He couldn't explain why he felt the way he did.

He was incredibly close to being vulture food, sprawled across a canyon floor, gashes across his arms and neck, ribs broken and protruding through his shirt. His head hurt—probably not good—and his lungs felt as if they were blistered inside and out.

The weirdest thing was a longing feeling at the back of his head, hardly noticeable but enough to anger him to no end.

It almost felt like he was missing someone.

But who?

He couldn't really remember much besides a clear feeling of having gone through extreme pain.

That was it. Pain. And that longing. He felt ebbing pain and longing.

Again, he couldn't explain why.

Another thing he remembered was his name. Or, at least what he thought was his name.

Percy Jackson.

This recognition caused pain to go through his head, and another name surfaced into his memory.

Thalia Grace.

And now, that nagging stopped, and he sighed.

Why?

He didn't know. As far as he knew, he thought his name was Percy Jackson and this girl, Thalia Grace, probably had some significance to him.

So with all this newfound information, he sat up, ignoring the pain that came with all his effort, and leaned against a wall in the shade of the canyon. Sighing once more, he thought of what he was to do then.

Stay?

Or find help?

Looking to each side, he could see that no one was around him. The canyon bent around, creating turns on his left and right that led off to somewhere. He became even more confused.

What was I doing here anyway?

Something happened. Something bad. Right? You don't just... fall down a canyon and lose your memory aside two names. That was just crazy. So something happened.

But what?

His head hurt, and it came to mind that he had obviously taken a hard hit, and the glint shining into his eye didn't help.

Wait, glint?

Yes, there was a glint. Off to the left there was a sword. A shining sword, increasing the pain he felt immensely. Grunting in pain, he bettered his posture, and leaned against the canyon wall for support. With the sun bearing down onto him, he ventured the few meters to the sword and crouched in a huff next to it.

Now that he saw the sword, he could tell it was not normal.

For one, it had dried blood on it—usually not a good sign—and the words "ANAKLUSMOS" were engraved into the side of it.

Riptide.

How did he know that?

Was it latin?

Greek?

Or maybe some other language?

Dammit.

He hated not knowing. It made him angry and he felt almost like he had been devastatingly wrong before.

Maybe that was what happened.

I was wrong, and I paid for it.

Though what was he wrong about? Did it have to do with the sword called "Riptide"?

Screw it.

He would find out later. So, pushing all these confusing thoughts into his subconscious, Percy—if that was his name—stood once more and clutched the wall, Riptide in hand.

He wasn't quite sure if he should be walking, in the state he was in, but he needed to find water.

And food.

And civilization.

And from what he could tell there was none of the three nearby. So he walked.

It took the malnourished boy more then half an hour to reach the part of the canyon where it started to curve. He turned to his right to find it was a dead end, and then looked to his left.

Riptide seemed to hum in his hand, urging him to go that way.

And so he did.

Another half an hour later and he reached another curve, only this time Riptide hummed to the right. He went that way.

He must have walked for hours following Riptide's hum before he found a hill. It was rough and steep, but it led straight to the top of the canyon.

He stumbled up the first part of the hill.

It was hard. The rocks kept slipping underneath his feet, making it practically impossible to accomplish anything. He slipped a few times, tumbling down the rough slope and coming to a stop some few meters below where he originally was. The process angered him greatly.

If I'm to get anything done! I need to stop slipping over some Gods damned rocks.

Gods?

Why "Gods"?

It brought to question whether or not he usually said this.

Pain erupted into his head once more and suddenly images of a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a beard, another man with startling blue eyes and a toga, and one more man with a leather jacket and typical haircut for what some consider to be a "biker" appeared in his view. They were fighting, and he saw himself in one of the images.

He was standing before the three men. Actually, they weren't men, but Gods. He could tell because these men were more than twenty meters tall and could crush Percy in their hands. And Percy was standing in front of them, looking surprisingly confident. The images changed to him standing before the three Gods, except this time the man with the blue eyes was raising a large bolt in his hand, glaring down at Percy, and another girl with spiked hair and the same blue eyes as the man ready to kill Percy looked like she was running towards him.

Percy, awakened from his flashback, stumbled on the rock face, and rolled down once more.

"Dammit!" he screamed to no one in particular. His voice echoed through the canyon below him, and suddenly he heard voices.

"Hey!" he cried again. "Who's there!?"

He tried his best to get up the rocks without toppling over again, but only managed to make it four more meters before crumbling. His head hurt—scratch that—his whole body hurt. It felt as if he had been holding the sky.

Pain in his head once more.

A girl, sorry, woman in her twenties was holding the sky. At least, it seemed like the sky. It was a sort of cone that narrowed down and flattened into a small square about one meter on each side. The tiny platform stretched and extended to Gods knows where, and it looked heavy. Like, extremely heavy.

The poor girl was grunting and whimpering, clearly in pain, so Percy rushed to her side.

It was odd, for it wasn't like those other flashbacks he had recently experienced. No, that one was alive. He could tell for two reasons: 1. he was actually moving, and so were the other things around him, and 2. the girl saw him, and even reacted to him.

She gasped for some reason, and when Percy looked down he could see he was still in the state he was before he entered the "dream". His clothes were torn, he was extremely thin, and he had cuts everywhere, and the girl did not seem happy to see him.

"Percy?" she squeezed through her clenched teeth.

"Wait, my name actually is Percy?" He slid underneath the sky and helped bear the weight with her.

"What do you mean? and why do you look like that?" She seemed utterly shocked to see him trying to hold the sky in the shape he was in. She imagined him to be in incredibly amounts of pain.

And he was, but he ignored it for her sake, instead explaining. "I don't really know. I woke up in some canyon, and I looked like this. I found some sword called, um… what was it? Anaklusmos, I think? I'm not sure. I have terrible memory right now. Anyway, I've been having these weird flashback-type things. They uh, show me what I think are memories, but they were only images. This one is weird, it's like I'm actually alive.

"Oh and I had a head injury."

"You should've started off with, 'I have a head injury,' instead of going into some long explanation," she smirked despite how she felt

He blushed a bit. "Sorry, um… what's your name?"

"Artemis."

"Artemis, yes. It would've been smart to say that first. Anyway, I'm not quite sure what is happening. I can't remember anything except my name, Percy Jackson, and the name of some girl, Thalia Grace. Do you know her?" He turned his head to the right, cocking his head to the side in a gesture of curiosity.

Artemis smiled. "I do know a Thalia Grace, however the last time I saw her, she was a tree..." She turned away from him, looking off towards the ocean, just barely visible atop the cliff ahead of them.

"A tree?" He became confused, but laughed.

How do I know a tree?

Artemis watched him laugh, warily. "Yes… a tree. I don't see what's so funny, but you see, Thalia and a few of her comrades were venturing towards a camp for demigods, children of the gods and mortals"—he nodded, understanding—"and they were attacked by a cyclops. Thalia stayed behind to fight the cyclops by herself so that her friends could make it to camp safely. But, she wasn't doing so great and ended up close to her deathbed. Her father, Zeus, saw this and took pity on her, turning her into a tree before she could die, and creating a barrier around the camp so that such a situation would never occur again.

"And so Thalia still sits, as a tree of course, on the outskirts of Camp Half-Blood, protecting all demigods."

Percy smiled, feeling almost... in love. "She sounds brave."

Artemis chuckled. "Yes, Thalia was brave, though I never met her face to face. The ancient laws forbid us gods from communicating with demigods. Now," She turned back towards Percy. "I'm interested to know what the Child of the Prophecy is doing here."

Confusion. "What?"

Her face sunk. "Percy, I can tell just by looking at the memories you can't find that what you have experienced is immense suffering, but I cannot do anything to help you. The fates have a plan for you, one that I cannot interfere in.

"Now go young hero. Trust me, all will be fine."

And then she was gone, or he was gone, because he was now back in that stupid canyon. The only difference now was that he was surrounded. Yet it wasn't threatening, because these people were actually helping him: one girl patching up his arms, and a boy tried to feed him a drink that smelled very close to his mom's blue cookies.

Wait... Mom? Blue cookies?

He found it weird that just thinking of something as simple as, for instance, blue cookies, brought back glimpses of memory.

He knew his mom was a great woman, and she knew much of the Gods and their history.

And then suddenly he knew what the drink was.

Nectar, the drink of the Gods.

Immediately after the realization, Percy reached out, gently grabbing the boy's wrist and pulling the drink towards him. The boy seemed slightly shocked but happy to see Percy awake and responding. The boy reached back and pulled a small square of what looked like a biscuit out of his pack.

Ambrosia.

Percy greedily ate a corner of the food and sighed, leaning back onto the rough wall of the canyon they had apparently located him to.

As he began to lose the attention he place on the food, he got a good look at the two girls and one boy.

One girl was scuffling around through her pack and the other two—the girl finished dressing his wounds and the boy—were staring intently at Percy.

The boy on the left who had given Percy the food looked to be about sixteen. His hair was as black as black could be, and stuck to his forehead with sweat. The boys eyes were painfully familiar, a deep grey that looked almost menacing, yet held such a tenderness in them, that he knew the boy was good at heart. He had pale skin all over except for his left wrist, grazed with a patched mark darker color than the rest of him. Percy didn't realize he was staring until the boy moved his painted hand to grip the girl's hand.

The girl looked almost the complete opposite of the boy. She had blonde hair that curled around her shoulders from a loose ponytail and she, unlike the boy, was sporting a true Californian's tan. There was a baseball cap at her side that seemed nothing less than mysterious. Between the two, the only thing they had in common was they're eyes, only a slightly different shade of grey, and each wore the same orange t-shirt.

"What do you mean we can't come home!?" the girl who was previously rummaging through the pack cried out. Without anyone noticing, she had pulled out a cell phone that looked rather old, and began screaming obscenities into it.

Percy had to admit it, she looked cute when she was angry. The way her eyebrows scrunched up and her cheeks reddened slightly in anger.

I wonder what she would look like blushing?

Stop Percy. You don't even know her name. You can't think like that about someone when you don't even know them.

He hadn't even realized that the girl had put away her phone and was now staring at him until a vulture screeched, and his attention followed the noise as the intruder flew above. The girl cleared her throat, and as he turned his gaze to her, he noticed she was practically killing him with her glare, but while the other two flinched slightly, Percy just sat there, smiling a bit.

"What are you smiling at, you dolt?" She shoved the phone into her pocket.

"What's your name?" he asked, pushing with his legs to move into better sitting position.

She scrunched her eyebrows once more. "What do you mean? You know who I am, Kelp-Head."

"Kelp-Head?" He smiled nervously."I don't-I don't know-my name is Percy. Do I know you?"

"C'mon Percy this isn't funny..." The Californian girl mumbled, and glanced at the other two worriedly.

"Yeah Perce, stop bein' funny." The boy now.

Percy held up his hands in an act of frustration. "What are you guys fucking talking about? I don't know any of you. I woke up in the canyon down there and I looked like crap. I found a sword called Anaklusmos or something. I tried to get up this Gods damn hill but fell and then suddenly you guys are here, acting like you know me. I don't know you!"

"Oh Gods," the girl with the phone breathed out.

Percy finally had a chance to look at her. Her hair, much like the boy's, was pure black spiked up in places. She, similar to the others, was wearing a faded orange t-shirt, the lettering nearly gone. She gazed at Percy with bright blue eyes.

They looked like a storm ready to happen. And the tears threatening to spill onto her cheeks only made this feature more realistic.

"Who are you?" Percy whispered quietly and leaned forward.

One tear fell down her cheek, and suddenly he knew who she was.

She was the girl that had confused him ever since he had woken up on the canyon floor, about to be eaten by famished vultures. She was the girl Percy had spoken about with Artemis. The girl who was a tree.

Was.

"My name," She smiled despite her pooling tears. "Is Thalia Grace."

Yeah hiya. Gunna be starting to rewrite this cause man it sucks. But hopefully it's better now and I can even remember what the hell I planned on doing with it XD

—therightofpassage