The Ordeals Of The Labyrinth - Part 4
Thalia screamed.
She'd been screaming for some time too - a very, very small part of her mind that wasn't scrambled with terror recognized that much - and suspended by the feet as she was by a force she couldn't see and dangling over a chasm to what looked like literal Tartarus, she couldn't get herself to shut up and think.
It wasn't the pervasive darkness that pushed her past the edge, swirling around her in every which way and seemingly extending endlessly beyond that.
It wasn't the very literal river of flames and bubbling lava waiting below, the one source of infernal light that reeked of sulfur and ash and something borderline malevolent as it raged underneath her.
It wasn't even the knowledge that this was the third time in recent memory that she'd woken up to a disaster worse than the one that she'd blacked out to before - a real shitty trend, that.
No, it was the distance between her and the certain, extra-crispy death waiting below that got to her.
Every time she gathered the nerve to unscrew her eyes and look down, the space to the fiery inferno underneath seemed to warp and twist until her gut violently contorted with nausea and she was forced to dry heave desperately - and to no avail.
She was terrified of heights, more than any monster or god with a stick up their ass looking for a fight, and this?
It was her most humiliating, most pathetic fear made manifest - She'd rather take on a drakon with a toothpick than suffer this.
Hades damn it, She'd take on the three furies, again, and an entire army after them rather than go through this.
But there was nothing she could do - no way for her to tell how long it had been in this miserable state, and she couldn't think of a way out of it.
Thalia couldn't pull herself together long enough to even try.
Naturally, just as soon as the one half-what conscious part of her brain admitted that, the real nightmare hit the road hard.
Ringing out and echoing with pressure she could feel deep in her lungs, a chorus of voices began to sing.
Thalia Grace, Thalia Grace,
Wretched, Wretched, Thalia Grace!
It was a rotten, twisted melody. Thousands of clashing pitches and cadences forced into an unholy choir of taunting misery and evil, and the words they spewed were just as poisonous.
Daughter of The King, The Thunderer's Get,
Whelped to him from a broken pet!
The surface of the burning river began to churn more fiercely, fiery waters sloshing and frothing, and then hands began to emerge from the inferno.
Thalia stared as the limbs of all shapes and sizes, warped and deformed and tipped with claws and talons and writhing things she'd never dared imagine before, their flesh bubbling and sizzling as they rose up and out towards her.
Weak and feckless
Lost and worthless
Born a pawn to the games of fate
And in spite of all, she fails to be great!
Ten, twenty, thirty... more and more emerged with every passing second , growing upwards like a macabre tower straight out of the gnarliest imagination - and the grotesque chorus grew louder the closer they got to her.
Would be Hero, Fallen Low
Betrayed by kin, No greater foe!
Thalia Grace, Thalia Grace,
Truly Wretched Thalia Grace!
She flailed and tried to move, to do something - those things were not touching her, to Hades with that - but the effort was strangled in its cradle almost as soon as she got through the horrified revulsion, because where exactly was she going to go?
She was trapped.
Fuck.
Thy end is nigh, your string is frayed
You've lost your chance to wield the blade!
With that screech, the invisible force stringing her up vanished, and Thalia began to drop, a ragged wail welling up in her as fell directly into the terrible hold below.
Blind panic lit up in her chest, as the heat and the gods-damned stench of putrid rot clogged her nostrils, and true, desperate mortal terror threatened to end her when the roving limbs closed on her and began to drag her down into a hell that put all others to shame, fingers tightening brutally and skittering like insects over as they pulled and pulled and pulled.
Now brace and burn and greet the flame
Fall at last, and be unmade!
It was then, just as she could feel her heart swelling to the point of giving out-
"Relashio!"
-that she heard the most beautiful word she'd never learned in her entire life.
There was a pulse of power, and the limbs strangling her were blasted off with so much force that Thalia felt the ones nearest to her burst. Dimly, she thought she heard something screech in pain, but the thought was lost in the moment of breath-freezing free fall she experienced as the limbs holding her off the surface of the fiery river vanished and left her to tumble down-
"Accio!"
-Before the familiar voice rang out again and that same power seized her like an invisible fist and sent her careening towards a bank of rough-hewn but distinctly undeadly earth that hadn't been there a second before.
Thalia hit the ground roughly, flat on her back, but the impact was cushioned, somewhat, and she wouldn't have felt it regardless, not with the overwhelming relief of having gotten away from that evil coursing through her brain like a triple dose of adrenaline.
"There you are."
Luna Lovegood's face appeared in her vision, the other girl leaning over her with a stance that screamed tension and wariness.
"Up you get. There's no time to waste!"
She stared back into those silver eyes, heart jackhammering in her throat, mind screeching like a broken record.
"...I don't know whether I want to stab you or kiss you, Lovegood" Thalia said, in lieu of screaming hysterically. Again. "But watch your back anyway."
Luna's lips quirked up, tiredly amused even as her eyes remained alert.
"I'll keep it in mind."
A low, sharp growl cut through whatever it was she was going to say next.
Thalia's hackles rose and she shot up to her feet in a scramble, lips barred furiously as that same snarl rang out again.
The surface of the river was bubbling again, and. Only this time, the monsters came in full.
Snarling hell hounds, slithering dracaena, hideous chimera with multiple heads... Things Thalia had never even seen before, and all of them were rising from the flames, mouths frothing and rabid and ready for the hunt.
She'd just gotten her wish, then.
An entire army of monsters, far too many to fight. And they didn't feel like monsters if that made any sense at all.
They felt worse.
"What are these things?" Thalia whispered as they began to inch back, fists clenched so tightly that her knuckles popped out, stark white and shaking ever so slightly. She tried to keep the tremor out of her voice. "And where are we?"
"One of the many, many crevices of Apollo's mind," Luna said without missing a beat.
"What?"
"Our minds were drawn into Apollo's own when the connection I was trying to forge was... overwhelmed by his weight, so to speak." Luna didn't waste time trying to see if she understood, and Thalia had to swallow down enough questions to put a child of Athena to shame. "The only reason we weren't either expelled or disintegrated is because his consciousness is in shambles. Whatever Zeus did to him has shattered his sense of self and our slumbering selves have tangled with the jagged fragments."
She stretched out a hand towards the encroaching hoard. Thalia gawked when her stygian spear appeared in her hand, before scrambling to draw out her spear and expanding her Aegis.
The severed head of Medusa reflected in the gleaming bronze didn't feel as reassuring as it normally did, given that half the things emerging before their eyes looked to be uglier than the gorgon was, but it couldn't hurt to try.
"These things are... fear. Fears. And more." Luna nodded as if to reassure herself. "Negative emotions and ideas drawn from the three of us and made manifest. More yours than mine, I think. I tend to fear other things."
"So this is..." Thalia struggled to find the words, even as she kept her eyes on the emerging hoard. "A demigod dream."
"Something of its sort. But infinitely more dangerous. This isn't the realm of sleep." Luna said and dared to glance her way for a second. "We can get hurt, and suffer far worse things in here than in any mere dream. Don't let them touch you."
Fucking peachy.
"How do we get out?"
Survive now, freak the hades out later.
"I'm working on it." Luna admitted, "Have they said anything to you?"
Wretched, Wretched, Thalia Grace!
She swallowed. "No."
She was going to stab Apollo right in the face - and probably breakdown, assuming she didn't end up dead.
Whatever that would look like in this state.
Luna didn't comment on the obvious lie. The first monster - a hellhound twice as large and as mean as any Thalia had seen before fully emerged from the waves. It placed a pair of paws larger than her head against the shoreline and heaved itself up with a low snarl, fur bristling and dripping with molten flame.
"We need to find Apollo. However much of him remains whole." Luna said, The tip of her spear beginning to crackle with eldritch violet light. Thalia followed suit, the familiar smell of ozone banishing the scent of brimstone and ash as her own weapon sparked to life. "Get ready to run, on my mark."
Run where? Barring the lake, there was nothing but darkness surrounding them. She didn't try to argue the point, though, just readied her spear and her feet, bent her knees in preparation to move, and-
"I found you."
-It was all for nothing.
Thalia stiffened as the words rang over them, seemingly closing in from every which way, and Luna froze solid.
Even the monsters stilled.
Abruptly, her mind flashed right back to the answer Luna had given her.
"I fear other things."
What did a demigod have to fear, if not monsters?
As it turned out - and as just was their luck - the answer appeared behind them.
There was a figure standing right within striking range, six feet tall but seeming to tower beyond even that. They wore robes of black so deep they would have disappeared amongst the utter darkness caging them in if it wasn't for the mask they wore.
Pure silver, shaped like a skull, and all but gleaming with malice.
"Did you think you could flee forever, blood traitor? It's your turn to burn."
Luna went white.
Before Thalia could lunge and drive her spear forward, the masked figure snapped out an arm and brandished a length of pale wood, the tip pointed right at her.
"Ignus Infernum!"
And the wave of demonic Fiendfyre exploded towards them at point-blank range.
...
To borrow a quote from one of my favorite fics ever (This Bites By Xomniac):
"Matters have just left pear-shaped and escalated to the eldritch topographies of a taco warping through a tesseract."
And believe me - It's going to get worse!
Next Chapter: We get back to Percy and co, and escalation of all sorts occurs!
XD
As always leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it please be courteous.