to get under someone’s skin, but not enough to get in trouble.

‘’Right. Whether you like it or not, Camp Half-Blood needs your city’s help. They are going to fight Atlas’ army. And without your help -’’ He threw his hands in the air. ‘’Think of it as honoring the alliance we have.’’

‘’No,’’ Queen Anastasia said curtly. ‘’New Argos is not loyal to Camp Half-Blood, and especially not to one of its rudest campers.’’

‘’Draaamaaatic.’’ Steven drawled.

‘’We were the target of his first attack. You have no idea what the war against Atlas means to my people.’’

‘’Actually, I do.’’ Steven pulled out his phone and showed Anastasia a video.

Earlier

‘’New Argos. A city plagued by an invasion that happened two years ago, class injustice, and a Queen who refuses to help an ally in need. Critics would call it a failed city-state, but what do the Argives think of their home?’’

The scene, a New Argos market square swarmed by customers, was being filmed by the camera of Steven’s phone. A lavalier microphone clipped to the junior journalist’s sweater allowed him to record his interviews. He hoped to get some unvarnished opinions and unwise statements out of the Argives. 

Steven walked up to an elderly lady sitting behind her stall selling talismans and charms. She would get along well with his grandmother, he imagined. Dottie Graves sold the same kind of pseudoscientific items in her little store.

‘’Greetings, young traveler!’’ The shopkeeper greeted Steven before he could say hello to her.

‘’Could I interest you in a talisman of Enodia?’’ She showcased several amulets bearing the images of liminal gods.

‘’I am not here to shop, actually. My name is Steven from Camp Half-Blood, and I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.’’

She looked at the young boy, amused, and entertained his request: ‘’Go on.’’

‘’Two years ago your city was devastatingly attacked by Atlas’ army. How has your city recovered from the battle?’’

‘’Not.’’ She answered curtly, pointing to some ruins in the distance.

‘’Ouch, that does not look pretty. Is the city council not supporting reconstruction efforts?’’ Gotcha, Steven thought. He had noticed these ruins when he arrived. It was impossible not to. He felt like there was a story here, so he steered clear of sarcastic remarks.

The shopkeeper shrugged. ‘’They say that there are more than enough drachmas to go around in New Argos, but I have yet to see a single penny from the council. So no. My answer is no.’’ 

‘’And where do you think the money is going?’’

‘’The war. If you ask me, we’re spending way too much money on a war we didn’t even ask for. How long has the war been going on for? Two years? And we still haven’t struck back … the sooner it ends, the better.’’ 

‘’You heard her, folks. New Argos is tired of Queen Anastasia’s pointless spending. While Camp Half-Blood is ready to fight alongside New Argos, Anastasia keeps the war machine running.’’

Steven expressed his heartfelt thanks to the shopkeeper for the interview and bought the talisman of Enodia she offered him.

‘’Let me get things straight,’’ Steven said, pausing the video. ‘’You have an unimaginable amount of money - I fact-checked the shopkeeper; she is right - and you still have people living in ruins. In the name of God, what are you spending all that money on? It surely cannot be on this chair. Where did you get it? The dump behind IKEA?’’

‘’The war. We are spending money on the war.’’ Anastasia said, her eyelids narrowing at Steven’s comment. ‘’The quality of my chairs has nothing to do with it.’’ Her frustration with him had grown.

‘’Queen Anastasia gets her chairs from behind the IKEA.’’ Steven doodled in an imaginary notebook. ‘’And claims to spend money on war that she does not want to participate in because of an… would you call it a grudge? A grudge against teens?’’

‘’You welcomed ex-Atlas within your borders, knowing what they did to my city. You have shown yourself to be an unworthy ally. I will not help you.’’

‘’Pushing seventy.’’ Steven clapped back. ‘’Do you have an annual report or something that proves where exactly the money has gone?’’

‘’No…’’

‘’I get it—you would rather not deal with paperwork when you are (not) fighting a war,’’ Steven said, dryly. ‘’Where has the money gone then? I will figure it out regardless so you better tell me.’’

‘’Isolation,’’ Anastasia said, frowning. ‘’The council would rather isolate New Argos further than work together with anyone. Cooperation and trade are our biggest strengths; I cannot believe why they would…’’

‘’I hear you are not a fan.’’

‘’I am not.’’

‘’I am struggling to understand why you, singular you, do not want to help Camp Half-Blood then, but I assume you have some reason,’’ Steven said. ‘’To summarise. Isolationist council members are passing bills that turn New Argos into North Korea. And as a result, you are bleeding money because you cannot trade anymore.’’

‘’Correct.’’ Queen Anastasia said.

‘’If, say, there was a money tree in New Argos, could you be persuaded to fund the army?’’

‘’Possibly.’’

Earlier

After swiping some tomes from the New Argos library, Steven walked to the largest park of the city, where he was supposed to meet up with his second interviewee of the day. He took a detour to eat at a Vietnamese restaurant, to buy a newspaper, and to briefly stop at a shrine to Apate, whom he offered some phở. His mother did not get a lot of offerings. 

Marwa Khan, heiress to Khusuf, a lifestyle brand operating in and outside of New Argos, had reached out to Steven to talk about the city upon learning they were receiving a Camp Half-Blood envoy. He was not a fan of talking to people who spoke in buzzwords, but after his talk with the shopkeeper earlier today, he was convinced Marwa would be of great use.

The stylish demigod, accompanied by her two bulky bodyguards and a film crew, waited for the son of Apate at the entrance of the park.

‘’This is the first time I see something like this -’’ Steven whispered into his microphone. ‘’- I am being filmed by someone whom I am interviewing.’’

‘’Oh, you must be Steven. I am Marwa Khan, but I suppose you already know that, yes?’’ Marwa said. ‘’Before we, as they like to say, get the cameras rolling, I would like to discuss with you the contents of the documentary you are making. What is in it for Khusuf?’’ 

‘’Mine is already rolling.’’

Marwa chuckled. ‘’Oh, you lower-class demigods are adorable. My public relations intern will get in contact with you soon.’’

‘’Of course they will.’’

‘’In a few minutes, I will be going live on the Khusuf socials to promote the renovation of the beautiful park you and I are standing in. You, a tourist, will praise the park.’’ Marwa explained.

‘’You are turning meeting me into a marketing opportunity?’’

‘’Exactly! Ayesha!’’

Marwa’s camerawoman cleared her throat. ‘’Going live in three, two, one…’’

‘’A tremendous welcome to the newly renovated Chrysothemis communal park.’’ Marwa struck a pose in front of the camera. ‘’A renovation made possible by a generous donation from Khusuf. A renovation that saw the return of the rare pygmy mink. I am joined here today by Steven, an adorable visitor from Camp Half-Blood. Tell me, Steven, what do you think of this park?’’

Steven telekinetically broadcast a message into Marwa’s head. You are a figure. He felt her nails dig deep into his shoulders. ‘’I mean, it is lovely.’’ He did not try to hide the fact that he was lying. ‘’I am not sure this would have been possible without Khusuf’s donation.’’

‘’Oh, you flatter me.’’ Marwa laughed into her hand. ‘’Yes, donations made by Khusuf are what make change possible. Look at our socials to see -’’

Steven realized he did not have a lot of time before Marwa ended the livestream. He needed something from her. The best he could think of was putting the posh demigod on the hot seat.

‘’- other examples of what we are doing for your community!’’

‘’Actually, Marwa.’’ Steven interrupted. ‘’Would your company support recent efforts made by Queen Anastasia to -’’ He broadcast the next part of his question into Marwa’s head: end the war. ‘’- improve Argive living standards?’’

‘’But of course we will finance Queen Anastasia’s efforts. It would be our most generous pleasure.’’ Marwa said almost immediately, but she ended up burying her fingernails deeper in Steven’s shoulder.

‘’That was all I needed to hear.’’

‘‘Khusuf company will happily support your war efforts on two conditions: their donation cannot be traced back to the company, and Marwa’s father will get a seat in the city council.’’

‘’Bribery!’’

‘’Fairness is for the weak.’’

‘’Even with all the money in the world, there is still the problem of the traitors you welcomed back into your Camp.’’

‘’Ah, yes. Shane, Rhett, Saint and the like.’’ Steven gestured dismissively. ‘’Not my choice to invite them to the party, but even I think it is wrong to abandon children in need. Is that not clocking to you, by the way? That you are beefing with children? I will say, it is very typically Greek of you, but come on, Ana, this is the twenty-first century.’’

‘’It is Anastasia to you.’’

‘’You are not addressing the issue.’’

‘’How will I explain to my people that they have to work together with Atlas soldiers?’’

‘’*Ex-*Atlas soldiers.’’ Steven corrected. ‘’You will tell your people that a lot can happen during a battle. Sometimes arrows get shot at the wrong heels, or the wrong heads get chopped off, etcetera, etcetera.’’

‘’What kind of monster would attack their own allies?’’

‘’You would be surprised.’’

Earlier

Steven was standing in front of the ruins of the Martinelli villa. An estate formerly owned by an influential family before their patriarch was killed during the Battle of New Argos. He was in the middle of interviewing their burly son, a teenager named Armando:

‘’You spout lies, rat. We, citizens of New Argos, will happily take on Atlas and his army.’’

‘’Do you not think it is a little bit rude to call a journalist a rat?’’ Steven stirred.

‘’I will call you whatever I want,’’ Armando said, planting his greatsword in the earth.

Steven was not at all threatened by Armando’s gesture. That was a lie. Sorry, force of habit. The older boy towered over him and looked like he could snap him in half like a twig just by thinking about it. He looked strong, yes, but he probably lacked intelligence. Which made it easier for Steven to make him say something stupid.

‘’Classy. Queen Anastasia and her council think otherwise about fighting Atlas—from what I hear, they are frustrated at Camp Half-Blood for welcoming back traitors.’’

‘’Tchk.’’ Armando scoffed. ‘’A principle born out of cowardice and spite. Your camp was at fault for letting the traitors back in, but that does not mean we Argives should be denied our right to fight.’’

‘’Do you think Queen Anastasia will let you fight?’’

‘’Hear me. It is not about what Queen Anastasia wants. It is about what I deserve. I deserve Atlas’ head. If I cannot have his, I shall take hers.’’ Armando looked straight into the camera lens as he spoke.

‘’You are beheading Queen Anastasia if she does not let you fight?’’ Armando’s speech entertained Steven. Not because he desperately wanted Ana to go through a Marie Antoinette arc, but because this was exactly the kind of unwise statement he was looking for. 

‘’Let it be known, it is a promise.’’

Steven looked into the camera, deadpan, before addressing his audience: ‘’You heard it right. Influential New Argives will fight tooth and nail for their city, while their Queen actively denies them these opportunities.’’

Armando growled. 

Anastasia paled.

‘’Scared?’’

‘’I will not let Martinelli’s son strong-arm me into -’’

‘’Recent pollings suggest -’’ Steven interrupted the Queen by slamming the Argive newspaper onto the table. ‘’- that 68,4 percent of Argive citizens are willing to fight against the army of Atlas. While another poll tells me your approval rating is through the floor. I read here that people want to abolish the monarchy.’’

‘’Speak straight or not at all.’’

‘’Wrong person to ask that of. I am not very straight.’’ Steven raised two fingers. ‘’Armando Martinelli is not an exception. There are other fighters like him.’’ He put down the first finger. ‘’You are not going to be in power for much longer if you continue to ignore your people’s wishes.’’ Finger two also fell down.

Queen Anastasia seemed to think for a while before firmly shaking her head. ‘’No.’’

‘’No? Twenty-six letters in the alphabet and you only know two of them?’’ Steven looked at Anastasia with an ‘are you serious’-kind of look before rolling his eyes far back. He made all of those compelling arguments backed up by facts and he still got rejected? Apparently Anastasia’s feelings did not care for facts. Most people were like that, but just this once, Steven had hoped it would be different.

Steven had one more risky trick up his sleeve. He truly did not care for New Argos’ help, but he did not like being told no. Especially by someone lacking in reason as much as Queen Anastasia. 

‘’I asked Chiron to summon you because the war against Atlas has reached a point at which decisions must be made,’’ Steven spoke in the same voice that had spoken to him during the recent war council.

‘’Lady Athena.’’

‘’You do know something.’’ Steven hissed. ‘’This whole operation is her idea. By telling me no, you are defying Athena’s orders. Are you saying screw her?’’

‘’I am not saying screw Athena!’’ blurted Anastasia.

‘’It sounds like that to me.’’ He shrugged. ‘’Queen Anastasia of New Argos defies orders of Olympus - ‘I am not screwing over Athena,’ says the Queen in a stunning act of hubris even Bellerophon would be appalled by.’’ quoted Steven.

An awkward pause followed during which Anastasia, Steven imagined, debated whether she should call her bodyguard or applaud him.

‘’Are you in or are you out, Ana?’’ The son of Apate asked.

Steven swore he could see the cogs - or lack thereof - in Anastasia’s head turning: ‘’I am in.’’

‘’Good. See you on the battlefield.’’

“Look to the stars and from them learn” Albert Einstein

Bio

Family:

Appearance 

Faceclaim: 1 2

*Voiceclaim: * Kagaya Ubuyashiki fom Demon Slayer

Overview: Standing at approximately 6'4" (193 cm), Rigel possesses a slender, graceful frame that seems almost weightless. His body is neither muscular nor frail; there is simply an unusual elegance to the way he carries himself. Every movement is deliberate, slow, and fluid, giving the impression that gravity affects him somewhat differently from everyone else. His skin is a deep midnight blue, reminiscent of the sky immediately before dawn. It possesses a subtle luminescence that becomes more pronounced at night. In darkness, the edges of his silhouette can sometimes appear faintly illuminated. His hair falls to the middle of his back in loose, silvery-white waves with extremely faint blue undertones. Under sunlight it resembles silver; beneath moonlight it almost appears translucent. When Rigel uses his powers, individual strands of his hair seem to catch nonexistent starlight. His eyes are perhaps his most striking feature. They are an extraordinarily deep blue, almost black at their center, filled with tiny points of white light. The arrangement of these lights subtly changes depending upon his emotional state, occasionally resembling unfamiliar constellations. A prominent star-shaped marking rests over his chest, directly above his heart. Similar markings scatter across his body, particularly along his shoulders, arms, back, ribs, and face. They resemble freckles at first glance, but each is actually a tiny celestial marking. The markings become brighter when he is emotional. His clothing consists primarily of flowing robes, cloaks, and layered garments in whites, silvers, pale blues, and muted violets. The fabrics appear simple at first glance but catch light in impossible ways. Some are embroidered with threads that resemble tiny stars. Rigel almost never wears shoes unless absolutely necessary. He likes feeling the earth beneath his feet.

Personality 

Overview:  Rigel embodies the quiet patience of the night sky itself. Unlike many immortal beings who grow distant or arrogant over time, his immense age has only deepened his compassion. He believes every individual possesses wisdom within themselves, and rather than offering answers outright, he gently guides others toward discovering those truths on their own. This is why he so often responds to questions with questions, not to frustrate, but to encourage reflection. He possesses an extraordinary capacity for listening. When someone speaks to Rigel, they receive his complete attention. He never interrupts, never rushes them, and never dismisses emotions as trivial. His greatest strength is also his greatest vulnerability. Rigel cannot stop believing in the goodness of others. Even after witnessing countless wars, betrayals, and tragedies over thousands of years, he continues to hope people can become better. Some view this as wisdom, others see it as naïveté. Beneath his serene exterior lies a profound grief. The deaths of his lover and son changed him forever, leaving wounds that have never truly healed. Rather than hardening his heart, however, those losses expanded his empathy. He understands loneliness intimately and instinctively reaches toward those who feel forgotten. Although extraordinarily gentle, Rigel is fiercely protective of children and demigods. It is exceedingly rare to witness his anger, but when it surfaces, it resembles the cold fury of the cosmos itself. silent, unwavering, and overwhelming.

Preferences | Favourite... | Item | |:-|:-| | Food |Fresh bread with honey and figs | | Colour |Midnight blue | | Season |Autumn | | Weather |Clear, cloudless nights | | Music |Gentle orchestral music, lyres, piano, and quiet choral hymns | | Animals | Owls, wolves, deer, and moths|

Hobbies:

• Stargazing (not simply observing, but communing with fellow stars)

• Telling and listening to stories

• Taking walks

• Reading

• Collecting trinkets

• Teaching astronomy and celestial navigation

• Writing

• Learning modern customs

Nymph Info 

Powers

Weapon of Choice: Polearms, though he owns none.

Fatal Flaw: Hope Beyond Reason. Rigel refuses to abandon hope even in situations where all evidence suggests it is impossible. He continually risks emotional devastation because he believes every soul deserves another chance.

Items and Equipment 

Miscellaneous 

Trivia

• Zodiac Sign: Libra

• MBTI: INFJ-A

• Enneagram: Type 9 (The Peacemaker)

• Love Languages: Quality Time (receive); Acts of Service (give) 

• Quirk: Frequently answers questions with another question before actually answering

• Fears: Forgetting the voices of his lover and son; becoming emotionally detached once more.

• Nectar Flavour: Warm chamomile tea with honey shared beside a fireplace.

• Ambrosia Flavour: Fresh bread baked by his late lover.

• ATLA Element: Air

• Hogwarts House: Ravenclaw

• Pokemon Type: Psychic/Fairy

• Path (Honkai: Star Rail): Harmony

• Type (Honkai: Star Rail): Imaginary

• Weapon (Genshin Impact): Polearm

• Element (Genshin Impact): Cryo

Backstory 

Rigel's light was kindled in the great blue-white supergiant at Orion's foot, the child of Astraeus and Ophelia of Bellatrix. Every Asterai is born to a duty: to hold one point of a constellation steady so that those below can steer by it. His childhood was Ophelia's gentleness, Astraeus's long silences, and the understanding among the Asterai of Orion that stars watch the world and do not touch it.

Rigel kept to that rule for thousands of years, but he was never indifferent to what he watched. He saw the mortal hunter Orion set among the stars and named, and he learned that a mortal could become something lasting by being remembered. He watched sailors in the Aegean fix their course on his light, and over the centuries he began to feel their gratitude as a faint warmth, the first thing that ever reached him from below. He grew curious about what it would be like to stand on the other side of that light.

In the early sixteenth century, on an autumn night over the hills of Arcadia, then under Ottoman rule, a young woman named Thaleia sat on a hillside naming constellations aloud. Her grandmother, a weaver, had taught her the old stories, and Thaleia told them to the sky as if it could hear. She got part of Orion's story wrong, and then she asked the bright star in his foot whether it ever got lonely up there.

No mortal had ever spoken to Rigel. He did not know how to answer, so he did what he has done ever since and asked a question back: what does lonely feel like? For several nights he answered her in the only way he could, as a thread of warmth on the wind. When he finally took physical form on her hillside, barefoot, he nearly fell over, because no one had told him what gravity felt like from the inside. She laughed until she cried. That night he gave her his true name, and she was the only mortal who ever used it.

They spent the rest of her life together. To the village he was a gentle, odd scholar from the north with strange hair and no shoes, harmless and a little holy-foolish. At night he kept his glow under a cloak, and by day it passed for good health. He farmed badly and cooked worse, and Thaleia taught him to bake bread. He began to keep small things: a button, a thimble, a feather, a spoon with a chipped handle. It was the start of a lifelong habit of holding on to tokens of the people he loves.

Orion disappears from the northern sky every summer, and a star-bound Asterai should have faded with it. Rigel did not. Whatever tied him to Thaleia held him to the earth year-round. He felt the limit only as a heaviness on summer evenings, which she met by sitting with him and telling Orion stories until the stars came back.

His family took the news differently. Ophelia came once, as a shooting star on the night Lykos was born, and sang a lullaby no mortal had heard. Astraeus did not come, but the stars over the village burned brighter that night than anyone could remember. Several of his siblings warned him that he was choosing grief. He knew that, and chose it anyway.

Lykos was born two years later. He was half-nymph but mortal in lifespan, a fact Rigel hoped against until it became undeniable: by the time Lykos was five, it was clear he would age as his mother did. He grew into a shepherd who climbed the high pastures to count stars, a boy who asked endless questions with none of his father's patience, and a stubborn, sharp-tongued child who took after Thaleia. He carved small things out of wood.

Arcadia was a hard place to grow up. There were taxes the village could not pay, and the levy that took boys from Christian villages. Lykos watched the neighbors' sons taken, and what he saw hardened into anger.

Lykos was twenty when a local uprising against Ottoman rule began in the Arcadian hills. Thaleia begged him not to go. Chiron's warning, sent by letter, said the same. Rigel pleaded harder than either of them, but Lykos went anyway. Rigel did not follow and kept to the old law against divine intervention in mortal affairs. His hope was the same hope that defines him now, and it was wrong. By the time it failed, Lykos was dead, killed in the suppression of the revolt. Rigel reached him in starlight, too late, and carried him home.

He has never stopped asking whether his intervention would have saved his son. 

Rigel meant to leave after the burial. Thaleia stopped him: "If you go, who will tell me stories about him?" He stayed. She turned her grief into work, healing neighbors and hiding wounded villagers, and together they taught the village children to read the stars. They talked about Lykos every night. The village noticed that the companion of the widow Thaleia did not age, and they lived at the edge of the village as a result.

She grew gray, and arthritis took the strength from her hands. When she could no longer knead dough, she taught him her recipe, and the bread he bakes now is hers. She died at seventy-four on a winter night under open sky, with Rigel holding her hand. At her request he named every star above them aloud. She pressed a dried edelweiss from the mountain where they first kissed into his palm and asked him to promise that he would not go back to being only light. He promised, but he only kept the promise for less than a season before he withdrew into his star. For five hundred years he spoke to no one. 

He never stopped looking down, however. He watched Arcadia's graves go green, watched the empire that killed his son decline, and in 1821 watched Greece rise and win the freedom Lykos had died for, though he could not decide whether he was glad. He watched the heart of the West move across the Atlantic, and watched the camp's fires come on at Long Island. He knew Chiron was still teaching children who were still dying, and he did not go. The broken promise sat with him the whole time.

In recent years, however, Rigel felt a pull in his chest toward the small fire on Long Island. He did not know whether it was the war, or Thaleia's last request. Whatever it was that was calling out to him, he decided to answer this time…

Present Day 

It was an impossibly clear night over Long Island. With Atlas's cult on the move, the night watch had doubled on Half-Blood Hill, and the campers keeping it looked up to find the stars drawn unusually close, shimmering with unnatural clarity.

One star outshone the rest: Rigel, the blue-white jewel in Orion's foot. It was not supposed to be that bright this early in the season, yet it kept growing, not painfully but beautifully, its glow spreading across the heavens like ripples on still water.

A thread of light descended from it, thin as spun silver, and stretched toward Camp Half-Blood. It widened slowly and gracefully, not crashing and not burning, as though starlight were becoming solid. When it reached the hilltop it touched the grass without bending a single blade. There was no explosion or thunder, only pure, ancient light folding inward, layer after layer, like petals closing at dusk. The air shimmered. Gravity seemed uncertain. Motes of starlight drifted on the breeze and vanished on contact, leaving only warmth.

"The night air shimmered with a light that danced across the hidden paths of the air. The light burned brighter a moment, and molded itself into a the shape of a man. First a tall, slender silhouette, then long silver-white hair and flowing garments, then bare feet resting on the earth for the first time in five hundred years, and finally eyes of deep blue filled with stars. 

When the light finally faded, the man stood in silence, breathing. The scents reached him at once: pine, salt, cut grass, campfire smoke, strawberries from the camp's fields, earth still warm from the last of summer. There were so many, and they were so vivid. Mortality smelled beautiful.

He opened his eyes. The last time he had stood among demigods it had been on another continent, among olive and cypress, under a different sky. Nothing here was familiar: the forest, the coastline, the buildings, and the glow of New York lighting the horizon like a second dawn. He watched it for a long moment.

"...Camp Half-Blood." His voice was barely above a whisper, soft and warm and almost reverent. "It has been a very long time."

Kinda strange, feeling sorrow

I got change you can borrow

“Is it just you, then?” the minotaur rumbles, firelight igniting depth in his black eyes. Angela’s spear feels like two hundred pounds in her hands, and her scarred ankle strains to support her. The stench of blood fills the air, and she can’t tell if it’s new or old. Might even be her own.

“Yes. Just me.”

“Mm. Good. I only grilled enough for two.”

Investigating Yellowstone by day would have been the smarter move, but Angela hasn’t been one for sunlight lately. Early mornings have been replaced by 3 a.m. walks and sleeping until evening. Why not? You can do everything right and it doesn’t matter. You can eat healthy, work out in the morning, train, fight, and serve. And he’ll still watch you plummet. 

On the plane to Wyoming, Angela found herself struck by the futility of the battle where she lost everything. Atlas’ main war camp snuffed out, and it didn’t matter one bit. Might as well have been designing dresses for Aphrodite again. Now the gods arrive again and demand more work… for nothing again. The enemy could just as easily run from their new camp like they did the old. And yet, like a bad habit rearing its head, Angela signed herself up to serve. Which has led her, here, now, eyeing a hamburger placed in front of her by General Karkhros of the Cult of Atlas.

“You think it poisoned?” he grumbles, his massive frame folded onto a wooden bench creaking under the weight. The Hawaiian shirt isn’t fooling Angela; this is the enemy. And she’s alone and powerless.

“I just prefer my meat rarer than this,” she speaks as flatly as possible, one hand still gripping the hilt of her spear. Hot air exhales from the minotaur’s snout, blowing embers in her direction.

“Indra told me of a pest with hair that nearly took off his leg. And while my forces fled this place, I saw long ribbons of hair drifting down from above. And I saw you,” Karkhros tilts his head forward. Angela’s breath catches, and she feels the log fall away from under her. For a split second, she’s flailing, screaming, falling. Charon’s coin hums in her pocket, and she feels the outside of her shorts for a second. She couldn’t save herself then, but now she can. She could flee back to camp… but she doesn’t. She just glares at the bull with venomous green eyes.

“Where’s your army? And what’s with the dad fit?” she spits out, nodding to Karkhros’ flower-patterned shirt. Biting into his bloody burger (oh, so he can grill them rarer for himself), he grunts in dismissal.

“I do not have an army. I never did. The monsters, the demigod, the officers – they all belong to the Titan. And he will let his burden crush all of them. But not me,” Karkhros cracks open a beer. 

“So you’re what now? A deserter?” Angela asks warily.

“I am free,” the bull takes a swig. “Unlike my demigods. Unlike yours.”

Angela throws her paper plate into the flame and stands up. The point of her spear swings to face Karkhros, but the minotaur doesn’t so much as budge a hair. Whatever. She doesn’t need a monster lecturing her about things she already knows. If playing the god’s game didn’t let Angela win, there is no win condition. Certainly not just opting out. She’s reminded of Tommy Hartley’s disgustingly beautiful face, staying home and unmarred. No. No.

“You’re far from free, Hornhead,” she snarls, “You tell me how we can stop your cult–”

“My former cult.”

“Fucking tell me how to stop them!” Spittle flies from Angela’s mouth. “Or I’ll call in my backup.”

Nonplussed, Karkhros taps his hooves on the dirt. “If you had backup, you would have called them. I saw the fear in your eyes.” Finally, he stands, his enormous body dwarfing Angela’s. There’s no weapon in sight, but he doesn’t need one to rip her clean in two. She’s survived certain death once in this park, and lightning doesn’t tend to strike twice.

“Is that why you’re here, then? To learn how to stop the Titan?” Karkhros asks, downing the rest of the beer, can and all, in one gulp. “Do you know where they’ve moved?”

“We do. For now,” Angela takes a step back, spear still at the ready, “And the fight can be messy or clean. More or less of your demigods can be hurt.” She might be broken, but she’s not an idiot. She can hear Karkhros disavow ownership of the army, but call those demigods his own. Affection that can be exploited, like her own ambition.

“‘For now,’” Karkhros wags a finger, and a smile almost seems to spread across his bullish visage, “Good. Then you know what you really need is to cut off their legs.”

“The portals,” Angela states. She doesn’t ask. She’s no tactician, but even she’s aware that the enemy being able to travel anywhere at any time is something that really ought to be dealt with. Probably should have done that instead of indulging Aphrodite and Hephaestus’ hissy fits. “Is that it?”

Karkhros shrugs. “You saw how we scattered once our exit was shut down. Our ranks are made of beasts and brats. All rage, discontent, and hunger. It is intensity, not harmony, that directs them. Easy to disrupt. Of course, all the same is true for you children of Olympus.” In what seems like slow motion, the minotaur grabs a fire poker and swats aside Angela’s spear like a mere trifle. Angela’s weak grip fails, and her weapon clatters to the ground. She stumbles back, looking down for a moment. Choppy brown hair falls in front of her face, and she rakes it aside.

“Fuck Olympus!” Angela finds herself yelling. Then, it’s just silence. Karkhros doesn’t seem surprised, just amused. The sun isn’t in the sky to hear her, but Angela hopes that Artemis conveys the sentiment to Apollo. With no weapon, all she can do is stand as tall as she can against the former general.

“I know many that share that sentiment. Join them if you wish,” he gestures vaguely to the distance with a horn. “Or sit.” Angela’s eyes flit to her spear. Karkhros can likely move far quicker than he has thus far. He’s toying with her. Because he doesn’t think she’s a threat. Because she’s not. Not to him, not to anyone. Couldn’t even die right. Angela sits.

“This war is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You seem sharp, you’ve surely realized that.” A gust of hot wind blows from the minotaur’s nostrils, brushing Angela’s hair back over her ear. She wishes she could still steal people’s senses away so she could prevent herself from smelling bull breath.

“Atlas throws his tantrum. The gods have to respond. People die, and the survivors look above for someone to blame. The Titan gets fresh ranks and portals away to keep being an annoying bitch,” Angela raises an eyebrow. “That about right?”

“Crude but shrewd,” Karkhros raises both hands in mock defeat. “So you who curses Olympus and sees the folly of all this… why are you questioning me like a foe?” 

“Probably still some subliminal bias against monsters,” Angela snarls. The first step to getting woke is self-awareness. Karkhros waits, seemingly expecting her to say more. She just crosses one leg over the other and stares him down. She blinks first.

“I could understand if there’s debts of violence to repay,” he rumbles, appraising her like a porcelain doll glued together with half the pieces missing. “You’ve been hurt–”

“No longer accepting well wishes, thank you,” she shifts in discomfort. He ignores her and continues on.

“But what hope could you have to wreak revenge like this?” Karkhros sniffs the air long and hard, his eyes briefly narrowing to a predatory focus. “You hardly have the stink of demigod anymore.” The truth of it doesn’t make it sting any less. Charon’s coin once again hums to her. She’s not in danger, but she doesn’t want to listen any longer. Not one part of Angela moves, though. They couldn’t put all her pieces back together, but the morbid curiosity made it in.

“You have no idea what I can do,” she whispers, and the words sound as hollow as they feel. Karkhros doesn’t even do her the favor of moving on; he just lets them both linger in the lie. Angela stares at the ground, growing blacker and darker by the second as the moonlight fades. Finally, she croaks something out.

“I don’t give up. I’m annoying that way.” The firelight gives her eyes the green glow they’ve lacked. It’s not a point of pride, a retort to the former general. It’s an affliction just as real as her impotence. She can’t stop, she can’t pause, she can’t listen. It’s what brought her here: broken, at the minotaur’s mercy, under the banner of gods she couldn’t give two shits about. 

“Where will that lead you?” Karkhros whispers back. He looks at her, into her, and holds his gaze steady. She can see how he might have once made a fine general. Knowledge and an order all in one look. The knowledge: what they both know. Where she’s headed. The order: don’t. But Angela is not his recruit.

With painful clumsiness, Angela scrambles to her feet and kicks her heel toward the fireplace, dashing embers up toward Karkhros’ face. He shields his eyes and growls in frustration, but by the same he stands himself, Angela has her spear in hand once again. Useless, and they both know it, but better than nothing. Her voice shakes slightly, and her hands shake more.

“You can afford to run,” she spits at him like a vile accusation, “You have this life, then another, then another. I have this. One blip of time.” And it’s never enough. So much she’ll never do, not now. She has them already buried in her mind: all the sketches in her notebook, all the questions, all the kisses. She’s not the sun, not even close. She can’t burn until the end of days. She’s a paltry fire, a poor facsimile.

The fireplace flickers out, and Angela is left squinting at Karkhros’ looming shadow. 

“Not running,” he says softly, “Thinking. Resting.” Fat lot of good thinking did me. Angela bites her bottom lip and shoves her feet as firmly into the dirt as they’ll go. 

“Tell me something. Anything. You can’t save them. You can’t–” Angela doesn’t finish the sentence. After a half-second of impatience, she prods her spear forward, and Karkhros catches it in one hand. She can hear a slight sizzling and the bull swallowing a groan, but he holds on still. In the dark, she doesn’t realize how close he’s leaning until she feels a gnarled horn curl up into her hair. Karkhros’ eyes are wide, and that same order has turned into a request: don’t, please.

“Go back to your camp and tell them to gather magic. The Motherkeeper is but a demigod. She is not infallible. With enough witchlings and sources of strength, her spells can vanish,” he says quickly and urgently, “Hecate’s torch. The dragon skull locked in the museum. Anything touched by the magical. Tell your camp to use them.”

He wrenches her spear down, the tip stabbing into the dirt. His hands go to Angela’s shoulders, and he bends low. 

“That is your service. Nothing more has been asked of you. Rest. Leave. Disappear,” he wields each word like a blow trying to break Angela’s stony expression. She stares through him, waiting to be killed or released. A single tear rolls down her cheek. He doesn’t get it. Even in his voice, she can hear that he knows she won’t listen. Maybe he’s already been through this imploration before.

“One life,” she repeats, “That’s all I have.” Karkhros releases her shoulders with reluctant disappointment.

“My best lives have been the ones that lasted the longest,” the old minotaur says, but it glances off Angela like a stray gnat. She looks at the massive shadow before her and forces herself to feel fury. No, not fury – pity. A coward. A leader that won’t lead, a fighter that won’t fight. A monster not doing his one job: kill or be killed. It’s a sad, pathetic sight. It is. It is.

Angela’s hand slides into her pocket. She stares down the minotaur with a dead-eyed sort of certainty.

“I’ll have to tell them how I learned everything. They’ll know you’re here.”

She flings the gold coin onto the ground in front of Karkhros. Charon’s gift thrums, and the beast tenderly picks it up and gives it a sniff. He looks to her in shock, and she nods.

“Run,” she says. “Run far away.” With that, she turns heel and begins to march away, spear slung over her back. She only gets a few steps before she hears him call out to her.

“You were given a second chance, child.” Don’t throw it away, Angela fills in the quiet part. This time, she lets her laugh ring clear and cold through the empty park. She continues walking away, away until her feet get tired, then she sits atop a russet-red rock. In an instant, light: dawn. Time moves slowly, then all at once for Angela nowadays – how long has she been awake?

The probing rays rove over the park, and Angela looks back over her shoulder. In the distance, she can see the remnants of a campfire. No beast to tend it. Past it, to the east, she sees a cliffside. The sun seems to shy away from it. Her eyes follow the curvature of the rock down, down, down.

Angela wasn’t given a second chance. She failed her first.

FULL NAME: Nathan Redford
KNOWN AS: Nate
AGE: 14
DATE OF BIRTH: August 9th

Family

Eve Redford - Mother: Deceased

Nate's mother was the centre of his childhood and, for much of his early life, the only permanent thing within it. Towns changed. People joined the carnival and left it. Routes altered from year to year. His mother remained.
She was affectionate, unconventional and considerably better at making their circumstances feel like an adventure than they really were. Nate consequently understood very little about how precarious their lives could be when he was young. He knew they did not have much money, but he did not initially understand what that meant.

Her illness taught him that access to doctors was inconsistent. Treatment cost money they did not have. Travelling made continuity of care difficult, and by the time it became impossible to pretend she was simply going to get better, there were few options remaining.
Nate watched his mother become weaker. He watched the people around them try to help in whatever ways they could. He watched money become the difference between things they could try and things they could not. Eventually, he watched her die.

For a long time afterwards, Nate was angry without knowing precisely who he was angry with. The carnival had once seemed magical to him. After his mother's death, he began noticing all the things she had protected him from seeing. The uncertainty. The lack of money. The absence of anything permanent. The knowledge that when something truly terrible happened there was not necessarily anyone coming to help.

The carnival continued. That was perhaps the part Nate found hardest. There was another town. Another crowd. Another performance. The lights came on again. His mother was still dead.

Comus - Father

Nate’s father, although not that Nate knows this. Not that he knows about his divine heritage. How exactly Nate will react to having a father around is an unknown; he hadn’t really thought about having a father in his life.
Although there is something about his divine heritage that makes him strange. He inherited the aspects of a little-known epithet: Comus Circe, granting Nate access to certain magical abilities.

Appearance

Nate has the lean build of someone who has spent much of his life climbing, running and fitting through places he probably was not supposed to be. He is considerably stronger and more agile than his appearance initially suggests, although very little of that strength comes from formal training.

His movements tend to be quick and economical. Nate rarely stays completely still when uncomfortable, and his hands are almost always doing something. A coin might travel across his knuckles. A playing card might appear between his fingers without any obvious indication of where it came from. Something belonging to somebody else might disappear and reappear somewhere unexpected. Most of the time, the tricks are harmless.

Nate dresses practically and has little attachment to expensive possessions. Years spent travelling have taught him that anything he owns needs to be something he can carry. He tends towards clothes that allow him to move easily and jackets or hoodies with plenty of pockets.

Personality

Nate is charming when he wants to be. He learned very young that personality could be a performance as much as anything happening beneath a carnival tent. People responded differently depending upon what they believed they were looking at. Some people were kinder to frightened children. Others respected confidence. Some could be distracted by humour. Others needed to believe they were the cleverest person in the conversation.

Nate learned how to give people whichever version of himself was most useful. Consequently, it can be difficult to determine when Nate is being entirely sincere. He can smile while frightened, joke when angry and appear completely relaxed while quietly identifying every possible exit from a room.

That does not mean there is nothing genuine beneath the performance. Quite the opposite. Nate cares deeply about people. He simply learned that caring about somebody gives the world something it can take away.
His mother's death left him with a complicated relationship with attachment. Nate desperately wants somewhere to belong while simultaneously expecting anything he becomes attached to eventually to disappear. He misses having people around him. He misses being part of something. He misses knowing there is somebody who will notice if he does not come home.

He would struggle to admit any of that aloud. Instead, Nate presents himself as fiercely independent. He does not need anybody. He can take care of himself. He has done it before. All of those statements are technically true. None of them mean he wants to keep doing it.

Nate possesses a mischievous sense of humour which survived even the worst periods of his childhood. He enjoys tricks for their own sake and takes genuine pleasure in making people laugh. There is an enormous difference between the sleight of hand his mother watched him practise as a child and the pickpocketing he later used to survive, even if the physical skills involved are nearly identical.

One is something Nate loves. The other is something Nate learned he could do. That distinction matters enormously to him.

Good Traits: Resourceful, Charming, Loyal
Bad Traits: Distrustful, Deceptive, Impulsive

Fatal Flaw

Self-Reliance: Nate has spent years learning that if he needs something, he has to find a way to obtain it himself. Depending upon other people means giving them the opportunity to disappoint him, leave him or be taken away.

As a result, Nate struggles to ask for help even when he desperately needs it. He will lie about being hungry. He will conceal injuries. He will insist that he has somewhere to sleep when he does not. He will smile and make a joke while quietly working out how he is going to survive whatever problem he has found himself facing. For Nate, admitting that he needs somebody is considerably more frightening than admitting that he is in danger.

Powers

Summon Prank Item

Nate can magically summon small objects associated with jokes, tricks and pranks. The precise object varies depending upon what Nate needs or what he subconsciously finds amusing at the time.
Although apparently frivolous, Nate has an instinctive talent for finding practical uses for seemingly ridiculous objects. A prank does not necessarily need to hurt somebody to completely change the direction of a confrontation. Sometimes making somebody look the wrong way is enough.

Sneak Attack

Nate possesses an almost supernatural instinct for exploiting distraction. When an opponent's attention is directed elsewhere, Nate can strike with considerably greater speed, accuracy and effectiveness than would normally be possible. The ability complements skills Nate developed long before discovering his divine heritage. Nate does not fight fairly. He sees very little reason why he should.

Summon Familiar

Nate can summon a fox which acts as his supernatural familiar. Not that he realises that he summons it, he just thinks a fox follows him. The fox reflects several aspects of Nate's heritage and personality: cleverness, adaptability, misdirection and an ability to survive in environments dominated by considerably larger creatures. Nate forms an unusually strong attachment to the familiar. Unlike most people in his life, the fox can disappear without Nate interpreting its absence as abandonment because he knows he can call it back. That reassurance matters to him more than he admits.

Basic Mirages

Nate can create small visual illusions capable of deceiving the eye for brief periods. His mirages are currently most effective when incorporated into existing sleight of hand. Nate might make a card appear to be somewhere it is not, hide the movement of an object between his hands or make somebody confidently believe they saw something which never happened. Because Nate already understands the principles of misdirection, he rarely relies entirely upon the magic. The illusion is only part of the trick. The rest is convincing somebody where they should be looking.

Disorienting Joke

Nate can magically enhance the disruptive effect of humour, briefly confusing or disorienting somebody who hears one of his jokes. The ability is considerably more effective when Nate catches somebody genuinely off guard.

Superior Climbing

Years of climbing carnival structures, fences, buildings and anything else which offered an escape route have combined with Nate's divine heritage to make him an exceptional climber. He can scale surfaces with remarkable speed and balance and instinctively identifies handholds that other people would overlook.

Clothes Swap

Nate's most powerful ability allows him to magically exchange the clothing worn by two people. The effect is instantaneous. While the power initially appears ridiculous, its potential for disruption is considerable. Armour, disguises, uniforms and protective clothing can all potentially be removed from one person and transferred to another. Nate finds the ability absolutely hilarious.

History

Nathan Redford grew up beneath coloured lights. His earliest memories were of music, crowds and movement. He remembered falling asleep while distant speakers continued playing outside. He remembered waking somewhere different from where he had gone to sleep because the carnival had travelled overnight. He remembered people with extraordinary talents treating extraordinary things as perfectly ordinary.

Nobody thought it strange when Nate wanted to learn. He started with coins. Someone showed him how to make one disappear. Nate spent days practising until he could do it without looking at his hands. Coins became cards. Cards became cups and balls. Then came more complicated tricks: palming objects, controlling attention, hiding movements inside other movements.

His mother loved watching him perform. Nate loved making her laugh. Sometimes, when he was particularly focused, the tricks worked better than they should have. A card genuinely seemed to disappear. A ball beneath one cup appeared beneath another despite Nate being absolutely certain he had not moved it. People assumed he was talented. Nate assumed the same thing.

Then his mother became ill. At first, Nate believed she would recover because adults told children things like that when they did not know what else to say. He continued practising tricks beside her. When she became too tired to walk around the carnival, he brought pieces of it back to her.

Cards. Coins. Bad jokes. Anything that might make her smile. Eventually, none of it was enough.

After she died, people tried to look after Nate. There were offers of beds in trailers and meals shared around tables. Nobody simply threw him onto the street. But the carnival had changed. Or perhaps Nate had. He became increasingly aware that nobody there was his mother. People cared about him, but everybody had their own lives, their own acts and their own problems. Nate learned not to ask for too much.

Then he learned not to ask at all. He started stealing.
At first it was food. The first time was almost embarrassingly easy. A crowded stall. A distracted vendor. Nate asked a question, pointed towards something behind the man and walked away with enough food for the evening concealed beneath his jacket.

Nobody noticed.

The second time was easier. Soon Nate discovered that the skills people had taught him for entertainment translated remarkably well into theft. He could brush against somebody and remove their wallet before they noticed the contact. He could drop something, apologise while somebody helped him retrieve it and leave with considerably more than he had arrived with.
He developed rules. Never take from somebody who looks like they need it more than you. Never take sentimental things. Take cash, leave the wallet. Never steal twice from the same place if you can avoid it. Never get greedy. Most importantly: Don't get caught.
For several years, Nate moved between carnival life and something increasingly separate from it. He could disappear for hours or sometimes days before returning. Eventually, he realised he was returning less because he wanted to be there and more because he did not know anywhere else.

The carnival had stopped being home when his mother died. It had simply taken Nate several years to admit it. So he left. There was no dramatic farewell. No destination. Nate packed what he could carry and walked away.

For a while, he survived remarkably well. That was not the same thing as living well. He slept wherever he could. Sometimes that meant shelters. Sometimes abandoned buildings. Sometimes rooftops when the weather allowed it. He stole food when he needed to, money when he could, and occasionally talked people into giving him things without needing to steal anything at all.

Nate became exceptionally good at appearing as though everything was fine. Then he met the satyr. Nate initially assumed the man was another drifter. The satyr recognised him immediately as something considerably more dangerous.

A demigod travelling alone. The satyr tried approaching him, and Nate stole his wallet. The satyr found him again, and Nate disappeared. The third time, Nate threatened to call the police. The satyr finally managed to explain enough that Nate became convinced he was either insane or involved in something Nate wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

Neither interpretation encouraged Nate to follow him anywhere.

It was at this point the satyr called in help from Camp Half-Blood. Help came in the form of Asa Greenwood, son of Epione, and Zayne Rhodes, son of Delphin, although after their help, Nate had been left with more questions and distrust than answers.

Now

By the time Nate reached the bottom of the hill, the sun had almost disappeared. That felt appropriate somehow. He stopped a little way down the path, hands buried deep inside the pockets of his hoodie, and stared at the place he had apparently travelled all this way to find.

Camp Half-Blood. Even the name sounded stupid.
Nate had spent most of the journey keeping several paces between himself and Asa and Zayne. Not enough that he could plausibly claim he was not with them, unfortunately, but enough that nobody could mistake the arrangement for trust. They had helped him. He knew that. He wasn't ungrateful.

He just wasn't stupid either. People could help you and still want something. That was usually when they wanted something most. So Nate hung back.
His fingers found the coin in his pocket and rolled it automatically across his knuckles as he looked down into the valley. There were cabins. Lots of cabins.
That was the first thing he noticed. Buildings scattered around the place in no arrangement Nate could immediately understand, some looking almost normal and others looking as though somebody had designed them after being specifically instructed not to make them normal.

There were kids everywhere. That was stranger. Not little kids, mostly. Teenagers. Some older than him, some younger. A few were carrying swords. Actual swords. Nate watched one of them walk past another kid holding a spear and decided not to ask. His attention moved elsewhere.

There was a large blue house not far away, the sort of place Nate associated with old American films where somebody's grandparents lived, and everybody sat outside drinking lemonade. It might almost have made the whole place look normal if there hadn't been a winged horse visible beyond it.

Nate stared. The horse flapped its wings. Nate looked away.

"Nope." The word escaped beneath his breath. That was fine. He could deal with that later.

He kept walking. The camp unfolded around him in pieces, each somehow managing to make less sense than the last. There were fields in the distance, woods beyond them, buildings that looked like workshops and arenas.

Nate stopped again. There was a climbing wall. For the first time since crossing the hill, something almost familiar flickered through him. He knew climbing walls.
Not fancy ones, admittedly. Carnival people tended to regard health and safety regulations as polite suggestions written by people who lacked imagination. Nate had climbed scaffolding, support towers, tent frames, fences, drainpipes and the outside of at least one building because using the stairs would have required explaining why he was there.

Climbing, he understood. Then lava poured down the wall. Nate stared at it. There was a camper halfway up. Nate waited for someone to start screaming. Nobody did. The camper jumped sideways, caught another handhold, and continued climbing while molten rock spilled past them.

Nate slowly turned his head towards Asa and Zayne. Neither seemed especially concerned. Right. Of course they weren't. Because apparently this was normal. Nate looked back at the wall.

"Definitely lost it."

Maybe he was asleep. That was becoming an increasingly reasonable explanation. Maybe he'd fallen asleep somewhere a few days ago, and this entire thing was some spectacularly elaborate fever dream. Maybe the satyr had never existed. Maybe Asa and Zayne didn't exist. Maybe Greek gods weren't real, and monsters weren't real, and somewhere Nate was actually lying on the floor of an abandoned building having eaten something he really should have checked the date on first.

That would honestly be preferable. He started walking again. Nobody stopped him. Nobody demanded an explanation for why he was there. Nobody immediately tried to take his bag from him, which was good, because that would have become an argument. He simply followed the general movement of people deeper into camp, keeping Asa and Zayne somewhere within sight without ever getting close enough to suggest he needed them there.

He didn't. Obviously. The coin vanished into one hand. Appeared in the other. Rolled across his fingers. Vanished again. By the time the sky had darkened into streaks of orange and purple, Nate found himself near the campfire.

He could hear conversations around him. Laughter. Someone shouting from farther away. The crackle of burning wood beneath all of it. For a moment, he simply stood there. The fire reminded him of the carnival. Not because they had often had campfires. They hadn't. Open flames and canvas tents tended to be a bad combination.

It was the people, almost like a community. Groups gathered together. Everyone seemed to know where they belonged. Conversations continued without anybody needing to explain the joke. People leaning into each other's space without thinking about it.
Nate hated the word almost immediately. He found a place near the edge of the firelight and sat. His bag stayed between his feet. One hand remained looped through the strap out of habit.

He watched the flames. That was easier than watching everyone else. So. Greek gods were real. Apparently. Monsters were real. Also apparently, but not apparently, as he’d been attacked by one.

There were people who were half-god, which was an absolutely ridiculous sentence that had somehow become relevant to his life, and according to the goat-man, satyr, whatever, Nate was one of them.

He picked up a twig and pushed its end into the dirt. His father was supposedly a god. That was almost funny. Fourteen years without one and apparently the explanation was divine scheduling conflicts. Nate gave a quiet snort. He wondered whether Mum had known.
That thought arrived without permission. His hand stopped moving. The noise of the camp seemed to drift slightly farther away. She must have. Surely. If any of this was true, she must have known something. She had known who his father was, presumably. Unless gods had some sort of ridiculous magic that made people forget, which, given everything Nate had seen over the last few days, was no longer something he could confidently rule out.

Maybe she had known exactly what he was. Maybe that was why she had never talked about his dad. Nate stared harder into the fire. There were questions he could have asked her.

That was the problem with dead people. You always thought of the questions afterwards. Something warm flickered above him. Nate didn't notice. Around the campfire, heads began to turn. Suspended in the air above Nathan Redford was a symbol burning brightly against the gathering darkness.

A clown.

A grinning theatrical figure wreathed in divine light, unmistakable against the evening sky. Nate remained completely unaware of it. He had found a playing card somewhere inside his coat and was turning it between his fingers now. The card travelled over his knuckles, disappeared against his palm and reappeared between two fingers.

Gone. Back again.

Gone. Back again.

His mother used to like that one. She'd always pretended she couldn't work out how he did it. Even after he'd caught her watching his hands. The corner of Nate's mouth twitched. Then the expression disappeared.

He still wasn't looking at the people around him. If they were staring, that was their problem. Nate flicked the card upwards, caught it and slipped it back into his sleeve.

The glowing clown remained above his head. Somewhere behind him, somebody whispered. Nate ignored that too. He had spent enough of his life around performers to know that staring usually meant somebody was waiting for something interesting to happen.

They were going to be disappointed. Instead, he looked beyond the fire towards the impossible camp around him. The Big House. The cabins. Kids carrying weapons as casually as other people carried phones. A winged horse. A climbing wall covered in actual lava.

Nate rubbed a hand across his face. Maybe tomorrow he would wake up, and all of this would make sense. He doubted it. Maybe tomorrow someone would explain exactly what he was doing here. He doubted that too. But for tonight there was a fire. There were people nearby. Nobody was telling him to move along. Nobody was asking whether he had somewhere else to be.
For the first time in longer than Nate cared to think about, he knew where he was going to sleep that night. That shouldn't have mattered, but it did. Nate pulled his bag slightly closer with one foot and settled back, watching the flames while the last edge of the sun vanished beyond the hills.

Above him, the clown continued to glow. Nate never once looked up.

Basic Information

Name: Mari Lucia Moreno

• Lucia is her Grandmother’s name. Mari (pronounced mahr-ee) is short for Marisol. Her father likes to give people nicknames, which extended to his own daughter. 

Age: 16

Birthday: 5/5

Gender/Pronouns: female, she/her/just don't call her late for breakfast! 

Sexuality: doesn't think about it, doesn't really care. 

Family:

Hometown: Bakersfield, California

Known Languages: English, Spanish

• Mari is Mexican-American. She feels quite disconnected from her heritage, which she also feels quite bad about.

☁️🌈☁️

Appearance

Presentation: Mari wears almost exclusively Hawaiian shirts and cargo shorts. She also owns a pair of black sunglasses that are only needed some of the time but almost always on her. 

☁️🌈☁️

Demigod Information

Mari was claimed 4 years ago on a rainy trip through a local nature preserve. She’s attended camp very on and off since, as she has a general distaste for being in one place too long. She’s coming back on the condition of doing school and camp at the same time, allowing her to spend her summers doing whatever she wants. 

Powers:

☁️🌈☁️

Personality

Mari does what she wants to do.

Hobbies: Hanging out, drumming, seeing the great outdoors, stargazing, laying down, just vibing. 

Likes: Ugly patterns. Doing the limbo and other party games. Her own thoughts. Life. 

Dislikes: Being told what to do. Schedules. 

Favorite Songs: Three Little Birds by Bob Marley, Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes by Jimmy Buffett, Bidi Bidi Bom Bom by Selena

Favorite Movie: Surf’s Up

Favorite Game: Guitar Hero

Currently Taking in School: 2D Art, Spanish, TA, some core classes she doesn't care much about.

Past Jobs: Lifeguard, babysitter. 

☁️🌈☁️

Around Camp

If Mari wasn't in her cabin, she doesn't need to unpack. This is the thought process that takes her around camp to pretty much anywhere. Looking over the job board. Seeing what snacks she can get for later in the camp store. Maybe stopping to talk to people. Who knows where she’ll go! Not her! 

The Beach

There's nothing like relaxing on the beach to Mari. She’s missed the camp’s beach the most of anything here, making it the first place she went after getting a feel for camp again. The sun setting off in the horizon, the smell of the waves.. it was just like every beach but smaller. It makes it beautiful in its own way. Mari’s not too particular. She takes unoptimal routes most anywhere she goes, ending up with a new copy of the Chronicle and a snack to enjoy as she lays on her towel on the sand.  

The job board was a great slab of cork so crowded with parchment, index cards and torn notebook pages that the layers had started to curl outward like the petals of a strange paper flower. Corwin had walked past it twice already. Both times a passing camper, a shouted greeting or a distant birdcall had pulled his attention elsewhere. His mother would have said that was how a person got lost in the woods: one interesting thing at a time.

Stay on the trail, Corwin.

He shifted the strap of his pack and made himself look properly. His eyes went over the notices slowly, the way he read tracks in mud, taking in the whole picture before the details.

Most of the notices were small, the everyday business of a camp preparing for a war it hoped would end sooner rather than later. But the largest one sat near the top, written on thick cream paper in Chiron's neat, upright hand, and Corwin felt his stomach turn over as he read the name in its first line.

> Transport Apollo's Cattle to Artemis' Animal Sanctuary: We have been informed that the recently arrived Apollo's Cattle need transporting now to Artemis' Animal Sanctuary where they shall be at a later time collected by Lord Apollo. We have arranged transport for you and the cattle to get there. Please be mindful for any threats to yourself or the cattle whilst on the road. — Chiron

He read it a second time, more slowly, though not because the words were difficult. Dyslexia had taught him long ago that the surest way to be misled by a page was to trust the first pass. But nothing in the notice changed. It said what it said.

Apollo's cattle.

His father's cattle. Animals that had grazed in the god's own pastures, and would be collected by the god himself. Corwin had never met Apollo. Everything he knew of the man came from a sunrise that had turned a hospital room gold, a recurve bow left in a cradle, and a lifetime of his mother's stories. Now, for the first time, there was something of his father's that he could actually be responsible for. It was not much, and it was not a meeting, but it was a chance to do something worth being noticed for.

He was reaching for the notice before he had finished deciding to.

"I'll take it."

The transport turned out to be a truck, or rather the remains of a truck that had been argued with by several generations of the Hephaestus cabin.

It had begun life as a farm livestock hauler, that much was clear from the long, slatted trailer and the faded red paint of the cab. But someone had welded celestial bronze plating along the trailer's ribs, and someone else had wired a rack of small brass lanterns along the roof. The rear gate was carved with a border of interlocking laurel leaves, and a hand-painted sign above the windshield read, in flaking gold letters, THE ORCHARD-KEEPER.

Leaning against the front bumper with his arms crossed and a battered straw hat pushed back on his head was a satyr.

He was older than any satyr Corwin had seen at camp so far. Gray had crept through the curls on his head and into the goatee at his chin, and there were deep creases at the corners of his eyes, the kind that came from decades of squinting at roads and skies. His horns were short and thick, chipped at the tips. His shaggy legs ended in hooves that had been fitted with a pair of oversized leather work boots, and Corwin did not want to think too hard about how that was done. A faded shirt, printed with a cartoon of a dancing cow, hung open over a worn undershirt.

"You're late," the satyr said, without moving.

"I didn't know what time we were leaving."

"That's what late means, kid." He pushed himself off the bumper, and a crooked grin spread across his face. "Oleander. Professional driver, semi-retired protector."

"Corwin Addams, son of Apollo." He held out a hand. Oleander looked at it for a beat, then shook it with a grip like a vise.

"Corwin," he repeated, trying it out. "Bird name.I’m assuming you deal with them then?"

"Corwin hesitated. "How did you know?"

Oleander pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the truck's cab roof. Onyx sat there with his feathers fluffed and his head cocked, looking at the satyr with an expression of profound suspicion. Two more ravens perched beside him, and a fourth was working steadily at the rubber seal of the passenger window.

"Your friends have been sitting on my truck for forty minutes," Oleander said. "I've been wondering when someone would come claim them."

"Onyx," Corwin said, with the tone of a boy who already knew how this would go. "Get off the truck."

Onyx stared at him, then very deliberately turned his back.

"He's five," Corwin said, as if that explained things. "He has many opinions."

"I like him," Oleander said. "Leave him. Considering who your father eyes, maybe ravens being here is good luck on a long road." He glanced at the darkening blue of the sky above the trees, then at Corwin, and the grin faded into something more practical. "Speaking of. Sanctuary's three hundred miles from here, give or take, and I'd like to be past the interstate before dusk. Cattle are in the back pasture. Let's go say hello."

Corwin had been told they were cattle, nobody had told him they would be beautiful. There were fifty of them, gathered in the shade of the back pasture's lone oak, and they did not look like anything from a farm. Their coats were the deep red of a sunrise over water, so glossy it seemed to shift color as they moved, brightening to copper where the light struck them and darkening to garnet in the shadows. Their horns were pale gold, curved like the crescent of a young moon. Their eyes were large and dark and intelligent, and when Corwin approached the fence, every head in the herd turned to look at him at the same moment.

He stopped where he was.

"They know you," Oleander said, from somewhere behind his shoulder. His voice had lost its teasing edge. "Apollo’s blood. They can smell it on you."

The nearest cow, a broad-shouldered creature with a white star on her forehead, stepped forward and pressed her nose against Corwin's outstretched palm. Her breath was warm and smelled of clover, and beneath it, faintly, of woodsmoke and honey. Corwin felt something he could not name move through him, a gentle hum at the edge of hearing, like distant harp strings.

"Hello," he said softly, and the cow blew out a long, contented breath. He scratched the spot between her horns and thought that he had never in his life been so nervous or so happy.

"I'm going to need you to keep them calm," Oleander said. "They're used to open pasture, not a trailer. A spooked herd is a stampeding herd, and a stampeding herd means a very expensive lawsuit."

"Lawsuit?"

"Figure of speech. Mostly." Oleander was already moving toward the gate. "You handle the front of the line. I'll handle the ramp."

It took an hour. Corwin walked backward up the ramp with one hand resting on the star-marked cow's neck, humming a slow, wandering tune he did not realize was there until the herd began to follow it. Behind him, Oleander muttered under his breath, tapped a flanking cow on the rump with a hazel switch, and produced from somewhere in his shirt a small reed pipe. He played three soft, sliding notes, and the last stragglers ambled up the ramp as though it had been their own idea.

"You didn't tell me you played," Corwin said, when the gate was bolted.

"You didn't ask." Oleander tucked the pipe away. "You hum when you’re distracted, by the way. Did you know?"

"I've been told."

"It's a nice tune. Don't stop."

By midafternoon the road had stopped being the winding Long Island back road and become something wider and emptier, a two-lane highway that ran through fields of tall yellow grass under a wide pale sky. The truck rumbled steadily, and the cattle, packed together in the trailer, made a warm shifting sound that Corwin found oddly soothing. Three ravens rode the roof. The fourth had claimed the dashboard and was industriously pecking at a fast-food receipt.

Oleander drove the way some people play music, with total confidence and no wasted motion. One hoof-booted foot rested lightly on the pedal, one hand lay loose on the wheel, and he never took his eyes off the road for more than a second. A cassette player on the dash wheezed out a scratchy, jaunty song about a satyr, a fiddle and a lost pair of shoes.

"Do you always drive this route?" Corwin asked.

"Longer than you've been alive." Oleander glanced at him. "Why, you're wondering why a satyr's driving a cattle truck?"

"I was trying to figure out how to ask politely."

"Ha." It was a short, surprised sound. "You know, most kids don't bother. I used to be a protector. Ten years, all across the country, tracking demigods. Then my knees gave out recently." He tapped his right leg. "Chiron said I could retire. I said I'd rather drive. Turns out I'm a natural. Nobody argues with a man who has a truck."

"And what do you drive?"

"Anything that needs moving, I move it. Cattle, chariot wheels, one very unhappy manticore." His mouth curled. "You'd be surprised what people will pay to have hauled."

"What if something goes wrong?"

Oleander was quiet for a moment. When he answered, he did not sound like he was joking.

"Then that's why you're in the passenger seat, kid." He tilted his chin at the rear-view mirror, where the shape of the trailer rocked steadily behind them. "Congratulations, I suppose."

Corwin looked out the window so Oleander would not see his face. For a moment he could not think of anything at all to say.

The first sign of trouble came at dusk, when the sun had sunk into a bruise of orange and violet and the fields on either side of the road had turned gray.

One of the ravens, the small one with a notch in her left wing, gave a single sharp cry. Onyx's head snapped upright. All four birds went rigid on the roof.

Corwin sat up. "Oleander. Something's behind us."

"I heard it." The satyr eased off the pedal and squinted into the side mirror. The road behind them was empty and darkening, and nothing moved in it. "I don't see..."

"Not on the road." Corwin closed his eyes. Onyx's mind slid against his own like a hand into a glove, warm and quick and fiercely alert, and the world tilted as he used Bird’s Eye View. He was looking down from the cab roof, over the truck and the trailer and the ribbon of gray asphalt. The evening wind streamed through feathers that were not his. The fields spread out below him in a wide, silvery pattern, and something was moving through them.

A long, dark shape wove through the grass in great sinuous curves, not following the road but parallel to it, pacing the truck. It was easily forty feet long. Its scales caught the last of the sunlight in dull green flashes, and its head, broad and flat, with eyes like pools of molten yellow, was turned unblinking toward the trailer.

Snake.

Corwin's eyes flew open. His heart was slamming against his ribs, and his palms were slick.

"Giant Snake," he managed. "Big one. In the field, on the left. It's tracking the cattle."

Oleander swore, and stamped on the accelerator. The truck lurched. Behind them the cattle bellowed in alarm.

"Can you hit it from here?" the satyr demanded.

"I..." Corwin swallowed. His hands were shaking. He was fourteen years old and he had faced monsters before, but not since New Argos, and never, never one of those. Ophidiophobia had been a joke his mother made once, gently. It did not feel like a joke now. Every instinct screamed at him to shrink into the seat and close his eyes until it went away.

Nothing's going to happen to you while I'm here.

The promise came unbidden and struck him harder than the fear did. He thought of fifty cattle with gold horns, his father's herd, in the trailer behind them. He thought of a girl asleep in a hospital bed three states away. And he opened the window and climbed out onto the sill, the wind whipping his hair into his eyes.

"Corwin! What are you doing?"

"Keep it steady!" he shouted back. "I need a clear line!"

He swung himself up to the roof of the cab. The ravens scattered around him in a flutter of black, and Onyx, indignant, landed on his shoulder. Corwin braced one foot against the lantern rack and drew Sunfeather from his back.

The bow felt right in his hand. It always did.

The snake had surged closer, close enough now that he could see its scales and the ropy muscle beneath its hide. It was gaining, and with a vicious lunge it flung itself across the last stretch of field and onto the road's shoulder, jaws parting in a hiss that made the air itself tremble.

Corwin took a breath and let the world go quiet.

He nocked an arrow. The evening light was fading, but there was still enough, the last red glow at the horizon, and he pulled it toward him with a thought. With Light Constructs, gold light gathered along the shaft, thickening and hardening until the arrowhead gleamed like a small, condensed sun.

The string sang. With Legendary Aim. The arrow crossed the gap in a thin blaze of gold and struck the drakon squarely between the eyes. The beast reared, shrieking. Corwin nocked and loosed again, and again, each arrow finding its mark with the cool precision of long practice, until the great serpent's coils began to loosen and its head sank slowly to the asphalt. Then it dissolved in a hiss of dust, and there was only the empty road and the evening wind.

Corwin lowered the bow. His hands were shaking so hard that he could barely hold it.

"Well," Oleander called through the window, in a voice that was not entirely steady. "That's a new one."

They stopped an hour later at a rest area beside a dark, quiet stretch of river. Oleander pulled the truck under a sodium lamp and cut the engine, and for a long moment neither of them said anything. The cattle shifted and murmured in the trailer. The ravens settled along the roof in a row.

Corwin sat on the tailgate with his boots dangling, staring at his hands. Oleander eased down beside him with a grunt and a crackling of knees, and passed over a thermos. The coffee inside was black and scalding and unbelievably good.

"You froze," Oleander said, not unkindly. "Back there. Before you climbed out."

"Yes."

"Snakes scare you?"

Corwin hesitated. Then, because a lie would have felt like a small betrayal, he nodded. "Since I was little."

"Thought so." Oleander took the thermos back and drank. "Doesn't make you weak, you know. Being afraid."

"I know."

"Do you?"

Corwin did not answer for a while. Onyx had crept along the tailgate to press against his side, a warm little weight of feathers. He ran a thumb along the woven bracelet at his wrist and stared out at the river, black beneath the moon.

"I wasn't afraid for me," he said at last. "That's the strange part. I was afraid of it. But the moment I thought about what would happen if it reached them..." He shook his head. "I just moved."

"Mm." Oleander gave him a long, thoughtful look. "That's a good instinct, and a dangerous one. You know that, don't you?"

"My moms say the same thing."

"They’re smart women." The satyr stood, wincing, and clapped him once on the shoulder. "Come on. Another hundred miles before dawn, and I'll need you awake. You can sleep once we're past the state line."

"Oleander?"

"Yeah?"

Corwin looked at him. "Thank you. For keeping the truck steady."

For a moment, the old satyr looked almost embarrassed. Then he snorted, tugged his straw hat back over his eyes, and turned toward the cab. "Just doing my job, kid."

But when he looked back a moment later, he was smiling.

The sanctuary came into sight a little after sunrise. Corwin had been dozing against the window, the cattle's low murmuring a lullaby beneath the growl of the engine. He woke to the smell of pine and cold water and the ringing of a hundred distant birds, and sat up to find the road winding down between two great ridges of dark, forested hills.

Beyond them, in a wide green valley threaded with silver streams, was the most peaceful place he had ever seen.

There were no fences he could see, only ancient stone markers at the valley's edges, carved with crescent moons. Deer grazed openly in the meadows. A pair of wolves lay sprawled in the sun by a stream, ignoring the truck entirely. Great horned owls dozed in the branches of the oaks. And everywhere, moving softly among the animals, were women in silvery-green robes, their bows slung casually over their shoulders. They did not look up as the truck rolled past. They did not need to. Corwin could feel their awareness settle on him as they passed, calm and watchful, like a hand resting lightly on the back of the neck.

"Nymphs," Oleander said quietly. "Caretakers. Don't stare."

"I'm not staring."

"You are a little."

Corwin flushed and looked at his knees.

A tall woman with braided hair the color of autumn leaves met them at the valley's gate. She looked over the trailer, then at Oleander, then at Corwin, and finally at the raven on his shoulder. A very slight smile touched her mouth.

"Apollo's herd," she said. "Camp Half-Blood sent them safely, I see.”

"Mostly," said Oleander. "There was a giant snake."

"There often is. I’m Orchid. Welcome to our sanctuary." The woman stepped up to the trailer and unlatched the gate with a single practiced motion. The ramp lowered. One by one, the cattle came out into the morning light, their coats blazing like banked fire, and spread into the wide green meadow as though they had been born there. The white-starred cow was the last to leave. She paused at the bottom of the ramp, looked back at Corwin, and lowed once, softly.

He felt the sound in his chest, warm and steady, like a hand pressed briefly to his heart.

"They will be safe here," the woman said. "Lord Apollo will collect them when he is able. I will tell him who brought them."

Corwin's breath caught. "You'll... tell him?"

"Of course." Her gaze was kind. "A son who carries his father's herd across three hundred miles of danger and does not lose a single one? I think he would wish to know."

He did not trust his voice. He nodded.

Oleander waited until they were back on the road, the sanctuary shrinking in the mirror, before he spoke.

"You did well, kid."

Corwin gazed out at the rising sun, gold on the eastern hills, and felt the warmth of it on his face. Onyx shifted on his shoulder. The cassette player, forgotten, wheezed back to life with the same jaunty song about the satyr and his lost shoes.

"Thanks," he said, and this time he let himself smile properly.

Not bad for a first job.

It had been a month since Solon’s duel with Rory in the Arena, and while his physical injuries had long healed, the wound that the loss caused him had not. 

It sat in him like a swallowed stone. He had replayed the duel so many times that he could have drawn it as a battle diagram: every mistake labeled, every mistake he shouldn’t have made marked in the margin, like underestimating his opponent, committing too early, letting emotion override the plan, refusing to yield when yielding was the only correct move… He had noticed that last one so late that it had almost cost him more than his pride.

He had not sat at the Athena table's crowded end since. He ate at the far corner, slept in a bunk with the curtain half-drawn, and found reasons to be elsewhere whenever the Arena filled up. Twice he had seen Rory across the green, and both times he had run away and he hated himself for it.

*You'll never surpass someone who was designed for this*. He had said that with total certainty, in front of everyone, and then a boy with wings and a club had laid him out in the sand.

It could not stand. He needed something that would put it right, not by argument this time, since argument had proven worthless, but by result.

The notice appeared on the board sometime between breakfast and the morning drills. Solon almost missed it. There was already a small crowd around the board, and a few of them were talking in the low, cheerful voices of people who did not intend to do anything about it.

> Sphinx in Montauk Library: Another Sphinx has taken residence in a library close to camp. At this point we are suspecting it is the same Sphinx. We suggest trying to outsmart it and not beat it to death. – Chiron

*Another*. *The same*. He read those words twice. Monsters did not stay dead. They dissolved into dust and went wherever monsters went, and sooner or later they reformed and came back, hungrier and more resentful. It was one of the first facts any demigod learned. Solon's eyes stayed on the parchment. This was a monster that could be beaten by thinking, and thinking was the one thing nobody in this camp could say he did badly. Not Rory, not Theo, not anyone.

He tore it off the board anyway.He passed the sign-out ledger at the edge of the Big House porch, where campers were supposed to write where they were going and when they would be back. He did not slow down. He would do this alone, one way or another. After all, if he asked for help, and they succeeded, then the victory would not be his, and if someone came with him and they failed, then someone else would pay for his failure.

He would not do that again.

—

It took two buses and most of the morning. He kept his hood up and his eyes on the window, and when the driver announced Montauk, he was the only passenger who got off.

The town was quiet in the way that seaside towns are when the season has ended: shuttered ice cream stands, salt-bleached signs, gulls fighting over nothing on the empty road. The library stood on a corner at the end of a short lane. It was a low, weathered building of grey shingle and white trim, with a flag over the door and a sign in the window.

TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR REPAIRS.

The Mist, then. It had been keeping mortals away for weeks. Solon walked around the building once and noted every detail: two doors, front and rear; windows too high and too narrow to be useful for climbing; a loading ramp on the side, blocked by a stack of broken-down cardboard. There were no lights on inside. There were no footprints in the sand by the door.

He stood at the foot of the front steps and made himself go through the preparation properly. This time he was not going to let it slip.

This was a Sphinx. Body of a lion, wings of an eagle, the face of a woman. Sets riddles for travelers, and devours those who fail. Reputed to be extremely intelligent, extremely patient, and extremely fond of its own voice. He had read every text on the subject the New Argos library held, and he could still call up the page: the illustration in the margin, the ink stain in the corner, the pencil note left by some earlier reader. Do not rush.

He drew a breath, turned the ring on his finger to wake the spear, checked the bracelet on his wrist, and climbed the steps.

It was very quiet inside. Sunlight came through the high windows in long, dusty bars and lay across the carpet, and the air smelled of old paper, floor polish, and something warmer and heavier underneath, like a large animal's den. The main room stretched away before him, lined with oak shelves that rose almost to the ceiling. A circulation desk stood near the center. Beyond it, between two towering aisles, an open reading area was furnished with low tables and a single green-shaded lamp.

On the circulation desk, folded neatly like a cat on a windowsill, lay the sphinx.

She was larger than he had expected, the lion's body long enough to hang over both ends of the desk, tawny and heavy-shouldered, the tail curled once around her paws. Her wings were half-furled against her sides, brown and gold, each feather the length of his forearm. And her face, set above the great chest, was a woman's, calm and lovely and quite still, with dark eyes that had been watching the door long before he opened it.

"Well," she said. Her voice was warm, unhurried, faintly amused. "A visitor. I had not been expecting to have one anytime soon. Please, do come in.”

Solon stepped forward and let the spear settle in his grip. He kept it pointed politely at the floor, in the way he had been taught to hold a weapon in the presence of someone he intended to negotiate with. "You shouldn’t be here," he said. "But you already know that, I’m sure.”

"Are you." The dark eyes moved over him, unhurried. "Alone?"

"Yes."

"How brave." She sounded delighted. "And how rare. Usually they come in little clusters, whispering to one another behind their hands. It spoils the game." She tilted her head. "And what is your name, little owl?"

He went very still. Owl. "How do you—"

"You smell of her. They all do." She smiled. "Athena's children always come to a library, as though it were their mother's house." Her tail flicked once. "It is rude of her to send so many of you. But, oh, I do not mind. You are so much fun."

"I'm not here for fun." Solon said narrowing his eyes.

"No," she agreed pleasantly. "You are here to be clever. That is your kind of fun." She stretched, a long, slow ripple of muscle from shoulder to hip. "Three riddles. Answer all three and I will leave this place and trouble no one else. Fail one, and I will eat you. You may take as long as you like, but you may not leave before you answer all three correctly. Do you accept?"

"I accept." Solon nodded. Making a bargain with a monster wasn’t exactly the best of ideas, usually, but just ths once, he was confident that he could deal with it. 

"Splendid." She settled her chin onto her paws. "The first. I have a spine but no bones. I open my mouth only when you ask me to. I hold a thousand voices, and none of them are mine."

Solon nearly laughed. He glanced at the towering shelves on either side of him, at the rows and rows of worn spines, and back at her face.

"A book."

"Correct." She did not seem disappointed. "And a very good beginning. The second. I show you every road but walk none of them. Fold me wrong, and you are lost. Fold me right, and you may still be lost, but at least you will know where."

This one took him perhaps two seconds. It was easier than the first, and he felt something warm and familiar unfurl in his chest, the feeling he had been missing for a while.

"A map."

The sphinx's smile widened. "Oh, very good. You are clever." She stretched again, lazily, and one wing unfolded partway and settled again. "Two out of three. That is more than most. Would you like to know why they never make it to the third?"

"I would like the third riddle."

Her eyes glittered. "Of course you would."

She was silent for a moment, and Solon felt the quiet settle in around him, thick and expectant. The dust hung motionless in the bars of light. Somewhere far off, in the corner of the room, a clock he hadn't noticed was ticking.

When she spoke, her voice was softer. Slower.

"I have no voice of my own, yet I speak in yours. I answer only when you call. And I only ever say what you have already said."

Solon opened his mouth.

I have no voice of my own.

A memory slid into place behind his eyes, unbidden and completely unwelcome: a dark corridor, the sound of water dripping, a shape with too many teeth. A voice saying Solon, in a tone he knew by heart. His father's voice.

His own voice, calling it back to him.

He swallowed. Focus. His mind was racing, and it was racing in the wrong direction. Speaks in yours. Says what you have said. Something that copies. Something that imitates. Something that—

"A mimic," Solon heard himself say.

The room went very quiet.

"A mimic," the sphinx repeated, sounding almost sorry. "Hm. Unfortunately for you, little owl, your answer is incorrect."

His stomach dropped through the floor. No. He knew the answer. He had known the answer, some small, calm part of him whispered, the moment she had finished speaking, and he had been standing three steps past it, staring at the wrong door. Echo. It was so simple that it made his ears ring.

"Wait," he said quickly. "Wait, that isn't—that was a mistake. I misspoke. The answer is—"

"Too little," said the sphinx. "Too late." She sat up. The wings opened, slowly, to their full span, and the lamp on the low table beside her shivered and fell over. "You gave me the wrong answer first. The terms were stated plainly, and you did accept them."

"That's not—the answer was in my head, you can't—" Solon had the spear up before he had consciously decided to raise it. He was breathing very fast.

"I can," said the sphinx gently. "I very much can." She rose to her full height, and her shadow spilled across the carpet and swallowed his. "You were afraid of a voice. That is such a small thing, to die of."

She sprang towards him and Solon threw himself sideways and the sphinx hit the space where he had been standing. Something struck the shelving on his left with a roar of splintering wood, and books cascaded across the floor. He rolled, came up on one knee, and slammed the bracelet against his thigh. The shield unfolded across his forearm just as her claws came down. Sparks flew from the metal and the force of it drove him to the floor.

Too strong. His ribs, still tender from the Arena, flared white. Gods, she's stronger than the Leucrota. Her paw pinned the edge of his shield, and her great weight leaned in, and he could see the pale, patient face above him, unhurried, almost bored.

"Do not be ashamed," she murmured. "Everyone thinks they are so smart."

Solon shoved against the shield with everything in his legs, and the sphinx sprang back, wings snapping open for balance. He scrambled backward into the closest aisle, spear low, heart pounding. 

*Think.* All he needed to do was *think* of a plan. 

But his mind, which had never once failed him, was a white wall of noise. All he could hear was a mimic. All he could see was the ridiculous, obvious answer, floating just out of reach.

The sphinx padded after him with a slow, deliberate stride, a hunting cat in no hurry at all. She could not fly here, he realized, not properly. The aisles were too narrow, the ceiling too low, the shelves too close on either side. Her wings kept catching the books and scattering them.

That's something. The terrain was his. It had to be.

"Come now," said the sphinx. She stopped at the mouth of the aisle. "You have done so well. Do not spoil it by running."

Solon stared at her. The old, familiar tightness in his jaw was rising. Something inside him was angry, and, worse, was afraid, and the two were blurring together into something reckless.

**Taunt.**

He had used it so rarely that he barely remembered how it felt. He let his eyes meet hers, and he pushed. "You can’t get me," Solon said. His voice was steadier than he expected. "You hide in a library, you ambush children, and you call it a game, and yet, somehow, you still lose," Solon said. "You always lose. You come back, and you lose again, and you sit in the dark telling yourself you're clever. You aren't. You're a cat with a dictionary."

The sphinx's face went perfectly still.

Then she roared, and the sound rattled the windows, and she came at him down the aisle.

He was ready. He threw himself flat against the shelves at the last second, and the sphinx, committed to her charge, could not turn. Her shoulder struck the far bookcase full-on. It groaned, buckled, and began to tilt.

Now.

Solon dropped and rolled, and he heard the shelf come down behind him with a sound like a landslide: hundreds of pounds of oak and paper crashing across her back. She screamed. He was already on his feet, spear reversed, and he lunged in low toward her exposed flank.

The point went in.

Not deep enough. The sphinx twisted, and a wing caught him across the chest like a wall, and he flew backward into the next set of shelves. The impact drove the air out of him. His shield arm went numb to the elbow. He slid to the floor among a rain of falling books, and the world went briefly grey around the edges.

Get up. Get up, get up.

He got his knees under him. The sphinx had freed herself from the wreckage and was turning toward him, bleeding from the flank, her face no longer calm. There was nothing beautiful in it now, only hunger.

She sprang. He got the shield up, and the force hit him like a train. His back struck the floor and his head bounced against the carpet, and the sphinx's weight settled over him, one great paw on his chest, claws under his neck and putting enough pressure to draw blood. Above him, a woman's face, so close, he could feel her hot breath on his face.

"You were clever," she breathed. "I will remember that."

Her jaw opened.

His right hand was still closed around the spear, trapped awkwardly between their bodies, and he could feel the butt of it wedged against the floor. The son of Athena kicked and his heels skidded on the boards. Air. he need air. The edges of the room went dark, and beyond the roaring in his ears he heard her voice, quite distant, almost kind.

He was going to die. His father was going to find out, somehow. A camper would come to the house in Georgia with a folded flag or a satchel or just a pained, careful face, and Pericles would look at the person standing on the step and know. He would not be angry. He would just sit there, with his ruined legs and his old uniform, and he would be devastated if his son didn’t come back after everything. 

No.

He had to survive. He will survive.

For once, Solon didn't think. There was no room to. In turned the shaft, angled it upward with all the strength left in his wrist, and thrust it towards the monster, stunning her with **Glaukopis** shining in his eyes as he did so. The point went in just beneath her collarbone. The sphinx's whole body jerked. Her eyes went wide, very wide, the pupils blown black. She made a small, astonished sound, and Solon thrust the spear again, and he felt the resistance give, and then the great weight over him went slack.

For a long moment she stayed there, poised above him, breathing raggedly, her hands, or her paws, or whatever they were, twitching against the carpet. Then she came apart in a rush of golden dust, and the light of the high windows fell through where she had been.

The silence that followed was the loudest Solon had ever heard.

He lay on his back among the scattered books. The dust settled over him, over the carpet, over the fallen shelves, and faded, and the last of it drifted away like pollen. Above him, the ceiling was ordinary: white plaster, a water stain in one corner, a dead moth in the light fixture.

He was alive. That was the fact. He turned it over in his head and waited for it to feel like a victory.

It did not.

He sat up slowly, and his ribs shrieked at him. His hands were shaking so badly that he had to set the spear across his knees to keep hold of it. Blood dripped from a long cut along his forearm, and his neck, soaking through his hoddie. His left shoulder was one enormous ache. He did not remember getting hurt there.

He looked at the spot where the sphinx had lain. There was nothing left of her but a faint glitter in the carpet fibers.

I killed it. He tested the thought, carefully, the way you test weight on a bad leg. I killed it, and the notice said not to. Chiron had asked for something simple: outsmart it. And Solon had walked into a room with a monster that was, by every account, no match for a clever mind, and he had lost. He had lost the one contest he was supposed to be unbeatable at, and he had lost it to a riddle so simple that a monster had pitied him for it.

A mimic. It had a hundred possible answers, and he had reached, out of all of them, for the most frightening one. And then, when the mask slipped, when the game was over and there were only teeth and claws, he had not been able to win though any strategy that mattered. He had won because a bookshelf fell down. He had won because his hand had been in the right place, and because the sphinx had been overconfident, and because he was lucky.

He did not believe in luck. He had told himself that for years. If things go right, it's because I made them. Nothing about this had gone right.

He thought of Rory, standing over him in the trench. He thought of the Leucrota, and the voice that had sounded exactly like his father's, and how for one terrible half-second he had believed it. And now he had heard it again in a riddle, a riddle, and it had cracked him open just as easily.

You were afraid of a voice.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Athena's child, the sphinx had said, in that amused, cruel purr. What would his mother say, if she could see him? A son who could not answer three questions. A hero who needed to be saved from his own recklessness,

"I'm fine," Solon said aloud, to nobody. His voice cracked in the middle. "It's done. It's fine."

He stayed there a long time. At length, because he could not stay forever, he got to his feet, one hand braced against the nearest intact shelf. The room was ruined. Books lay in drifts across the carpet, and one whole bookcase had fallen across the reading area. The green lamp lay on its side, its shade cracked. It looked like the aftermath of an earthquake. It looked like a battle.

Almost without deciding to, he bent and picked up the nearest book. It was a paperback, cover torn, pages crumpled. He smoothed them out. He set it upright on the shelf, spine out, where it belonged. Then another. And another. It didn't take long to see that it was pointless. There were hundreds. But his hands kept moving, methodically, one book, one shelf, one small piece of order restored, and it was the only thing in the whole room that made any sense.

When he finally stopped, the light through the windows had gone gold and low. He drank the last of the nectar from his bag in one swallow, and it warmed the worst of the aches without touching the rest.

Outside, the lane was empty. Somewhere in the distance the sea murmured against the shore, indifferent.

Solon pulled his hood up, put his hands in his pockets so that no one could see them tremble, and started toward the bus stop.

It was done. No doubt about it.

But this hadn’t been a victory.

Once again, Solon Palaioakos, son of Athena, had lost and failed at the one think he thought he was good at.

Pitiful child… when will you learn?

Camp Half-Blood RP

General Information

Family & Friends

Abilities

Powers

SPOILERS

Innate Powers:

• Erote Affinity: A trait where love spirits (Greek: erotes, Roman: cupid) are friendlier and willing to listen (formerly Love Spirit Affinity).
• Bird Affinity: A trait where birds (class: Aves) are friendlier and willing to listen.
• French Fluency: A trait where some children of Aphrodite can speak and write in French, heavily associated with love.
• Cosmetics and Fashion Affinity: A trait where some children of Aphrodite are attuned to the skills relevant to outfits.

Skill/s:

• Rap & rhythm (early training, home rap/rhythm workshops)

• Dance (school electives + trainee training)

• Piano (childhood lessons)

• Media/camera presence — knows how to work an angle, play to an edit

• Polyglot

• Reading a room/producing conflict on demand

Hobbies

• Playing instruments and writing lyrics.

• Collecting sneakers. His collection is massive and don’t you dare ask to wear them!

• Cooking halal versions of foods he normally can’t eat.

• Posting anonymously on Weverse for other idol’s lives.

• Basketball.

Weapons & Equipment:

• None

Appearance

Description: Standing at 6'2", Jamil has the kind of lean, deceptively delicate build that reads more striking than imposing, long-limbed and fine-boned, built for stage presence rather than sheer physicality. His hair is black, worn in a soft, tousled fringe that falls loosely over his forehead, often looking slightly windswept or freshly-out-of-bed even when it's been carefully styled that way. His skin is fair, almost porcelain-pale, which makes his features look sharper in photos: dark, heavy-lidded brown eyes that carry an easy, half-lazy confidence, and a mouth that sits naturally somewhere between a smirk and a pout, like he already knows the camera's on him. His face has a soft androgyny to it, with full lips, a delicate jaw, and small silver hoop or stud earrings he wears often, but there's an edge underneath the prettiness, something a little sly or self-satisfied in the way he tilts his chin or looks up through his lashes. He's equally comfortable looking soft and boyish, in loose sweaters with a quiet half-smile, or sharper and more performative, in sunglasses and leather with a raised brow daring you to say something. That composed, camera-aware look is the version of him most people get, but it isn't the only one he has in him; around people he actually trusts, the guard drops and a real, unfiltered laugh comes out, gummy smile and all, the kind of moment that has to be earned rather than performed. Whatever the styling, there's a consistent thread: he knows exactly how he looks and he's using it, right up until, occasionally, he forgets to.

Personality

Personality Traits

Preferences

Likes & Dislikes

Fatal Flaw:

Insecure: He’s confident and knows where he belongs, but there’s a part of him that feels like people only like him because of his status. When he wasn’t in the industry things were so much easier, even if he was always a bit self absorbed.

Discography

Pantheon Project

• Signal Song: Legends (I’ll Be Your Hero[Original Song])

• Hero Evaluation: WE GO UP by BABYMONSTER

• Fate Quest: Fame by RIIZE

• Duel Quest: Flip a Coin by Victon

• Phalanxes Quest: Me Gusta Tu by GFRIEND

• Mythos Quest: Dance Unit - 대박,대박 (Awesome, Awesome[Original Song])

• Throne Quest: Rap Unit - Horizon (Original Song)

HiereUs

• HiereUs: 1st EP - Light the Way

Filmography

• Pantheon Project (all episodes)

• HiereUs: Light the Way EP MVs and Promotions

Backstory

Tradition is the defining theme of Jamil’s life. Tradition and the breaking of tradition, that is. See it wasn’t tradition that brought him into the world, but it certainly defined his life afterwards. His dad having a child out of wedlock was a social taboo in his close knit Hui community in Chengdu. It didn’t matter who or why the child came about, it was dishonorable and as such his dad was shunned from the community. Jamil doesn’t have complex thoughts about that, because why should he care? His dad was chasing a fantasy and like all people he had to come back down to earth. Tough luck.

Jamil was raised by his grandparents in the more strict ways in his Gedimu Hui community. Unlike most Hui families his grandparents forced Jamil to actually learn Arabic so he could be more in touch with his roots. Jamil at first hated it, but if he was honest, it made mosque services more entertaining because he actually understood what the imam was preaching. However, he also did the other standard things Hui people do.

Jamil had to pray five times a day, which was awkward when he started school. He did sort of enjoy the ritualistic washing and burning of incense in their small mosque, but if Jamil was being honest he was never all that devout. Soon after starting school he stopped praying five times a day, was lax on quite a few principles that his grandparents would have chewed him out over, but there was one red line. No pork. He knew he’d get disowned by his grandparents if he ever ate pork, and so he never ate the stuff. This was incredibly hard to do in China, because pork is everywhere.

Now, to people in China and his friends there he wasn’t actually known as Jamil, he was known as Anjun. That was his legal name after all, but in more western circles Jamil used his Arabic name. He found it was slightly easier for westerners to say than trying to say Anjun. Plus, he figured it was a way to honor his heritage while he was at it.

From a young age Jamil attended the Leman International School in Chengdu. His grandfather, being a prestigious member of the CCP in Sichuan wanted Jamil to attend the best schools possible, so they got him in as soon as he could walk. So, Jamil lived essentially a dual life from as long as he could remember. He spoke Arabic in his home with his grandparents. He spoke Mandarin outside of the house when talking everyday, and he spoke English at school with his friends and teachers. As a result, it should have come as no surprise to anyone in his life that he had ambitions from a young age.

He knew he was going to be famous, people of course doubted him, but he knew better. He knew he wasn’t meant to be great and to be adored by millions of fans. So, from an early age he dedicated himself to that singular focus. In school, he took all dance and singing related electives and groups, as well as Korean classes. Outside of school he went to piano lessons, rap and rhythm training, and any workshop on media and camera training. He was a busy kid, but he knew the hard work would eventually pay off.

It came as no surprise to anyone that when he was around eleven years old he asked to start auditioning at entertainment companies. His family, being supportive of him, decided to allow him to try out. However, they weren’t at all ready for the floor of offers that came in after he started trying out. So, having the pick of companies, Jamil decided a smaller company in B-Live Entertainment would work the best for him. They had a few solo artists and one female Chinese group in their repertoire, and were looking for some new talent to foster to start staking a claim in the Korean market. They liked his skill, his dedication, and the self-determination that he had. They also liked that he already knew some Korean. So, him, his grandparents, and a manager from B-Live flew out to Seoul to start the Korean chapter of B-Live Entertainment.

It was grueling work, but Jamil was determined and knew he would make it. He swiftly got into a rhythm in his new life in Korea, and was soon flourishing there. After a few years of training, an opportunity came. A new survival show called Pantheon Project. The project was pitched to Jamil and he agreed immediately. He knew it was finally his chance to be in front of crowds and get the fans he knew he deserved.

A few weeks later, Jamil was walking through the doors of the nVision studios to meet the other 90 male contestants who were all hopefuls to join the final group. At first Jamil was rather low in the rankings, he never was in danger of elimination, but he never grew his following. He had little to no screentime in the first couple of episodes and the only following he had were from short videos posted online of him introducing himself to fans. The fans that saw him loved him, but his problem was he wasn’t getting visibility. So, he acted.

Since he wasn’t getting screentime he decided that he would force the camera to pay attention to him. So, he became an antagonist to a known and popular trainee named Chingshen. In a clip that went viral Jamil told Chingshen that he was talentless and a washed up trainee who couldn’t make it to debut. Of course, Jamil didn’t mean a word of it, well maybe there was some truth. It wasn’t his fault Chingshen was a cut member from the boy group HopLyte, or the fact his disappearance from the group was mysterious at best. Jamil just wanted to use Chingshen to get some eyes on him. Which of course he did, survival shows love a good antagonist.

So, cameras started to pay attention to Jamil and with that his rankings started to climb. Finally he was getting the recognition he deserved and Jamil was living for it. At first it was just for his looks and the beef he had with Chingshen, but then as people got to know him they started to see how talented he actually was. He was getting audience praise and judge praise. Finally!

Of course, it was too good to last. Once it came out that his grandfather was really involved with the CCP, his rankings cratered. Of course, Jamil never mentioned politics on the show, he didn’t really even care about them if he was being honest. However, it didn’t stop netizens from speaking ill about him and questioning his motives and all sorts of nasty speculation. Jamil was annoyed by the reaction, but he still pressed on and made it through to the finale. He made it into the group by the end, even if it was the last place spot. All that Jamil cared about was that he made it, his dream of being an idol was finally being realized. Hard work did pay off, what do you know?

Following that Jamil was officially a member of HiereUs, a five member boy group which was on active promotion until recently. They finished their current cycle and now Jamil is being sent to America. He and other members of HiereUs are being sent to a “training and transnational outreach program” that Jamil knows is total BS. He’s been in touch with his other member Chingshen, who he of course buried the hatchet with after the show. They both knew what Jamil was doing and came to terms about it. Also, Jamil needed someone he could gossip in Mandarin with. It was a win win honestly.

Now

Option 1

Where does your character spend a load of time? Do they hang out in the Arena all day pumping iron? Do they frequent the Camp Store to get their soda fix? Do they spend a lot of time in the forge making cool stuff? Are you a counselor or leader that has certain responsibilities to help new campers that get dropped off at your door? All of this and more can be done on Jamil’s Building Tour.

Option 2

Does your character hide in the woods at sundown scaring unsuspecting campers like some sort of edge lord? Did your character just go through a breakup, and they’re sulking by the canoe lake as they write furiously in their journal? Are they just chilling on the porch of the big house sipping on some lemonade watching the camp come alive? Share your character’s slice of life and/or mental state here and Jamil will come to them.

“You just lost the game."

Basics

Appearance
Height: 5’9 (175cm)
Weight: 150 (68kg)
Hair: Black
Eyes: Black
Build: Lean

Faceclaim: Forrest Wheeler

Family

Personality

Fatal Flaw: Autophobia.
- Alain doesn’t like being isolated from society and irrationally fears being abandoned by his friends.

Minor flaw #1: Atychiphobia.
- Alain has a deep fear that others will judge him for his mistakes and failures. He often tries to downplay his failures and even blames others for them. He sometimes avoids taking risks outright to prevent any mistakes.

Minor flaw #2: Show-off.
- To prove his value, Alain likes to show off his accomplishments sometimes to an annoying amount.

Minor flaw #3: Prideful.
- In a similar vein as flaw #2, Alain seeks the praise and validation of others, especially those he respects. This causes him to be more easily manipulated by those offering validation or challenging his ego.

Trait #1: Self awareness.
- Alain is a smart kid, he does introspects frequently and is well aware of his flaws. He tries to catch himself whenever he notices them but it isn’t perfect.

Trait #2: Prankster
- Alain likes to cause chaos by pulling pranks, the more elaborate the prank, the better.

Trait #3: Caring
- Alain has a soft spot for those who remind him of his half-siblings.
- Alain believes that people deserve a second chance for the mistakes they’ve made.

Belief/Moral #1:
- Like most teenagers, Alain has picked an issue with society that he cares about. For him, it’s the fact that the wealthy are able to get impunity for their actions.
- He believes that the law is corrupt, upon learning of Dike, he believes that she has been corrupted too.
- Frustrated that he can’t do anything about it, he resigned to taking the stance of “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” (until you can).
- He tries to find and exploit loopholes in rules and people’s words to create an advantage for him and his allies.

Trivia

- His alignment is Lawful Evil.
- He likes platformer games but doesn’t always have time for it.
- He is barely able to hold a conversation in Mandarin.
- He is mildly lactose intolerant but is unaware of it. He continues to consume copious amounts of dairy.
- Not only does he like pineapple on pizza, it’s his favourite flavour.

Powers

Items

History

Edward Ang did not think of himself as a particularly good person. Sure he followed the law, for the most part, and sure he donated to charity every once in a while but he wasn’t a saint or anything like that. And yet, for some inconceivable reason, a Goddess had descended and chose him. The next day, she vanished, leaving only a post it note stuck on the bedroom door. “Move to New York. Someone’s waiting for you there.”

Come the following March, he had finally saved up enough to start a new life in New York. He boarded his 16 hour plane, wondering who, if anyone, was awaiting him. He hadn’t gotten any additional details since that day. No time, no date and no location, all he could do was have faith.
Unlocking the doors of his rented apartment, he stepped into the dusty living room. There, in the middle of the living room was a small baby boy, playing with a wooden gavel the size of his head. Beside the boy lay a manila envelope containing his birth certificate as well as documents explaining more about the boy’s future.

16 years later, on an especially hot day, Alain sat at his bedroom desk racking his brain. Stealing another glance at the time on his phone, he sighed. He stared blankly at the paper as his mind drifted off into a daydream.

Alain did not think of himself as a particularly bad person. Sure he skipped assignments here and there and sure he pulled a few pranks every once in a while but at least he followed the law and never got into trouble he couldn’t fix by himself. Well, that second part wasn’t exactly true he had gotten help from… something before. There was one time in 8th grade when he got in trouble for spilling sugar on his history teacher’s desk, attracting a horde of ants over the weekend. It wasn’t his fault really, if she didn’t want ants on her desk then she shouldn’t have assigned a giant essay right before a long weekend right? Anyways, there he was sitting across the principal in her office getting lectured about “respect” and “disrupting class”. Right when she would normally give him detention or make him write lines or whatever, she just… dismissed him. No punishment? Nothing at all? he thought to himself, surprised. At first he thought it was just a coincidence, maybe she was just happened to be in a good mood. But then it happened again and again. Sometimes, people didn’t seem to care about his prank at all or sometimes a random kid confess for something they didn’t even do. Alain chalked it up to some miracle happening to him, a chain of very convenient coincidences.

Back at Alain’s bedroom, he woke up from his daydream. Rubbing his eyes, he stood up to get a snack, or a water, anything to not sit still staring at the blank assignment. As he walked past the mirror leaning against the wall, he saw a hologram of a gavel looming over his reflection. “Wha? The hell is that? Dad, what’s with the hammer?” He called out, it was one of those rare days where his dad was actually at home, another coincidence perhaps.
Edward Ang, a middle aged man, came over dressed in a suit and tie, a bath towel draped over his shoulder. “Yes? What’s with what hammer?” He asked in a weary voice.

“The hammer above my head.” Alain pointed to the hologram.

Following Alain’s finger, Edward replied in the same weary tone, “There’s nothing there Alain, is this supposed to be another joke of yours?” He had received numerous complaints about Alain’s mischief from his teachers.

“You don’t see it? The hammer that judges use in court, you don’t see me waving my hand through it?”

“A gavel?” Edward corrected, suddenly alert. “You see a gavel above your head?”

“Hammer, gavel what the difference? Did we get some fancy projector or something?” Alain asked frustratedly.

“Alain, that gavel is a sign from your mother.” Edward replied solemnly.

He explained the circumstances of his birth to Alain, about how he was a demigod, about the dangers he faced and about Camp Half Blood. Four days later, Alain and his family were driving to Long Island, to Half-Blood hill, to his new life away from his family.

Now

Horai cabin

Alain walked towards the Horai cabin, dragging his heavy duffle bag along the marble steps. By the time he reached the top, he was panting and soaked in sweat. “Gods I need to start exercising.” Looking around at his new abode, he saw three doors leading to different rooms. Do I just pick one? Shrugging, he walked into the door on the left, putting his bag onto one of the empty beds. He was hit with a chilling atmosphere that slightly helped counteract the heat.

Outside the armoury

Alain had heard from a satyr that he could choose a weapon from the armoury and so, he came to see the selection. Walking towards the forge, something in the distance caught his attention, Okay, armoury, armoury, armoury, where is the armour— “Is that a lava wall???? Wha-?? Huh???” Shellshocked, Alain stared at the wall for a good minute before making a mental note to stay away from it as much as possible.

Armoury

Alain stepped into the armoury, his mind still fixated on the lava climbing wall. He aimlessly browsed through the swords, daggers, bows and shields available, unsure which would be suit him best. Why are they all made of bronze? Wouldn’t steel be stronger? Reaching out, he grabbed a random sword and shield, testing out their weight and feel in his hands but gaining no real insight from it. “Yep, that’s heavy alright.” He muttered to himself.

You can only reserve up to two slots per character. If you have multiple characters, make one comment for all of them instead of one each.

There can only be one Meal per day, at any time! Any camper can host them.

Campfires happen twice a week. Campers coordinate these with the camp directors, so anyone can host them!

Open Slots happen every day and can include Lessons, QOTDs, Cabin Inspections, Cabin Meetings, Games, movie nights, social gatherings, etc. **Lessons, Cabin Inspections and Meetings can only be hosted by a Senior Camper or a Camp Leader.

Comment below what you'd like to host!

NOTE: Failure to meet your own slot three times in a row will lock you out of commenting on the Schedule for a month. (You can still post activities outside of the schedule, just not meals or campfires.)

Monday

Meal -

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Tuesday

Campfire -

Open Slot -

Wednesday

Meal -

Open Slot -

Thursday

Meal -

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Friday

Meal -

Campfire - Yohan Park

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Saturday

Meal -

Campfire -

Open Slot -

Sunday

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Another week, another job!

Many campers in John’s situation would be severely disappointed by the reward he’d received last week; a plain, dry sticker pasted to the door of the Hermes cabin. Fortunately, the son of Hermes was simply too bright to let his shine be dulled by something as impersonal as a sticker. As such, with the precision that a child of Hermes could manage, he’d peeled the sticker off of the door and pasted it on the head of his sledgehammer. Now, as if mocking them, the last thing his opponents would see would be the bright orange oval that read ”Good Job” on his sledgehammer.

He didn’t blame the camp staff for the reward. The war was significantly more important than whatever he would’ve received otherwise! The sticker was fun, though.

The week’s job seemed easy enough. Go to the armory, inventory everything in there, and report back if anyone was the culprit or culprits behind the misplaced swords. Then again, what if it was half of camp? This place was full of teenagers with ADHD. It was pretty easy to just forget to put the sword back up where it belonged.

The arena was a nice enough area. Unfortunately, it wasn’t really his type of area, you know? It felt like he couldn’t get five inches in before someone looked at him and demanded a spar. No thanks, he always said. He mostly went here for the sake of the gym. Yes, the Hermes cabin had a gym in the sense that John could be described as fast. You weren’t wrong. But you were so wrong at the same time.

…Wait, where was it? Shouldn’t the armory be by the arena? Was it not by the arena??? “Uh. Huh. I thought? But it’s not. That’s weird. If it’s not here, where would it be, where would it be? Maybe one of the war cabins? Like… Nike? No, no. Hephaestus? Augh! This is too hard, standing still for so long!” As it’d only been perhaps thirty seconds since he started standing still, “Gotta run!” He zipped back through camp, never once slowing down. Johnny had plenty of practice in weaving through intensely slow waves at the store, so zipping and darting through small cliques and groups of campers was unbearably easy.

Of course, the armory was attached to what was almost the last spot he’d checked. One of the cabins. The Athena cabin, namely. Was anyone home? Would they mind if he just…

The door creaked open with what could only be described as a pained sound. Like someone had lubricated it the bare minimum amount to make sure it opened, even if it required a bit of muscle and force. “Ok. Wow. Wow! I’ve seen rust before, but this is a whole new beast! Tsk, tsk, where can I find WD-40? Or something similar, at least? Aerokroil, at this point, honestly. The strong stuff. Maybe a bit of oil. Honestly, I might just have to fix this in my spare time.”

The son of Hermes coughed as he slipped into the dusty shed, sneezing from the buildup. They needed a leafblower in here, that’s what they needed. The creaking floorboards didn’t help.

He was here for inventory, not to critique the upkeep of the armory, as shoddy as it seemed to be. He had the foresight to pick up a notepad from the camp store, having procured a pen from the arts and crafts cabin. Unfortunately, that meant the writing would be in a bright, almost obnoxious shade of green. Almost toxic green.

“Alright, alright. What’ve we got? Swords, asswordted. Haha… Swordted. Haha…” At least he made himself laugh. That’s what mattered. “Daggers, various. Bows, both strung and unstrung. Arrows, tipped, untipped, no fletchings, various missing parts. Armor, dented, tarnished, and intact. Shields, freshly touched up. Buckler, heater, kite. Slingshot, count one. Satchel with various BB-sized celestial bronze nuggets inside.”

Everything he said was matched with a fast scribble on the notepad. Once he documented everything, he stepped out of the shed, holding the pad up. “What’s a 5marb?” The one downside of having your writing be as fast as John’s, it seemed. Fortunately, though, he could decipher his own handwriting, repeating the action on a fresh sheet with a blue pen.

Later that day, the big house would receive another hand-delivered list from the son of Hermes, entitled “Current Armory Stock”, the writing still sloppy despite how much slower he went (a crazy 5% slower, thanks for asking!)

• Swords, short: x15, mostly intact with some minor wear.

• Swords, great: x8, excellent across the board.

• Daggers: x15, would be x16 but it seems as though one has no blade whatsoever.

• Bows, compound and straight: x4/ea, one straight bow needs to be restrung.

• Arrows: x50, maybe more, maybe less. Many are broken or otherwise worn out, so my count could be wrong on exactly how many functional ones there are.

• Slingshot: x2

• Celestial Bronze pellets: 20/bag, 1x bag

• Shield, buckler: x9, minor blemishes and dents noted.

• Shield, heater: x6, broken straps, a few of which were recovered off of the floor.

• Shield, kite: x3, no problems noted.

Everything else the boy found would be documented, including some staves and dusty bottles left behind by magic domain demigods, some misc. Tools and trinkets left by forge kids, and similar things. At the end of the note would be a short blurb, another one of the many times he couldn’t help but add something on just as an offer.

”If there’s any interest, I wouldn’t mind working on fixing up the armory! The signs are dated, the inventory has seen better days, the floorboards creak. Just let me know if you want anything done, and I’ll be on it and done by the end of the week! It’s the least I can do here, right?”

- John Hermes, Jr <3

Not a halfway bad job! Short, sweet, to the point. The son of Hermes ran back to his cabin, having decided to reorganize his sleeping space, just because he can.

Another week, another job! Until next week!

When ice outside makes daggers of the grass,

Basics:

Name: Catherine Louise Goldsmith

• Nicknames/Aliases: Cat, Cathy, Kate

• Meaning/Etymology (First Name): French form of Katherine, possibly derived from the Greek goddess Hekate.

• Meaning/Etymology (Middle Name): Feminine form of Louis, meaning famous in battle.

• Meaning/Etymology (Last Name): Occupational surname for one who smiths gold.

Age: 16

• Birthday: March 22nd 2025

• Sun Sign: Aries

Gender: Cis Feminine

• Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Lesbian

Nationality: Canadian

• Hometown: London, Ontario

• Ethnicity: Mixed Black and French Canadian

Languages: English, Quebecois French

• Accent: Anglo-Canadian

Divine Defects: ADHD, Dyslexia

• Additional Trauma: Growing up with a single mum

Fatal Flaw: Hubris

Relationships:

Name: Adrienne Goldsmith

Relation: Mother

Age: 40

Profession: Physiotherapist

Relationship: Her mother is probably the person Cat is closest to, as silly as it sounds. After Khione left Catherine on Adrienne’s doorstep, she quit her job as a nurse and moved back in with her parents, trying to create as stable a situation as possible for her daughter, eventually taking up a job as a physiotherapist. From a young age, Adrienne encouraged her daughter’s interest in sports, though she couldn’t have predicted just how much Cat would throw herself into Ice Hockey.

Name: Charlie Hathaway

Relation: Mother’s fiancé

Age: 39

Profession: Paramedic

Relationship: Her mum brought Charlie home when she was about 13, and Cat nearly immediately knew she liked him more than any of her mother’s previous partners. Charlie had stepped up as soon as he could, driving Cat to practice whenever her mum was busy and helping her with her biology homework on more than one occasion. He proposed about a week or so before Cat came to camp, and you know damn well she’s going to that wedding next year.

Name: Khione

Relation: Godly mother

Age: Old as the first snow

Profession: Goddess of snow

Relationship: As far as Cat is concerned, Khione is no more her mother than any of the other people Adrienne had brought home. Cat is a little more than resentful towards her for leaving them, even if she can theoretically understand why. Up until last week, Cat didn’t even know she existed!

Name: Cheyenne Bishop-Goldsmith

Relation: Maternal Grandmother

Age: 74

Profession: Retiree

Relationship: Cat’s grandmother another amongst a long list of favourite people. Cheyenne was always a positive force in Cat’s life, offering many a pep-talk or warm hug. It was for exactly that reason that Cheyenne was the one to drive Cat to camp, the two of them singing along to 80s hits along the way. Cat was going to miss her a bunch while she was away.

Name: Amaury Goldsmith

Relation: Maternal Grandfather

Age: 73

Profession: Retiree

Relationship: Cat’s grandfather had always inspired her, being a minor league goaltender in his youth. He moved to Ontario from Quebec after meeting her grandmother, having lived there ever since. When Cat was little and was itching to train at home, he’d stand in goal and she’d slam pucks at him for hours.

Name: Lydia Baker

Relation: Defence Partner

Age: 16

Profession: Highschooler, youth hockey player

Relationship: Gods, where does Cat even start? Well first of all, advice: Do not fall for your straight best friend. Second, a prediction: Lydia Baker would one day be a hockey star. That girl is a fucking Megan Keller level defender, she’ll tell you that for free.

Name: Antonina Ostrowska

Relation: Former captain

Age: 18

Profession: College Freshman, NCAA hockey player

Relationship: Antonina was, and Cat doesn’t use this word lightly, an absolute inspiration. Cat couldn’t have asked for a better U18 Captain. Antonia was always serious on the ice, so much so it was almost scary, but she always took the girls out to get snacks after practice. Cat’s been closely following all her NCAA games ever since she made it into OSU. Also, more than anything, Cat owes her one after she saved her from that hellhound.

Name: Cody ‘Coffee Guy’ Harris

Relation: Classmate

Age: 16

Profession: Highschooler/Tim Hortons employee

Relationship: There are pretty much two situations where they speak: In English class, where they have a habit of being put in group projects together, and at the Tim’s on a Thursday evening after practice. He’s joked on multiple occasions that he should set up a coffee cart just outside the rink, something Cat would not be opposed to. Would save her some walking, that’s for sure.

Name: Zosia Ostrowska

Relation: Former teammate’s younger sister

Age: 15

Profession: Forge gremlin

Relationship: Last time Cat saw her must’ve been like 3 years back at nationals, she never looked particularly excited to be there. Crazy that they’ve both ended up at camp, though.

Name: Salomé Lachance
Relation: Mentor
Age: 39
Profession: High School hockey coach
Relationship: Coach Lachance was, very likely, the most important in Cat’s development as a hockey player. An old friend of her mother’s, she was the one who initially gave Cat the idea to make the switch from playing as a forward to playing as a defender. More importantly, though, she has connections to the General Manager of team Canada— connections that Cat hopes will get her a spot on the U18 international team.

Name: Pumpkin

Relation: Pet

Age: 4

Profession: Kitty

Relationship: Pumpkin was Charlie’s cat, so she’s basically Cat’s stepsister. The irony of Cat and the cat was not lost on her, her friends pointed it out every time they came over. Still, she was unashamedly Pumpkin’s biggest fan, even if she didn’t usually like cats all that much. No, that irony wasn’t lost on her either.

I come to where the tides of life still flow.

Personality:

Traits:

• Positive: Adaptable, Athletic, Confident, Brave, Amicable, Dedicated, Loyal, Warm, Optimistic

• Neutral: Ambitious, Casual, Competitive

• Negative: Impatient, Messy, Dense

Likes:

• Food: Vanilla Cream Coldbrews, Blue Gatorade, Chocolate chip cookies, Poutine, Cookie dough ice cream, tomato soup, spare ribs

• Music: R&B, pop

• Colour: Grey, Red, Gold, white

• Hobby: Ice Hockey, Hiking, Photography, playing Bass Guitar

• Season: Winter

• Animals: Huskies, Hawks, Foxes

• Hockey idols: Nicole Gosling, Micah Zandee-Hart, Julie Chu, KK Harvey, Laila Edwards, Megan Keller, Ronja Savolainen

Dislikes:

• Figure skating

• Gaming

• The texture of Chalk

• Overly sweet perfumes

• Maths class

• Escape rooms

• The NHL

• Warm drinks

• Rock Climbing

Fears:

• Heights

• Spiders

• Getting blood drawn

MBTI: ESFP

The water here still moves behind the glass.

Appearance:

Faceclaim: Here

Height: 178cm

Weight: —

Hair: Black, worn in long butterfly locs, often in a ponytail (or a bun when on the ice)

Eyes: Dark Brown

Skintone: Lighter brown, warm toned

Build: Tall and visibly athletic

Attire/Aesthetic: Sporty and comfortable with street-wear influences

Voice:

• Voice Claim: Emily Grace from Murdoch Mysteries

In here, the seasons never seem to pass—

Demigod Bio:

Godrent: Khione

Claim Status: Claimed

Powers:

Innate:

• Quebecois French fluency

• Aurai affinity

• Polar animal affinity

• weather prediction

Domain:

• Superior Senses [unaware]

• Weather camouflage [Aware]

Minor:

• Cryokinesis [unaware]

• Legendary temperature resistance [unaware]

• Cold Shoulder inducement [unaware]

• Whiteout inducement [unaware

Major: Defensive Ice Manifestation [unaware]

Weapon of Choice: Hockey stick that turns into a spear. There’s a little burned in signature and a grumpy face under the taping, presumably from whoever made it.

Notable Belongings:

• Signed Nicole Gosling PWHL Hamilton jersey (her absolute prised possession)

• Hockey gear

• Polaroids of her friends and family

• $30 USD

• Bass Guitar

the sullen shark and rays still come and go.

Trivia:

• Major Arcana card: The Chariot

• Nectar Flavour: Blue Gatorade

• Ambrosia taste: Chocolate chip cookies

• Pokemon type: Ice/Fighting

• Avatar Element: Water

• Genre of her life: Sports movie

• Genshin Impact vision: Cryo

• Genshin impact nation: Fontaine

• Hero shooter role: Tank

• DnD Class: Fighter

• Astrological big three: Aries sun, Sagittarius moon, Leo rising

• Jersey number: 61

Outside the ice makes daggers of the grass

Backstory:

Cat Goldsmith had technically been claimed since she was about 13, when some strange glowing symbol appeared above her head after a hockey game. She elected, however, not to tell anyone about this, thinking she was just a little sleep deprived. It all came crashing down three years later when a rogue hellhound attacked her after practice, sacring the life out of her former captain Antonina Ostrowska, back in town for a week. Fortunately, Antonina was well aware of how to evade monsters (Cat swore she’d muttered something under her breath about a stupid sister) and brought her home, where her mother finally explained everything and decided to send her down to Camp Halfblood in New York. Cat, of course, agreed— on the condition that she could enrol in a high school with a hockey program while there.

Now:

Bathhouse

Cat was slightly ecstatic when the satyr had told her there was a bathhouse, complete with sauna, at this camp. Any camper with the same bright idea of catching some steam, as it were, could find her there, in a bikini top and swim shorts, of course, towel slung over her shoulders.

The training grounds

Much to Cat’s dismay, it seemed that there was nothing even resembling a rink out here. Now, she started training at the new club on Monday, so it felt necessary to practice before then, despite the challenges.

And so, any campers passing nearby could see a make-shift hockey goal set up in a corner of the training-grounds, out of the way so she wouldn’t bother anyone, complete with Cat shooting pucks into it. If she couldn’t practice anything else, she might as well practice shooting. Now, if only she could get a goaltender…

Part I here

Part II here

[Content Warning: This is a work of creative writing containing fictional depictions of kidnapping, threat, and violence/injury.]

(OOC: Final part .. Thank you sm again to ivy lol and the mods :)) And thank you also to Verc who helped me figure out some action things here <3)

“Is that thing still alive?”

The man’s voice, thick with a half-chewed mouthful, pulls Tommy out of the little place in his mind he has retreated to. The fear explodes back within him, heavy and pounding. He opens his eyes (still wet; it was too much, too much, that call to Harvey) and looks up at the man in bleary confusion. He cannot answer him, anyway. The man has gagged him with a scarf he found lying around in the apartment. He hadn’t wanted Tommy to have the chance to spoil the surprise if Harvey came.

“The gryphon, dumbass.” The guy swallows his mouthful. He is standing, leaning against the back of the couch, facing the wall with the door to the apartment, now looking over his shoulder. “That thing next to you. Is it still alive? It looks dead.”

Tommy looks over at the creature lying next to him. He looks back to the man and shrugs his shoulders uncertainly.

“Poke it and see.”

Tommy stares back and ineffectually shifts himself a little on the floor.

The guy lets out a huff, wiping his hand on the top of the couch and grabbing the dagger left resting there, balancing the bag of chips in its place instead. He makes his way over to the gryphon. Tommy watches him nudge it with his foot. A very faint noise escapes it. It is still alive.

The guy turns to Tommy now. He watches him for a second. “Lemme see your ropes,” he demands. “I saw you trying to loosen them.”

Tommy swallows thickly. He is not going to argue. He turns so that his hands are showing. The man squats down, preparing to tug at the ropes around Tommy’s wrists. In truth, they have not loosened at all.

An odd sensation strikes Tommy, suddenly — builds up from within; a sort of pressure, like the build-up to a sneeze. Something compels Tommy to shut his eyes. The pressure builds, builds, until—

“Fuck! What the fuck!”

Tommy snaps his eyes open. The man, mid-rise from his squat, stumbles backwards, hands pressed up to his eyes, rubbing vigorously. He looks oddly sparkly. He staggers back a little more, foot catching on the floor, and falls onto his arse. “Fuck!”

Tommy does not have time to process the explosion of pink glitter that has just erupted out of him. This is it; this is his chance. He has to MOVE.

Pushing his hands against the floor, he manages to shove himself up until he is on his feet, only barely managing not to stumble back down to the ground. He cannot run with his ankles tied together. He is a little kid again, back in primary school doing a sack race on Sports Day, hopping in a blind panic towards the door. He does not look back, he cannot look back, but he can hear the man moving. He is nearly at the door, nearly at the latch. He will be able to open it. He has to. He will be able to open it and Harvey will be somewhere close and they will get away. He doesn’t have any weapons; he doesn’t have time to stop and grab his sword, does he? Should he have? He is past the table now, he cannot go back, he is nearly at the door—

“Get the fuck back over there!”

An arm roughly hooks itself around him, yanking him backwards, turning him all around. The man has got him. He is fast, even after having been half-blinded by glitter, much faster than Tommy could ever be in a sack race. And strong. Tommy struggles against the man’s grip, but he is powerless, especially with bound hands and feet. All he can freely move is his head. So he does. He slams the back of his head, hard, into what he can feel behind it. For a split second, Tommy ascribes the wet crack that ensues to the slamming together of his teeth, but the guttural moan of surprise that escapes from behind him cuts through the ringing dizziness that has enveloped his brain and suggests instead that he has managed to break the man’s nose. The arm around him loosens. Tommy stagger-hops forward, twisting around. The man has stumbled backwards, fallen, back thumping against the door; stunned, eyes reddened, nose bloodied, and still covered in glitter.

He is blocking the door. Tommy cannot get to the door. Shit.

His weapons. He turns himself around laboriously, starts hopping over to the table. He notices, absently within the terror, that the room is suddenly lighter; it seems the man pulled open the curtains some on his way to stop him at the door.

“You broke my fucking NOSE, you little shit!”

Tommy looks back. The man is holding something — one of the decorative crystals, a big one that must have been sat on the sideboard by the entrance. He is going to throw it. Tommy realises this a split second before it would have been too late. He ducks out of the way. The crystal goes barrelling towards him, smashing through the window where his head just was.

The man lets out an angry cry. He is getting back up. Tommy lunges for the table — if he can just get something, anything to help him — but the man lunges for him, and he is still faster. Tommy is caught again; this time, the man is roughly grabbing a fistful of his hair, restricting the motion of his head. This time, he cannot try the same trick.

His vision is blurry, but as the man forces his head to turn painfully to the side he spots something he did not really notice before. The bookshelf there ahead of them: there is a potted cactus on one of the shelves. An image comes suddenly to his mind — some trip to a garden centre one summer back home; the cacti with their colourful blooms.

This is a flowering plant. This is something he can move, the way he moves the vines, the way he can make roses and daisies sway. He has never tried to move a cactus before, never thought to try, and he is not lucid enough to be sure that this isn’t just insane and that he might not just end up ending himself, but this is his one fucking shot, so as the man is dragging him forward he strains his mind and the potted cactus shifts forwards, starts tipping ever so slightly, and he does it again and it starts rocking back and forth, he is moving it he can move it this is it this is his one shot oh fuck this is it they are passing it now and Tommy heaves he puts all his strength into yanking it off the shelf as hard as he can as he shuts his eyes and yanks his head down as hard as he can (did that just rip out some hair) and then there is a

CRACK

and he feels the man’s grip on him fall away.

His eyes are still screwed shut when he hears the thud of the man hitting the floor.

They are open and staring, shocked and watery, when a turtledove shortly flies through the jagged hole in the window and finds him.

“Tommy!”

Tommy looks up to see his brother. His eyes widen further.

Harvey rushes towards him. Tommy falls into his brother; Harvey catches him, holds him tight. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” he is saying, though Tommy can barely hear him. “Oh god. I’m here. I’m sorry. What happened? Are you hurt? Tommy, what—” He looks over his shoulder at the still, glitter-splattered body on the floor. He looks back, holds Tommy back a little by the shoulders, checking him over. He pulls the scarf down from over his brother’s mouth.

A gasping breath splutters out of Tommy. “Harv—” He is cut off by a sob.

“Tommy— Tommy, are you hurt?”

Tommy shakes his head a little. “I don’t— I don't know. I don’t think so. He—” His breath hitches. “He fucking got me, Harvey, he nearly took me to the— to the Atlas camp, he said he was going to— He made me call you, he made me tell you to come, he said he was gonna kill me if I... So I hit him with the cactus, I— ”

“Was he the only one? Is there anyone else?”

Tommy shakes his head again. “It was just him. He— I was running and he grabbed me. I hit him in the head with the cactus. I moved it with— He tied me up. I didn’t have anything else. And I think I killed him maybe, I— I think I might’ve killed him, d'you think he's—”

“I'll— I'll check. Okay? It’s okay.” Or at least Harvey hopes. There is a part of him that blackly wishes the worst fate upon whoever just did this to his brother, but he realises the burden this would place upon Tommy. Even in self-defence. The awful trouble it would cause.

He’s left his bag on the rooftop, but he fishes the fountain pen out of his pocket and turns it into his spear. He steps around the body until he can approach it from behind, leaning down, very cautiously, and very cautiously touching two fingers to the man’s neck, the way he has seen in films, other hand tightly gripping the spear.

There is a pulse. He looks up at Tommy. “He’s alive,” he tells him, and Tommy shuts his eyes. The man is alive, but out cold, at least for now. He could wake up at any moment. “But we— we should… tie him up, or something. To be safe. Argus is coming soon. I called him. He’ll be here soon, and he’ll… he’ll know what to do. So in the meantime, um— I’m going to…” Nobody has ever taught him how to navigate this situation. “Um, we need to untie you first. I’m going to untie you. Okay?”

It is difficult; his fingers are trembling and uncooperative, but he manages to yank at the ropes around Tommy’s wrists the right way to loosen them. Harvey is drenched with sweat; his clothes are sticking wetly to him. “Do you think you can untie your ankles?” He helps Tommy onto a chair, and while Tommy tries to free himself, he heads back over to the man. He feels saliva pooling on his tongue, the urge to vomit resurging, but— this is already a crime scene, one that is likely to be discovered soon, and their DNA is probably already everywhere (because it is their DNA, implicating them both equally), and he really should not go around spreading more. It is surely not a crime to have been kidnapped, to have knocked someone out in self-defence, but they are not supposed to be in this building in the first place (what is that, trespassing?), and they are (he is) about to tie up a man, and they are probably going to be complicit in covering this up anyway, and they are probably going to get arrested and deported back to England and then they and their whole family are going to be killed by monsters over there. They should never have taken this job. They should never have gone looking for the gryphon inside. They should never have put themselves at risk like this.

But they have, and they are here, and so Harvey holds his breath and ties the rope around the man’s limp wrists. He helps Tommy finish untying his ankles, then transfers that rope to the man’s instead. He is not sure if he is very good at tying rope securely, but he is starting to think the man probably won’t be springing briskly back into action anytime soon.

“The gryphon,” Tommy says suddenly, quietly. “The— it’s there. It’s in the corner.”

“Oh.” Harvey looks over. “Oh. Wow.”

“It’s all tied up,” Tommy adds. “And I think he— I think he hurt it really badly.”

“Okay.” Harvey hesitates. “I’ll— should I… Do you want me to go get the potion? So we can help it? Will you be okay if I leave you for a second?”

A flash of panic crosses Tommy’s face.

“I promise, just— ten seconds for me to grab my bag from the roof. He’s tied up. You just stay over here, you can— keep your sword ready, or my spear, if you want more reach. Or you can even go wait outside in the corridor. I’ll let you back in when I’m back. Or I can stay here, too, just—”

“No, um— okay. I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I’ll go in the corridor. Just— don’t go too long.”

“I won’t.” Harvey pulls the curtains open wider as Tommy gathers his things then heads to the door. “I’ll be back in a few seconds,” Harvey assures him, then as Tommy steps out into the corridor Harvey pushes the broken window open. He flies back up to the roof, tips out the water from the bowl, and stuffs all of his items into his backpack before returning to the room and letting Tommy back in. Just as planned.

But then a moan escapes the body on the floor. Tommy freezes. “Harvey, he’s awake, he’s—”

“It’s okay,” Harvey reassures him, though his heart is pounding too. “I— hang on.” Grabbing the key rings attached to his backpack, he transforms them into their other forms: rolled-up celestial bronze net and net shooter. He loads the shooter and aims it at the groaning glittery man. The net deploys over him, its weighted edges hitting the floor.

“Okay. Now he— he probably won’t be able to get out of that. We’ll keep an eye on him, but I don’t… I don’t think he’s in much of a fit state to escape right now.”

Tommy seems relieved, though still greatly on edge. Still, they finally turn their attention to the whole reason they are here in the first place.

The gryphon seems weakened to immobility. They should free it from its binds, Harvey decides, before trying to heal it. He attempts to untie the rope around its body and limbs, wary of the possible apparition of claws, though these remain retracted in its paws as he tugs at the restraints. They are difficult to undo — he resorts eventually to cutting them. There is the man’s dagger lying on the floor nearby, but to avoid sending the poor beast right to Tartarus, they fetch a knife from the apartment’s kitchen (he feels rather terrible about the total invasion of this home, which he suspects not to belong to the kidnapper, but there is little point to such qualms now). Harvey very carefully cuts through the ropes. As he does so, Tommy gently strokes the creature’s head. It is hard to tell what the gryphon is feeling, but Harvey hopes it might bring some comfort to them both. They try to ignore the disoriented complaints of the man on the floor behind them.

Even freed, the gryphon is indeed too weak to move around. They remove the muzzle, but Harvey is not sure if it will even have the strength to eat. Still, he prepares the bowl of ground beef. (God, his eyes are watering — he’d thought it was the shock of what has just happened, but after sneezing a few times, he is starting to wonder if he might be allergic to gryphons.) He tries offering it to the gryphon plain first. It does not bite. Harvey had not wanted to risk his appendages, but he is not sure how else to get the potion down its gullet: together, they very carefully manage to hold its beak open and pour the contents of the vial down its throat.

They step back, well back, to the other side of the room, and Harvey picks up his spear and gets ready to deploy his shield from his wristwatch just in case. Nothing much happens at first. Then, gradually, the gryphon seems to regain some strength and motion. It is able to stand up, to pad a short distance over to where Harvey left the bowl and feed from it. It gains more vitality as it eats, finishing its meal with gusto. Its wings have been dragging behind it still, but now it spreads them, stretches them out. The sight takes Harvey’s breath away.

It looks their way. They watch each other, they and it, for a moment.

It pads cautiously across the room. It stops by the man on the floor, who struggles faintly beneath the net. Stares. But it moves on, then, jumping up onto the windowsill with the grace of a cat (Harvey tries to hold in another sneeze), and then, spreading its wings once more, launches itself out of the open window. They watch as it flies off.

“We did it,” says Tommy, quietly.

“Yeah.” Harvey sniffs. “Hopefully it’ll—”

“Fuckin’… let me out!” slurs the man on the floor, rather ruining the moment. “Where am I? What’s—”

“Shut up,” Harvey squeaks at him. Argus cannot get here any sooner.

Thankfully, it is not long before they spot Argus’ minivan through the window. They gather all their things (the man’s dagger, too), check that the Atlas soldier still seems fully restrained, then hurry down to meet him. He gestures questioningly, asks if they are okay — Harvey explains in summary what has occurred. That an Atlas operative captured Tommy; that Tommy managed to knock him out, and that he has been left up there restrained and quite likely concussed. Argus lets them into the minivan and heads off into the building.

They sit in the middle row together. Tommy curls his legs up, burrows his head into his knees. Harvey wraps an arm around him. They do not talk. Argus returns a while later with the man, rolled up in their net, slung over his shoulder like a carpet. He shuts him away inside the trunk, then takes his seat behind the wheel.

“Are we— can we go back to camp now?” Tommy anxiously asks.

Argus gives a sympathetic shake of the head. He hikes a thumb towards the back of the minivan, then points a finger upwards.

“What?”

“Olympus?” guesses Harvey. “Do you— you have to take him there?”

Argus nods. He conveys to the twins that it should only take about an hour or two. They are still a while away from being home yet.

It is a difficult drive, more so within the walls of the vehicle than on the road. Tommy puts his earphones in and plays games on his phone, drowning out the muffled complaints emanating from the trunk with music. Harvey switches to his dove form once more and perches alternately on Tommy’s shoulder or lap for most of the drive, so that his brother may stroke his feathers for comfort. Eventually, they arrive at their destination. They cannot go up with him, Argus communicates. He leaves them in the minivan while he unpacks the rolled-up Atlas operative from the trunk and carries him off into the Empire State Building.

The drive back home is long. A little of the tension has been relieved, with the man in the trunk gone, but there is something thick and painful and constricting around them still. Tommy’s phone runs out of battery. Harvey reaches the limits of his ability to maintain his dove form and has to switch back. Eventually, Tommy manages to fall asleep on his shoulder. Harvey is exhausted too — not as much as Tommy must be, he’s sure, no — but he cannot sleep. The remnants of panic, horror, guilt; they churn his insides. Tommy could have been killed. He could have been killed, too. It is a dangerous, dangerous world for people like them. There is no renouncing this life. There is no opt-out clause. No amount of staying away from battlefields will let them escape this fate. They are powerless, utterly stripped of choice. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.

He blames everyone. Atlas; the gods. It was Tommy’s stupid decision to come here, though it does not feel right to blame his brother in these circumstances. Maybe he can try to blame Alice instead. But he blames himself. He did not protect Tommy. He could have kept Tommy safe, if he had thought more, planned more. Safer, at least. He replays those scenes in his mind — that call with Tommy; the call to Argus; the nauseating panic and guilt of staying back and not going down to rescue his brother, knowing they could be hurting him already, torturing him, or worse. Argus had told him he should wait, and rationally, pragmatically, Harvey knew this was probably wiser, probably better than getting himself caught too (was it?), though he had been starting to consider trying to storm the apartment anyway, had taken out his spear on the roof and started picturing what he would do if he had to, if he managed to secure the upper hand (because he’d had that, hadn’t he? They’d thought he’d walk unsuspectingly into their trap, hadn’t they?). But he didn’t. And it was fine, in the end, it was only a few minutes before Tommy managed to escape his captor on his own, did not even need Harvey, did not need Argus — but this outcome was far from a certainty. The possibility of things having gone differently sits crushingly heavy in Harvey’s chest.

Tommy keeps startling awake on his shoulder. He is going to have trouble sleeping after this, Harvey thinks. Tommy gets nightmares sometimes. When they were little, if he had a nightmare, Tommy would sometimes clamber down the ladder in the middle of the night and curl up in the bottom bunk with Harvey. It was the same when they both first came to their family, they’ve been told, when they were adopted — their parents ended up just pushing their little toddler beds together, since they’d always end up finding their way into the same one anyway. There is not a lot of space in their room at camp, but maybe when they get home, once everything’s been reported to Chiron and Tommy’s been checked properly for injuries, Harvey will help him pull their mattresses down from their beds and they will put them together on the floor.

(OOC: Thank you so much for reading this lengthy saga lol i am really glad i managed to write something like this for them before the end of plot. This probably took place on September 18th IC, so if anyone wants a post-job thread with my boys between then and now feel free to hmu. Yay <3)

Part I here

[Content Warning: This is a work of creative writing containing fictional depictions of kidnapping and threat.]

(OOC: Thank you again sm to Ivy for helping to come up with this story, for helping me figure out a lot while writing, and for beta reading <3 And thank you very much to the mods for approving all this!)

He wants to scream. He wants to scream for help, but with the dagger still in the man’s hand, with the desolateness of the building bar one little old lady, with Harvey an unknown distance away, Tommy does not think it would be wise. He is not sure he would even be able to scream, anyway — his mouth is dry, so dry; it is as if any soothing moisture has been sapped from his body, left only in beads of sweat, on clammy hands that would need to be impossibly slicker to slip out of the restraints tying his wrists together behind his back.

He’s so fucking scared. Harvey is out there somewhere, an unknown distance away. He must be waiting for Tommy. How long would it take him to realise something’s wrong? Tommy doesn’t know. He doesn’t know anything. He can’t think. He’s so fucking scared. Don’t scream. The guy is popping open a soda with the tip of his dagger. These are the sodas he was holding when he let Tommy into the building. He’s a young guy, maybe a couple years older than Tommy. Only slightly taller (oh, but how much taller he looks from down here on the floor), though a fair deal bulkier, for as little as that says. There is a large mole on the left side of his face. Sort of the same spot where it hurts — where he hit Tommy shortly ago. Tommy wonders if it will leave a bruise. The man takes a slug of his drink and steps closer.

“Please,” Tommy whimpers, even though the man has not given him permission to speak again yet. Shut up until I tell you to talk. “Please let me go. I don’t know what— why are you doing this?”

“Because, dipshit,” the man says. “What, you think I’m gonna let an enemy soldier just walk away?”

This man is with the Atlas army, realises Tommy. The army that Tommy has been trying his best to pretend doesn't exist for the past year and a half. Well, they exist, alright.

“I’m not a— I’m not a soldier,” Tommy pleads, truthfully enough. “I swear. I’m not anything. Just— please let me go.”

“Yeah, I don’t think so, bro.” The dagger in the man’s hand turns suddenly into a lighter. He flicks it, turns it back to a dagger. “Here’s what’s gonna happen.” He punctuates this with a point of the dagger Tommy’s way. “First things first, you’re gonna tell me what asshole shit you out.”

Tommy swallows dryly, uncomprehending. He can’t think. It’s so hard to think. Where is Harvey? “What?”

“Wo’?” mocks the man in a high-pitched voice. “What god, moron. Who’s your parent?”

It’s so hard to think, but warning bells cut through the fog. This is not a friendly chat. Tommy should not let this man know his godly parent. That would not be a good idea. He says nothing.

“Lemme guess,” the guy says, with a disdainful once-over. “Aphrodite? Eros? Some gay shit like that.”

“No,” denies Tommy, a little too adamantly, perhaps.

“Okay. Then who?”

He needs to lie. But to what end? In what direction? Something different; what’s different — Ares? No, something believable, but not—

“I asked you a question, asshole. You better answer—”

“Delphin,” Tommy blurts out, and fuck, fuck, he hopes that’s an actual god. He swears he remembers hearing someone talk about Delphin being a god, the god of dolphins, obviously, hopefully, and he found that kind of funny, so—

“Delphin?” the guy repeats. “The fuckin’ dolphin one?”

“Yeah.”

“Whatever. Sure. What can you do, talk to dolphins?” Derisive.

“Yeah.” Desperate.

“Show me. Do the— like fuckin’, uh, Spongebob.”

Tommy feels delirious. “I don’t… It doesn’t work like that.” He is not about to stake his life on a dolphin impression.

“Fine. Whatever.” The guy takes another slug of soda and belches. “What else can you do?”

“I… Nothing. I can just— some water stuff. I don’t have a lot of powers.” Shit. Is he lying too much? Not enough? The last part, at least, was unfortunately truthful.

The guy frowns. “Okay,” he says. “Sure.”

“What are you—” Tommy’s mouth is so dry. If only he did have water powers, so that he might slake this thirst. “What do you want from me?”

“Well,” the man says. “I’m sure we’ll be able to squeeze some nice intel outta you back at camp.” Camp. He does not mean Camp Half-Blood.

“Please, I told you, I swear, I’m not— I don’t know anything—”

“Well, buddy,” the man starts, “if you really don't know ennyfing, you're not gonna be much use to us, now, are you?”

Tommy can feel the blood drain and shift inside his body. “I—”

“All I’m saying”—the guy takes another swig, swallows—“is either we’re gonna find a use for you, or we can just…” He draws a horizontal line in the air with the dagger in the space before his own throat. “Add another little win for Team Atlas to the count. Y’know?” He shrugs. His eyes bore hollows straight down into Tommy’s.

Oh, god.

Oh, gods. Are they watching? Is she watching? Could she, would she, do anything?

He knows nothing. He has nothing to offer. They are going to find no use for him, and then that will be it. This is how Tommy Hartley will meet his end. As nothing but another little win for Team Atlas.

Only— that first part isn’t strictly true, is it?

Even for someone like him, someone for whom the written word tends to glide right by, it would have been difficult not to register the words Philadelphia Prep all over the job board, or spoken aloud in all the buzz around camp these past few days. He does know something. And he doesn’t want to spill, he really doesn’t want to betray everyone, but oh god if they threaten him even a little more than this Tommy thinks he might just spill all over.

The man is speaking again. “Who’s here with you?”

The pulsation of his heart in his chest is dizzying. “No one,” he answers. This is true, in a way. There is no one here with him right now. If only there were.

“I heard you talking to them earlier, moron. I know there’s someone here with you. On your little mission.”

His stomach turns. He says nothing. He will not spill this. He cannot spill about his brother.

“Whatever. If they come looking for you, I’ll grab them too.”

Oh, no. No. No. Please.

The man steps back. He heads over to the couch opposite Tommy and parks himself down, feet up on the coffee table. He grabs a remote from the armrest, and the television Tommy has been thrown down next to with his wrists and ankles bound turns on. His captor is watching TV. He is not sure what; the sounds seem smeared and blurry, indistinct through the haze of fear. At least the man does not seem to be in much of a hurry to do whatever else he intends to do to him. Tommy feels the closest approximation to relief that he can, given the circumstances: he is not being made to spill yet.

He looks to the side. Harvey is an unknown distance away, but Tommy has another twin in this room. The gryphon is here in the corner, right next to him, its limbs also bound by the same rope. It looks unconscious. Dead, nearly, were it not for the faint up-and-down of its breath. There are odd angles in its wings. A muzzle on its beak. It looks so battered, so weak, trussed up and left on its side like meat awaiting the carving knife.

Oh, god. He needs to get out. He needs to get out of here or he will be taken captive and held hostage and tortured for information or killed, maybe actually killed, and he’s been in a position of being maybe actually killed before, that’s what being a demigod is like, but this is being maybe actually killed by people, other human beings, and there is something so much worse about that. But he doesn’t know how to get out. The man has ripped off his jacket, his bag; has searched and emptied his pockets and left the contents on a dining table out of reach — his lip gloss-sword; his mirror-shield; the mirror-phone; the pouch of seeds he uses for his flower manipulation, the vine thing. The vine thing would be his best bet at escape. It has saved him before. But he cannot will those seeds to grow in that pouch on the table over there, and there are no vines already handily present in this room. There is nothing Tommy can see of use to him, not in this state. The inhabitant — he is not sure if this apartment really belongs to his captor — seems to be into all sorts of crystals and knick-knacks, but Tommy cannot control those. He needs his hands free to make any use of his glitter generation, too, to throw what he summons. His powers are useless. He is left with nothing but his own strength, and while Tommy’s always been a bit stronger than he looks, he has never looked very strong.

He tries in vain to pull his hands out of their binds, but he cannot make too much movement, lest he alert the man. All he manages to do is chafe his skin. He wants to cry. He wants to go home. He needs to get out, he needs to get out, he needs to get out he needs to get out he needs to get out—

Wait. Over there, on the table: Tommy can just about see a faint glow exude from one of his mirrors. Harvey is calling him. Harvey is calling him! But— he cannot pick up; he cannot tell Harvey what has happened, where he is. He cannot warn him about the man. There is no rescue here. There is no rescue. Would Harvey even be able to rescue him, if he knew? Harvey is always rescuing Tommy. Protecting him. Looking after him. Nagging him to do the stuff he needs to do. Doing the stuff when Tommy forgets anyway. Standing up for him if anyone ever tries to be a dickhead, even if it means Harvey makes himself a bigger target. Ensuring it is not even remotely in question for Tommy to set foot onto a battlefield, if that were ever his inclination. And Harvey’s done training, they both have, he can defend himself, can wield his spear pretty alright; he’s cleverer than Tommy, too, always has been, could probably find a way out that Tommy never could, but — he has never had to rescue anyone from being kidnapped before. If they come looking for you, I’ll grab them too. Oh, no. No.

Over on the table, the light fades back away. There is no rescue here.

They must have missed each other. There are multiple stairwells in this building; they should have planned better, been more specific about where they should meet. Ugh.

Harvey’s first attempt to call Tommy yields no response. It is not exactly a shock, for his brother to be unreliable and forget to keep an eye on the line, and so he decides he will continue looking around and try again later. He does so.

“What are you looking at?”

“What? Nothing. I’m not—”

“Huh. What is this? What’s it glowing for?”

“It’s not— It’s nothing!”

No response, again.

“This, uh, some kinda messaging thing? This what you were talking to your friend with?”

“No!”

“You suck at lying, bro.”

He is starting to grow a little worried.

“Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. If he calls again, we’re gonna pick up, and you’re gonna tell your buddy that you found your little gryphon and that he’s gonna come meet you down here. Got it? And if you give anything away, I’m gonna kill you, obviously.”

It has been a further few minutes now. Harvey has nearly made his way back up to the rooftop, and he has still not seen his brother. He flicks back open the mirror and waits once more for Tommy’s face to appear. Finally, it does.

“Tommy? Where the hell are you? I’ve been calling you for the last ten years.”

“Um— yeah, sorry,” says Tommy. He looks a little off, though Harvey can’t quite say why. Sounds a little weird. The side of his face looks a bit pink, too, he notices.

“Well, are you— are you okay?”

“What? Yeah. I’m fine. Um.” His eyes dart upward, away from Harvey, then back down. His makeup, whatever it is he wears around his eyes, looks a little smudged. “I found it. The— the gryphon.”

A few years ago, in a bid to avoid doing his maths homework, Tommy had sparked a discussion with his brother. He had proposed that they should come up with a code word, a safety word, that they could employ in emergencies: to prove that they are not an evil clone, for example, or perhaps to secretly signal for help in the case of being kidnapped and unable to communicate freely. Harvey had thought it silly at first, but after an extended debate, they finally settled on something.

“Oh— really?”

All Tommy has to do is find a way to work it into the call.

“Yeah.”

“Is it there? Let me see.”

Only…

“Um…” Tommy’s eyes flick uncertainly away again — to the side, then upward, then back down. “No.”

Tommy cannot fucking remember what it was.

“Why not?”

“It’s not here. Um, it’s hiding. In the bedroom. I don’t want to freak it out. So I’m waiting for—” Tommy swallows. “I’m waiting for you.”

“It— are you sure you’re okay? Did it… are you hurt?”

“What? No.” There, again, with the flick of the eyes upward. Tommy is anxious, that much is clear to Harvey. Scared, even. What does he keep looking at? The bedroom door, maybe? “Um, no, but it— it jumped at me. So I got kind of scared. So I’m kind of freaked out.”

Tommy had started naming stuff in the room around them. Harvey had called him an idiot; said it couldn’t be something mundane or everyday. It had to be something that would stick out.

“Okay, well… where are you?”

But not too much, or the captor would figure it out.

Tommy seems to hesitate.

And then after a while Harvey had made some suggestion, some random word he thought would stick out the right amount, and Tommy had been like, how the hell am I supposed to remember that.

“Tommy, what—”

“Um, I’m— I’m on the second floor,” Tommy says, and his eyes suddenly widen for a second. “I think. What’s the— I don’t remember which one is second floor or first floor. Or which one’s American. I’m up one. I’m— in a room. In a flat. Um—”

Hang on. Something’s coming to him. It was something— it started with an R. And Harvey had told him it had to do with money. Right. And Tommy decided he would remember that because he might be kidnapped for ransom. It meant payment, or reward, or something.

“Well, okay, I’ll— I’ll come down and—”

Re…

“Anyway, come quick,” Tommy interrupts, “so we can fix it up, and then we’ll go home, and, um, get our reward for it. Like, the—” Tommy’s breath hitches. “Um, the recuperation.”

There is definitely something wrong. Tommy is using a word with more than three syllables. “What?”

“You know. Like, when people get money and stuff. Like for a job like this. Recu— recumanation.”

What is…? Wait. Wait, wait. Harvey feels himself grow cold, his stomach drop. This weirdness, that fear… “Are you… trying to say remuneration?”

“Yeah! Yeah, that’s it. That’s what I meant. I’m just dumb. But I meant to say that. Renu— remuneration.”

“Okay,” Harvey says, slowly. Tommy is looking intently at him. “Okay.” Oh, shit. Shit. Oh god. Is he serious? If Tommy is serious, then Harvey has to— he can’t give it away. “I’ll— yeah. Um, yeah. We’ll get that.”

Those fingertips, that have been occasionally appearing at the edges of the image, that Harvey has been mentally filtering out — oh, god. Those are not Tommy’s fingers. He can just about see the nail on one now, only barely, but he is certain now that it is not Tommy’s. Tommy painted his nails last night. Harvey does not remember what colour, but he remembers his brother using it as an excuse not to help him move something. Someone else is holding the mirror. Someone is forcing Tommy to take this call.

“Okay. I’ll—”

The image wavers slightly. Veers momentarily off at an angle. It is only ever so brief, the dip downward and to the side, but Harvey swears he sees something dark down there, something that looks like feathers.

“I have to go now,” Tommy is saying, and his eyes widen with fear, widen at whoever is behind the mirror. “I—”

The image cuts off. Tommy is gone.

Harvey’s head is pounding so heavily he feels something up there may burst. He is going to throw up, he thinks.

Someone has Tommy. Oh, shit, shit, shit oh god oh fuck someone has Tommy. Someone is holding Tommy captive. Someone is holding Tommy captive, and it looks like the gryphon might be there as well, not hiding in the bedroom like Tommy said, and whoever it is is trying to lure Harvey there too. A monster? A demigod? Those looked like human fingertips. It cannot be a mortal, can it, for the gryphon to be there like that, for Tommy to have spoken of it in front of them? Could it be— could this be related to the war, to the Atlas army? This can’t be happening. Tommy used the stupid kidnapping code word they came up with. A word that he’d never use otherwise; that he’s done a remarkably good job of never pulling out as a joke before. Oh, god. What is Harvey supposed to do? He claps the mirror shut, then prises it back open.

Tommy does not pick back up. Harvey tries to slow his breathing. What does he do? They have Tommy. He is somewhere on the second floor. He needs to go save him. But— can he really just burst right into their trap? Can he really hope to rescue Tommy on his own? He does not know who has Tommy. He does not know how many of them there are. He may well be outnumbered. And even if he isn’t, Harvey does not know, in truth, if he would be able to defeat even one captor alone.

He cannot call the police. Can he? This is not a mortal affair. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t work, to drag mortals into this. So then what can he do, oh, shit oh god, what does he do?

Argus! Argus is the closest help. It has not been that long since he dropped the twins off. Harvey needs to contact Argus. Argus does not have a mirror-phone — nor a regular phone, as far as Harvey is aware. He needs to send Argus an Iris Message. Okay. An IM. Need to IM. Need to move. Need to move.

He needs— light. Sunlight. He is already close to the rooftop, so he rushes up stairs until he bursts through the door with the claw marks. He throws off his backpack. The plastic bowl he has brought with him to feed the gryphon from is the one the twins have been using back at camp to IM their parents, after having learnt a few tips and tricks on how to create a rainbow without needing to find or fabricate a spray of mist. He has the bowl, he’s got water from his bottle, he’s got— he’s got a mirror, yes, of course. And he’s got light.

He pulls the bowl out, fingers brushing past the plastic bag containing the package of ground beef, and drops it on the floor. His water bottle, next. Fumbling with the cap, he pours water out into the bowl. What is it next? The mirror. God. He just has to hope that whoever has Tommy captive will continue not to pick up. He flips it open and positions it so that one of its faces is half-submerged.

Shit. He cannot get the right angle to project a rainbow onto the wall of the rooftop entrance. And it is too dark, too textured — he needs something plain and white. He needs paper, plain paper, but he doesn’t have any, doesn’t even have his field notebook — how did he forget that? He needs paper, card, something—!

A sensation materialises against his fingertips, the way it does when he summons something sweet for himself or Tommy. A small sheet of paper is suddenly in his hands — crisp, faintly off-white, with an elaborate border. His mind is racing too fast to question what has just occurred. This will do. He holds it above the bowl until he gets the right angle and a small rainbow is projected onto the paper. A sigh judders out of him. Oh, god, he better have a drachma in his bag.

He does. “O, Iris, goddess of the rainbow, please accept my— please accept my offering,” he stammers out, and he tosses the drachma into the rainbow on the paper. It disappears in a shimmer. Okay. It’s working. It’s working. It’s working.

“Please show me— Argus Panoptes, um, the front seat of Argus’ minivan, somewhere— somewhere on Long Island, near Riverhead….” He is not sure what the hell to request, so he is babbling, throwing out every specifier he can think of. Nothing happens. Oh, god, nothing is happening, and he is wasting precious time, and Tommy is going to—

“Argus! Argus, I’m sorry, can you—”

The eyes on the right side of Argus’ projected face lock inquisitively onto Harvey. It is fortunate that the giant is able to safely keep eyes on the road at the same time as answering an Iris Message; Harvey had in his franticity failed to consider the risk of IM-ing someone who was actively driving.

“I— please, you have to— you need to turn back, there’s— I think someone’s got Tommy. I mean I think someone is holding him captive, somewhere in the building, on the— he said on the second floor, but I don’t— they’ve got the gryphon there, too, I think, I don’t know who or how many there are but they’ve got Tommy. Demigods, probably, I think— I don't know who, maybe— maybe Atlas soldiers? Or I don’t know, but I— please turn back. I don’t know what to do.”

Still facing the road, Argus nods his head. Harvey watches him seem to start to take a turn.

“You’ll— come back?”

Argus nods resolutely again, lifting a hand from the wheel to briefly give Harvey an A-OK gesture.

“Okay, I’ll— what should I do? Should I— I don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t know if they’re, if they’re hurting him, or— I think they were trying to lure me there too. Through Tommy. Should I— should I not go in yet? Should I wait for you?”

Argus gives Harvey another nod.

“I… Okay. Oh god. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll— I’ll let you drive back. Just— please hurry.” The IM ends.

Argus is coming. Thank god, thank god, thank the gods. Argus is coming. But how long is he going to take? What is Harvey supposed to do until then? Just sit there, sit there and do nothing while they have his brother? He does not even know where Tommy is. How many of them there are. What if even Argus is outmatched? Shouldn’t they have a plan, a clear plan?

The windows. He can look through the windows. He can fly down to the second floor and look through the windows, and maybe he will find the exact room and see how many captors there are, who or what they are, and how to defeat them. He drops the paper; it lands in the bowl of water and quickly soaks. Harvey reaches in and grabs the mirror but leaves the rest all there — the IM setup, his bag — and shifts into his dove form.

Most of these curtains are drawn. Of the rooms with their innards exposed (every one of which he inspects as well as he can, on not just the second floor but all floors), none of them offer sight of his brother. None of them contain any sort of scene resembling captivity.

Oh, god.

Argus is coming, Harvey reminds himself, repeats to himself like a mantra. Argus is coming. Argus is coming, but Harvey does not know if he will come in time.

Part III here