Chapter Text
“Hazel? Hazel, hi!”
The sound of her own name startled her so badly, she almost woke up. The dream had started out…not normal, but standard-weird, for a demigod dream. She was walking through a city that looked as though it should have been familiar, but there was just too much wrong with it. Too much different. Maybe out of place?
She'd been trying to pin down what exactly was so off, when suddenly the dream was interrupted.
The red-haired girl didn't step into the dream. More like the dream paused and the oracle suddenly went to stand in front of it.
Rachel Elizabeth Dare. Hazel only kind of knew her. She was Percy and Annabeth's friend. Nico's friend, or maybe acquaintance. But being a friend to Hazel's friends was enough to make her at least attempt a welcoming smile, despite how the oracle had startled her.
“Hey, Hazel,” Rachel said, her words quick and urgent. “Sorry. I tried to Iris message you, because I forgot it’s like five in the morning in California, and I don’t know what time you wake up, so instead I asked Apollo for dream privileges.”
“Dream privileges?”
Rachel smirked. “Yeah, about once every couple of months he lets me pop into someone’s dreams, if I ask. I mostly save it for important stuff. Mostly.”
“Okay…And, no offense, but why is the Greek oracle calling me?” Granted, there had been more crossover in that regard, lately. The gods’ aspects had settled down, now that the war was done (as of last week), so separating and sharing were both a great deal more comfortable than they had been before. But still, New Rome had its new augur. If any prophecy was to come for them, it should come through him. “Is this about the Doors?” she added nervously.
Olympus had supposedly been discussing her “alive” status for days now, deciding what to do about it. With each night that arrived with no news, she began to suspect more and more that they were using the pretense of “discussion” to get away with letting the whole thing slide. But maybe not. She sure couldn't seem to relax about it for too long. Between that and the lingering weight of Leo's death, the aftermath of their victory had been a pretty grim time for her, actually.
“No,” Rachel said, in a voice that pitched a little high, like she actually wasn’t sure. “It doesn’t seem to be. It is about your thread, but…”
“My thread?!” If she could catch a chill inside a dream, she would have.
“I don’t have a full prophecy for you, but I hear things from the Fates sometimes. Oh boy, not sure how much time I have to explain this, but…Okay, so in the cosmos, there are a lot of different looms. They mostly drift around in infinite space or something…Sorry, not space. That’s confusing. They mostly drift around in infinite nothing, and for each loom, different Fates craft the tapestry and grow it and move it around. But apparently one of the other looms suddenly got really close to ours? Yesterday. I don’t know how ‘close’ works when we’re not measuring space, but basically, another tapestry started to touch ours. Which theoretically shouldn’t matter, but somehow your thread started to get tangled with it. Not ’somehow’. Through some kind of godly, or titanly, or third party intervention, your string got tangled in another tapestry. Maybe because your thread is one that was already cut once. The Fates are working on it, and we’re sending someone, probably Percy and Nico, over as soon as we can, because it might cause-”
And then Hazel woke up.
She woke up dazed, like she was dizzy before her head even left the pillow, but she was still pretty certain that she woke up in her own bed at home in New Rome. She woke up and she got to her feet, and at some point between those two things, she was suddenly somewhere else.
She was standing on a sidewalk, outside a row of small stores, along a street that was packed with honking cars. The passersby showed no signs of shock or alarm, no awareness that she had appeared out of thin air.
And for that matter, it didn’t feel as though she had.
She felt like she’d been standing in this spot just as much as she’d been sleeping in her bed. She had walked here in her dream.
"Rachel?" she said shakily.
Blinking away the final distortions of the daze (and they looked like strings of light; that couldn’t be good), Hazel processed the oracle’s words all over again.
Tangled in another tapestry. The Fates’ tapestry.
Okay, this really wasn’t good at all, was it?
"Rachel? Frank? Nico?"
She looked down at herself. Still dressed in her pajamas. A button-up shirt and shorts, both patterned with tiny purple flowers, and big, fluffy, brown slippers that looked like horses. Given to her by Percy.
Very. Not. Armor.
No weapon– just the earth and a halfway-decent command of the Mist. Okay, a pretty good command of the Mist actually. Still, no spatha. She really wished she had her sword.
And not that it mattered in the scheme of things, but she didn’t love wearing pajamas in public. Certainly not short pajamas. She didn’t think it was any old-fashioned sensibilities kicking in; it just made her uncomfortable. She pulled off her bonnet, at least, but didn’t dare mess with the headscarf underneath, because who knew when she would actually have time for a mirror, brush, and comb.
Okay. Regroup. Roman up. Don't panic. Don't be a baby.
Am I at least close to where I was before?
She made herself start walking, scanning around for landmarks. Her ears caught onto a passing conversation, and okay, good news, they were speaking English. The accents sounded American to her. Californian? That much she wasn’t sure. Most of her California time was spent in New Rome, and there were all kinds of accents there.
Another passing conversation piqued her interest, this time for its content:
A woman, walking arm-in-arm with a friend, asked, “Is today a Hellenic day, or a Latin day?”
And the friend replied, “One sec…” glanced at her cell phone, and answered, “Hellenic.”
Um, what?
Okay. Bad.
No- weird. Not necessarily bad.
Actually, bad. This was weird in a bad-defaulting way. Even if those two, specifically, were just sharing an inside joke or something, it was a bonkers enough coincidence to qualify as a bad omen.
She didn’t know where she was. That stuff about a tapestry sounded like it had to do with another world, or dimension, or timeline, or something like that, which was definitely at risk of exceeding the level of sci-fi she’d been able to absorb in her time since coming back to life. But there were stores, and cars. Nothing brain-breaking. The oracle had said that another tapestry had gotten close to theirs, and that proximity wasn’t measured by actual space, so maybe “close” meant “similar” in this context. Maybe this was a world that was so similar to hers that she had somehow accidentally walked from one to the other...in her sleep...
Not ’somehow’. Through some kind of godly, or titanly, or third party intervention, your string got tangled in another tapestry.
Right, there was also that. Sheesh.
For now, she was going to hope that this world was similar enough to hers that she could find equivalent help. New Rome or Camp Half-Blood. First, she needed to find someplace to settle and gather information about where she was. Maybe a gas station with local maps. She walked faster, emboldened by the hope of next steps.
People nearby were beginning to notice that she was out and about in pajamas and slippers. She snapped her fingers and wrapped the Mist around herself, blanketing her body from outside observation. Well, that was a little better. No eyes. Just mission.
…
On another hemisphere, Lady Hecate’s head turned in the direction of North America.
…
Some early observations: She was still in California. A lot of the street names were the same, which wasn't enough to help her navigate to New Rome, but it was at least comforting. And the Greek and Roman gods were much more normalized as a topic of conversation here. Not by name; the mortals seemed careful about names. And not by ancient epithets, either. It was actually somehow weirder.
“Gods, I’m already sweating,” one nearby teen complained. “I swear, Apple-Lowe’s is trying to ruin my life.”
“Apple-Lowe’s?” Hazel muttered under her breath (while routinely bending down to collect a gemstone that had emerged from the sidewalk in her wake). It was only after forming the words herself that the shape of them made clear the meaning: Apollo.
“He’s not trying to ruin your life,” the teen’s friend replied, in a mocking tone. “He’s trying to kill you. Kill you dead. Give you the Hi-Cynthia special, straight to Hey-nuts.”
Was Hi-Cynthia supposed to be Hyacinthus? And contextually, it seemed like Hey-nuts could easily mean Hades…though Hazel didn’t see the connection, with that one; they sounded nothing alike.
There was a library at the end of the block, and just on the way, she overheard Jupiter being referred to as “Chew Pewter” and Diana referred to as “Die-Banana”. (Which was all very stupid and annoying, compared to regular epithets, but she couldn't hold it against them.) Both times, the person nearest the speaker corrected, “It’s a Hellenic day.” Like the Roman gods weren’t supposed to be discussed on “Hellenic days”.
This world was seeming distressingly not-similar.
She reached the library. Directly across the street from it was a mosque, which was a pretty big relief. Other religions also existed here. Awesome. Maybe obvious, but still good news. Hearing so many people talking about Apollo and Jupiter had really put her on edge.
The Mist was still doing its part to hide her from the other library patrons, as she entered and started to look around. On the surface level, everything seemed normal. Shelves, books, tables, chairs, desks. Computers. Desktop computers, which were usually safe. Something about location settings? She knew nothing about computers. She wished Annabeth were here to ask. Annabeth even had a laptop!
Something was weird. What was weird?
She turned around in a full circle. All the mortals were walking around normally. Her bonnet was still balled up in her hand, and there were about five or six gems congregating in the shallow breast pocket of her pajama shirt, because what else was she supposed to do with them?
Okay, having looked the place over a second time, she could identify a few weird things.
One: Map on the wall. It was wrong. Or, it was different. Same-looking continents, different countries. Very different countries. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted to look at that for too long, because the implications of how much of the Eurasian continent was taken up by a country called “Hellas” had the potential to stress her out.
Two: There were signs above the shelves, labeling the fiction section, the nonfiction section, and audiobooks, films, and music…Except the music wasn’t labeled “music”. It was labeled “meric”. What?
Three: There were different symbols for the bathrooms than she was used to, but that wasn't too big a deal. Sometimes that was a stylistic choice.
Four: It felt like someone was watching her. She couldn't see anyone looking at her, and the Mist should have prevented anyone from making note of her, but it felt like she was being watched.
She could do this. Just a few quick reads to get her bearings, and then...And then what happened next depended on what she learned. The feeling of being observed made it impossible to roam the shelves looking for the right stack of books, so she resigned herself to the theoretically-quicker option.
She sat at one of the computers, her fingers poised over the keys. It was just like playing a piano.
First, had to open a search engine. She knew how to open a search engine. She got lost a couple times, but she figured it out quick enough. And that was the hard part; now she just had to type out her questions and...
Maybe it was too minor a detail to fixate on, but the first thing she looked up was “meric”.
Meric is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, melody, auxiliary melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content.
That was just music. It was just the word “music”. Why was the word “music” different here?
She scrolled down to "etymology".
The modern English word 'meric' is derived from the Egyptian goddess Meret, whose domains include rejoice, song, and dance.
Oh! Right. "Music", like the Muses. Greek. So either the mortals' reluctance to say any of the Greek or Roman gods' names out loud had prevented words like "music" from ever existing, or the difference in the world map had some trickle-down impact on the way the English language developed. Not for nothing, Europe seemed to still be called Europe. Should she be testing out other words?
No, focus!
The next thing she looked up was "New Rome", on the off-chance it was something people knew about here. And...There was nothing.
Not only was there no "New Rome"; that had been a long shot in the first place. But there was no "Rome". Nothing to do with "Rome", "Roman", it was like it didn't exist. The query just returned:
Did you mean: new home?
That was weirder. The people she'd overheard had definitely been talking about the Roman gods, hadn't they?
They had, and yet...
They didn't say "Roman", she recalled. They'd said "Latin". And they hadn't said "Greek" at all, either. Hellenic and Latin...And the country, the huge country enveloping a huge chunk of Europe, it was called "Hellas".
That sounded like more etymology stuff, which she did not need to investigate. She was looking for allies, not fascinating diverging histories. Might as well look up "Camp Half-Blood", though her hopes weren't high.
Yeah, nothing. Some stuff about blood testing, blood types, and weirdly high in the search results, something about Apollo? Signs and symptoms of a bloodline cursed by gods...In a medical journal.
So there was no secret here. The mortals knew. Myths were facts, magic was science, it was all out in the open. There were guides on which gods to pray to for what, and how. None of the major Greek or Roman gods made the list, weirdly enough. There was Hypnos, Hecate, but none of the major ones. She searched "how to pray to pluto", not because she planned to, but because she still hadn't learned her lesson about getting distracted by all the weird questions this world raised.
Oops! Today is a Hellenic day.
Did you mean: how to pray to hades?
"Gods, yes, sure, whatever," she grumbled under her breath, clicking for more. She knew she should've just found a book, instead.
The consensus among theologians, as recently as the 2013 United Nations Colloquy, holds that the twelve major Hellenic-Latin gods should only be addressed with prayers of worship or prayers for forgiveness– and should not be asked for blessings or favor. Academics in the field of godly relations[1,2] contend that it is highly unsafe to address or name members of the Hellenic and Latin pantheon outside the parameters of the published ceremonial guidelines for worship or apology. This rule is conditionally suspended on holidays such as The Festival of Asking, but humans are advised to remain cautious even when prayers of asking are made welcome, so as to avoid incurring godly wrath.
The wrath of the Hellenic-Latin gods is rated existentially severe, on the world-standard pain scale- the highest available rating. No other pantheon has been known to neutralize this effect.
Whoa.
"Yikes," she breathed. And by reflex, she looked under her chair and gathered up the nugget of gold that was starting to nudge its way through the seam between the library's pristine marble floor tiles. That was pretty bad, too. Not as bad as the Greek and Roman gods being famously wrathful in this world, but pretty bad.
There was no more room in her pocket, so she dropped the gold into her bonnet.
New agenda. Actually, she was not going to be talking to any gods here, and maybe not demigods either. She was avoiding risk, focusing on clothes and food and hoping all that stuff about the Fates "working on it", and her friends being on their way, panned out.
This would all be so much easier if she could, in good conscience, sell these rocks she kept accidentally digging up.
Okay, some more important information. She looked up "monsters".
Monster is the colloquial term for members of the biological phylum Monstrum, within the biological kingdom Immortalis.
Sounded about right. Jeez Louise. Every search result was about emergency plans and contact numbers...
Emergency contacts.
Emergency contacts related to monsters. The first thing that came up was a website that asked her to either "Search by Nome" or "Search by City". And there were hieroglyphics on the screen.
Was America officially under the Egyptian pantheon? She kind of hoped so; they sounded way nicer. What was their wrath rating? Could she ask them for help?
Were there rules about Roman- or, Latin -demigods talking to other pantheons? What status were demigods supposed to have, if immortals were seen as a whole other biological kingdom, separate from the rest? Did that...even make sense?
She searched up "demigods".
In polytheistic religions, a demigod or demigoddess is a mythical being that is half-divine and half-human, born of an immortal deity and a human. Unlike their godly counterparts, demigods are understood to serve as a rhetorical and prosaic construct, rather than a concrete, observable entity. In poetry and art, the character archetype of the demigod has been known to represent grief, longing, and impossible blessings.
Hazel blinked at the screen. There was something there...She was sure there was something there that was actually really important, some dot she was close to connecting...But instead, a yawn suddenly worked its way through her whole body, and now her face was on the keyboard.
That sucked...She couldn't even read the screen from here...
And she'd just woken up! Now she was sleepy again...
At least she was already wearing pajamas. Ha. Cozy. Her slippers were so soft.
...
"It's impossible," Hypnos breathed, even as his hands hovered in the air surrounding the sleeping girl, feeling every trace of divinity that emanated from her very being.
"It's as I said," Hecate replied. Her hands were not near the girl, but balled tightly in the long skirts of her own chiton.
"We must be sure. If it turns out she belongs to the Egyptians, or the Norse, or..." It had been centuries since they warred with another pantheon- directly, at least -and abducting a claim of theirs would certainly strain the peace. As of now, the girl was still in the library and had not been touched.
"There are seven people alive to whom I have taught my ways, and all seven have served in my temple for at least thirty years. No mortal or otherling can wield my magic without my help. That means she is no mortal or otherling." In awe, Hecate added, "And I think we'll find that withholding a discovery of this kind from the Twelve would be rather more immediately unpleasant than antagonizing the Egyptians or the Norse. We should bring this matter to Hermes."