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I, Annabeth Chase, didn’t ask to be born. I didn’t even need to be born! My mother is a virgin goddess! And yet, here I am, running through yet another part of the Labyrinth that refuses to die and apparently has a vendetta against me, personally.
Annabeth’s thoughts were interrupted by Percy’s scream as he slashed at another vine that had erupted out of the wall in his direction. “Stupid plant monsters!” he yelled. “I just wanted a dinner date!”
They were trapped in a corridor made of earth and stone with no visible doors at either end of the hallway. This was especially interesting because they had started out in a large room with no exits. Annabeth and Percy had both been assured that this room was safe and that no one had vanished since it had shown up in Camp Half-Blood two months ago.
But, apparently, two of the most powerful halfbloods in centuries were just too tantalizing to pass up. Annabeth sighed, cursing her fortunes once again, and took out her knife. “Hold on!” she shouted to Percy who was being held against the wall by the vines.
“To what?!” he called back. Riptide had been wrenched out of his hand and was lying against the wall on the far side of the corridor, and Annabeth could see the vines starting to tighten around him.
“Just hold on!” she repeated. Looking around the corridor she could see carvings along the top of the wall. Most of them were grapevines but some were stars and an amphora would show up every now and then.
Grapevines and amphoras. Both of those have a connection to wine-making. Annabeth slashed away a vine that was creeping towards her shoe and started sawing at the vine around Percy’s ribcage. Dionysus? But what does he have to do with stars? The tendril she was cutting through broke with a woody snapping noise and Percy lunged towards Riptide. Annabeth started on the vine restraining his ankles. Did Dionysus turn anyone into stars? Maybe someone close to him?
“There!” Percy pointed above their heads as the last of the vines gave way. There, above their heads, was a narrow tunnel that Annabeth knew hadn’t been there a minute ago.
“How do you want to do this?” Annabeth called, moving back to back with Percy as more plants crawled through the walls.
“Boost me up,” Percy said, “and then I’ll pull you up.”
Annabeth nodded, kneeling on one knee on the cold dirt. Percy stepped on her thigh and in one quick move she stood up, boosting him towards the ceiling. Above her head, there was a metallic sound, probably Riptide being wedged into the wall as a handhold, and then Percy’s voice sounded far away.
“It’s okay! It opens up here!”
A hand was lowered and Annabeth jumped to catch it. For one moment she hung in the air with only Percy to support her. The terrible sensation of falling and despair and awful, torturous thirst flooded her brain and for a moment she forgot to breathe, but then Percy was hoisting her up and she got a grip on Riptide’s handle in the wall.
“Thanks,” she said, out of breath not from the escape but from the memories. Standing in Tartarus, knowing that the ground under her feet was a living body, knowing that it was capable of hate and wanted her dead more than anything else in her existence ever had, knowing the hatred that had made her run away from home as a child was nothing compared to this malevolence by a creature older than time itself -
“Annabeth?”
Percy’s voice. Percy. He had been the one who had never given up, who had stayed with her even when the logical choice had been to let her fall alone and deny Gaia her prize.
“Percy,” she whispered, eyes shut tight.
“I’m here,” he reassured her, rocking her tightly, the smell of salt and seawater still faint on his shirt through all the dirt and vine residue it had accumulated in the past hour.
A nnabeth took a deep breath. We’re here, we’re alive, everyone’s safe. It had become a sort of mantra for her after the war. We’re here, we’re alive, everyone’s safe. After both wars. We’re here, we’re alive, everyone’s safe. She took another deep breath. “All right, how do we get out of here?” she asked.
Percy unwrapped his arms from around her, leaning back to look her in the eye. “Well, in between trying to free myself from the world’s friendliest Venus flytrap, I did hear you say something about the carvings on the ceiling.”
Annabeth nodded. Grapevines, stars, a connection to Dionysus. “I think I know what we have to do,” she said. Standing up, she checked for her weapons, her hat, and her emergency supply of nectar and ambrosia. Finding it was all there, she pointed to a set of stairs that had appeared at the end of the room they were in. “We need to go up.”
Once they were trekking up the stairs, Annabeth noticed more grapevines carved into the walls, these ones interspersed with Dionysus’ thyrsus. I’m definitely right.
“So,” Percy interrupted her, “are you going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What you’re thinking about. You have that “I’m smarter than everyone else” look in your eyes.”
Annabeth scoffed. “I don’t have a look .”
“You totally do!” Percy said. “It’s when you know something about mythology or whatever and everyone else is trying to figure it out.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “I think it’s super cute,” he whispered into her ear.
Annabeth could feel her face getting hot. “Okay, fine,” she said with a laugh. I did figure something out while you were being attacked by vines.”
“Lay it on me.”
“Ampelos was a satyr that was friends with Dionysus when they were young, before Dionysus was made part of the Olympian Council. One day when they were spending time together, Ampelos climbed up a tree to pick a cluster of grapes. He fell and, as he was dying, Dionysus changed him into a constellation.”
Percy frowned. “The version I heard was that Dionysus made the first wine from his blood after changing him into a grapevine.”
Annabeth nodded. “Myths change over time. They’re not a fixed, steady, form.” She squinted up the staircase, trying to see if she could spot any light above them. “Anyway, I think Ampelos might have something to do with those vines.”
“Okay,” Percy said with a nod. “But why attack us? We weren’t doing anything!”
“I think,” Annabeth said slowly, “it’s because we’re known for keeping promises. The Seven, I mean.” She paused, trying to add up the pieces in a way that made sense. It was almost visible, like an ancient manuscript that had a few untranslated words left to puzzle over. “I think,” she repeated, “Ampelos wants to see the stars and his constellation again.”
Percy hummed in agreement. “And so attacking us was the best way to do that?”
“It got our attention,” Annabeth pointed out.
“So we get out of here,” Percy mused, “and then we what? Collapse this section of the Labyrinth? Will that even work?”
Annabeth reached out and traced one of the carvings running along the wall beside her. “I think we don’t need to collapse the Labyrinth,” she said. “We just need to open it up to the stars.”
“Okay, but you’re missing something, Wise Girl.” Percy’s tone was worried and when Annabeth looked over at him, she saw old memories in his eyes. “I can’t stop once I start – start...” He trailed off, but Annabeth knew what he was talking about.
Mt. St. Helens. Geryon’s stables.
She stopped walking up the staircase a step above Percy and put her hand on his arm. “It’s okay,” she reassured him. “I’ll be right beside you.”
This time it was her turn to be the comforter. Percy buried his face in her shirt, shoulders shaking. She kept murmuring reassuring words to him about how it would be all right, he wouldn’t be alone, he wouldn’t need to play saviour all by himself, how she would be right there to help him see it through to the end.
“I literally went through Tartarus with you, Seaweed Brain,” she joked, the light tone of her words taking the edge off of them. “I’ll be here with you no matter what.”
Percy mumbled something into her shirt that might have been “thanks” and stood up. Taking a deep breath, he reached out and took her hand. Together, they continued up the staircase.
“So,” Percy said after another indeterminable period of time, “on a scale of one to “I got sent on a godly fetch quest” how does this date rank?”
Annabeth pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “Dinner date turned into a Labyrinth escape room? I’d give it a solid five.”
“Five?!”
“The search for Hermes’ caduceus ended with us in Paris!”
“You’re right,” Percy conceded. “Trekking through the Labyrinth doesn’t have quite the same atmosphere.”
Annabeth didn’t have time to think of a reply before they were approaching the top of the stairs. The square of light widened into an opening beside the far end of the strawberry fields. It was evening, just after the stars were starting to light up the night sky.
We must have been gone for at least six hours, Annabeth calculated. At that realization, her knees felt the effort of climbing all those stairs, and she sat down abruptly in the strawberry bed. Percy joined her, and they sat for a moment, staring up at the sky and breathing in the fresh air.
“Okay, are you ready?” Annabeth asked finally.
“I think so,” Percy replied. He buried his hands in the soil and Annabeth put hers over top of them, interlocking their fingers.
“You’re going to need to identify the weak spots, the structures that hold up the ceiling,” she instructed him. “There should be one or two load-bearing spots that will open up the top of the Labyrinth with crumbling all of it.”
Percy nodded. “Okay.” He concentrated for a moment and then relaxed suddenly. “What does that feel like?”
Annabeth froze. “Um, so you know what a load-bearing pillar is, right?”
“Yeah, it’s like in Jenga when you remove that one piece and the rest collapses.”
“Exactly. So, if you try and think about this like Jenga, then you need to find the one area to break without the rest of it going under.”
Percy nodded, closing his eyes. There was the Sound not that far away from them and while Percy was no geomancer he was the son of the Earthshaker. Annabeth held his hand and worked on focusing her breathing beside him.
About two hundred feet away, the earth began to rumble. Grass, trees, and a single row of strawberries shook and trembled before slowly sliding into a crevasse that was opening in the ground. Percy dug his hands further into the dirt for a moment before letting out a last breath and relaxing entirely. The miniature earthquake stopped, and Annabeth could see that the corridor they had been dropped into earlier that day was now exposed to the night sky.
“Good job,” she whispered, pulling him in for a kiss. She could feel the relief in his muscles when he kissed back, and when he pulled away he laughed.
“I did it!” he said joyfully, flopping back into the strawberry plants. Annabeth joined him and they lay there watching the constellations appear above the horizon.
“Hey,” Percy said after a moment, “is that one new?”
Annabeth looked. Next to the Huntress, there was a tiny constellation. Only a few stars tall and two wide, it looked like a satyr prancing through the night.
“You did it,” Annabeth said, bittersweet at the sight of Dionysus’ long-lost friend.
“We did it,” Percy corrected her, pulling her in for another, longer, kiss.