Chapter Text
Percy Jackson hadn’t planned to come back here.
That was the first lie he told himself as he stood barefoot on the New Jersey shoreline, jacket zipped halfway up against the wind, staring out at the Atlantic like it might offer answers if he waited long enough. The second lie was that this was nostalgia. The third was that he’d be fine once he left.
The beach was quieter than he remembered. No boardwalk noise carried on the wind, no kids shrieking as they ran from the cold water, no vendors hawking sunscreen out of season. Just the steady rush and retreat of the waves and the dull gray sky pressing low enough that Percy felt like he could reach up and touch it.
Twenty-one years old. Bachelor’s degree completed. A future he was supposed to be thinking about.
Instead, he was here.
When he’d fought Ares, he’d been eleven and terrified and riding on pure adrenaline. Everything about that day had been too loud, too sharp, too much—godly anger crashing into mortal fear, lightning-bright and overwhelming. He’d almost died here. More than almost. He’d bled here. So had the god of war.
Percy shoved his hands into his pockets and let out a slow breath.
“I know,” he muttered to the ocean. “You don’t have to give me that look.”
The sea didn’t respond the way it usually did. No teasing swell. No familiar, comforting tug. Instead, the waves drew back farther than they should have, leaving a broad stretch of wet sand exposed. The waterline paused there, hesitant, as if waiting for permission to move again.
Percy frowned.
He took a step closer to the surf—and stopped.
The sand beneath his bare feet was warm.
Not the lingering warmth of sun-baked grains. This was deeper, radiating upward in a way that prickled against his skin. Percy shifted his weight, then pressed his foot down harder, like he was checking to see if the sensation was real.
It was.
The warmth pulsed faintly, slow and steady, like a heartbeat.
His stomach tightened.
“Okay,” Percy said quietly. “That’s… not great.”
He crouched, brushing his fingers across the sand. The grains slipped between his knuckles, damp and cold on the surface, but beneath that thin layer—heat. A living heat. Percy swallowed.
He’d felt this before. Not here, not exactly, but in places where something ancient and powerful had sunk its roots deep into the world. Battlefields. Ruins. The spaces gods forgot to clean up after themselves.
This beach had never really been empty.
The memory came back unbidden: golden ichor spraying across the sand, hissing where it struck, Ares roaring in fury as Percy’s blade cut deeper than it should have. Percy had won that fight, somehow. He’d limped away bloody and shaking and very, very aware that he’d survived something that should have killed him.
He’d always assumed the tide erased the rest.
Apparently, the tide had been patient.
The ocean shifted again behind him, waves pulling back farther, exposing even more shoreline. Percy glanced over his shoulder. The water felt… wary. Protective, maybe. Like it was holding its breath.
“That’s not ominous at all,” Percy murmured.
He should leave.
That thought landed solidly and sensibly in his head, which was usually a bad sign. Sensible thoughts rarely stuck around long when Percy was involved. He could call Annabeth. Call Grover. Call literally anyone who wouldn’t default to digging up mysterious, god-infused beach phenomena.
Instead, he planted his hands in the sand.
It gave way easily beneath his fingers. Percy dug slowly at first, half-expecting lightning to strike or some booming divine voice to shout STOP from the heavens. Nothing happened. The wind whipped at his hair. The ocean waited.
He dug faster.
A few inches down, his knuckles brushed something smooth and unyielding.
Percy froze.
Carefully—too carefully for someone who’d once faced down Titans—he brushed the sand aside. A pale, curved surface emerged, faintly glossy despite being buried. Dark red veins traced across it in irregular patterns, pulsing softly when Percy touched them.
The warmth intensified.
Percy sucked in a breath.
“Oh,” he whispered. “Oh, no.”
He cleared more sand away, heart pounding harder with every inch revealed. The object was oval, massive, easily the size of a beach ball, and humming with a low, almost inaudible vibration. The red veins brightened when his shadow fell across it, like it was reacting to his presence.
His presence.
Percy pulled his hand back as if he’d been burned.
“That’s not—” He stopped himself. “No. Nope. Not doing this.”
The sand beneath his knee shifted.
Percy looked down.
A second patch of warmth spread beneath him, then a third, like embers waking beneath the earth. He stared, then laughed—a short, disbelieving sound that carried no humor at all.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
He dug again, faster now, the rational part of his brain frantically trying to catch up. Another egg emerged. Then another, their surfaces brushing against each other beneath the sand, connected by faint threads of heat and energy that made Percy’s skin prickle.
The heartbeat grew louder.
Not just one rhythm. Three. Overlapping, out of sync.
Alive.
Percy sat back on his heels, chest tight, staring at the partially uncovered cluster. The ocean surged forward a few inches, restless, then retreated again.
“Okay,” Percy said, voice hoarse. “Okay. This is… manageable. Probably.”
He did not believe this.
Godly biology was not something demigods were trained for. Monsters, sure. Prophecies, fine. Divine leftovers that incubated for a decade under a public beach? That felt new.
His thoughts raced ahead to the obvious conclusion, and his stomach sank.
Ares.
War gods were not known for their nurturing instincts. Percy had seen what Hera did to children she didn’t want. He’d seen what gods did to demigods they considered inconvenient. Whatever these things were—whatever they would become—Olympus would not be gentle with them.
Percy stared at the eggs, at the faint red-gold glow pulsing beneath their shells.
“They didn’t ask for this,” he murmured.
The nearest egg shifted.
Percy went very still.
The shell didn’t crack—not yet—but the movement was unmistakable, a slow adjustment, like something inside had turned toward him. The warmth spiked, and Percy felt it echo in his chest, answering something old and deep and sea-salted in his blood.
The ocean surged again, waves rolling higher, urgent now.
Percy closed his eyes and dragged a hand down his face.
He should tell someone. He knew that. Annabeth would tell him exactly how stupid this was, in that calm, furious way she had. Grover would panic. Chiron would weigh the political implications and decide what was best “for everyone involved.”
Olympus would decide what was best for Olympus.
Percy looked at the eggs again.
“No,” he said quietly. “Not yet.”
The decision settled in him with uncomfortable ease. He didn’t know what these creatures were. He didn’t know what they would become. But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:
If Ares found them now, they wouldn’t live long enough to choose anything at all.
Percy stood, brushing sand from his hands, pulse still racing.
“Okay,” he told the eggs, the ocean, the sky. “We’re going to… figure something out.”
The warmth pulsed again, steady and strong.
Behind him, the sea finally surged forward, reclaiming the exposed sand—but it stopped just short of the buried cluster, leaving a wide, dry circle around them.
Like a boundary.
Like protection.
Percy swallowed.
“Yeah,” he said faintly. “I was afraid you’d do that.”
He stared down at the sand, already mentally calculating how fast he could dig, how quickly he could get help without drawing attention, how much trouble this was going to be.
He hadn’t planned to come back here.
But the gods, apparently, weren’t finished with this beach.
And neither was he.