Chapter Text
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The life of Hermes had always presented him with interesting twists at full speed. Starting from his birth, which was miraculous in its essence, his extraordinary acquaintance with his older brother, who nearly killed him for stealing the cattle and because he supposedly “dared” to imitate the scent of Zeus’s sons, and ending with him becoming Dad’s messenger. However, this time, this drift was unusual in its lack of cause: Hermes could swear by his winged sandals that he was not the reason for this situation.
The day before it, he had a remarkably wonderful day. In the morning, he visited Pan, who was playing some version of those ball games with Dionysus. During breakfast, he crossed paths with his sister Athena and his mother, after which he was forcibly combed, and his feathers were brought into… as his mother put it, a “decent state.” After a series of lectures from his sister and Apollo, who had joined her. Of course, his brother himself needed to take care of his feathers: they were black, like those of any of his ravens, and uncombed, careless black feathers against the backdrop of his blondish-red hair gave him the appearance of a disheveled chicken. But Hermes’ feathers mostly blended in with his curly hair, and when smoothed out, they looked, to say the least, strange.
Closer to noon, these feathered fiends deigned to let him go, and he hurried to his father. In a more or less decent mood. What improved it was the fact that throughout the day, he had not split once accidentally, which usually happened regularly. One moment you’re chatting with your father, and bam — you’re in Delphi, or, what was even more repulsive, when you finally get where you need to go during a translocation, then suddenly either you return back, or you scatter from the overload, splitting equally among your other incarnations, which were doing something useful. Through experiments, it was established that three was the optimal number of incarnations, and if he gathered himself into one, he would rather quickly start to “flicker,” becoming a kind of ghost-like being unable to hold not just a goblet, but even a papyrus sheet in his hands.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to bother with those papers today. At his father’s request, he dashed to Corinth to his uncle with an invitation to the evening feast and returned to Olympus, where he gossiped with nymphs and the son himself right up until the feast itself, which he, of course, attended, and stayed there until its very end after sunset. Having said goodbye to everyone, he went to his chambers, where he fell asleep as usual in his beautiful room overlooking the pristine domains of his son. He fell asleep, as usual, on the balcony (despite the fact that this threatened a reprimand from Aunt Hestia about sleeping on something hard) and after feeding George and Martha some wonderful colors in a marinade.
And now he woke up here. In this unknown place between two brick walls, which rose high enough to stress Dad out, but not high enough to anger him. Judging by the position of his body, his throbbing head, the dent at a height of about a hundred cubits up, and the terracotta dust in his hair, he could confidently state that, apparently, he had passed out during a flight and, having crashed into this strange wall (he was ABSOLUTELY sure that there was no structure like this in the vicinity of Olympus, nor was one ever planned), had lost consciousness and lay, um, that is to say, slept here until dawn. And he was sure the flight was not during somnambulism; although he often suffered from moon madness, he had never once during his night-time sleepwalking thought to leave Olympus, much less been able to strap on his sandals or take the caduceus.
But here he was, amidst abnormally large walls, painted near the ground with some kind of Hades-ishly nuclear-colored squiggles, layered one on top of another. At the bottom stood a gray cylinder with a lid, and next to it were several cubes made of solid papyrus. George and Martha were evidently asleep, and not wanting to wake his insolent snakes, Hermes decided to exit these walls. Upon a quick inspection, it became clear that he was approximately in the center of the structure. Looking in both directions, to the left he found a wall, but to the right, there was sunlight and some noise that was clearly beckoning him. By his senses, there were definitely mortals there, and they were definitely haggling… Though they were doing it strangely, as if they weren’t even arguing about the price.
Stepping out onto the street, sunlight struck his eyes, and then a cacophony of sounds and smells hit his ears. Some metal boxes, like carriages without horses, music. By the gods, it was calmer at Dionysus’s bacchanals. Horrifying. Smoky, greasy, loud – that’s how he would describe this place… In the name of the Fates, where was he? He waved off a dog snarling at him and tried to concentrate on his senses. It was disgusting. It felt like he’d been hit on the head with a club; he even thought he might follow his father’s example and have another Athena, only smaller, spring from his head. His head was simply splitting. It wasn’t that he had few domains of influence, but they seemed so vast, and it seemed even new ones had been added. So much information flashed through his mind, as if someone had copied the entire Library of Alexandria into one long scroll and was now scrolling it through Hermes’ brain at a frenzied speed, blurring the letters. It was VERY unpleasant.
He definitely needed to find Dad, or at least Apollo, to relieve him of this migraine. Such side effects of existence usually concerned Athena, not him. Something was wrong. Definitely… A sense of divinity emanated from the north. He turned his head towards where Olympus should be by his senses, and froze. Amidst a stone labyrinth with glazed holes, over a sudden field of rampant trees, stood a tower. And what a tower: its spire pierced Dad’s domains like an arrow of Artemis – aimed at careless men. Oh, he did not like this one bit. This was definitely not Dion, which had been located at the foot of Olympus for a thousand years already. Yet in this tower, which pierced the sky, Olympus was definitely located. How could it be this tall and not be Olympus? Father would have destroyed this structure if he didn’t like it or if it wasn’t advantageous.
Either way, he needed to get there. Doing so with a migraine that made his vision darken was quite a trial, and the fact that neither Martha nor George responded was starting to worry him. However, he soon discovered that he couldn’t teleport as usual, and the path through this strange labyrinth was taking a considerable amount of time. He never thought that a distance of four and a half Delphic stadia could be so hard to traverse, even without any visible threat, and Hermes didn’t want to offend what was apparently in his domain (?) Yet… Yet. Those metal carriages were simply unbearable. They squealed disgustingly, beeped at him, and rushed around at some insane speed for the carriages Hermes knew and used. They annoyed him terribly, even though he was far from the most temperamental of all his brothers. He’d rank himself fourth on that list, and the Fates were his witnesses, he was perfectly fine with that.
Having finally reached this spire-like building, Hermes was already incredibly tired… and he certainly wouldn’t have been in the mood to drag himself up the stairs, and something told him that Olympus was located far from the ground. Fortunately, a man near the metal door saved him; he fussed about, handed him some kind of card, and, pressing a button, opened these doors. Hermes entered this box and placed the card in the only spot where it seemed it should go. And so the box soared upwards, music began to play… Hermes even thought it might be cursed: he had never heard such an irritating yet simultaneously catchy tune in his life, and he regularly visited Apollo.
Olympus was perhaps the most unchanged place of everything he had seen since he woke up. Although it was clearly visible that certain sections of Olympus, he’d even say a few sectors, had been destroyed and rebuilt, and while he could confidently say that the rebuilt part was clearly more to his liking and seemed more convenient and beautiful than the previous one, the fact that on his way from the entrance to Olympus all the way to the throne room he observed exclusively new sections was definitely unnerving. As if someone had tried to reach the throne room and destroyed everything around them. At this, he shuddered. What kind of disgustingly powerful force could destroy the structures of Olympus and, more importantly, why would anyone try to get into the throne room, and why didn’t any of the Olympians try to stop this force? He thought he could think about that later.
Reaching the throne room, he saw all his relatives: eleven Olympians besides himself, Uncle Hades with Persephone, Uncle Poseidon with Amphitrite and Triton. They looked unusually fresh, new, more stable, stronger, softer, somehow? More human-like. Although apparently, they were all also suffering from migraines, and Triton had even grown almost to the size of his father. They all stood around a table, which, in turn, stood around a flame that, judging by all appearances, belonged to Hestia. Most of the gods, except Dionysus, who now looked about forty years older and no longer resembled a teenager; likewise, Apollo no longer looked like a raven. And so this wonderful company was trying to brew… well, certainly some kind of concoction, presumably meant to help with the headache. However…
“Where’s Pan? Where is my son?” was literally the first thing he said to Dionysus, who had approached him, to which he received pursed lips and a heavy look.
“Brother, listen to me,” Dionysus tried to put on the calmest and most supportive face in the world, and despite the fact that Dionysus was the patron of theater in particular and acting in general, he did a remarkably poor job.
“Dio, this isn’t funny. Where is my child…” Hermes was beginning to panic. He tried to reach out to Pan, as he always did when he wanted to talk to him or check on him. The pain in his head shot even sharper, clouding his vision. Ignoring Apollo’s words, which had blurred into unintelligible rambling and sounded more like bird chirping, he took a deep breath and tried again to reach Pan’s essence, only to encounter emptiness. Nothing. A complete absence of a domain, and he had been gone for a long time. His son had been dead for at least several centuries. Hermes’ legs immediately buckled beneath him, and he fell onto the white marble… He simply couldn’t believe it. He was overcome with hysteria, his vision went dark – and then, emptiness.
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Hermes realized he wasn’t very fond of the state of having just woken up after a bout of hysteria. It was disgusting, and also the fact that his head was throbbing much, much less. Judging by the awful aftertaste in his mouth, he had Dionysus’s and Apollo’s concoction to thank, which didn’t help much with the situation. He was lying on his throne, covered with a blanket – definitely Demeter’s doing. And so, having pried his eyes open and calmed down, he felt he was ready to listen. And there was certainly something to listen to. Firstly, everyone present in the room had lost consciousness in the morning. Secondly, they all definitely remembered the same thing as Hermes, and had certainly been in Greece yesterday evening. And absolutely everyone was definitely suffering from migraines, absent-mindedness, and the feeling that their domains had been, as it were, expanded.
Uncle Poseidon described the feeling thus: “It’s like pouring a salty lake into the sea. Essentially, both are water, both are salty, even the composition is similar, but still it feels like too much, and unfamiliar.” Apparently, Apollo had slightly different ideas regarding metaphors, but he decided to leave that uncommented. Athena, who, along with the other responsible relatives, had been sorting through documentation for eight hours since their awakening, had only learned so far how much it now cost to maintain Olympus and pay for feasts, the absence of a children’s cemetery in Hades’ garden, Poseidon’s new palace, as well as the fact that he and Amphitrite had at least two more children, and that from the time they presumably all remembered, about… three to four thousand years had passed, and that was it for now. The migraine was definitely a hindrance, and while there was still little information, and even less useful information, they had still managed much more than Hermes, because he, apparently, had passed out during flight and spent four hours unconscious, then spent two hours on self-awareness and trying to get to Olympus, and another two hours sleeping after his hysteria. Compared to them, Hermes had simply been slacking off for eight hours. Which was sad, because he wanted to help his family.
And so, under the capable guidance of Apollo, Hermes got off his throne and approached the table. He had mostly accepted that Pan was dead, and he definitely wanted to go back to their time, to his only son…
And then, in the pile of documents, he discovered a bound folder of sheets labeled “Camp Half-Blood.”