Just a Pair of Broken Wings

Prologue

Disclaimer: If I owned Percy Jackson, I would've set him free into the wild long ago. Or lost him under my bed. One of the two.

Full summary: He said she was special. He said she had the blood of the gods. He said she was beautiful. He said his name was Percy.

Note: This is story that places the characters from Percy Jackson and the Olympians in an alternate universe. This means that they are in a different world but are not necessarily all human. Well, they might be part human. Okay, I'll shut up now. (Enough foreshadowing!)

She might have been in track, but Annabeth wasn't that much of a runner. That is, not unless something was after her, filling her muscles with adrenaline and pushing her sore legs to move faster. The sound of her feet pounding against the ground with each increasingly laborious step was muffled by the forest floor and the leaves that settled there, only to be disturbed as Annabeth slipped on them in her flight.

If one were to see this girl, a ghost dancing among the trees, one would probably ask, Well, what's after her? Annabeth, if she had the time to respond to the hypothetical inquiry, would probably say, That's a good question, because, in all honesty, Annabeth didn't know what was chasing her.

From the glances over her shoulder, it seemed big (though all she could see was its figure and nothing more), like a large grizzly bear, but Annabeth new that grizzly bears didn't live in the area. Not to mention, she didn't have time to think, at all, much less about the cosmetics of her pursuer. Some sort of instinct took over her when she first discovered that something was stalking her, and she ran. She ran so fast she felt like she was flying.

Who knows? Maybe she was.

But the experience of flying wasn't enough to expel the fear from Annabeth's mind. She kept running because she was scared. Not scared as in Thalia-just-jumped-out-from-behind-the-door scared, but rather scared as in terrified for her life. Annabeth was no longer thinking, a feat never achieved before in the seventeen years since her birth. She just was running, and it was all she could do to stay alive.

Something inside her, some instinct, said that if she stopped moving and surrendered to whatever was behind her, she would die.

Time seemed to slow as Annabeth moved, but that still didn't give her enough of a chance against the predator behind her. She tripped on a root that was hidden under some brush and fell forward. She clamped her jaw shut as she fell to stop a scream from escaping her lips and bit her tongue. The coppery taste of blood exploded in her mouth. Pain shot through her arms as she tried, and failed, to break her fall with her hands. She heard the thing behind her catching up.

Gasping for breath and lying against the cool of the forest floor, Annabeth found that her muscles would no longer respond to the signals her nerves were sending them. She was paralyzed, whether by fear or exhaustion, she couldn't tell and at the moment, really, didn't care.

There was a footstep next to her shoulder, then a pressure on her back. Annabeth bit back a scream.

That instinct that said if she was caught, she would die? It was right.

Don't worry, I didn't kill Annabeth first chapter. This is [more] foreshadowing. This is in the future. So, yes, you will get the rest of this, in context, later in the story.

And I wasn't going t upload this for a long time, but I figured, "Hey, why not?" Updates will probably be few and far-between, but I thought I'd through the prologue out there just to see how people responded to this.