Chapter Text
You are fourteen years old, and you have never felt more alone.
Not in the way mortals mean it—the empty-bedroom, quiet-dinner-table kind of alone. You’ve had that too, of course. You grew up with a mother who loved you but never quite understood the shadows that clung to your face, the way your footsteps seemed to echo even in crowded rooms. She tried. Gods know she tried. But when you turned ten and a shimmering silver helm above your head, glowing with the unmistakable seal of the Underworld, she stopped trying to understand and started trying to survive. She sent you to Camp Half-Blood with tear-stained cheeks and a suitcase that was too big for your small hands, whispering that you would be safer there.
She was right. Mostly.
Camp Half-Blood saved your life. It gave you a bow, a bunk, and a family of misfits who bled half-godded blood and laughed in the face of monsters. You learned to fight, to run, to dodge, to stab first and ask questions never. You learned that your father was Hades, god of the dead, king of the Underworld, and that the other campers would either fear you or pity you for it. Sometimes both.
But you also learned something else. Something worse.
No one knows how to train you.
Chiron tried. He really did. The old centaur has trained heroes for three thousand years, from Achilles to Theseus to the sons and daughters of Olympus who still stumble through the strawberry fields each summer. But even he admitted, with a pained twist of his ancient face, that he had never instructed a child of the Underworld before. “Your father does not often claim his own,” he said carefully, as if the words themselves might crack open the floor and swallow them both. “The powers you possess… they are not like the others. They are older. Darker. They answer to a logic that even I cannot fully teach.”
Mr. D—Dionysus, god of wine, madness, and eternal irritation—was even less helpful. When you asked him, point-blank, if he knew anything about death magic, he looked up from his Diet Coke, blinked at you with those bloodshot eyes, and said, “Why would I? I’m the god of being alive, thank you very much. Now go away before I turn you into a dolphin. Or a shrub. I haven’t decided.”
So you stopped asking.
You stopped asking when you were eleven, after you accidentally shadow-traveled three miles from your bunk to the armory in the middle of the night, arriving covered in cobwebs and smelling like freshly turned earth. No one could explain how you did it. No one could explain how to stop it.
You stopped asking when you were twelve, after you touched a dying shrub at the edge of the forest and felt its life drain into your palm like water through a sieve—not because you wanted to, but because your body simply took. The tree turned to dust. You threw up behind the Big House for an hour.
You stopped asking when you were thirteen, on the quest that nearly killed you.
Percy Jackson. Annabeth Chase. Grover Underwood. And you. The four of you, sent west to retrieve Zeus’s stolen master bolt, to stop a war that would have torn Olympus apart. You didn’t want to go. You remember that clearly. You had begged Chiron to send someone else, anyone else, because the prophecy had whispered your name and you knew—knew—that the Underworld would call you home.
It did.
You met your father for the first time not in a dream, not in a distant memory, but face-to-face in the sweltering heat of the Los Angeles Underworld entrance. He looked nothing like you imagined. Oh, you had built him up in your head—a towering skeleton king, a hooded figure with eyes like burning coals, a voice that could shake mountains. Instead, you got a man in a black pinstripe suit who fidgeted with his cufflinks and seemed almost… nervous.
He had your eyes. That was the first thing you noticed. The same dark, bottomless shade of black, the kind that made mortals look away too quickly. He had your sharp cheekbones, too, and your habit of hunching your shoulders when you felt cornered.
“You’ve grown,” he said.
That was it. After ten years of silence, after claiming you only when the Fates forced his hand, after leaving you to figure out death magic on your own—he said you’ve grown.
You wanted to scream at him. You wanted to throw your quiver of arrows at his feet and demand to know why he couldn’t just be a normal dad who showed up to soccer games and forgot your birthday instead of a god who forgot you entirely.
But you didn’t. Because Percy was standing right next to you, and Annabeth had her hand on her knife, and Grover was trembling so hard his hooves clicked against the marble floor. And because Hades was still the god of the dead, and even an awkward god could turn you into a ghost with a flick of his wrist.
So you swallowed your anger. You completed your quest. You handed your father's helm to Alecto.
He called after you, though. Right before Olympus, via Iris Message.
“You did well,” he said. Quietly. Like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to say it. “For what it’s worth.”
You didn’t reply. You shot an arrow through the shimmering water vapor and watched it dissipate.
That was a year ago.
Now you’re fourteen. You’ve survived hellhounds, dracaena, a run-in with a chimera that singed off your left eyebrow. You’ve mastered archery, and your swordwork is decent when you remember to breathe. But your powers—your real powers, the ones that hum in your blood like a second heartbeat—remain a locked room inside your chest. Sometimes the door cracks open on its own. Shadows writhe at your feet. The ground trembles. You feel the pull of the earth’s deepest places, the call of bones and fossils and forgotten things.
And then the door slams shut again, and you’re left standing in the middle of the arena with a sword in your hand and no idea what just happened.
It’s a warm June evening when you finally make your decision. The sun is setting behind Half-Blood Hill, painting the sky in shades of bruised purple and gold. Most of the campers are at the dining pavilion, laughing and trading battle stories over plates of roasted chicken and fresh bread. You can hear them from here. The sound drifts across the valley like a distant wave.
You’re sitting on the steps of the Hades cabin—your cabin, the only one in the row that no one ever visits. It’s made of black obsidian, cold to the touch even in summer, and the torches flanking the door burn with green fire that never goes out. Inside, it’s just you and the empty bunks and the faint smell of myrrh. No siblings. No counselor. Just you.
You’ve been sitting here for an hour, turning an obsidian pebble over and over in your palm. It’s smooth and warm from your skin. You found it at the bottom of the creek last week, and something about it felt familiar. Like a piece of a puzzle you didn’t know you were solving.
You need to go back.
The thought isn’t new. It’s been circling you for months, a vulture in a wide blue sky. You’ve ignored it. You’ve distracted yourself with capture the flag and border patrol and late-night poker games in the Hermes cabin. You’ve told yourself that you can figure this out on your own, that you don’t need him, that you’ve survived this long without his help.
But you’re tired. Gods, you’re so tired.
You’re tired of waking up from nightmares where the dead whisper your name. Tired of accidentally extinguishing torches when you get frustrated. Tired of the way the other campers look at you—not with fear anymore, not exactly, but with something worse. Uncertainty. Like they’re not sure if you’re one of the good guys or just a monster who hasn’t snapped yet.
You’re tired of being alone in a cabin full of empty beds.
So you make a decision. It doesn’t feel brave or dramatic. It feels like giving up, almost. Like admitting defeat. But underneath that, buried deep where the shadows live, there’s something else. Something that feels like hope.
You’re going to go to the Underworld. You’re going to find your father. And you’re going to demand that he teach you how to be his daughter.
Not ask. Demand.
There's a tiny bone that sprung from the ground. A bat's skull.
You close your fingers around it and stand.
Leaving camp is harder than you expected.
Not physically—you’ve snuck out before, usually to chase monsters past the border or to steal extra dessert from the kitchen. But this feels different. This feels like goodbye, even though you plan to come back. You don’t know how long you’ll be gone. You don’t know if you’ll come back the same.
You pack light. A change of clothes. A bag of ambrosia and nectar. Your bow, and a quiver stuffed with as many arrows as it can possible hold. Hades’s gift to you when you were eleven—a canteen of Lethe water, because you’re not stupid and you know the Underworld doesn’t play fair.
You write a note to Chiron. Short. To the point. Gone to talk to my father. Don’t look for me. I’ll be back.
You don’t write a note to anyone else. There’s no one else who would care.
The border of camp is a shimmering barrier of magic, invisible to mortal eyes but blindingly obvious to yours. It feels like walking through a curtain of warm honey. You step through, and the world changes.
The strawberry fields vanish. The laughter fades. You’re standing on a dark road under a sky full of stars, and the air smells like rain and old stone.
And no, you don’t have a car. You definitely don’t have a plane ticket.
All you have is the map from last year's quest, and a whole lot of ambition.