Prologue
9 year old Sally was on the run. Her parents had died a few years before and although her uncle was doing the best he could raising her, Sally had enough. The constant reminders were painful; everything she once knew had changed completely.
The bare walls of her new room and the empty silence surrounding the house was suffocating. The streets outside the apartment where she lived with her parents were always bursting with people and cars, even in the earliest hours of the morning. Now, the clean street her uncle's house was lined up prim and proper, a little too peaceful and quiet for Sally who had long grown used to the hustle and chaos that was evidently found in the streets of New York.
It wasn't that there was anything wrong with her uncle's house, it was actually quite nice. The house was a two story brick house with trimmed bushes lined up against the fence that separated their backyard from the neighbors. Neighbors could often be seen talking and helping one another.
They had, in fact, also helped Sally out by throwing her a surprise birthday party when they first found out it was her birthday. Unfortunately for her, the party only seemed to be a painful reminder of the fact that her parents were no longer there. But still, Sally put on a happy expression even though her inner feelings were the complete opposite, and thanked everyone for putting together the party as well as making her feel welcome.
As the days went on, the gnawing grief seemed to consume her and leave only an empty shell of the person she once was. Most people tried to get her to talk, or even smile, but the growing absence of her parents hit her hard and left her emotionless and blind to the world around her. The final straw, however, had been when Sally saw a little girl with her parents walking down her street while she was staring out the window. The sudden pain of her loss hit her hard. She would never get to hug her parents again or beg them for a treat.
Suddenly, the world jolted back into color. The overwhelming surge of emotion clicked her out of her daze. She had to get away from it all. Quickly packing a small backpack's worth of clothes, she briefly stopped to grab a few snacks that her uncle always kept hidden in the drawer below the sink and left, not stopping to look behind her.
A few hours later, she had to stop and camp for the night. Tired and hungry, Sally cried herself to sleep that night. The next morning, she woke up, to her surprise, next to a small burning fire.
She smiled and thought, "Thank you Lady Hestia." Sally knew the gift had been from Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth. Although only nine, she knew all about the Greek gods, mainly from her dad who happened to be a demigod. The only reason why Sally knew about the mythical world was because of an incident with her parents when she was 4. A drakon had managed to smell her dad's scent although he was only a child of Athena and tried to attack him. Luckily, her dad always kept a sword on him even though chances of needed it were low. After the attack, her parents explained to her about the Greek world. Both her mom and herself were clear-sighted mortals, so they could see past the mist that blinded regular mortals, and even demigods occasionally.
After packing up her things, she continued to trek along the side of the road, without a specific destination in sight. For three days she traveled, until the fatigue caught up to her. She tried to fight the exhaustion but the weariness started seeping into her vision. Her last sight when she blacked out was of an eight-year old girl tending a hearth.
