Chapter Text
Luke watched the five go. Anxiety gnawed at his stomach like Python at younger Apollo. He knew the group would be fine- three children of the Big Three and two strong, powerful young women could handle anything Daedalus’ death maze decided to throw at them. (Hopefully.) He was worried about the camp.
The four muses run rampant in the scorching maze, as a long-dead ruler brings the half-gods to their knees in a brutal siege. All prophecies (even false ones) were ominous, but that line in particular scared the sh*t out of him. A dead ruler who could bring Camp Half Blood to its knees? Well, he didn’t want to meet them.
And with all the chaos going on right now, he didn’t think they would be able to put up even a decent fight. Basically everyone was out for the count, with the exception of the five people who’d just left, Luke, and perhaps Chiron. And Percy…if he was here. If he was alive.
Luke knew he was missing something. He remembered going inside Cabin Three right before the fire. He remembered feeling as if he was drowning in blood; watching his sins echo even through universes. And he didn’t know what the f*ck that meant…only that something terrible had happened to Percy. A fate worse than death.
So they couldn’t rely on the son of Poseidon suddenly returning from the dead to help save the camp. In fact, camp itself might not be saveable. He pushed the thoughts from his mind. He had to get the camp ready for an attack…if he even could at all.
**
Percy felt like he was underwater. He could barely hear what he- no, Kronos- was saying. He felt disconnected from his body, as if his soul was made from helium. It was an odd feeling, one he could really only compare to the one time he’d had some mini cavities filled in at the dentist’s as a kid.
However, that at least had been an enjoyable feeling. This was not, because he was freaking possessed by Kronos. Gods, he wondered if Luke’s experience had been like this at all, and mentally shuddered at the thought. f*ck, he wanted Kronos out of him so badly.
Come on, Annabeth. I’m alive, Wise Girl.
**
Annabeth heard screams, and her blood turned to ice. She hurried out of Athena’s cabin, quickly followed by Malcolm. Outside, there wasn’t just the Titan muse-caused chaos. There was fighting, and her mind flashed back to a sentence from the false prophecy.
The four muses run rampant in the scorching maze, as a long dead ruler brings the half-gods to their knees in a brutal siege. f*ck. The attack had started, almost as if it had been timed exactly for when the muses’ chaos took effect. It probably was, the blonde thought grimly, barely dodging an empousa.
Malcolm socked the empousa in the face, who then hissedand then hurried off to find easier prey elsewhere. “Uh, ‘Beth? What do we do?”
“Mal, go find the Stolls. You’ll be safe with them, at least for the moment. Find somewhere to hide.”
“What about you?”
“I need to help, Malcolm.”
Her brother nodded and hurried off, barely avoiding being impaled by a shade wielding an imperial gold spear. Annabeth drew her dagger and hurried into the thick of the fighting, nearly slipping on the blood-slicked grass. All around her were scenes of violence- she saw Clarisse and Chris Rodriguez facing off against several spartoi , the skeleton warriors almost surrounding them. But the duo were more than holding their own.
Clarisse’s electric spear, Lamer, crackled as the daughter of Ares wielded it to deadly effect. Each time it met a spartoi, the skeleton warrior crumbled into ash from the electricity, but Clarisse seemed unharmed, thank the gods, and so did Chris (who seemed to be helping by using a shoddily-made bayonet made from a gun from the shed with a celestial bronze blade taped to it. She gave him full points for creativity, though.).
Other people weren’t doing so well, though. Annabeth knocked an eurynomosaway from a still, blood-soaked body with a shrill scream of rage, and plunged her knife straight through the dirty corpse-eater’s chest, making it disperse in a puff of rancid black smoke. She turned to the body and fought back a sob. The poor demigod had been ravaged beyond recognition, the only identifying item not f*cked up from the daemon’s attack a golden butterfly necklace around the body’s neck.
“Rest well in the fields of Elysium,” she told the body sadly. Gods, whoever the body was haddied a horrible death. She could only hope that they found peace in Elysium after their brutal death. She set off, the memory of the eurynomos’ victim burning fresh in her mind. Unfortunately, as she fought her way through the massive mob of monsters, she saw more people fall.
There were so many corpses. The once bright green grass was now a muddy brown from all of the blood. She saw so many injuries, as well. Annabeth quickly located Nico, who seemed to be shadow-travelling people out two at a time as others made a protective circle around him. Annabeth recognized Luke (who had a nasty gash on his arm), Lee, and several Apollo kids in the circle around where Nico was vanishing and reappearing every five seconds.
“Annabeth!” Luke called.
“Hey!” Annabeth grinned, ducking under a spartoi and running up to the blond. “What’s going on?”
“Nico’s shadow-travelling people out to a safe place,” Lee explained. “He just took Miranda and Castor-”
“-Did he get Will and Leo?”
“Yeah, the first group he took. Without Bianca here, the process is going slowly, but if we can hold on for a few more minutes-”
Luke’s scream broke the conversation, and the two whirled around to find a ghoul dressed in legionnaire armour standing above Luke, who’d seemed to have collapsed. His shirt- right above his ribs- was slowly turning red. The ghoul smiled at them, revealing yellow, decaying teeth.
Lee and Annabeth screamed at the same time, and Annabeth didn’t remember who was the one to decapitate the monster, but someone did. The last thing she remembered before she dragged Luke into the shadows was Lee’s horrified, worried face.
**
The quintet in the Labyrinth were unaware of what was happening back in camp. They had their own things to focus on. Bianca led the group through a series of tunnels, which grew increasingly dark until it was as dark as Challenger Deep. The tunnels, thank Hades, were too narrow for anything to hide in, so the few monsters they ran into were easy to defeat and didn’t have the numbers to cause mayhem.
Reyna, for one, savoured the quiet darkness. It was almost soothing, and it reminded her of quiet nights with Hylla in Puerto Rico when she was younger, before everything went wrong. She could almost hear the coquí frogs.
Jason loved the dark. Lupa and her pack had raised him in their ways, and so like a wolf, the son of Jupiter was just as skilled in the dark as he was in sunlight. And he loved the shadows.
Bianca was a daughter of Hades. She neither feared the dark nor hated it. She embraced it. She commanded it. The darkness was part of her heritage.
Silena was awkward in the dark. She did not like feeling trapped, whether it be by her mother’s standards or close rock walls. And she didn’t like not being able to tell what came next. It made her feel small and powerless.
Thalia hated the dark. She had too many bad memories spent in caves, or dark houses, or on the streets in the darkness of night. It hid her, yes, but it kept her enemies from sight.
But the five walked on. They walked to the sound of the heartbeats ending at home, of the terror lurking in all their souls. They walked the never-ending maze, looking for the gods who were dwelling in this place. They were looking for Aoide, Arche, Melete, and Mneme.
And soon enough, they would find them. But it was more of them finding them.
**
Luke felt Nico and Annabeth pull him into the shadows, and the last thing he saw before the darkness swallowed him was Lee’s face. His terrified, handsome, face. He closed his eyes and wondered if this was the last time he’d see Lee- again.
