Chapter Text
Chapter I
Where It All Began
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Five Years Earlier — New York
Percy Jackson
New York was a sea of desperation and agony. Cronus and the gods battled fiercely behind us, and my feet fought not to stumble as I tried to get us out of there. Nico kept pace beside me.
Luke had died, , or rather, Cronus had fully reclaimed his body; the retinue that once followed him now lived inside the titan they had sworn such loyalty to. It was horrible—people around us ran in desperation, searching for shelter from a war you couldn't hide from. Thunder crashed with a deafening sound, the coastline churned with impatience and violence, and the sun above our heads seemed dimmed, as if it couldn't decide whether it was still worth shining.
The mortals didn't know it. To them, natural disasters were battering the world. But for those who could see past the Mist... well, the giant titan who'd already leveled half the city was reason enough to run.
I had failed. I'd spent a whole year preparing to fight him, and still I couldn't match him—I wasn't even half of what Cronus truly was.
"Percy!" Annabeth's voice stopped me cold.
I turned just in time for her arms to wrap around me; the impact threw me off balance for a second, but I managed to catch us both before we hit the ground.
"Are you okay?" I asked, my voice tight with fear.
I'd seen her right before everything went to hell. I'd tried the only thing I could think of—stabbing Luke in his "Achilles heel" before he got the chance to do it himself. I should have trusted him.
Cronus had regained enough strength that his true form had shed Luke's body like an empty husk in the corner of Olympus. Now it was the Titan of Time sitting on that throne, and that meant disaster.
Annabeth was okay, at least as okay as anyone could be after what we'd been through. Her clothes were torn, and a few bloodstains made me frown with worry.
"We have to go!" Nico shouted beside her, as debris crashed down around them.
Annabeth and I nodded, following Nico down the crowded street. Those who hadn't been put into an eternal sleep ran in terror alongside the demigods.
With every step, my body protested. The Curse of Achilles kept me alive, but the physical and mental strain was catching up to me; I could feel parts of myself starting to give out from exhaustion. My hands were caked with dirt, sweat, and someone else's blood, and my vision was starting to blur at the edges. Still, Annabeth stayed at my side, her hand locked firmly with mine, refusing to let me fall apart.
"We need to get to camp!" she shouted, in that authoritative tone she always had.
"What if it's destroyed?" Nico asked, his dark eyes wide with panic this time.
"Then we'll find out," I said, gritting my teeth as I pressed a hand to my side, where a sharp pain threatened to double me over.
We kept running without looking back, weaving through the shadows of the disaster. Along the avenue, the Mist could barely hide the horror: ten-foot Laistrygonians and empousai with blazing eyes fought fiercely against the last pockets of demigod resistance, or simply amused themselves terrorizing the few mortals caught in the crossfire. We were rats fleeing a ship that had already sunk.
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The trip from New York to Long Island was anything but relaxing. With the highways gridlocked and magical transportation out of commission, we had to improvise. Annabeth, in an act of pure desperation I never would have expected from her, stole a car.
It was a gray family sedan we found abandoned on a street corner, keys still in the ignition—its owner had probably fled on foot at the first sign of the Mist tearing apart. Annabeth drove with a reckless aggression that made my hair stand on end, swerving around abandoned cars, cracks in the asphalt, and overturned trucks with the pedal pressed to the floor. Nico sat in the back, gripping the ceiling handle with a face gone completely pale, while I tried to hold pressure on the wound at my side, feeling every pothole jolt straight through my ribs. The silence inside the car was thick, broken only by the roar of the engine and the distant echo of explosions fading behind us.
The real nightmare was waiting for us when we arrived. The hills that had once meant safety were now a battlefield. As we crested the rise, the sight hit us head-on: the camp's magical barrier flickered and sparked, fading in and out, weakened by the fall of Olympus.
Below, near Thalia's Pine, a thin line of defense made up of just a handful of armed campers fought with desperate courage against the hordes of monsters daring to slip out from the shadows of the forest. They were too young, too exhausted, and they were running out of time.
Annabeth didn't hold back; she drew her drakon-bone dagger with a look of steel in her eyes, while Nico, at my other side, raised a pair of skeleton warriors from the ground to even the odds.
I threw myself straight at the first monster in our path: a massive hellhound drooling acid onto the shield of a boy from the Demeter cabin. I swung upward with everything I had left, tearing through the beast's thick hide. It burst into a cloud of golden dust that blinded me for a second, but I didn't stop. Camp was falling, and if this was going to be our last stand, Cronus would have to bleed for it.
I reached out my hand and pulled the kid to his feet.
The battle was brutal, a chaotic whirlwind of celestial bronze, claws, and screams that seemed to last forever. The few campers who actually knew how to wield a sword with real skill fought with blind conviction, driven by pure instinct to protect the only home they'd ever known. But what tore my soul apart was watching the younger ones—the kids who could barely hold the weight of a weapon—still standing their ground against monstrous creatures clawing to break through, terror written across their faces, hands shaking.
There were losses. Too many. Some were campers I'd barely known, faces I'd only seen in passing at the dining pavilion or around the campfire, kids whose names I'd never even learned. But seeing them now, reduced to bodies laid out on the ground, pale and hollow under the ash-gray sky, hit me like a physical blow to the chest, a weight so heavy I could barely breathe. The guilt of failing in New York crashed into me twice as hard.
When the last monster dissolved into dust, a heavy, sepulchral silence fell over the hill. The horde was finally gone, and for the moment, Thalia's Pine seemed to steady itself, flickering with a faint golden light trying to hold the horror at bay. But the immediate danger leaving only made room for absolute panic. No one celebrated. No one shouted victory.
A few yards away, Clarisse La Rue moved through the blood-stained grass, gathering the bodies of the fallen. The head of the Ares cabin—always known for her explosive temper, her battle cries, her fierce pride—moved now in a silence I'd rarely seen from her. There was no trace of her usual roughness; she lifted the dead demigods with a painful solemnity, jaw clenched, eyes fixed on the ground, refusing to let anyone see her break.
I stood there, Riptide still dripping ichor in my right hand, feeling every loss strip away a little more of our humanity. I looked at Annabeth and Nico, searching their faces for some kind of answer, but Clarisse's silence hung over us like a verdict: we'd held the camp, yes—but the war was already lost.
I had failed.