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It’s only fitting that the fire burns blue. Everything feeding it is.
There’s a clearing in the forest that’s off-limits to all campers.
The satyrs mention a curse. The nymphs whisper about eternal slumber. The dryads speak of decay. Chiron doesn’t talk about it at all, save warning the children under his care away with a sad smile and old eyes.
But if you ask Tamati Nīkau, the young son of Demeter will glance around nervously, to make sure Chiron is not nearby to scold him for his secret adventure, and then he will speak of a sleeping boy.
He is beautiful. The light passing through the trees illuminates wavy black hair with undertones of blue and silver. His eyes are closed, and his face is both serene and severe. It is easy to imagine this boy commanding armies, Tamati whispers, with his sharp angles and soft face. It is easy to imagine legions bowing to the will of a boy with such beauty and presence.
His shirt—faded and sun-bleached, but recognizably a Camp tee with an outdated design—declares him a cabin counsellor. It was difficult to tell, Tamati will say, through the vines crawling over him. Through the moss creeping over the hem, and the flowers cushioning him. In one hand is a pen. In the other, an old hat. He is wearing two leather Camp necklaces.
His face is sleeping; it is tan and flushed and he must have been asleep for a long time, because his lips are dry. But after looking again at his arms, Tamati had realized they were grey. That was when he felt the first pinpricks of fear, when he remembered the nature spirits’ tales.
Lastly, Tamati will pause. “I do not think the sleeping boy was breathing.”
The shroud is mesmerizing; a perfect picture of light on water, shimmering waves wrapping around a soft golden trident.
It is surrounded by tokens: pictures with friends and loved ones, both posing for the camera and completely unaware of its presence; trinkets forged and found and gifted and loved, all with some connection to the lost hero; flowers, picked for their mixed colors of cerulean and indigo and violet, reminiscent of the darkest parts of the sea.
It is burning, and the fire is blue.
There is a mother weeping before it, and in her arms are two similarly grieving best friends. One of her hands idly combs through the hair of a love left unrealized. The other curls around the horns of a steadfast brother.
Slowly—slowly enough for the crowd amassed in mourning to dwindle and shrink until only the closest friends remain—ever so slowly, the shroud burns away. The tokens follow it, crackling and floating up as cinders and sparks and soot and ashes.
It should be over.
Everything should have burned.
A body remains, untouched.
The Curse of the Styx does not seem like a curse at first glance.
Total invulnerability in battle, save one easily defensible point on the body? Armor could cover what Styx would not. The river of broken dreams and mortal choices and immortal oaths gives a gift, surely.
But one is not always at war. One does not fight in battle after unceasing battle. Life holds softer things as well: love and family, worship and praise, stories and song. This is the cost of invulnerability. This is what Styx takes in return. In exchange for power nigh undefeatable, Styx takes peace.
Where there is not battle, there is slumber. Fight, kill, watch your brothers-in-arms fall. Stumble home, drained and mourning and unharmed. Gaze upon those you love, perhaps; remind yourself why you have done this, what you are fighting to protect (what Styx has taken from you). And then fall yourself, to an enemy no more menacing than your dreams.
When you wake, it will be time for battle again.
The cruelest thing was, Percy Jackson had not been stabbed in the back.
Oh, when Annabeth had realized that this boy, this beautiful, loyal, insufferably trusting boy, would only ever die if someone behind him—someone he was protecting, someone he trusted, someone he would willingly turn his back to—took advantage of his trust and good heart to stab him in the back…oh, her heart had ached.
It was always going to be him, wasn’t it, taking on the burden of the Great Prophecy? Because while Thalia was kind, she was guarded and unforgiving and had a thirst for power that might have doomed the world. Because while Nico was powerful, he held grudges and stayed aloof and he would never have gotten a chance, anyway, unless Percy died first.
Percy had heard the prophecy and grabbed hold of it, claimed it as his, to protect Nico from it.
Maybe, Annabeth surmised, Nico would have been the one to stab him in the back. Percy let him get the closest, trusted him the most deliberately. Every interaction with Nico had been tainted with grief and blame and the memory of a promise unfulfilled.
That would have been cruel.
But no, Percy’s end was kinder, in a way—in that he had not been betrayed to his death.
But his death was cruel to those who loved him. Those who knew he was invulnerable and hoped with everything in them that he would escape fate and the prophecy alive because of it.
Percy was invulnerable. He would not fall in battle. But the true form of a Titan exploding outward from its irreparably damaged vessel, searching for something to host it before it curled in on itself and died was not a physical injury, and a mortal mind—no matter how strong—could not handle the strain.
Chiron counted years. Then he counted decades. Then he counted centuries.
Perhaps if Percy had been injured—if his mortal point, his weak spot, had been broken—he would have decomposed. As it was, Chiron counted passing time in stages.
The first stage was a body with no life, refusing to die. After Percy’s funeral, they laid him to rest in a ring of open space. Juniper’s tree stood at the edge, and she promised to watch over him always. And that was all they could do. Sally returned to the mortal world her son had died protecting, Annabeth threw herself into training and schooling and architecture, and Grover campaigned for the Wild.
When Tamati Nīkau discovers the sleeping boy, the second stage is underway. Slowly, Percy loses his color. His clothes fade as does his skin, tan fading into a pale, anemic white, until that too faded to grey. Tamati Nīkau has long since grown and died by the time the desaturation reaches Percy’s face.
The third stage branches out from a point on Percy Jackson’s back. The grey, dead color…changes. Chiron does not dare touch the fallen hero; the grey of his skin blooms and swirls until it resembles, in all but the quick, violent churning, the surface of the River Styx. The tips of his fingers, in the right light, aren’t there anymore. They are faded and translucent in the way the souls of the dead are.
It creeps. Percy’s hands and feet are gone the next time a demigod stumbles on his clearing. They do not stay and admire him like Tamati had. They freeze, and stare, and then run. Rumors of ghosts float around for nearly a decade afterward.
Chiron watches as his student’s body finally fades in full. It is a hot summer afternoon, and should Chiron check a calendar, it would be hundreds of years to the day that Percy Jackson had died. One moment, he is there, so faded and washed out that Chiron might simply be looking at a memory. The next, Juniper’s clearing is empty.
He is the last one left to witness as the cruel Lady Styx finally allows Percy Jackson rest.