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; the dream hadn't bothered explaining—on a stone balcony above a room full of dead people. Pale, shapeless figures carried weapons between black pillars. Red light pulsed through cracks in the floor. I recognized the feeling of an Underworld, but none of the landmarks.
I'd crossed the Styx, wandered Asphodel and Elysium, and stood in Hades's palace. Here, the walls pressed into the surrounding rock, and the doorways funneled anyone coming through towards the armed shades. Somebody had put considerable thought into making the way out unpleasant. The stranger was working through their arrangements with a sword.
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.
Eight dead things rushed him. He smiled, which concerned me more than the weapons. Red-black light broke around him, and I lost him for half a second. Then he was behind the first attacker, cutting through it. He ducked a spear, turned into another stroke and tilted his head as a shot passed close enough to stir his hair. 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.
An enemy raised its axe, and the stranger was moving before the swing began. He turned into a spear attack at his back. When three shades tried to surround him, he retreated just far enough to bunch them together, cut through the first two and kicked the third into a pillar. Annabeth read weaknesses in buildings that way; Nico could find the dead in a room before anyone else noticed them. This guy seemed to have learned the whole room's habits.
I would've enjoyed watching if the dream had given me any reason to expect a pleasant ending. Eventually he cleared the room and rested his sword against one shoulder. He surveyed the fallen shades. "Well," he said, in an accent I couldn't place, "that could have gone better."
I stared at the pile around him. "You killed all of them."
A doorway opened at the far end. He went through, and the dream dragged me after him, changing my view as he crossed one chamber and entered another. We were climbing. I'd fought my way out of enough underground places to recognize the effort, though he seemed to be enjoying parts of it considerably more than I ever had.
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."
She attacked before I could enjoy his complaint. He avoided three lashes; the fourth drove an iron tip through his chest. He stopped and looked down at it, 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 upright in Cabin Three with Riptide in my hand. Apparently whatever was happening inside my skull deserved armed intervention. My other hand pressed against the small of my back. The weak point was still there beneath my shirt; nothing hurt. I waited for the familiar walls to come into focus, then looked at the sword. "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'd assembled several reasons to ignore the dream. Nobody had asked for help. There'd been no prophecy, no warning, no giant face in the clouds—just an unfamiliar man fighting his way through dead people and losing. After the last couple of years, that barely made my top twenty. I tried not to remember how often things I'd decided to ignore came looking for me.
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. Dating her had changed absolutely nothing about how often she told me my ideas were terrible, which was reassuring in its own way. That night, I went to sleep.
The stranger was alive the next night. He walked into the red-lit chamber without a limp or a mark on his chest, drew his sword and regarded the way ahead with mild annoyance. "Let's try that again."
"No. Seriously. You were dead." He entered the next chamber as the shades appeared. I followed. "Yesterday. I watched."
When another shade charged him, he vanished in that red-black blur and reappeared several yards away. "Stop doing that too!" I said.
He didn't hear me. I watched him take a different route, and that bothered me more than a repeated image would have. He remembered the first run. He was using it.
A few weeks ago, the gods had offered to make me immortal. I'd said no. Watching this guy treat dying like a failed practice run was making me feel pretty good about that decision.
He ignored a doorway he'd used before and avoided the attack that had injured him the previous night. Later, he crouched beside a trap and triggered it from a safe distance. "Interesting," he murmured, studying the damage. I leaned closer too. He'd stopped in the middle of an escape attempt to inspect the mechanism.
The next morning I tried to give Annabeth a brief account. Twelve seconds in, she lowered her book. "The same dream twice?"
"Technically not the same dream," I said. "The location is the same."
"And the person?"
"Same guy."
Annabeth leaned forward. "What changed?"
Most people would have started by asking whether I was feeling okay. Annabeth wanted the part I'd nearly left out. "He changed his route. Based on what happened the first time, I think."
"You're certain it was the same man? That he died?"
"I watched the whip go through his chest. Next night, not a mark on him."
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?"
"He has a laurel. A sword. Lots of dead people. Pretty Greek."
"Percy, by that definition half the people we know are Greek."
"Exactly. Strong statistical evidence."
She tapped one finger against the table. "Tonight," she said, "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, and I settled back before she could give me further instructions.
- • •
He died on the third night. On the fourth, I woke before anything killed him. The fifth took us through regions I hadn't seen, and by the sixth I had begun recognizing the continuing journey beneath the changes. Different chambers, different injuries. He carried each attempt into the next.
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 beside the Styx. I knew it before I saw the water: that ancient cold, the weight of promises nobody should make lightly. Then I looked down. The river I remembered had been black and oily, with an unmistakable dislike of living visitors. This one 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 bored tonight, 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?"
His eyes found me. I held my breath while he narrowed them, green and red, studying the place where I stood without a body. "Odd."
I took one step back, and his gaze followed me. "Oh," he said, sounding mildly surprised.
I swallowed. "Can you see me?"
He gave a small nod. "Apparently."
After a week of watching him fight and die, I hadn't prepared anything to say. We stared until he recovered enough to give me a polite nod. "Hello."
"Hi," I said. I glanced around at the red Styx. "So... are you dead?"
He paused over that. "At present?"
"That's usually what I mean when I ask somebody that."
"No," he said.
"I watched you die."
"Ah."
"Through the chest. Then you sank into the floor."
"The Styx," he corrected.
"That was the Styx?"
He glanced at the crimson water. "Yes."
"Mine doesn't look like that."
His amusement faded. "Yours," he repeated carefully.
I looked from him to the water, wishing I'd worked out how to explain this before mentioning it.
"The River Styx," I said. "Mine is different."
He examined my clothes, the orange Camp shirt and Riptide clipped inside my pocket. "Who are you?"
I hesitated. There were probably rules about giving your name to mysterious immortal men you met in dreams, but 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. He was absolutely going to call me Perseus.
"Your turn," I said.
He adjusted the sword resting against his shoulder. "Zagreus."
The name caught on something from an old mythology lesson. "Seriously? As in Zagreus?"
He frowned. "I wasn't aware there were enough of us to require clarification."
I'd heard the name in some obscure mythology lesson. Something connected to the Underworld. Ancient Greek mythology considered continuity optional; Annabeth would know which version to start with. I tried the connection I could remember.
"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.
Somewhere far away, Nico was probably having a terrible day. I stared at the stranger. "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.
His attention shifted past me. The river had stopped. He crouched beside it, all the amusement gone from his face, and I saw black currents reflected around his burning feet. Ancient faces moved beneath the surface. My Styx. Then the water flashed red again, and he snatched his hand away.
"You saw that," I said.
"Yes." He kept his hand clear of the bank. We listened to the silence where the current should have been.
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 followed. The dream shattered before I reached the doorway, and I woke in Cabin Three with the red Styx burned into my memory. For the first time, I was pretty sure what I'd watched all week wasn't only a dream.