Chapter Text
*
Chapter 1: A Mother’s Love
He knows.
The words rang in Sally Jackson’s mind like a death knell.
She didn’t know how he had found out. She hadn’t been foolish. She hadn’t spoken the truth aloud, hadn’t written it down, hadn’t even allowed herself to think it too clearly. But gods did not need certainty the way mortals did. Suspicion was often enough.
And now that suspicion had teeth.
Sally moved quickly, her hands shaking only slightly as she packed. Two backpacks lay open on the bed, their contents spilling and shifting as she tried to make impossible choices. What mattered most? What could be left behind? She stuffed her life savings into one – years of scrimping and saving, tucked into envelopes and folded tight. The other held clothes, toiletries, anything she thought Percy might need if they had to disappear completely – if they even got the chance.
She was working against the Fates themselves. She knew that. She wasn’t arrogant enough to believe she could truly win. But hopeless did not mean optional. A glance toward the crib in the corner of the room hardened her resolve.
The crib was old, second-hand, its blue paint chipped and scratched. She had bought it from a Salvation Army down the road, smiling apologetically as if she needed to justify loving something imperfect. Inside, Percy slept, sprawled out in a way that made it clear he was already too big for it. His dark curls fell into his eyes, lashes resting against soft cheeks, one small hand clutched tightly around his stuffed horse – bright blue and a little threadbare, but beloved.
Her chest ached.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure to whom.
At her hip rested the dagger.
Sally’s fingers brushed the hilt instinctively, grounding herself. Adamantine – divine metal, sharp enough to draw even a god’s blood. The blade shimmered faintly, catching the dim light of the apartment. The hilt, wrapped in sea monster leather, was worn smooth from years of being held, reassured over.
Her thumb traced the engraving: ἔλεος.
Mercy.
A bitter irony.
Poseidon had given it to her when he left, knowing he could not stay. A parting gift. A promise he couldn’t keep, and a protection she might never get to use.
She swallowed, memories threatening to rise – and then the floorboards creaked.
He’s here.
Sally froze.
“What are you doing?”
The voice came from behind her, deep and resonant, vibrating through the room like distant thunder. Sally spun around, heart hammering, and found herself staring up at a man who seemed to command the very air around him.
He towered over her, broad-shouldered and imposing. His dark hair was streaked with grey, curling around his shoulders, and his beard was neatly trimmed – controlled, deliberate. He wore a dark blue pinstriped suit, immaculate and out of place in her small apartment. His eyes were electric blue, glowing faintly, sparks dancing within them as his expression darkened.
A storm, contained in human form.
“Are you attempting to run away from Fate, Sally Jackson?” The man asked.
Sally straightened slowly, spine rigid, fear coiling tight in her chest – but she refused to let it show. She lifted her chin and sneered. “No more than you are.”
One of his brows arched. “You know,” he said mildly, “I never understood why Poseidon chose you. Too stubborn. Too brash. Never listens.” His gaze slid past her, dismissive – and landed on the crib. “Hardly worth breaking an oath for you – or for that.”
The gesture was casual. Cruel, almost.
Sally moved without thinking, stepping in front of the crib as though her body alone could shield her son. “Percy is worth more than anything,” she snapped. “He’s my son. And I don’t care what you say – I love him with everything I have.” Her voice shook, but she didn’t stop. “But I suppose a god wouldn’t understand that,” she continued coldly. “Would they, Zeus?”
Behind her, Percy shifted in his sleep, hugging his blue horse closer.
And Sally knew – with a clarity that hurt – that no matter what came next, she would never stop fighting for him. Even if it cost her everything.
Anger crossed Zeus’s expression so swiftly, so clearly and harshly, that Sally flinched despite herself. She had learned, long ago, that angering the gods was never safe – not even the ones who smiled, not even the ones who claimed justice or order. Least of all him. The air seemed to thicken, pressure building until her ears rang. Somewhere beyond the apartment walls, thunder rolled low and ominous, like a warning growl.
Zeus’s eyes glowed, electric and merciless.
“I didn’t expect kind words from you,” he said coldly. “You knew this was coming. I gave you four years with him – four years to prepare.” His lip curled. “But you can’t hold on any longer. He cannot reach his sixteenth birthday. He must go before he becomes a problem.”
The words hit like blows.
Sally didn’t answer. She turned away from him instead, hands shaking as she went back to the bed. The zipper on one of the backpacks snagged, and she bit back a frustrated sound as she forced it shut. Her movements were fast but careful – measured. Quiet. Percy didn’t know. He was only four. All he knew was that they were leaving tonight, that Mama had told him to keep his horse close and not ask questions. Sally had told herself it was the right choice – that a child that young didn’t need fear added to his already fragile world. But as she felt the weight of Zeus’s gaze burning into her back, doubt clawed at her ribs.
Was I wrong?
A harsh grip closed around her forearm.
Sally gasped and yanked away, fury flashing through her fear. “Don’t touch me,” she hissed, instinctively lowering her voice. “You’ll wake him.” She rounded on Zeus, eyes blazing. “Gods aren’t supposed to intervene directly. If you’re so eager to punish Poseidon for breaking an oath, then congratulations – you’re a hypocrite. You break your own rules all the time.” Her mouth twisted. “Or would your own demigod child like to attest to that?”
For a heartbeat, the room went deadly still. Then Zeus’s expression darkened into something truly frightening. “Don’t push me,” he warned. “Or you’ll be dying tonight, too.”
Sally stood her ground. She rose to her feet and jabbed a finger into his chest, right over his immaculate suit. “You wouldn’t dare.”
The lie tasted bitter. She knew better. But fear did not mean surrender.
Zeus moved faster than she could react.
His hand clamped around her arm and yanked her close, crushing the breath from her lungs. With his other hand, he reached toward the crib.
Outside, the storm exploded.
Lightning split the sky, flooding the room with blinding white light. The apartment shook violently, the walls groaning in protest. The floor beneath them shuddered – and then cracked. A thin fissure split the hardwood beneath the crib.
“No!” Sally screamed.
The crack widened with a sound like tearing bone. The crib lurched, one leg sinking as the wood splintered apart, revealing a dark, endless chasm beneath. The building itself seemed to scream. Sally thrashed against Zeus’s grip, pounding her fists against his chest, tears blinding her. “No – leave him alone! Please!”
But she was mortal and he was a god. Her strength meant nothing.
Percy woke to the sound of her voice.
He sat up in the crib, small and disoriented, clutching his blue horse to his chest. His green eyes widened as he took in the shaking room, the lightning, the towering stranger holding his mother.
“Mama?” He called, his voice thin with fear.
Something in Sally broke.
Zeus clenched his fist. The crib teetered, caught precariously in the widening.
Sally didn’t think. She didn’t even breathe. Her hand flew to her hip, to familiar leather. Metal flashed. She twisted in Zeus’s grip and slashed upward with every ounce of strength she had.
The blade cut true.
Zeus roared, stumbling back as golden ichor splattered across his pristine suit, streaking from temple to jaw. The smell of ozone and metal filled the air.
He released her and Sally ran.
She lunged for the crib, ignoring the yawning void beneath it, grabbed Percy, and crushed him to her chest. He screamed, burying his face against her shoulder as she slung one backpack over her back with shaking hands. She turned for the door.
“No!” Zeus bellowed.
The fissure surged forward like a living thing. The floor vanished beneath her feet, and Sally fell – twisting instinctively, curling around Percy to shield him as they hit the ground hard. Pain exploded up her spine. She scrambled back, pressing herself against the wall as Zeus loomed over them, ichor dripping steadily from the cut across his face. Gold stained the ruined floor.
“I gave you a chance,” he rumbled. “Now you will vanish with him.”
The crack roared like a beast unchained.
The floor split wide.
Sally screamed as the ground gave way beneath her, clutching Percy so tightly she feared she might hurt him. She reached upward, fingers grasping at empty air, at walls that were already pulling away. Darkness swallowed them whole. And Sally fell, holding her son, with nothing left but love and defiance.
*
Mortals would puzzle over the incident for months.
A freak earthquake, localised and inexplicable, had torn through a quiet stretch of lower Manhattan in the dead of night. The ground had split open without warning, swallowing nearly half of an aging apartment building before sealing itself just as abruptly. Structural engineers would later argue over fault lines that should not have existed. Seismologists would file reports full of question marks.
Miraculously, there were no confirmed fatalities.
Unfortunately, two people remained unaccounted for.
Sallyanne Jackson, age twenty-four, and her son, Perseus Jackson, age four, were listed as missing. Their apartment had been among those destroyed. Neighbours reported hearing shouting, thunder, and what some described as an explosion shortly before the collapse, though those statements were quietly dismissed as panic-induced exaggeration.
First responders worked through the night.
Search-and-rescue teams combed the wreckage for hours, then days. Dogs were brought in. Thermal imaging was used. At one point, the search shifted from hopeful to grim – from survivors to remains. But there were no bodies. No blood. No personal effects beyond what had already been catalogued from the debris.
It was as though Sallyanne Jackson and her son had simply ceased to exist.
The case lingered.
Missing persons flyers were printed and posted across the city, then slowly peeled away by weather and time. Leads dried up. Tips led nowhere. The earthquake was ruled an anomaly, the sinkhole an unfortunate convergence of circumstances.
Eventually, the files were closed.
Little did anyone know, the mother and child would never be found – not in this world, and not by mortal hands.
*
Sally did not want to die.
The thought clawed at her with every breath she couldn’t quite take, with every scream the wind ripped from her throat. She wasn’t ready – not for this, not now. Death could take her eventually, she supposed, as it took all mortals in the end, but it could not take him. Not when Percy was still in her arms, warm and alive and terrified. She clutched her son to her chest, curling her body around his as though she could shield him from the fall itself. Percy cried into her shoulder, his small hands tangled in her shirt, his voice hoarse and breaking. He didn’t understand. How could he? One moment he had been asleep in his crib, safe, and the next the world had torn open beneath him.
They fell.
Or perhaps they had already died, and this was what came after. Time had lost all meaning in the dark. Sally couldn’t tell how long they had been falling – seconds, minutes, an eternity. The pack on her back dragged at her shoulders like an anchor, and the wind howled around them, tearing at her hair, burning her skin, filling her ears until there was nothing but the roar of it.
Percy’s crying had not stopped, but it was weakening, fraying at the edges. He was wearing himself out. The thought broke something in her.
Then, abruptly, the darkness changed.
The blackness thinned, like a curtain pulled back just enough to let in light – not light as she knew it, but a sickly, blood-red glow that soaked into everything. The air grew warmer, heavy and foul, reeking of smoke and rot and something metallic. It felt wrong to breathe it, but she had no choice.
Below them, the abyss revealed itself.
A vast cavern stretched out in all directions, impossibly large, jagged and cruel. A glittering black ribbon wound through the landscape far beneath them – a river, she realised dimly, though it looked nothing like water. The chasm yawned open wider than her mind could comprehend, vast enough to swallow cities, states, whole worlds.
Sally’s breath hitched. Her chest tightened.
This wasn’t just death.
This was punishment.
Her heart began to race, panic flooding her veins. How was she supposed to survive this? How was she supposed to protect Percy when there was nowhere to run, nowhere to land?
The answer came with brutal clarity.
She wasn’t.
She was only human. She couldn’t fly. She couldn’t call storms or command the earth. Whether they struck jagged stone or that terrible river below, the fall would kill her. It would kill them both.
This was the end.
Grief washed over her in a suffocating wave – grief for the life she had wanted for Percy, for the birthdays she would never see, the stories she wouldn’t get to tell him, the future stolen from them before it had a chance to begin. It felt unbearably unfair, a cruelty so vast it hollowed her out.
Sally swallowed hard and blinked away her tears.
She tightened her hold on Percy, pressing him close, and slowly his sobs began to quiet. He sniffled, his small body trembling, and she shifted just enough to look at him. His face was red and streaked with tears, his nose running, his green eyes wide with fear.
Her beautiful boy.
She memorised him in that moment – the curve of his cheek, the way his dark hair fell into his eyes, the warmth of him against her. She pressed his head gently into the crook of her neck, shielding his face from the sight below.
If this was the end, then he would not face it alone.
Her voice shook, but she forced it steady as she whispered into his hair, over and over, like a promise she could still keep.
“I love you so much, Percy.”
And she held on.
*
Damasen began his day as he had begun every day for over a thousand years.
He rose from the sheepskin cot in his hut while the swamp groaned awake around him – the hiss of poisonous vapours leaking from the ground, the distant shrieks of things being born wrong, the ever-present grinding of glass beneath shifting earth. Time did not pass in Tartarus the way it did in the mortal world, but Damasen marked it anyway by routine. Routine was survival. Routine was sanity.
First came the drakon.
The Maeonian beast tore through the edge of the swamp on thunderous limbs, its scales blackened and scarred from countless deaths and rebirths. Fire and venom followed it like a promise. Damasen met it bare-handed, as always. There was no honour in the fight – only inevitability. Claws tore into his flesh, poison burned through his veins, and his own blood soaked into the glassy mud. He crushed its skull against the earth and wrenched its spine until it snapped with a sound like a tree splitting.
The drakon dissolved into ash and ichor, already reforming somewhere deeper in the Pit.
Damasen healed slowly, standing knee-deep in the swamp while the pain ebbed. When his skin knit itself back together, he exhaled and prepared to return to his routine.
But instead of heading back to his hut, he turned toward the River Cocytus.
The choice surprised even him.
The Cocytus was not a river Damasen lingered near. Its waters carried the cries of the damned – sorrow made liquid, misery given voice. To wade into it was to drown in despair, even for a giant born of Tartarus itself. Yet something tugged at him, faint but insistent, like a wrong note in the world.
So, he walked.
The banks of the Cocytus glittered beneath his feet, a mosaic of broken glass formed from centuries of shattered souls. Damasen bent as he walked, absently picking through the fragments. Blue and green pieces caught his eye, smooth at the edges from endless erosion. He rolled them between his fingers, thoughtful. Wind chimes, perhaps. Something small and pointless and almost beautiful. He slipped the shards into his drakon-leather bag and continued on.
He was nearly ready to turn back – mildly disappointed by the lack of interruption – when movement caught his eye. Something floated along the river’s surface.
Damasen stopped.
At first, he thought it was debris. Then he saw the dark curls of hair, the pale flash of skin. A person. Mortal, by the look of them. The only thing keeping the body afloat was a bag strapped to their back, bobbing stubbornly against the river’s pull.
Damasen swore under his breath.
Against every lesson Tartarus had beaten into him, he moved.
He did not step into the river – even giants were not immune to the Cocytus’ influence. Instead, he hurried along the bank until he was close enough. Kneeling among the glass, his drakon-leather trousers shielding his skin, he reached out and lifted the body from the water with ease.
She was light. Fragile.
Only then did he realise, she was not alone.
Cradled against her chest was a small child, barely more than a toddler. Both were limp, unmoving, soaked through with river water.
“Damn it,” Damasen muttered.
He set his bag down and laid the woman atop it, sparing her skin from the glass. His fingers pressed carefully at her neck. Nothing. No pulse. No breath. Death clung to her like frost. Yet even in death, her arms were locked tight around her child. It took effort – far more than Damasen expected – to pry the child free. He checked the small neck with reverent care.
A pulse.
Weak. Fragile. But there.
Damasen froze.
Why the child lived when the woman did not made no sense, unless …
He leaned down and inhaled.
Saltwater.
Not the bitter rot of Tartarus’ seas, but something clean. Open. The memory of wind and waves. Beneath it, faint but unmistakable, was something else. Something divine.
“By the Pit …” Damasen whispered.
A demigod.
The scent was muted, drowned beneath Tartarus’ stench, but it was there all the same. The sweetness of it struck something deep and buried inside him, something he had thought long dead.
He sat back on his heels, staring down at the child.
It would be mercy to kill him. No mortal survived Tartarus. A demigod child would draw monsters like blood in water. Ending it now would be painless. Quick. Kind. But Damasen’s hands did not move. He looked at the child’s small face, slack with exhaustion, and felt something dangerous spark to life in his chest – something he had been punished for once before.
Compassion.
With a heavy sigh, he gathered the woman’s body in one hand and the child in the other and turned back toward the swamp. He would bury the mother with care. And the child …
The child would live.
For as long as Damasen could make it so.
Let Tartarus rage. Let his parents watch and seethe. He had disappointed them once for loving mortals, and he would do it again.
This time, he would not stop, the consequences be damned.
*