Chapter Text
"⁰ The Sea Is Windows
The thunder reverberated, as loud as the beating of that creature’s wings.
He didn’t know what it was—he never really had. But ever since he was little, he had dreamed of the same colossal creature tearing through the twilight of the night, accompanied by that violent storm.
He remembered the feeling of terror, the fear that pursued him, while he thought only of getting back to her—his mother.
It was always the same dream. Every time he closed his eyes and fell asleep, he dreamed of that creature and of himself falling. The same dream that made him wake up every night searching for his mother, because her embrace was always what he needed, even though it was never enough.
It was ridiculous how his treacherous mind insisted on deceiving him, telling him that it wasn’t really that embrace he needed. Still, it always worked. Sally Jackson was his anchor.
At first, from the very first time he had the dream, his mother didn’t know how to explain it. Saying that a demigod’s dreams did not always reveal the future bordered on heresy. But how could she explain to a mother that, in the same dream he had been having for twelve years, the boy who fell wasn’t him?
That he always dreamed of the same boy, a boy who looked like him—but wasn’t him.
With that grotesque and enormous creature that resembled a dragon—something that, at twelve years old, he now firmly believed really was a dragon.
When you spend twelve years of your life having the same dream, you eventually begin noticing things you had never noticed before. The way the boy himself was also there… it was ridiculous that he had never noticed it before.
But why he dreamed about it, he never knew—and he didn’t even want to know. Dragons didn’t exist, and if they had ever existed, it was because the gods had decided they shouldn’t continue to exist.
Yet there he was, trapped in the damned loop.
Percy had forgotten how annoying it was to dream the same dream over and over again. Maybe he should send Morpheus a message asking him to change the script, because the lack of creativity was becoming immeasurable.
But out of all the times he had dreamed it, this one was different. Very different.
He remembered the enormous creature flying above him—not above him, but above the boy.
He remembered the fear, the desperation, and the feeling of wanting his mother, of going back to her… and the fall.
The straight fall into the sea.
He had always thought that was ridiculous, because that was where his fear of drowning had come from. He always dreamed of the boy falling straight into the saltwater, along with the habit of rubbing his right arm, which tingled as though there were an open wound being touched by salt.
Now, perhaps he had some idea why, even though he had already overcome his fear.
Rain splattered against his face like knives, almost as if the storm were mocking his failed attempt to escape. That was when he saw it—the creature’s mouth opening wide enough to swallow both him and his dragon.
Arrax.
He remembered… or maybe he didn’t. He had always had the same dream.
“jātās, Arrax. aderī.”
Faster…
His eyes widened as he looked behind him.
Percy hated the fact that the dream now seemed far too real. A nightmare like any other, but with a much greater degree of horror. Worse than dreaming about his grandfather calling for him—that had been traumatic.
The way the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end when he felt the creature’s breath made his desperation increase. He wanted Arrax to fly faster. Much faster.
But how could a young dragon possibly be faster than a dragon that size? They were dead. Very dead.
Then he jumped—jumped at the exact moment when Vhagar, Aemond’s dragon…—who was Aemond?—opened its mouth to swallow everything. But he wasn’t fast enough. The creature bit down on his right arm, tearing a scream from his very soul.
Damn, that hurt. It hurt so much. He wanted his mother. He just wanted to go back to his mother…
He was crying, crying from the pain. That creature had torn his arm off. His right arm.
“Lucerys!” a man’s panicked voice echoed in his numb ear. He knew he recognized that voice, but assumed it wasn’t important.
He was falling. Falling toward the sea.
The impact with the water made him lose consciousness for a few seconds. When he woke, he was drowning; his arm burned intensely from the saltwater, which only made his situation worse.
He wanted his mother. He wanted her embrace. He wanted to hear her say that everything was all right, that it had all been nothing but a terrible nightmare.
But there he was, somewhere in the middle of the sea, lost, crying, without his right arm, his blood attracting creatures as the salt began to numb his entire body. Seawater kept filling his lungs every time he tried to steady himself before sinking beneath the surface again.
He just wanted to go home.
He needed to get back to his mother.
Even with his lungs full of water and his vision fading, all he wanted was his mother’s embrace.
Then Percy woke up.
His eyes were glazed over, his body covered in sweat as he stared at the ceiling of Poseidon’s cabin.
He breathed several times, desperately searching for air, before beginning to cough uncontrollably.
It was just a dream, Percy. A ridiculously realistic dream.
He wasn’t drowning.
But that was exactly how he realized why he had been afraid of drowning before.
Because of this dream.
Damn.
He sighed in exasperation. Why couldn’t he have normal dreams?
“Aemond and Lucerys?” he whispered to himself after sitting up in bed, in his incredibly empty dormitory. “What strange names…”
There had been many moments in his life when he had dreamed of names as strange as those, but none had ever remained so deeply marked in his subconscious as this dream—or even these two new names.
They were names he had never heard before, yet they sounded as familiar as opening a dictionary he would never be able to understand because of his dyslexia.
Lucerys was very similar to the name Lucius, and he knew it came from Latin; from *lux*, meaning light.
But Aemond was different. He couldn’t think of any origin for the name, no matter how hard he tried.
The only thing similar enough was the comparison to the name Edmund.
Ridiculous.
He looked around the dormitory and couldn’t make the place feel like home. Even though he had spent most of the summer there, even after that stupid quest to retrieve his egotistical uncle’s master bolt.
And to think that, before that summer, he had been nothing more than a normal twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t stay at any school without getting expelled. Now, he was a demigod. Son of Poseidon. His best friend was a goat—or, in other words, a satyr.
His mother had been kidnapped by Hades, but he had saved her. The boy he had thought was cute had turned out to be a traitor and had sided with their maniacal grandfather.
And yet, Percy would rather continue getting expelled from different schools and having the same dream until the day he died.
Or maybe, when he fell into the sea again in his dream, he simply wouldn’t wake up—and would drown in his sleep…
Come to think of it, Morpheus and the children of Hypnos were extremely dangerous in that regard. He would keep that in his subconscious: never mess with a child of Hypnos.
Maybe they could change his dreams?
He stared at the backpack on one of the empty beds and then sighed. He had packed it the night before, before going to sleep, at Annabeth’s insistence; she seemed to know he would leave everything until the last minute.
And he absolutely would.
Ignoring that thought, he sighed again. He wasn’t in much of a hurry. There was still time before he had to go home, so doing what he always did after waking from that dream was more than just a way to relax.
When he stepped outside the cabin, he watched the commotion. He really was going to miss Camp Half-Blood. Campers ran from one side to the other, while others were more relaxed because they weren’t going home.
He knew—he knew that most of the ones running around were packing their things, and he always wondered whether he would be one of them if he hadn’t listened to Annabeth.
He headed north, straight toward the beach—Long Island Sound.
“jātās, Arrax. aderī...” The pronunciation came out perfectly, just as it had sounded in his dream. It was the first time he had spoken that forgotten language and, at the same time, it felt so familiar, as though it were part of who he had once been. “Arrax.”
The dragon’s name. He knew that.
But at the same time, he didn’t. It was new.
That frustrated him in a way he couldn’t explain.
“What language is that, Seaweed Brain?” Annabeth asked as soon as he passed her and her sisters; he really hadn’t seen her. “It’s not Greek or Roman, that much I know.”
She stared at him, and he wouldn’t lie: he was slightly startled.
“I don’t know, Wise Girl,” he answered honestly. “But I know it means ‘Faster, Arrax.’”
Annabeth stared at him, then glanced toward her sisters before looking back at Percy, while someone from the Ares cabin argued with a son of Hermes.
“You had that dream again?”
Percy felt a bitter taste gathering at the back of his throat; it was simply embarrassment.
Who would have thought that, during the quest, both Annabeth and Grover would have to wake him up because, ironically, he was drowning in his sleep?
“Yeah… let’s just say I did…” He looked away toward the sky, as though expecting the same storm from his dream—or nightmare—to return, just as real as before. “But this time, it was different.”
“How different?” she asked, concern bordering on her eyes.
“Different enough that I heard names whose origins I don’t even know. The way I discovered how the boy died in my dream… there were dragons, Annabeth. They weren’t three-headed dragons like the ones in Greek myths.”
Annabeth raised an eyebrow. Until then, the dream had sounded exactly the same, except that this time, the boy had died.
That explained a lot. A lot indeed. It explained why Percy seemed to drown while he slept.
“There was something else, wasn’t there?” she asked.
Grover was walking toward them with a flower tucked into his brown explorer’s jacket.
“Yes…” Percy answered as soon as Grover joined them. Slowly, in silence, the three of them made their way to the beach. “The dream felt real. Too real. And for the first time, it wasn’t the boy—Lucerys—who fell straight into the sea. It was me. I fell into the boy’s body, feeling all the pain of the saltwater against his severed arm.”
Annabeth crossed her arms, her brown eyes studying Percy as though he were a complex hieroglyph she was determined to decipher. The beach wind blew through her brown hair, but her expression remained stern and focused.
She remained silent for a long time, the sound of waves breaking against the sand of Long Island filling the silence between them. Grover let out a low, nervous bleat, distractedly chewing on a Diet Coke can.
“Percy,” she began, her voice softer than usual. “Demigod dreams are, most of the time, visions of the future or of what’s happening right now. But what you described… names like Aemond and Lucerys, dragons that don’t follow the Greek pattern, and that language… it sounds like some kind of prank by a child of Hypnos.”
“I don’t think so anymore, Annabeth…” Grover was the one who spoke.
Annabeth looked at him questioningly—in other words, curiously, but driven by the skepticism only children of Athena seemed to possess.
“Ever since I’ve known Percy, he’s had this dream. And according to Sally, he’s had it since he was very young too.”
But Percy was no longer listening to either of his friends. He walked toward the sea. He could feel every fraction of power in his bloodstream; the sea had called to him since he was little. The first thing he felt was the water touching his shoes, then his pants, and finally Grover and Annabeth’s hands on his shoulders.
“Percy, what are you doing?” Annabeth’s voice sounded urgent, but distant, as though it were coming from beneath layers of water.
He didn’t answer. The contact with the sea wasn’t merely refreshing; it was as if an electric current ran through his bones, but not one that hurt. It was the sensation of a perfect fit. He looked down at the water surrounding his legs, and for a second, the white sea foam seemed to transform into storm clouds from an ancient tempest.
“I’m just going for a swim.” Grover gently squeezed his shoulder.
“I don’t think swimming after a nightmare is a good idea, Percy,” Grover said, staring at the calm sea as though a two-headed monster might be lurking there at any moment.
“Especially when you’re visibly shaken by it.” Percy ran a hand through his hair before turning toward his friends.
“I always do this, okay? It’s something I found that helps me relax and reminds me that it’s just a dream,” he explained. He moved a little farther away from them; even in the water, he felt wet, yet incredibly dry.
“Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth called, and Percy looked at her.
“You’re almost out of time. You’re going to be late meeting Sally,” Grover continued, his gaze sweeping over his friend’s face.
He turned back toward the sea and continued walking. When he reached a relatively deep area, he turned toward his friends once more.
“I won’t be long.”
“I think you’re starting to mix up what’s false with reality, Percy,” Annabeth said, her voice almost hesitant, as though she feared saying something that might offend him.
Percy allowed himself to float on the water, lying back as though the sea were nothing more than a bed. His eyes, green as the ocean, stared up at the sky, as though waiting for the weather to darken and the same storm from his dreams to appear.
He was well aware that Annabeth and Grover were standing at the edge of the beach, watching him, so he closed his eyes.
For twelve years, he had had the same dream: a storm and a straight fall into the sea.
He wasn’t dreaming. He knew that.
But he wished it were a dream, because the moment he felt something resembling—a distant resemblance to—a hand grabbing his feet and pulling him downward, he realized that he should have listened to Annabeth.
The panic didn’t come immediately, but instinct did. The pull was violent, a force that didn’t seem to come from an ordinary sea creature, but from the very weight of the abyss. Percy sank rapidly, the surface of the water becoming a distorted mirror where the worried silhouettes of Annabeth and Grover grew smaller with every passing second.
He didn’t fight against the lack of air—his demigod lungs knew the ocean was his ally. But his mind, trapped in that damned twelve-year loop, screamed.
The fall. The sea. The pain.
He couldn’t breathe. He knew that, as the son of Poseidon, he wasn’t supposed to drown, but at that moment, the naked truth was that he was drowning. No matter how hard he tried to breathe, nothing but water entered his lungs.
It wasn’t killing him; not yet. But if he remained without air for much longer, he would die. It was so similar—or perhaps worse—than being suffocated that he began seeing stars before his eyes.
Before he knew it, he couldn’t tell whether they were his tears or the saltwater, but his right arm began to tingle, and he immediately started scratching it. That thing seemed to pull him deeper and deeper into the sea.
Exactly where the creature had taken the boy’s arm in his dream. It was real. Stupidly, terrifyingly real.
He wanted his mother. He just wanted his mother!
Now even his feelings were the same as the boy’s. It was frustrating and horrible. He only wanted her embrace. He wanted his mother’s embrace.
The darkness of the seafloor embraced him with a coldness that even Poseidon’s blood couldn’t warm. The water, which should have been his element, now felt like molten iron in his lungs. Percy struggled, but his hands grasped nothing except invisible currents of desperation.
“Mother!” His mental scream was the same as Lucerys’s. Two voices, two centuries, two worlds, united by a single terror.
Suddenly, the pressure changed. The pull on his foot ceased, but the tingling in his right arm exploded into an excruciating burning sensation, as though the salt were cauterizing flesh that wasn’t there.
In the silence of the abyss, an image flickered before his eyes: they weren’t the fish of Long Island, but shadows of black scales and the gleam of a sapphire-blue eye watching him from above, through the foam and blood.
“Lykiri…” The word vibrated through the water. It wasn’t Annabeth’s voice. It was a hoarse voice, filled with a possessiveness that crossed millennia. “Lykiri, Luke.”
The name “Luke” echoed like a trigger. But it wasn’t Luke Castellan. It was the diminutive of something much older.
His eyes widened when he realized he could breathe, but instead of rising to the surface, he screamed.
“Father!” he shouted for Poseidon. This was his father’s domain, and yet… there was something else there.
He didn’t know what it was; he only knew that it was a threat. A danger.
It didn’t come as a sound, but as a subsonic vibration that made his teeth ache. The ocean, once fluid, suddenly seemed viscous, like cold oil.
He could feel its gaze before he saw any movement: a vast, ancient, infinitely cruel consciousness residing in every molecule of salt.
It wasn’t the cold of temperature, but the cold of an absence of soul. The realization that, to that entity—if it could even be called that, although he had the strong feeling it was something far greater—his panic was nothing more than an irrelevant bubble of air.
The taste of iron and rotten brine seemed to invade his mouth the instant he called for his father.
But nothing surpassed the weight of his limbs; they felt as though they were made of lead. The water around him began to swirl in slow, heavy currents, as though the sea itself were closing into a fist to crush the tiny heart that still dared to beat.
He stared at whatever that creature was. It wasn’t a dragon… it was something lethal and cruel watching him.
Its eyes remained fixed on him.
Then he heard it.
“It’s time to come home, my little hero.”
The anger in its tone was entirely directed at his words, as though he had committed heresy by calling upon Poseidon.
But the exact moment that creature finished speaking, he was pulled even harder into the depths, with a violence that was downright terrifying.
He wasn’t going to die.
He knew that, as surely as though a knife were pressed against his throat.
Then he lost consciousness.
And the exact moment he lost consciousness, the weather changed. A storm appeared as though it could destroy cities at any moment, and Long Island Sound churned violently; anyone who entered those waters would not return.
Poseidon was furious.
The sea was as ancient as the earth and the wind. Within it were memories of ages, existing in the past, present, and future.
They were windows into a forgotten time.
And at that moment, Percy Jackson was no longer in Long Island, nor even at Camp Half-Blood.
In fact, he wasn’t even awake to understand what had happened.
He only wanted her embrace.
He wanted his mother.
********
********
The sea was as violent as the storm raging overhead.
The current was strong, seeming to push the ship toward a single destination. Even when they tried to change course, the sea always guided them back in the same direction.
Like a dog being led by an invisible leash, as though it wanted to show them something. The banners of House Velaryon were still in their proper places; the wind had not yet been strong enough to tear them away.
But if this continued, the supplies meant for Dragonstone could end up at the bottom of the sea, and they did not want to anger Rhaenyra any further, especially when she was already dealing with her brother, Aegon, usurping her throne—even though King Viserys I had not even died yet.
They hoped to reach Dragonstone in one piece, especially knowing that the princess was going through a delicate period in her sixth pregnancy, made worse by the loss of a child.
It was as though that last thought collided with reality when he spotted the boy.
The current was carrying them directly toward him; the boy seemed to be the center of it all. He was floating on a piece of wood, wearing strange clothes, but there was no doubt he was young, around the same age as the deceased prince.
The thought made Ser Tyland Hull furrow his brow. He stared at the boy more carefully. It was still daytime, but the storm had swallowed the sun.
He needed to get the boy out of there. With that in mind, he shouted orders to the nearest sailor, who quickly followed them.
It took nearly twenty minutes, but eventually, the boy was brought aboard the ship.
His hair was blond, but wet, it looked almost brown, very similar to the prince’s.
“Wasn’t the prince declared dead?” one of the crewmen asked once they confirmed that the boy was still breathing.
“Yes, but there must have been a mistake. With the prince here, this war will probably come to an end.”
Silence followed. They noticed that the boy had opened his eyes before closing them again.
“He isn’t the prince,” another crewman said, staring at the boy lying on the floor.
“And why do you think that?”
By then, the storm had begun to calm, as though it knew the boy was aboard the ship. The sea quieted as well.
“No one knows,” Ser Tyland Hull said as he fastened a small message intended for Rhaenyra to the leg of a black raven. “It is common knowledge that no one is supposed to know the identity or appearance of the princes.”
“Even with the descriptions, I know this boy isn’t the prince,” one of the crewmen insisted, although he seemed to ignore his own words as he placed the boy in one of the hammocks.
“If he truly isn’t the prince, we…” Ser Tyland Hull paused for nearly two full minutes, watching the raven fly toward Dragonstone. “We’ll be killed the moment we arrive.”
Of all the things Percy had ever expected to happen to him, he had never imagined being mistaken for someone who was dead.
But, at that moment, he didn’t need to know that he was in a different time, with completely different customs, or that he was apparently identical to a prince.
All he knew was that, even while unconscious, he could hear unfamiliar voices speaking with a strange accent.