The Ordeals Of The Labyrinth - Part 8
Percy woke up.
That was a surprise all on its own - though he wasn't quite sure he wanted to acknowledge why - but it was where he woke up that was the real icing on the cake.
He blinked his eyes open, and inexplicably found himself standing in the middle of a familiar throne room. The air was heavy and dark, but the floor and the walls were gleaming marble, engraved with great artistic scripts and illustrations of olden Greek myths. Gold, silver and precious stones of every sort were inlaid everywhere the eye could see, and the shine they put out almost overwhelmed the lighting from the torches, all of them held up by racks made of bleached white bones.
All of this was, naturally, second to the god a few feet away from him.
He was at least ten feet tall, just like the last time they'd met, and dressed in the same black silk robes with a crown of braided gold. His skin was albino white, and his hair was shoulder-length and jet-black. He wasn't the same kind of muscle monster that was Ares, or almost painfully brilliant like Apollo - in fact, he wasn't anything like any other god Percy had ever met - but he radiated power all the same.
He lounged on his throne of fused human bones, looking as graceful and at ease as a coiled serpent, and he stared down at him with the same cold expectation he had three years ago.
"Jackson." Hades rumbled "Awake at last."
Percy stared up at his divine uncle, long and hard.
"Oh. I'm dead."
The fight with Anteus...
He felt an odd sense of detachment as he remembered his half-brother killing him. Exhaling for lack of anything better to do, he lifted a hand and ran it through his hair.
Dimly, he noted that his skin had an odd tinge to it. Sallow and pale, and almost spectral. Like he could see through it if only he tried hard enough.
Even that didn't phase him.
His next thought did, though.
Annabeth. Mom-
"You're not dead, Jackson."
- and there went that said thought, screaming off into oblivion as Percy's eyes snapped up "Wh-"
"-Though you were, in fact, killed."
...
Percy stared at it. Hades looked back, just as expectantly.
...
"This is the part where you explain."
Strangely enough, the god didn't threaten to smite him for daring to make that borderline demand. His unusually placid expression didn't even twitch.
"The other ill-begotten spawn of my brother managed to snuff the breath out of you. Athena's get-" Percy twitched at the mention of Annabeth. "Succeeded in resuscitating you before your soul made it to Charon's grasp and crossed the Styx."
The god fixed him with a steely look.
"Consider yourself lucky. Her timing was certainly fortuitous. A few moments longer and you would have been lost to the living forevermore."
Percy processed that with the same heady detachment as before - it felt like being blissed out on disbelief, only there was no bliss to be felt at all.
"I don't remember meeting Charon."
He doesn't remember anything after Anteus at all, come to think of it. Even when he tries, the only thing he gets is the faintest impression of cold.
"Nor will you. Some experiences belong solely to the realm of the dead. This is one of them."
"Huh." There was another pause. "So I'm definitely not dead."
That was... good.
Hades closed his eyes, impatience finally dawning on his features.
"No."
"Then..." He blinks. "Is this a demigod dream?"
That'd be about bog-standard, actually.
"Not quite, but for the purposes of this little talk, the principle is the same."
And there's the vague, confusing divine, non-straightforward answer he knew and hated.. He was getting a little worried there.
"Why?" A terrible thought occurred. "I swear if your helm's gone missing again-!"
"Nothing of the sort!" Hades snapped, dark eyes narrowing in displeasure. The ground beneath his feet seemed to rumble in warning. "And it would behoove you to stop interrupting me, Jackson"
Percy scowled.
"What? Are you going to sic your furies on me again? At least this time it'd be for something I actually did."
...
Wait, did he just say that aloud?
Judging by the incredulous rise of Hades's brows and the rapidly growing rage on his face, then yes, he did.
"You-!" He rumbled ominously.
Being temporarily dead must have fried his impulse control. And now the God of the dead was going to fry the rest of him, dream or no dream.
Except he didn't.
Right as his uncle went to move - probably to vaporize him - his face blanked. An odd, eerie, stillness seemed to come over him and the aura of wrathful malice he'd been exuding half a second ago whittled down to nothing.
"Impudent," Hades grumbled, and Percy felt himself exhale a breath he hadn't known he was holding at that unspoken stay of execution. "Imperitent."
"I have been called that," he admitted to both.
"Stop. Talking."
Percy stopped talking.
"Regardless of your... present circumstances." Hades glared down at him pointedly, as if trying to remind him. Which was frankly unnecessary, because it's not like Percy was going to forget.
Ever.
"I have a task for you, Jackson."
Ah.
And now they were two for two on familiar ground.
Gods huffing and puffing only to ask him for something? Classic.
"In case you forgot, or just didn't get the news all the down in the underworld." Hades frowned dangerously and Percy had to bite down on the inside of his cheek to tone down whatever it was his brain was going to spew out next. "I am on a quest. And it's kind of a big deal."
"I am aware. You've become tangled in yet another prophecy in your quest to save Artemis, and you face the threat of both the Titans and Zeus and his hounds" His tone darkened. "As do my children."
"Yeah, so-"
Hold on.
...
For a moment, Percy thought he'd misheard him.
Then he glanced up, looking into onyx-black eyes that he abruptly and with a cold jolt of panic realized were far too familiar, and the pieces clicked together faster than they ever had in his life.
He stumbled back, jaw going slack. "No."
"So death has made you quicker on the uptake, has it?" Hades said flatly. "Joy."
"No."
There was no way - Bianca was a bit reserved, but she was pleasant enough, and Nico was a little ball of sunshine who probably swallowed triple-A batteries for breakfast.
And yet...
"But they're nothing like you!" Percy blurted out, and Hades's brow twitched as if he was strangling the urge to do terrible things to him.
He probably was.
"My children," In the end, the god blatantly ignored his outburst. "-Are not ready for the trials of demigod life, and they are certainly not ready for these machinations of fate. You will protect them until such a time that I can bring them to the Underworld."
It's phrased like an order. The sentiment behind is one he can totally get behind.
Only, he found himself opening his mouth to ask-
"Why can't you help them yourself?"
He didn't blurt it out this time. His tone was perfectly cool and level.
The words still landed like meteors, and everything went silent.
Why do you people never help?
(Why didn't he help?)
Hades gave him a long, long look - but he didn't grow any angrier.
Percy wasn't expecting an answer, but in the next few seconds, he got one all the same.
"Would that I could, if not for the consequences of this damnable quest." He blinked, and Hades's gaze seemed to pin him in place. "That accursed Oracle has unleashed another prophecy. The Olympians are breaking their vows of non-interference without impunity. Thanatos walks the earth in a corporeal avatar for the first time in millennia, all for the sake of the first and only child he has ever sired."
There's a quiet pause, filled with tension.
"And what a revelation that was." He murmured, before refocusing on Percy. "These actions... they are ripples stirring the surface of a lake and disturbing all that lies beneath. The Underworld is in turmoil. Forces and things are stirring in the depths of my realm... threats so ancient I had nearly forgotten them."
That wasn't ominous at all.
He swallowed, throat sand-paper dry.
"As it stands, it is all I can do to speak to you in this avatar and grant my blessing to my son to supplement his power." He blinked, but Hades didn't give him the chance to ask. "A state of affairs I will soon amend... but until then, watch over my children, Jackson. See them through this madness unharmed, and I will grant you a boon worthy of the King of The Underworld. Fail..."
Percy smiled weakly. "Poof goes the demigod?"
"Indeed."
Charming - this is why he hated these stupid family reunions.
"You don't have to threaten me. I'd look out for them no matter what."
And that was the truth.
"We shall see." Hades's eyes narrowed. "Let me offer you one small fragment of wisdom for the trials to come."
He tensed - there was something in those words...
"Some deaths cannot.... and should not be prevented." There was a growing pressure beginning to surround them. The walls of the Throne room began to tremble. "And some... are better for all."
And then Hades abruptly vanished, his throne disappearing with him.
Percy felt a sharp tugging at the base of his navel, and he woke up as the Throne room burst into nothingness around them.
...
He gasped and came alive to an eyeful of utter blackness, and a sensation that was entirely too close to free-falling for comfort.
Before Percy could do much more than stiffen, the blackness melted away, retreating to surround them in a looming dome that still somehow had enough light within for him to see the boy - Nico - hunched over beside him.
He scrambled up to his knees, chest heaving and mind roaring on adrenaline-
"Percy?"
Annabeth.
He turned, and his heart stuttered.
Annabeth was right there, on her knees next to him and staring at him with eyes so wide he almost winced. That expression alone had to hurt.
He cracked a shaky smile. By her sides, her slack arms began to twitch.
"Hey, wise-"
He heard the low, keening sob a second after she crashed into him, arms wrapping around him in a stranglehold. Her shoulders heaved.
"You idiot!" Her weeping voice cracked into his ear, and Percy would have said something smart, really he would have, except it felt like there was a boulder, and his eyes had gone blurry and unfocused. "You stupid, stupid idiot!"
"I-"
"Bianca!"
What?
Both of them looked up just in time to see Nico sprint full-force into a gaping Bianca, who'd stumbled out of the wall of shadows surrounding them in a heartbeat. Leaving on her with so much of her weight Bianca was practically carrying her was Zoë Nightshade, her eyes glassy and unfocused - the less said about the rest of her, the better.
Behind them, a black dog and the literal head of a cow followed suit.
Before Percy could even hope to ask - or, more likely, splutter out something undignified and utterly embarrassing, the situation got even more absurd.
"Jackson?"
No way.
But Thalia's voice was unmistakable, slipping out of the darkness. Behind her trailed an equally stunned Luna Lovegood, her arms propping up a blonde boy who was only vaguely familiar and an old man in leather armor who regarded them with a look so inordinately heavy it was a wonder it didn't fall right off his face.
"We're... we're back!" Nico cried, sounding euphoric, his face pressed against Bianca's hold. "We're all back together again!"
The moment Percy heard those words, he knew immediately that things were going to go straight to shit.
Nothing this good happened without cost.
And sure enough, not five seconds later, the other shoe dropped like a hammer.
"There you all are."
The voice reverberated through the air, and the dome of shadows surrounding them suddenly recoiled and was banished into oblivion as a wave of searing golden light carved through it like a hot knife through butter.
When Percy managed to blink the spots out of his eyes, he found.
A seven-foot figure in a black suit staring them down, his scarred face contorted in satisfaction, and an unholy gleam shining through his eyes.
"I was beginning to think I'd never find you."
Behind them, the old man who'd followed Luna and Thalia snarled.
"Prometheus."
...
So... It's Not PJOVER!
Next Chapter: The Titan Of Foresight