Chapter Text
The first time I watched the guy die, I figured it was a prophecy. That sounds terrible, but prophetic dreams and I have history. Usually they come with a few warning signs: creepy lighting, mysterious voices, somebody I care about standing ten feet away from certain death while I'm apparently forbidden from doing anything useful. Occasionally a Titan shows up. This one was different. For starters, I had no idea who the guy was.
I stood—or floated, or dreamed, or whatever you call it when your brain sends you somewhere without your permission—on a stone balcony overlooking a room full of dead people. Pale, shapeless figures carried weapons between pillars of black stone while red light pulsed through cracks in the floor. They looked almost like ghosts. The place felt like the Underworld, but I couldn't recognize any of it.
I'd crossed the River Styx, wandered the Fields of Asphodel, and been to Elysium. I'd spent much longer in Tartarus with my girlfriend than any sane person should. None of those places looked like this. The walls seemed built into the rock instead of carved from it, and every doorway looked deliberately placed, like somebody had designed the whole realm around the idea that you'd have to fight your way through it. Which, as it turned out, was exactly what the stranger was doing.
He stood in the middle of the room with a sword in one hand. At first I thought he might be another demigod. Then I got a better look. He was taller than me, pale enough that the red light made his skin look almost carved from marble. His black hair stuck out in every direction, barely held back by a red-orange laurel that glowed around the edges. One eye was red, the other green. And his feet were on fire.
Embers glowed beneath his skin, sending sparks across the stone whenever he moved. He seemed perfectly comfortable with that. So, probably not a demigod.
The dead things rushed him, and he smiled. That was the part I found concerning. Most people don't smile when eight armed corpses charge them. He moved in a burst of red-black distortion that sent sparks across the floor, and for half a second, my eyes lost him. Then he was behind the first attacker, his sword flashing as the shade came apart. He ducked under a spear without looking at it, turned, and cut another enemy across the middle. When something fired a projectile from the far side of the chamber, he tilted his head, letting the shot pass close enough to disturb his hair. That wasn't luck. He'd known exactly where it was going.
"Okay," I muttered as he drove his sword into another shade. "You're showing off."
He couldn't hear me. Something hit him from behind, throwing him forward hard enough that I heard ribs crack. I winced as he rolled, came back up, and kept fighting.
He was good. Not in the way somebody is good after a few summers of sword training. He was good the way Annabeth was good at spotting weaknesses in buildings, or the way Nico knew when a room had a dead person in it before anybody said anything. It looked less like he was reacting to the fight and more like he'd already seen the whole thing happen. An enemy raised its axe; the stranger moved before the swing started. A spear came at his back; he was already turning. When three shades tried to surround him, he gave ground exactly far enough to make them bunch together before cutting through the first two and kicking the third into a pillar.
I would've enjoyed watching him if I hadn't had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Prophetic dreams are annoying like that. You never get sent somewhere to watch a guy have a perfectly normal Tuesday. Eventually the stranger cleared the room. He rested his sword against one shoulder and looked over the defeated shades. "Well," he said to nobody, with an accent I couldn't quite place, "that could have gone better."
I stared at the pile around him. "You killed all of them."
He gave no sign of hearing me. A doorway opened at the far end of the chamber, and he walked through. The dream followed without giving me any say in the matter. Suddenly I was watching from another impossible angle as he entered the next chamber, then another, working his way upward. I'd fought my way out of enough underground places to recognize somebody looking for the exit. I couldn't understand why the Underworld seemed determined to stop him—or why he seemed to be having fun.
Eventually, fun stopped helping. Blood ran down one arm, one leg wasn't working right, and his movements had slowed enough for me to see the effort behind them. In the next chamber, a woman stepped into his path carrying a whip. She gave me an immediate, unpleasant flashback to Mrs. Dodds.
"Maybe don't?" I suggested.
The stranger stared at the woman and sighed. "Oh, come on."
I almost laughed. Then she attacked. He dodged the first attack. The second. The third. The fourth got him. A whip's iron tip went through his chest.
For one second, everything stopped. The stranger looked down at the weapon sticking out of him, then looked almost offended. "Right," he said quietly. The whip came free. He dropped to one knee.
I moved without thinking. "Hey!" When he didn't react, I shouted, "HEY!" His sword slipped from his fingers, and the fire around his feet dimmed. Then the floor beneath him liquefied. A dark crimson pool spread beneath his knees, and his body sank into it. I tried to reach him, but my hand went through empty air. The stranger disappeared. The dream went black.
I woke up sitting straight in bed. For several seconds, I didn't know where I was. Then the familiar walls of Cabin Three came into focus. My sword was already in my hand. Riptide had apparently decided that whatever was happening inside my skull deserved armed intervention. I looked at it. "Helpful."
Outside, Camp Half-Blood was quiet—the kind of quiet that meant it was probably around three in the morning and only the harpies, the night patrol, and whatever campers were currently making terrible romantic decisions were awake. I capped Riptide, watched the bronze blade shrink back into a pen, and dropped onto my pillow. I didn't go back to sleep.
- • •
By breakfast, I had mostly convinced myself the dream didn't matter. This was impressive because I knew perfectly well that whenever I convinced myself something didn't matter, it usually tried to kill me within seventy-two hours. Still, I had reasons. Nobody in the dream had asked me to save them. There had been no prophecy, no ominous warning, no giant face appearing in the clouds. Just some weird Underworld guy fighting his way through dead people and losing. After the last couple of years, that barely made my top twenty.
I ate breakfast, trained, and spent an hour helping some younger campers with sword drills. Then I lost an argument with Annabeth about whether "I'll figure it out when it collapses" counted as an engineering strategy. That night, I went to sleep.
The stranger was alive again. I knew it before I saw him. Same black stone. Same red light. Same impossible Underworld. Then he walked into view: no wound in his chest, no limp, no sign that I'd watched him die twenty-four hours earlier. He looked mildly annoyed.
"Let's try that again," he said to himself, drawing his sword.
I stared at him. "No. No, seriously. You were dead."
He walked into the next chamber. The shades appeared.
"You died," I reminded him. "Yesterday."
Another shade charged him. He vanished in that red-black blur and reappeared several yards away.
"Stop doing that too!"
He gave no sign of hearing me, so I watched the rest of the run. The different route bothered me. Dreams repeated things all the time; prophecies reused images. This guy remembered what had happened and changed what he did next.
He ignored a doorway he'd used before and avoided an attack that had injured him the previous night before the enemy even launched it. At one point, he crouched beside a trap, studied the mechanism, and deliberately triggered it from a safe distance. "Interesting," he murmured, examining the damage. I frowned. Whatever else he wanted from these runs, he seemed intent on learning how the place worked.
The next morning I gave Annabeth what I hoped was a brief account. That lasted about twelve seconds. "You've had the same dream twice?" Annabeth asked, lowering the book she had been reading.
"Technically not the same dream," I said. "The location is the same."
"And the person?"
"Same guy."
Annabeth leaned forward. "What changed?"
See, this was why telling Annabeth things was dangerous. Most people heard I dreamed about a flaming-footed man in the Underworld who died and came back and started with questions like, Are you feeling okay? Annabeth went straight to evidence.
"He changed his route," I admitted. "Based on what happened the first time. Maybe."
Her gray eyes narrowed. "And he died?"
"Definitely."
"And now he's alive?"
"Also definitely."
Annabeth was quiet for a moment. "Could be symbolic."
"That's reassuring."
"I didn't say the symbol was good," she said.
"Less reassuring."
She ignored that. "Greek?"
"I think so."
"You think?" Annabeth repeated.
"He has a laurel. A sword. Lots of dead people. Pretty Greek."
Annabeth gave me a flat look. "Percy, by that definition half the people we know are Greek."
"And a quarter Roman."
She gave me the look. I had missed that look while we were apart. I did not tell her that.
"Tonight," Annabeth said, tapping one finger against the table, "pay attention to details. Names. Symbols. Anything written down. If it's an actual place—"
"I'll probably get stabbed there eventually?"
"I was going to say we might identify it."
"Mine felt more realistic." Her mouth twitched. I counted that as a victory.
- • •
The third night, I saw him die again. The fourth, he lived long enough for me to wake up from my dream. On the fifth, he crossed regions of the Underworld I hadn't seen yet. By the sixth, the dreams had become one continuing story. The chambers, enemies, and injuries changed, and he changed with them.
Sometimes he carried the same sword; sometimes he fought differently, testing another approach to a room. He inspected doors and damaged defenses. Once, after defeating a group of shades, he walked back across the chamber to examine the hole one of them had smashed into a wall.
"What are you doing?" I asked. "You're supposed to be escaping." Nothing. I watched him inspect the broken stone. "Unless you're not escaping," I added.
He straightened and turned his head slightly. I froze, suddenly convinced he'd heard me, but he kept walking.
On the seventh night, I found him standing beside a river. My stomach dropped. I knew that river. Except I didn't. The feeling of it was unmistakable: ancient, cold, full of promises nobody should make lightly. The Styx. But the water wasn't right. I remembered black currents, oily darkness, the sense that the river hated everything living enough to take it personally. This river glowed red.
The stranger stood on its bank, with a fishing rod in his hand. His reflection trembled in the crimson water.
"That's impossible," I whispered.
He looked tired tonight. Not physically. Just bored, which seemed like a weird emotion to have in the Underworld. Then his hook moved.
"Damn it, that was close," he said.
I blinked. "What?"
He looked toward me. Not past me. Not vaguely in my direction. At me. Every hair on my arms stood up. The stranger's mismatched eyes narrowed—green and red, focused directly on the place where I was somehow standing without having a body. I didn't breathe. He tilted his head.
"Odd," he said.
I took one step back. His gaze followed me.
"Oh," he said, sounding mildly surprised.
I swallowed. "Can you see me?"
His expression changed. Not much. Just enough.
"Apparently," he said with a small nod.
We stared at each other for about three seconds. After a week of watching him die, come back, and set off traps on purpose, I had no idea how to start a conversation. I hadn't expected to have one at all. He recovered first, giving me a small, polite nod. "Hello."
"Hi," I said. I glanced around at the red Styx. "So... are you dead?"
He considered the question. "At present?"
"That's usually what I mean when I ask somebody that."
"No," he said.
"I watched you die."
"Ah."
"You got stabbed through the chest," I reminded him.
"Yes."
"And then you sank into the floor."
"The Styx," he corrected.
"That was the Styx?"
He glanced at the crimson river beside him. "Yes."
I pointed at it. "You sure?"
Now he looked offended. "I should hope so."
"Mine doesn't look like that."
Silence. His amusement disappeared—not all at once, just enough that I realized I'd said something important.
"Yours," he repeated carefully.
I probably should've stopped talking. Historically, that's not one of my strengths.
"The River Styx," I said. "Mine is different."
The stranger studied me more carefully now. Not just my face. My clothes. Riptide clipped inside my pocket. The orange Camp Half-Blood shirt I'd apparently decided to wear into a supernatural dream dimension.
"Who are you?" he asked.
I hesitated. There were probably rules about giving your name to mysterious immortal men you met in dreams. Unfortunately, nobody had ever taught me those rules.
"Percy."
His eyebrows lifted. "Perseus?"
I immediately disliked him.
"Nobody calls me Perseus."
"Of course," he said, far too politely.
There was something about the way he said it that told me he absolutely intended to call me Perseus.
"Your turn," I said.
He adjusted the sword resting against his shoulder. "Zagreus."
For once, my brain had a piece of mythology ready. "Seriously?"
Zagreus frowned. "I'm sorry?"
"As in Zagreus?"
His expression went completely flat. "I wasn't aware there were enough of us to require clarification."
I had heard the name before. Some obscure mythology lesson. Something connected to the Underworld. Ancient sources couldn't agree because ancient Greek mythology apparently considered continuity optional. Annabeth would know. Then another memory surfaced.
"You're connected to Hades," I said.
His eyes narrowed slightly. "One would hope."
"What does that mean?"
"It means he's my father," Zagreus said.
I stared at him. Somewhere far away, I imagined Nico having a terrible day. "No," I said.
Zagreus blinked. "No?"
"Hades doesn't have a son named Zagreus."
A longer silence followed. Then Zagreus glanced down at himself as though checking.
"That's rather awkward," he said.
"I know Hades."
"My condolences," Zagreus said with a sympathetic nod.
Despite everything, I laughed. That seemed to surprise him.
Then his attention shifted past me to the red river, which had stopped moving, like somebody had frozen a picture of it. Zagreus's humor disappeared. "What?" I asked. He didn't answer, only crouched beside the Styx. The ember-light around his feet reflected across the surface, but the reflection was wrong. For one instant, I saw black water instead of red: dark currents, ancient faces beneath the surface. My Styx. Then it flickered back, and Zagreus jerked his hand away from the river.
"You saw that," I said.
He looked at me. Whatever joke he'd been about to make never arrived.
"Yes," he said.
For a moment, neither of us said anything.
Then a deep grinding sound rolled through the cavern. I jumped. Zagreus didn't.
Across the chamber, a massive doorway was beginning to open.
"Is that supposed to happen?" I asked.
Zagreus glanced toward it.
"That one? Yes."
"Oh. Good. Finally, something normal."
He gave me a look.
"Your standards for normal appear somewhat concerning, Perseus."
"Still not my name."
The doorway opened onto darkness. Zagreus adjusted his grip on his sword and started toward it. "Where does that go?" I asked.
"Up."
I started after him.
The dream shattered.
I woke in Cabin Three with the red Styx still burned into my memory.
And for the first time, I was pretty sure whatever I'd been watching all week wasn't only a dream.