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The river spoke to him before the trouble did.
Percy felt it in the marrow of his bones, that subtle wrongness threading through the water somewhere beyond the forest, a tremor in a current that should have flowed serene beneath the spring dusk. It was the language of his heritage, older than speech, and it reached him the way a distant scream reached a mother sleeping soundly, immediate and undeniable, dragging him upright from the log where he had been resting beside the fading fire of the camp.
He turned toward the goddess seated near him, her auburn curls catching the last amber light of evening, her silver eyes lifting to meet his the moment she registered the shift in his posture.
"Something is wrong with the river," he said, his voice low, taut with the certainty that lived beneath his skin, "It feels furious, as though it wants to swallow everything it comes across in its path whole."
Artemis regarded him for a long moment, and when she spoke, her tone carried the weary patience of a being who had watched this pattern repeat itself across the countless centuries.
"There is a village beyond that ridge," she spoke at last, her tone even, measured, threaded with the particular calm she wore when speaking of matters ancient and settled, "It sits upon land that a river god has guarded since the first people raised their homes along his banks, he kept their fields fed, he kept their children from the flood, and he asked for so little in return, only the small remembrances that gods require to remain themselves."
Percy watched her face, the way the last light caught the auburn of her curls and turned them to burnished bronze.
"They forgot him," she said quietly, and there was neither cruelty nor satisfaction in her voice, "The generations passed, and belief thinned, and the people were raised certain that the world held nothing they could not see," the wind stirred through the branches, shaking loose a fine drift of pale blossoms, "They toppled his statues into the mud, they spoke his name as a jest at their gatherings and laughed at the sound of it, they let his shrine fall to ruin and did not think to wonder whether anything watched them do it," she drew a slow breath, her gaze drifting toward the darkening woods, "It was bound to happen eventually, a god scorned within his own domain does not suffer the insult forever."
Percy was already rising, his dark locks falling across his forehead, his sea green eyes hardening into something resolute.
"Then we stop him."
"We do not," her words landed firm, edged with the authority she had worn for the millennia, "This is the consequence of disrespect, and it is not our place to shield mortals from the reckoning they summoned upon themselves."
He looked at her, and for a heartbeat something passed between them that was almost sorrow, the recognition of two souls who loved each other and yet stood upon different ground, "There are children in that village who never spat on any altar," he said quietly, both to her and to himself, "There are people who did nothing but be born in the wrong place at the wrong time, I cannot sit here and let a river bury them."
"Perseus."
But he had already turned toward the far edge of the camp, where Blackjack stood beneath the pines, dark wings folded, obsidian coat drinking the last of the daylight. Percy whistled once, sharp and certain, and the pegasus lifted his head with the eager readiness of a beast that lived for exactly these moments.
"Do not intervene," she called after him, and there was something beneath the command she would not name aloud, "This is not your battle to fight."
He stopped at the saddle for a moment, one hand resting upon the warm flank of his companion, and glanced back at her with an expression that held both apology and refusal woven into the same look.
"It is now."
Then he mounted, and Blackjack surged into the sky.
They flew low and fast over the darkening land, the pegasus reading the urgency in his rider without needing to be told, the village came into sight, a scatter of lamplit windows along a bend where the banks had grown dangerously narrow, and above it the river had reared into a wall of black water that trembled at the edge of falling. It hung there like a held breath, vast and impossible, and at its crest stood the god.
He was old, this deity, worn thin by centuries of dwindling faith, his form woven from current and reed and the pale luminescence of deep pools, his eyes twin points of fire that had gathered every insult into a single grievance. Then he saw Percy descend, and he knew him, that much was written across his ancient face in an instant. He knew the tales that clung to him, of every monster slaughtered where it stood, of titans dragged down from their fury and bent to their knees, of a hero that had faced what the gods themselves feared and had not faltered.
He knew, and his rage would not let him care.
"Savior of Olympus," the words came from him like a flood pushed through a broken gate, "You would defend them, these worms who spit on my name?"
Blackjack touched down upon the bank, and Percy dismounted, drawing Riptide as his boots found the wet stone, the blade drank the moonlight and gave it back as bronze fire.
"They deserve the reckoning."
"Some of them," Percy allowed, and his voice was steady, almost gentle, which was somehow worse than fury, "Not all of them, and you do not get to decide that all of them pay for what some of them did."
The god screamed, and the river fell.
It came down as a black hammer, but Percy was already reaching for it, and the water knew him. It knew him the way it had always known him, as kin, as one of its own blood, and where the god commanded it with borrowed force, Percy asked it with the authority that ran in his veins like a second pulse. The wall shuddered at its crest. It broke apart into a thousand harmless ribbons that hung glittering in the dark, then folded back into the channel where it belonged, and the village slept, never knowing how close the water had leaned toward its rooftops.
The god shrieked and hurled himself forward, and then it was a battle, though it did not last as a battle should. The deity struck with whips of pressurized current, with the crushing weight of the deep, with every trick a river spirit had learned across the centuries, and Percy turned each aside as though brushing away rain. He was tired of talking. He drove forward through the assault, Riptide carving arcs of bronze through the spray, and when he closed the final distance he seized the god by the throat of woven water and lifted him bodily from the surface of his own domain.
"This is finished."
He cast the god from the river.
He wrenched him loose from the current that had cradled him since the ancient days and flung him spinning into the far dark, sundering him from the water that had been his home and his throne and his single remaining kingdom. Percy seized control of the water, forced it back into its channel, and drove the god to his knees upon the bank, the pale figure sputtering and diminished, his rage dissolving into something small and frightened.
"Leave," he said to the god kneeling before him, his voice dropping into something colder than the flood had been, "Leave this river, and this village, and do not return, if I ever hear that you have come back, I will drag you down to Tartarus with my own hands," he leaned closer, and the sea green of his eyes had gone dark as the deepest trench, "Do you understand me?"
The god understood, he fled into the shadows of the water and was gone, and the river settled back into its bed with a shudder that felt almost like relief, flowing gentle and quiet beneath the moon as though it had never dreamed of drowning anyone at all.
The village slept on, untouched, unaware, safe.
Percy stood alone on the bank with the water lapping quiet at his feet, and after a long moment he withdrew his sword, and the bronze fire went out.
Blackjack carried him back to the camp beneath a sky gone fully black and salted with stars.
Night lay deep over the Hunt by the time they returned, the tents silvered by moonlight, the fire pit reduced to embers glowing like the last coals of a dream.
Percy slid from the saddle onto legs that had begun to remember how far they had been pushed, and pressed his palm to the broad warm cheek of the pegasus, "Thank you," he murmured, scratching gently at the place behind his ear that always made the mighty beast lean into the touch, "Get some rest."
Blackjack huffed against his shoulder and wandered off toward the far margin of the camp, Percy was crossing the quiet grounds toward the tent he shared with Artemis, thinking of sleep, when he saw her. She stood with her arms folded, her silver cloak drawn about her shoulders, her auburn curls loose in the moonlight, and her silver eyes set upon him with a stillness that was somehow louder than shouting.
He slowed and then stopped a few paces from her.
"I told you not to intervene," her voice was quiet, it was not raised at all, it was cold as rain beading across a windowpane, and it landed harder for the softness of it.
"You were thinking like the god," he said, the weariness in him had burned down to something plain and honest, "You were standing where he was standing, looking at the ones who wronged him, you were not standing where the mortals were. There were innocent lives in that village, Artemis, people who never touched him, people who were going to be drowned for a thing they did not do."
"It was not your right to intervene," the words came sharper now, the calm cracking, "Do you understand what you have done, you struck a god, you cast him from his own domain. You inserted yourself into a matter of divine law that has stood since before any of the mortal civilization had a name, and you did it after I told you plainly to stand aside."
Something in Percy came loose.
"By what right," his voice rose, and it rang across the sleeping camp, though not a soul stirred, "By what right does a god take the lives of the innocent, tell me that, he was about to murder children because grown people mocked a statue, by what right," he took a step toward her, his sea green eyes bright and furious in the dark, "And by what right do you stand there and blame me, blame me, for reaching out my hand to stop it, for standing between those people and a grave they did not dig?"
Artemis opened her mouth, though he did not let her speak, his voice fell, dropping all at once from thunder into something quieter and infinitely colder, and the ice in it stopped her where she stood.
"By what right does the moon judge the tides?"
The camp was silent, the embers ticked, somewhere far off a night bird called once and fell still.
The fury drained out of Artemis like water draining from cupped hands.
He watched it leave her, watched the hard set of her shoulders soften, watched her silver eyes lose their frozen edge and fill instead with something that ached. She lowered her head. For a long moment she stood that way, breathing slowly, drawing a deep breath into her chest and letting it settle her, and when she lifted her face at last there was something in it he had seen only in their most unguarded hours.
She crossed the space between them in small, deliberate steps, she took his hands, both of them, folding them into her own, and her thumbs moved over his knuckles the way they always did.
"Forgive me," she said, and her voice trembled at the edges of it, "I condemned you for being exactly what you are, for being the hero who could not stand by. I looked at what you did and saw only the law and the consequences, and I did not see the lives you saved. That was wrong of me, it was deeply wrong of me, please forgive me, my love."
The apology reached into him and drew the fury out by its roots, the way a steady hand quiets a trembling one, he felt the tension bleed from his shoulders, felt the sharpness dissolve from his chest.
"I must apologize as well," he said, quieter now, the fight gone from him entirely, "For shouting at you, you did not deserve that."
She smiled, faint and small and wholly his, and she leaned in and kissed him, soft as the touch of the moonlight, brief and tender and full of everything the argument had not let them say.
"We carry different codes, you and I," she whispered against his mouth when she drew back, her forehead resting upon his, "I have ruled across a thousand years as a ruthless goddess and I have watched the world break itself upon its own cruelties, and I learned long ago to let the balance settle where it falls, but you," she touched his cheek, "You are a hero who wishes only to do what is right, who cannot look at a drowning child and call it justice, and I would not change that in you, I would sooner tear the moon from the sky."
He smiled then, and it undid the last of the tension in his weary frame, he kissed her, slow and grateful, and when it ended he simply let himself fall forward into her, exhausted past the point of standing, his face coming to rest in the curve of her neck where her auburn curls tickled his cheek.
"Promise that, from this day forward, we will always seek to understand the world from the eyes of one another."
"I promise, my love."
She held him for a moment longer beneath the watchful moon, then guided him gently toward the warmth of their tent, her arm around his waist, his weight sinking into her side, the camp slept on around them, quiet and whole, while the distant river flowed gentle through the dark, carrying nothing away but the reflection of the stars.